BLACK LIBRARY

Books | eBooks | MP3 Audiobooks

To see the full Black Library range visit

blacklibrary.com and warhammer.com

Contents

Cover

Warhammer Age of Sigmar

Grombrindal : Ancestor’s Burden

RAT-TAIL

HIGH AIRS

DURKAR’S WAKE

KING OSGEK’S PRIZE

NO GOD’S LAND

BITTER OATHS

THE MAKER’S PROMISE

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Epilogue

About the Author

An Extract from ‘Godeater’s Son’

Backlist

A Black Library Publication

eBook license

The Mortal Realms have been despoiled. Ravaged by the followers of the Chaos Gods, they stand on the brink of utter destruction.

The fortress-cities of Sigmar are islands of light in a sea of darkness. Constantly besieged, their walls are assailed by maniacal hordes and monstrous beasts. The bones of good men are littered thick outside the gates. These bulwarks of Order are embattled within as well as without, for the lure of Chaos beguiles the citizens with promises of power.

Still the champions of Order fight on. At the break of dawn, the Crusader’s Bell rings and a new expedition departs. Storm-forged knights march shoulder to shoulder with resolute militia, stoic duardin and slender aelves. Bedecked in the splendour of war, the Dawnbringer Crusades venture out to found civilisations anew. These grim pioneers take with them the fires of hope. Yet they go forth into a hellish wasteland.

Out in the wilds, hardy colonists restore order to a crumbling world. Haunted eyes scan the horizon for tyrannical reavers as they build upon the bones of ancient empires, eking out a meagre existence from cursed soil and ice-cold seas. By their valour, the fate of the Mortal Realms will be decided.

The ravening terrors that prey upon these settlers take a thousand forms. Cannibal barbarians and deranged murderers crawl from hidden lairs. Martial hosts clad in black steel march from skull-strewn castles. The savage hordes of Destruction batter the frontier towns until no stone stands atop another. In the dead of night come howling throngs of the undead, hungry to feast upon the living.

Against such foes, courage is the truest defence and the most effective weapon. It is something that Sigmar’s chosen do not lack. But they are not always strong enough to prevail, and even in victory, each new battle saps their souls a little more.

This is the time of turmoil. This is the era of war.

This is the Age of Sigmar

RAT-TAIL

Their boots pressed heavily through packed snow and cracked the ice upon the back of the mountain. They held fast to the straps of their packs and the hilts of their weapons, to the oaths they had sworn, and to memories of fire, meat, pipe-ash and ale. To a man and woman they spoke little, but disturbed the grave-cold air with grumblings and sounds of exertion. This was the manner in which the duardin folk had abandoned these peaks, long ago in a time lost to bitter memory, and this was the manner in which the duardin made their return.

They were twenty-eight in number, strong-backed and capable. Each had earned their place in Daltheim’s company with tales of toil in the silver mines of treacherous Chamon, of treasures claimed beneath the starlit mountains of Azyr, of adventure and opportunity in two dozen locales besides. Among them strode figures of some renown, at least among those duardin whose paths had led them into the fellowship of wanderers, speculators and mercenaries. The sharpshooter Auringa Greft marched with them, having been lured from her hunting grounds in Ghur. There was Phirgo Delvsson, whose long service in the company lent credence to his claim to have never met a foe that could not be repelled by the scowling ancestor mask upon his heavy iron shield. Then there was Ardassi Syln, whose skills as a sapper attracted prices that would give a Kharadron admiral pause.

Larn Rat-Tail, however, told no such stories; his place at the trailing edge of Daltheim’s throng had been earned upon sight of the rune-hilted axes he carried, and paid for with a share of a dead god’s gold.

Rat-Tail looked up to the head of the formation, where Borgni Daltheim himself took up the lead position. The latter was tall by duardin standards and frost gathered upon him – as it did upon all of them – causing the back and shoulders of his thick fur overcoat to glitter in the low morning light. The occasional heaving breath or quick step would unsettle the ice and send it eddying into the mountain wind, momentarily giving him the look of a stubborn lowland beast attempting to rid itself of unseasonal cold. What manner of creature had died in the name of Daltheim’s overcoat could not be native to these lands, Rat-Tail thought. Shyish bred few creatures that enjoyed such mass and lustre in life, let alone in death.

Rime crept into Rat-Tail’s beard and clustered in his dark, matted hair. It sloughed from the long hide shawl which clung about his shoulders in a steady glimmering stream that followed in the party’s wake. He was young yet, by any duardin measure, but moved heavily, bent-backed in the manner of one three times his age. He shivered with discomfort. Beneath his heavy outer garments, he sweated and sweltered; his scars itched. He felt the weight of the doom that closed in on all of them, found himself compelled and repelled in equal measure by the uncanny awareness of ill fate that had long been his curse to bear.

Borgni Daltheim took a few accelerating steps forward and stopped, bringing the formation to an unsteady halt behind him. He turned, raising his face to the sun at their back and adjusting his fine-cut lenses as he stared into the brightening sky. Daltheim frowned as he scanned the horizon. He crossed his arms, uncrossed them, adjusted his lenses again, and swore an oath. Rat-Tail was too far away to catch the words, but the sentiment was unmistakable. Everything in the treasure hunter’s posture spoke to anticipated grievance – neither the grudgement of something that was, nor that had been, but that could be. Might be. Shouldn’t be.

White-bearded Rigo stepped up to Daltheim’s side and placed a hand on his shoulder. The old prospector was the only duardin whose counsel was tolerated when Daltheim’s bitter fixations were upon him. Rat-Tail had little direct experience of the fellow, and no knowledge of the history that granted him such influence over a duardin as famously stubborn as Borgni Daltheim, but he was glad of the intervention all the same.

Larn Rat-Tail had been born to a mountain like this one, a black-boned leviathan of Shyish, and had learned that the Realm of Death almost always presented her dangers from below. He had the common Shyishan gift of knowing a grave when he trod upon one, and had felt that particular dread more and more keenly with each passing day of the climb. It had consternated him, then, that Borgni Daltheim’s bright lenses were always turned to the sky. At first, Rat-Trail attributed it to an outsider’s folly – a bad habit acquired beneath the starlit vaults of Azyr, perhaps.

After the first few nights, however, grumbling and gossip among the other duardin gave him the truth: it wasn’t death that pursued Borgni Daltheim, but indignity and ill fortune. There were rivals at his heels, the rumour went, though all those with secrets to spill were careful not to do so within Daltheim’s earshot. These rivals chased after him upon the ground and, most gallingly, in the air, closing in with all the ignoble advantages of the Kharadron. To make matters worse, neither treasure nor oath could dissuade his competitors from their course or bind them to Daltheim’s service. The opportunity that lay ahead of them was simply too great to be shared, its promise forbidding the possibility of an alliance among the ramshackle society of treasure hunters who thrived at the fringes of honourable duardin kind.

The discovery had been a slow, aggregate thing: a recovered deed here; a map there; a vision recounted by a sightless oracle under the light of Lunaghast, culminating in a revelation that would see armies mustered and venerable Warden Kings girded for gruelling campaigns of reconquest. For in these mountains, it was said, lay the treasures of Karak Thorga.

It was considered a good omen to live in a time of rediscovery; more so to bear direct witness to the reclamation of one of the lost mountain-cities. The ancient Khazalid were a singular people – in culture and in deed – and their legacy, preserved through memory, book and tale, was perhaps the only thing that the disparate duardin could now be said to honour equally. The manner and expression of this veneration varied, of course, and the enmity that arose as a consequence of these disparate traditions spoke to the puzzling tendency for points of commonality among the duardin to prompt an equal share of grumbling and division. However, the number of duardin who might place serious value in such a notion were few; dwellers in Sigmar’s free cities, more than likely, afforded the luxury of philosophy by thick walls and benevolent circumstance. To most duardin, the notion that the paths of stone, iron, fire and sky had a common origin – and a common destination – was a comfort, and to walk the halls of shared history a lofty honour that many aspired to, but few could claim.

Of course, it was also true that the halls of the Khazalid were rarely empty; certainly not at the time of their first unsealing. The revelation of the location of a lost karak would invariably send traditionalists scrambling for their writs of claim and ancient indemnities. Hosts of the Dispossessed would be gathered, ardent in their determination to see their long exile brought to a righteous end. In the case of Karak Thorga, such had already occurred: the ancient Warden King Hakhard the Patient had declared his intent, bringing to an end the truly historic period of inertia that had won him his particular epithet.

Yet significant gatherings of duardin took time to arrange, and their progress beyond the borders of the free cities was slow, if unrelenting. A truth known to many but acknowledged openly by few was that the great reclamations of the Warden Kings tended to encompass not what had been precisely rediscovered, but what was left by the time they arrived – after the treasure hunters had already been and gone.

Borgni Daltheim was one such treasure hunter, and had built the reputation of his company on being quick to the claim. Yet none present had seen such an opportunity as this one arise in their lifetimes. Each of them had taken a bet on Daltheim’s reputation, and staked a place for themselves in his ever-shifting company at the exclusion of his many rivals. Many had paid handsomely to do so, gambling that the gold and glories of Karak Thorga would outstrip any quantity of realm-coin.

For Larn Rat-Tail, the matter had been more circumstantial. Axe-work in the lowlands had grown thin, in no small part thanks to the efficacy of his own hand. He’d returned enough ragged doom-wolf skulls and marauder scalps to the smallfolk that their confidence had grown past the need for expensive mercenary aid. It had been smallfolk gossip that had told him of a convergence of his own kind at the foot of these mountains, however, and fortunate timing that had caused his path and Daltheim’s to converge.

Though he welcomed the way in which his taciturn air kept his new comrades at a distance, Larn Rat-Tail could not deny that he had missed the company of duardin. Even as the sense of doom that encircled them pressed in on him with greater and greater weight, Rat-Tail found in it something like the familiarity of home. It was part of him – of all of them, he suspected; an aspect of duardin existence that they shared but scarcely acknowledged. Larn Rat-Tail had been born to a bright hearth, but had never been able to deny the deep shadows that it cast.

The party mounted a ridgeline and Daltheim brought them to a halt once again. This time his gaze was focused on the mountains. After a moment’s consideration he directed them down the other side of the ridge with a broad gesture, indicating a craggy path that circumnavigated the deep snows of the upper slopes.

As he crested the ridge and began to descend the far side, uncanny recognition struck Rat-Tail like a furnace blast. The icy wind that whipped up at him could be the foul breath of the magmic deep; the dry scent of the rocks could be sulphur; those that marched heedless ahead of him could be his kin of old. He stumbled at the recognition of it, as he had stumbled then. Doom no longer closed in about them; it was here.

As it was before.

A warning rose in Rat-Tail’s throat. He felt the eyes of skulking figures upon them, caught unnatural movements in the gathering mountain mist. Yet this time the weight of old shame held his tongue and bound him to silence. In place of a warning, he acted. His hands went to the hilts of his axes, and he picked up his pace, his heart quickening, scars stinging beneath his shawl.

The clustered duardin at the rear of the company sensed his acceleration and turned to look back, eyes narrowed in consternation. Rat-Tail did not meet their gaze but drove towards a point at their flank. Snow shifted; a creature pale as rime leapt shrieking at one of the distracted adventurers. Rat-Tail’s first axe was up in an instant, held short in a high grip, directed blade first into the assailant’s throat. Momentum carried the ghoul’s twitching body to the duardin’s feet; its head spun high, trailing black ichor. Larn Rat-Tail adjusted his footing and prepared for battle.

A shout went up – ‘Ambush!’ – as the mountain unleashed an avalanche of shrieking, pallid flesh upon Daltheim’s company.

Guns were drawn and mauls of burnished gromril brought to bear. The wind itself screamed in response: a high and rasping howl that spoke of the cavernous appetites of the dead. The narrow marching formation of the duardin made them vulnerable and the line buckled before breaking into isolated pockets of resistance. At the rear of the column, Rat-Tail stalked the space between melees, intercepting flesh-starved wretches as they hurled themselves from the snowdrifts. The creatures were gaunt even by the standards of the Realm of Death, mad-eyed and desperate. They lunged forth with claws outstretched, seeking the necks and shoulders of the duardin that braced to resist them.

As it was before.

Bitter memory and the taste of shame coiled themselves around Larn Rat-Tail even as he hacked dexterously through the tide of ghouls that closed around him. The kin he protected were capable warriors in their own right, but battle was the domain where the frayed strands of Rat-Tail’s life found focus, and he committed himself ever more deeply to the battle with each cleaving sweep of his axes.

Mind the big one.

Instinct, memory and doom-sense spoke, for a moment, with a single voice. Ever-taciturn Rat-Tail was surprised to discover that the voice was his.

‘Mind the big one,’ he growled to sure-footed Auringa Greft, whose hands were deftly feeding shot into the breech-loaded drakefire pistol that hung over her elbow.

‘What?’ she replied, as a mass of rotting flesh the size of a carthorse forced itself through a pack of its gibbering kindred before batting her aside with a crudely bound bone club. She rolled away into the snowdrift and the horror made to leap upon her, but instead crashed forward as Rat-Tail’s axes bit deep into its calves. It shrieked in frustration, dragging itself forward with outstretched claws. Rat-Tail ripped his axes free of its legs and hauled himself up onto its back, landing two heavy steps before leaping and bringing both blades down upon the back of its neck, where a twisted crest of bone and tendon emerged from the creature’s rotting flesh.

He wrenched his weapons free and brought them down once more, one after the other, then again and again, holding his balance as the horror surged forward. There was a detonation and the creature’s head exploded; Rat-Tail shielded his eyes as his outer garments were spattered with ichor, bone and brain matter. He looked up to see the barrel of the smoking drakefire pistol, Auringa still prone but grim-faced and resolute. She looked up at the axe-fighter and nodded, but his mind was already elsewhere.

Unsteadiness struck him again, and for a second it was the acrid sting of warpstone – not honest duardin blackpowder – that settled on his palate. A heart-deep sorrow burned away to fury and compelled him to leap down from the fallen beast at his feet and bring death to the horde.

As it was before.

Yet incongruity wrenched Larn Rat-Tail back to the present; from his vantage point upon the back of the crypt horror, he could see that the duardin of Daltheim’s company were gradually gaining the upper hand. Daltheim himself had drawn together the warriors at the fore into a tight fist of resistance that steadily thinned the tide of flesh-eaters pressing in on them. The adventurer wielded a heavy falchion that flashed as it struck again and again into the mass of ghouls. His stubborn bulk was a bulwark against the aggression of the accursed.

Then, in a moment, the pressure exerted by the flesh-eaters broke. A few stragglers – those blinded by rage and hunger – continued their assault, but were swiftly brought down by the mustered duardin. Their kin howled and retreated, melting away into the ice, scrambling for the rocks until the movement of their bodies was no longer distinguishable from the steady flow of wind over the crags and ridges of the mountains. The bodies of felled flesh-eaters twitched as they gave themselves to the stillness of death. Daltheim’s company began to gather themselves, the snow at their feet stained red and black. Ironclad Phirgo Delvsson gave a gruff bark of triumph, an exhortation that was as much a warning to the retreating ghouls as it was a victory cry. A few of the other duardin followed suit. Auringa, her drakefire pistol freshly loaded, looked at Rat-Tail.

‘Well fought,’ she said.

He stared at her for a moment before returning the nod of acknowledgement that she had offered minutes earlier.

‘They have left us under-strength,’ he replied.

Auringa snorted in consternation and turned to validate the mercenary’s assessment. There was a marked difference between their ragged trailing end of the duardin formation and Daltheim’s robust cohort, which was already preparing to resume the march to Karak Thorga at the great treasure hunter’s energetic command. Yet this was not where Larn’s gaze led her. The gaps in their fractured line were strewn with the bodies of slain ghouls, scenes of scattered butchery littering the mountainside. The hulking corpses of crypt horrors were present too – but there were no duardin. Rat-Tail watched her face as the realisation prompted relief, then pride, then unease as her mind performed the inevitable arithmetic of the battle’s aftermath.

No duardin dead, yet less than half their number living: the heart of Daltheim’s company was simply gone.

Larn Rat-Tail strode up and past her as the throng began to move. He sheathed his axes beneath his shawl and stooped over the body of a ghoul before hauling it aside. The corpse concealed a long, wide depression in the snow – the after-image of something, someone, dragged away amid the chaos of the melee. Rat-Tail grunted and stood, then continued walking.

Auringa’s face was a mask of concern as she followed. Once you had seen the shape of the true damage wrought by the flesh-eaters, you could see it everywhere: trenches in the snow that extended from their position in every direction like splayed claw marks, terminating in some cases in narrow rents in the black rock.

‘They stole off with the dead,’ she said as she reached the axe-fighter.

‘Dead meat doesn’t keep,’ he replied. ‘They stole off with the living.’

It did not take long for the magnitude of the duardin’s losses to register among the rest of the company. Auringa stormed ahead, leaving Rat-Tail to reluctantly bring up the rear. He found that the battleground pulled at him even as he departed it, and he wrestled with his irreconcilable sense of obligation to both the living and the lost.

The tally of the taken was drawn up quickly: Ardassi Syln, the sapper; Lendrik Koron and the twins Juttei and Olif, all of Aqshy; Emryn Ryzand, the Shyishan pathfinder whose expertise had seen the company make such rapid progress since their arrival in the Realm of Death. Half a dozen more besides. Daltheim, his eyes fixed on the path ahead, did not offer much by way of response. Only one name made him wince – the prospector Rigo, who had vanished without trace from the front of the duardin column. Borgni Daltheim had liked the old whitebeard, and felt that he had an air of good fortune about him. Borgni Daltheim did not like to be wrong.

And he would not be beaten.

Daltheim’s company moved at pace the rest of the day, though fatigue and injury slowed their progress. At first, their haste had a pragmatic character – the site of the ambush would soon attract the other predators that stalked these passes, and the further they moved, the more likely it was that they’d pass beyond the borders of whatever hidden domain the flesh-eaters squatted in. Yet it was Daltheim’s ambition that truly propelled them onward, and they all knew it. While some were content to follow their captain’s lead, disquiet set in among the others: to simply abandon the lost was dishonourable, no matter how dire the circumstances.

Eventually the light of Hysh was lost to the horizon and darkness swallowed the mountain. Daltheim brought the company to a halt at the foot of the next ascent, a rocky upward passage that skirted the perimeter of a great valley. The climb would be demanding, but the landscape offered no other options. At their back lay the path they had already taken, and the only apparent route to the floor of the valley was a sheer drop from a steep-sided cliff face.

They assembled simple bivouacs in the shelter provided by the rocks, lit campfires and handed out torches to the duardin assigned to watch duty. A casket of salted fish was unsealed, and a small keg of ale. The bitter cold masked the taste of the former and soured the latter, but the duardin ate and drank in quiet rumination. Respite provided an opportunity for the doubts that had stalked them since the ambush to steal once more into their thoughts. In the end, it was Auringa Greft who spoke first.

‘Less than half of us left, and we’re less than halfway,’ she said, her voice measured and direct. Daltheim had been still and assured as he focused on his repast; his head snapped up at this. The others grumbled a mixture of assent and dissent.

‘Nothing for it but the climb,’ said Vigguir of Ghyran in a voice heavy with Greywater cant. Daltheim nodded. ‘We’re not stopping.’

The quartermaster, Possik, raised his head. ‘What of the wounded?’ he enquired. ‘Suspect we’ve a few that won’t keep pace.’

‘That’s on them,’ Daltheim replied matter-of-factly. It was clear that he had no desire to debate the issue.

Larn Rat-Tail found himself interjecting. ‘It’s on the flesh-eaters,’ he said as doubtful eyes turned to look at him. ‘They are going to come again.’

‘You’re so sure, Rat-Tail?’ asked Daltheim, leaning on the name as if giving voice to a widely held suspicion.

‘They are hungry,’ Rat-Tail replied. His doom-sense had his mind in a vice, and he sweated and itched beneath his shawl, but he offered the simplest and most pragmatic explanation he could.

‘We’ve fought them off already,’ Daltheim said with finality. ‘With no warning nor time to plan. We all feel the weight of those we lost – but there’s no honouring them save by being first to the Thorgiri gates. We have the advantage yet.’

‘Press on too hastily and we may lose it,’ offered Auringa Greft.

Daltheim’s voice rose suddenly as he loomed forward over the fire. ‘Waste time mewling and that is exactly what will happen.’ He shuddered with agitation, and Rat-Tail could see his hand drift instinctively for the hilt of his heavy falchion. ‘Those of you with your wits left know that the odds are stacked against us, and those of you with a spine know that’s when the finest claims are struck.’

Daltheim spat as he launched into his tirade. ‘Do I need to remind you that you could live another three lives and not see another chance like this one? Half of you paid me for the privilege of your place here, and you were right to do so. One of the great lost karaks stands ready to be unsealed, and you’re a fool if you think that’s our secret alone to keep.

‘You know who we’re outrunning?’ he barked. ‘Do you? It’s not just old Hakhard, you know. The Warden King is on the move. That’s to be expected, and he won’t be the last. No. This secret – that should be ours – has reached the ear of Shima – cursed – Sjarsdottir!’

A look passed among the longer-standing members of Daltheim’s crew. It held no meaning for Larn Rat-Tail.

‘She shouldn’t know, but she does,’ Daltheim grumbled. ‘And she’s closing in, mark my words. With her stolen skyship and her honourless crew. We have hours, not days, to spare, or this is for nothing. Nothing, you understand?’ He addressed the whole group, but his eyes lingered on Greft, and then on Rat-Tail. ‘If you must rest, do it now. Unless you’re taking a turn at the watch, you don’t set foot outside the camp – or I’ll trade you with the Carrion King for safe passage myself.’

There were a few gruff noises of assent; others kept their own counsel. Auringa Greft returned to her bivouac and busied herself with care of her pistol. Rat-Tail stared at the guttering fire until its meagre heat became somehow unbearable. The matter was more than temperature. It was doom, too, and memory, and bitterness, and the manner in which these things stalked, snared and overtook one another in his mind. This discomfort – maddening yet familiar – had only grown more intense with every step taken towards Karak Thorga. Yet he also knew that it had pursued him for much longer than that. It had been part of his life for as long as he had been Larn Rat-Tail.

He had paid his way into Daltheim’s company for many reasons, but the raw truth was that his stock of treasure no longer concerned him. A beast had pursued him these last years – a beast whose shadow extended long from these mountains, whose malice gathered thick around Borgni Daltheim and all the rest – and Larn Rat-Tail was simply tired of attempting to outrun it. He had no name for the path he truly walked, but he felt that fate and judgement converged all about him, and it was a bitter relief to march to meet it.

Ignoring Daltheim’s warning, Rat-Tail wandered out beyond the bivouacs to the very edge of the great valley. Here, thinning snow revealed that the cliff-edge was composed of great blocks of quarried stone, ancient but evenly cut. They no longer marched across mountains and ridgelines, Rat-Tail realised, but across the colossal stoneworks of an ancient Khazalid domain. Perhaps there was scarcely a difference between the two. As soon as he was content that he had not been followed, he shed his shawl and shuddered as the night wind hissed against his bare skin.

The flesh across his muscular shoulders bore deep, angular scars, each as red-raw as the day that he had forsaken the oaths they represented. Waning honour, and a desire for privacy, had compelled him to keep them secret. He had believed that over long years the heat within them would fade, but they burned still – hottest when he was angry and when battle was upon him, but most uncomfortably when concealed. They wanted to be seen, Larn suspected. Witnessed. Would they heal? he wondered. And what would he be if they did, if he were finally rid of the solemn directives impressed into his skin?

‘Now there’s a conundrum,’ said a warm voice in the darkness. ‘Though one I’m fond of, I must admit. Heard it half a dozen times, and each time a different answer!’

Larn twisted on the spot, drew his axes, hunched into a fighting stance. A white-bearded duardin approached along the cliff-edge, blithely unconcerned by the cold or the precipitous drop.

‘Rigo?’ Larn muttered, perplexed, lowering his guard. ‘How?’

The longbeard gave a curt shrug and chuckled softly, creasing his cheeks. ‘I had places to be, lad, so I’ve been to them. Now I’m here.’

It must be Rigo, Rat-Tail thought, though it couldn’t be; it was and it wasn’t. Of all the impossibilities that Larn Rat-Tail had contended with lately, this was by far the hardest to countenance – and yet the impact that the old duardin had on him was quite the opposite of the disquiet he was accustomed to. Far from being further distracted by this latest incongruity, Rat-Tail felt as if his feet had settled upon solid stone for the first time in many years. For a moment, all else about him was revealed to be shadow, and only this stout, bucolic longbeard was real.

‘Aye, lad, it’s a consternation, but such is the way of things. I’ve much to do, much to contend with. As do you.’

Larn snorted, narrowed his eyes. Rigo approached the edge of the cliff and withdrew a fine wooden pipe from his belt, lit it, drew on it a few times, and puffed white smoke over the precipice.

‘I heard it as a jest once, you know. An unwise one at that. What’s left of the sons of Grimnir when their fire goes out?’

Rigo straightened his back and tilted his shoulders, snatched up his pipe in one hand and flourished it in a distinctly un-duardin-like manner before tapping it out over the cliff. Rat-Tail simply stared.

‘A little. Pile. Of ashes!’ Rigo bellowed. He took in Rat-Tail’s blank expression and sighed.

‘Might not work outside Aqshy, that one. I can’t do the accent. Neither could the umgi who first said it, mind, and he said it loud enough to set the tavern a-roar. Regretted it right away, of course. He hadn’t seen the Vostarg lads in the corner, and they gave him a real answer. Might have had a war break out that night, had I not been there.’ Rigo chuckled. ‘An umgi dukeling’s shattered jaw is a fair price for a bit of peace, I’d say.’

A moment of silence settled upon them before Rat-Tail finally spoke.

‘You know what I am,’ he said, in a low voice.

‘Of course I do, son,’ Rigo responded. ‘You’re bearing it for the whole realm to see. I’m more interested in who you are.’

‘They call me Rat-Tail.’

‘So I hear, and I imagine that’s a story in itself, for such names are rarely granted kindly and scarcely accepted without some great hardship to hold them up.’ The longbeard’s eyes glimmered in the light of the pipe, kind and enigmatic in equal measure.

‘I’m sorry that you’ve suffered, beardling. Truly.’ He drew deep from the pipe again, puffing contentedly. ‘Yet there’s not an ounce of the craven in you, and if you won’t trust this old duardin when he tells you, then trust the flesh-eaters you left hewn about the mountainside, whose black blood you’ve so diligently scoured from those axes you carry. They were folk once, you know, and they’re mad enough to think themselves folk still. Strikes me that you’re quite the opposite.’

‘Larnik,’ Rat-Tail replied, the name tumbling free of him before he could snatch it back. Rigo looked at him directly. ‘Larnik Vuul-Kerrik.’

‘Kerrik,’ Rigo said, rolling the name around in his mouth as he looked out into the darkness. ‘Aye, lad, that’ll do it. A particularly dour spar of the Ulrung line, if I have it right, and that’s saying something.’

Larn Rat-Tail had heard only tales – old tales – of those that had founded Kerrik lodge and carved out the stones of her first magmahold. Old Rigo spoke of them familiarly, as if they were distant cousins.

‘A hidebound folk, your people. A great share of old Grimnir’s stubbornness, and an even greater share of his pride. They must have taken a measure of pride in you, lad, if that’s the name you once bore. And those runes…’

Larn shook his head. ‘I bear no runes.’ Rigo’s comforting presence gave way to a sting of discomfort at the mention of the word. It hewed too closely to the commitments and compulsions he had shed when he had ceased to be Larnik Vuul-Kerrik.

Rigo regarded him seriously for a moment, furrowing a brow creased with age. ‘Fair enough. Once, though, your thick hide was fairly struck through with the things, wasn’t it? That speaks to firstborn favour. A runeson, then.’

Larn’s answer first took the form of a long exhalation, and then he squatted down on his haunches to peer over the edge of the Khazalid edifice. Both were affirmations, in their way. Rigo folded his arms, letting his pipe hang loose between his fingers, and looked down in the same direction.

‘You’ve a righteous hunger that you refuse to feed. That’s rare among our kind, and rarest still among the children of Grimnir. I’ve wandered the lengths of these lands, lad, so don’t let it surprise you when I tell you that you’re not the first runeless exile I’ve met. I recall few who were compelled to do anything more than hunt down scraps of that which they’d lost. Yet here you are, marching steadfast in the opposite direction, swaddled in furs like a babe and skulking at the trailing end of Borgni Daltheim’s latest folly. Borgni Daltheim…’

Rigo shook his head with fond frustration. ‘He’s a quandary, beardling. You’re a conundrum. I find myself compelled by the two of you, though I admit that at present it’s you that has both my attention and, I think, the greater part of my sympathy.’

Larn Rat-Tail stood. The duardin at his side appeared more solid, more resolutely real to him, than he himself did, and yet something in his bones qualmed at this disarming new sense of stability. For a moment he wondered if he had, in fact, lost his footing upon this ledge – if his body lay broken on the rocks below while Shyish sent forth a phantasm to console his lingering spirit. For days now he had been haunted by memories that refused to be shut out, that appeared to overlap the present – echoes of doom that swam before his eyes as if he were a punch-drunk stripling staggering back into the fray time and time again. He had long suspected that the loss of his runes had afflicted his mind, but here in Rigo’s presence the tumultuous tides of his memory calmed and opened themselves up to recollection. Unbidden, taciturn Larn Rat-Tail gazed out into the night and began to speak.

Larnik Vuul-Kerrik, first son of the lodge, said little but led from the fore. Bright braziers blazed at his back, mounted to the gold-banded war throne that he bestrode. A hissing stream of embers rose from the corners of Ignabyr’s great maw. She was bellicose, his magmadroth, the giant of her brood – hot-tempered and naturally impatient. His brothers and sisters and their own mounts flanked him in a wide axe-head formation that was forced to narrow as the cavern walls closed around them. Their entire lodge followed in their wake. Their long years in Urgyrnaz Magmahold were ended, and the time of a new founding was upon them. So the flames had said, and so it would be.

They lived in a portentous age, one that drew interlopers from across the realms to the grey wastes of Shyish. Their armies converged coreward, hell-bent on the Silent City, as diverse in aspect and intention as the fickle gods they served: moon-eyed orruks and dark champions of the Ruinous Powers, intercessors from the domains of the God-King clad in gold and thunder. All of it spoke to fortune – a generation’s share of ur-gold to be seized in a few short years on campaign, should the Fyreslayers of Kerrik lodge be bold and swift enough to claim it. Gyraer Vuul-Kerrik, Larnik’s father, declared that the ur-gold called to him even at this great distance, and his brothers and sisters claimed the same.

To Larnik, the call that drew them further and further from Urgyrnaz was unlike any ur-gold bond he had ever felt. There was no touch of Grimnir’s fire to it, simply a nameless foreboding that deadened the spirit. Larnik pushed his misgivings aside and committed himself to the honourable charge that had been granted to him. Fresh runes had been hammered into his back, that last night at Urgyrnaz. Outwardly, they pledged him to his father’s cause: to see Kerrik lodge reforged in the war for the Silent City. Inwardly, they spoke of his father’s pride: confirmation that this new chapter in the history of his people would one day be Larnik Vuul-Kerrik’s to oversee.

They followed well-trodden tunnels for many weeks until they broke through into unfamiliar territory. After this point they followed the slow-moving rivers of the underworlds, outpacing the languid corpses that peered back at them from the amethyst-tinted depths. When denied a path forward, they paused to allow the lodge’s runesmiter, Ulrek, to channel his invocations and call upon the rocks themselves to grant them passage – but Runefather Gyraer’s mind was set on haste, and these alterations to the path were undertaken only where necessary.

Larnik sensed the recklessness in his father’s plan, but held his tongue.

As the tunnel narrowed about them, a blast of magmic air emanated from the darkness ahead. Larnik caught the scent of something foul in it; something wrong. Ignabyr took an overeager step forward, and the runeson, distracted, lost his footing and staggered. The moment closed in on him, reverberated in his subconscious. He felt a rush of unbidden disquiet – a gathering pressure that his soul knew as doom. He felt the attention of red eyes in the darkness; caught the darting shapes of agile killers. In the space of a breath, his throwing axes were in his hands and he bellowed the call to arms.

‘Halt!’ he cried, wrestling Ignabyr into a turn to allow him to address the Fyreslayer throng. ‘These are skaven tunnels. Slingshields forward! We draw back and fight them at the–’

A metallic clamour from the tunnel stole his words: the tolling of a diabolical bell. The walls of the tunnel exploded inward, flashes of green flame illuminating the passageway to reveal hundreds of cowering ratmen. They clung to crude spears and burst forth as the trap was sprung. Larnik’s command to his kin was lost to the madness of that instant, as the cacophonous shrieks of the skaven met bellows of duardin resistance.

The sons and daughters of Kerrik lodge surged forward into the darkness, fighting shoulder to shoulder as the ratmen swarmed in on them. Another detonation far behind them revealed another row of hidden tunnels, and a fresh wave of clanrats emerged to fully encircle the rear of the formation, where Larnik’s father barked defiance and dived into the fray. Larnik found himself fighting two irreconcilable battles. He and Ignabyr laid waste to the ratmen at their feet, the creatures’ spears shattering against the magmadroth’s molten hide, Larnik’s axes finding purchase with every swing and throw. Yet the fragility of their position pressed in on him: the clear evidence of a planned and orchestrated ambush, and the magnitude of what Kerrik lodge, gathered here in their entirety, stood to lose.

The bell tolled once more and staccato blasts of unnatural green illuminated the battle. Hulking, mutated skaven lurched forward from hidden tunnels. Some dragged forth great war engines under the command of scampering overseers; others were war engines themselves, their bodies bristling with grafted firearms and other deadly contraptions. A billowing tide of green flame belched from the darkness to engulf the berzerkers that Larnik had called to the fore, and he watched in grim horror as arcs of fell lightning converged on Runesmiter Ulrek and burned him to ash atop his own magmadroth.

Hauling Ignabyr away from the distraction provided by the clanrats, Larnik raced to intercept another weapons team as it emerged from the passageway at his flank. Ignabyr endured a hail of warpstone shot as she charged. The skaven guns clattered and shrieked as they discharged their volatile payloads, but soon the first son of Kerrik lodge was among them. He and his mount fought as one, pressing in on the largest and most dangerous ratmen.

‘Watch-mind the big one!’ chittered a skulking figure, evidently an overseer, who gripped an oversized rifle in its claws. The Stormfiend under its command grunted in confusion before being battered aside by Ignabyr’s bulk. The mutated brute wrestled for its life beneath the magmadroth’s claws, discharging canisters of choking warpstone vapour against her hide as Larnik prepared to spring forward to do battle directly. Then a deafening crack shook the tunnel, accompanied by a concussive blast that punched a hole in the foul miasma spreading from the fallen Stormfiend. Larnik caught sight of the overseer once more, scented musk and saw the plume of acrid smoke rising from the heat-blackened barrel of its rifle. The skaven was unusually still, hunched and tense as if paralysed by shock. It took a split second for Larnik to parse that the force of the shot had caused the overseer’s weapon to explode from both ends. The skaven pitched sideways and sprawled to the ground, revealing a hole in its torso the size of an ogor’s fist.

It was then that Larnik’s attention was drawn downward. Ignabyr made an unnatural sound and staggered, almost casting Larnik to the ground. His heart burned and fury threatened to overtake him as he saw the ruin that the overseer’s rifle had made of his companion. The magmadroth’s horn and upper jaw were missing, and the inferno that boiled inside her gouted forth in an unstemmable torrent of volcanic blood. She keened and stumbled forwards, crushing the stricken Stormfiend in her death throes, and then she herself died, collapsing onto the cool rock.

Wrath compelled Larnik Vuul-Kerrik to leap forth from Ignabyr and find his own death at her side, but from his vantage point upon the magmadroth’s fallen body he could see that the duardin of Kerrik lodge were too consumed by their own battle-lust to understand that they faced extinction. The choice that Larnik Vuul-Kerrik made in that moment would forever change his life. It would cause the oath-runes embedded in his flesh to forsake him and run in burning rivulets to pool at his feet. It would sunder his ties to his father and his clan, and see him emerge into the cold Shyishan night as Rat-Tail.

Larnik Vuul-Kerrik sheathed his axes, took up the pair of bright braziers from Ignabyr’s back, and signalled the retreat.

Old Rigo puffed ruminatively on his pipe as the tale concluded. Or – given that such things had a habit of never quite concluding – as it reached the ending that Larn Rat-Tail saw fit to give him. The thoughts that caused the whitebeard’s brow to furrow and his whiskers to twitch were unreadable. His eyes, however, half-closed, bright and still, spoke of sympathy, fatigue and frustration. He sniffed at the night air.

‘An oathbreaker with good judgement. There it is. There’s the conundrum.’ Larn got the impression that Rigo was speaking to himself. Something in the words good judgement was difficult for him to hear.

‘They cast you out for that, did they? Ach.’ Rigo winced, tapping out his pipe. ‘A stubborn, prideful lot, yours. Dare say you saved their hides. Damned raki.’

‘Not all of them,’ Rat-Tail replied gruffly. The whitebeard must have seen the sorrow in his eyes – grief like cooling ashes – as he did not press for details.

‘Regardless,’ Rigo said, after a moment had passed. ‘It’s a dreadful thing to lose a child, whether to death or exile. There was a time when I’d have stuck dishonour on that list, too, mind you, but the older I get – and I’m very old – the less convinced I am that you can lose a child to dishonour alone.’

‘Depends on the dishonour,’ Rat-Tail muttered darkly, tugging at his matted beard.

Rigo chuckled. ‘Come now, come now. You’re not telling me you did something else?’

Rat-Tail sighed. ‘Got angry, after the rout. After the tunnels caved in and we were forced back on the road to Urgyrnaz. That was when my father’s wrath was at its worst. My kin, too. Blamed me for the loss of the prize they could no longer sense. Half of them wanted to tunnel blind into the underworlds rather than accept the loss. I was furious. Thought they were all fools. Swore an oath I shouldn’t, right there before the Zharrgrim priests.’

Rigo’s expression was soft. ‘You’re not the first duardin to swear an oath against his father, son. Most of them do. It’s usually over the fate of the family steel, mind. Or a particularly good batch of ale. Sometimes one leads to the other.’

‘Didn’t begrudge my father,’ Rat-Tail replied curtly. ‘I swore an oath against Grimnir.’

Rigo spluttered white smoke in surprise, bent double, reduced to a hacking cough that soon gave way to open, earnest laughter. Rat-Tail folded his arms uncomfortably. When the old whitebeard looked up at him once again, his eyes were damp with mirth.

‘Aye, so you did, so you did,’ he wheezed. ‘Aye, me lad. I’ll never cease to marvel at it, the habit of this age to tip an old dawi on his head and tell him down is up.’

He lost himself to chuckling again. ‘You were born to Grimnir’s path. Grim-set and dire-sworn to the bravest, most reckless, most contrary being to grace these realms or any others. You go and disgrace yourself with a bit of common sense and then it’s you that declares a grudgement against him! Oh, lad. I knew I liked you.’

Rat-Tail started as Rigo slapped him hard on the shoulder with a strength that surprised him. Then the whitebeard settled, and his voice softened.

‘What are you doing, son? Where are you going?’

Rat-Tail paused, looking back at Daltheim’s encampment. ‘There’s a doom about these mountains. Mine, theirs. I’m going to face it.’

Rigo considered him seriously. ‘Are you, now? And which way is it?’

Rat-Tail was silent for a moment. He almost nodded along Daltheim’s chosen course, but hesitated. Truly, he did not know.

‘They are steadily coming to the knowledge that the reputation of Borgni Daltheim has been built as much on luck and bluster as good sense,’ Rigo said. ‘It’ll start with the Greft lass, and it’ll spread. She’s got a good head on her shoulders, that one. You’re the best fighter among them, if you don’t mind my saying, and she saw it. Even if you do make them uneasy.’

Rat-Tail scowled.

‘Don’t blush. You’ll do more good for them by stepping away now. When they wake and see that you and your axes are gone, it’ll tilt the calculation ever more in Auringa Greft’s favour.’

Rat-Tail huffed. ‘You’re telling me to go on alone.’

‘No, ya wazzok. I’m telling you to follow that instinct of yours.’

‘Those that were taken. They live.’

Rigo stared at him, letting him figure it out. Rat-Tail gripped his axes and looked back down the mountain.

‘I can help them.’

‘More than you can help Borgni Daltheim, I’d wager.’

Rat-Tail looked solemnly at Rigo as he prepared to break another oath. The sight of the stolid whitebeard was a comfort even so. He drew a lungful of night air, grunted, and gave a nod of respect. Then he turned and began to stride away down the mountain, heedless of the heavy shawl he’d abandoned at Rigo’s feet.

The whitebeard’s voice reached him on the wind. ‘There’s another answer, you know, my boy. To that jest. I’ll tell you the one I told that foolish umgi…’

Rat-Tail slowed but did not stop, casting a glance back to where the wizened prospector stood at the edge of the great precipice.

‘What’s left of the sons of Grimnir when their fire goes out?’ the old duardin called out.

The voices of instinct, memory and doom-sense stole up on Larn Rat-Tail once again, and the words emerged from him unbidden.

‘A slayer,’ he called back.

HIGH AIRS

The deck of the Drakkul sang beneath Admiral Shima Sjarsdottir’s steel-braced boots. The ironclad was a Barak-Thryng original, if such a thing could ever be said to emerge from that most conservative Kharadron enclave. It was a wedge of thick-riveted iron that bludgeoned the sky before it, rancour given form by the ingenuity of the sky-faring duardin. Once, its prow had been adorned with a twin-headed rendition of Grungni and Grimnir, a tribute to the sigil of the City of the Ancestors. That figurehead had been torn away during Sjarsdottir’s spectacular escape from that uncompromising place. This was said to be the beginning of her legend – indeed, most tales told about Shima Sjarsdottir opened with it, in one way or another.

‘You’ve not heard of Shima Sjarsdottir?’ the tale-tellers would begin. ‘She’s the pirate who whipped the very Code out from under those who cleaved to it most jealously – and left only scowling gods in her wake!’

The Drakkul had undergone many modifications. It was held aloft by a pair of deceptively swift thunder-growlers, dark endrins that had been bolted to its hull in Barak-Mhornar. Later, the missing figurehead had been replaced with a sharp-edged naval ram of Sjarsdottir’s own design. The ship had grumbled ever since. Shima Sjarsdottir took pride in that low, powerful discordance. It was a renegade composition, the inescapable murmur of notoriety won over the course of a long, profitable and outrageous life.

Sjarsdottir held to her customary position astern of the navigator’s wheel, where the raised bomber’s step gave her a view of the Drakkul’s deck and the sky ahead. She’d had most of the ship’s deck guns stripped, exchanging firepower for speed and the discreet stowage opportunities afforded by now superfluous aethershot magazines. This was something that the conniving powderbeards of Barak-Mhornar might have called a calculated loss. Shima Sjarsdottir placed great stock in calculated losses. After all, she had been orchestrating them since the day she received her first commission.

Night had fallen. It scarcely seemed as if they’d had a full share of daylight since the Drakkul had slipped through an unguarded sky-path over Greywater Reach and entered Shyish. Yet those who served aboard the sky-ship had plied darker skies than these and made good profit out of it. Only the pilot, Renke, gave Sjarsdottir any concern. Her name had been made chasing fresh-sparked aether-gold deposits where they drifted between Ghyran and Chamon. That was dangerous, lively work, and Sjarsdottir did not regret the decision to snatch Renke’s commission out from under her former admiral – but the dangers of Shyish were new to her. These were the skies of death.

A blinding flash of light illuminated the Drakkul’s prow. Sjarsdottir adjusted her lenses; Renke winced and ducked behind the wheel. The pilot peeked back up to see two long ovals of golden light hovering in the darkness, parallel to one another. They were slender, radiant blades that tapered to sharp points. The Drakkul’s scattered crew made a point of turning away or ducking into cupolas; Renke expressed her disquiet with a grunt.

‘Eyes forward, dearie,’ Sjarsdottir said.

With a smooth motion the lights parted. The one to starboard held its position, dead-vertical. The other described a curving orbit as it glided a few degrees to port. Renke hesitated.

‘Do as she says,’ Sjarsdottir said.

Renke’s hands moved over the wheel, tilting the ship to mirror the movement of the lights. Almost as soon as she did so, the deck of the ship bucked in an updraught and they felt themselves buffeted by a crossing wind. The lights vanished, revealing motion to starboard. A great mass of blue-black stone whipped by the Drakkul’s flank, a looming edifice that had been near invisible in the darkness. There was a rumble and a second wall of rock closed in. The lights had guided them into a ship’s-width gap in the mountains. Beneath her mask, Shima Sjarsdottir chuckled. Young Renke gripped the wheel so hard she looked as if she might snap it in two.

Sjarsdottir stepped down onto the deck, glancing up at the stone that pressed in on the ship from both sides. It had been carved, long ago, into a gallery of towering duardin effigies that glowered down at them. The Khazalid stonewrights who shaped them must have intended them for the merchants, emissaries and interlopers who would have once traversed the mountain passes that sped by hundreds of feet below. It had taken grit, stubbornness and ingenuity to bring these mountains to heel, Shima Sjarsdottir mused, her boots firmly planted upon the deck of a craft that had long since made such accomplishments irrelevant.

Irrelevant, but not without value.

Sjarsdottir had been preparing to depart Greywater Fastness when she was approached by a pair of would-be passengers: an evidently penniless human and his companion, a swamp-plodding duardin woman from one of the local clans. Shima Sjarsdottir was not, in the main, in the business of offering transportation – especially not to beings as evidently improvident as these. Her refusal was immediate, and delivered in stride. It was the response that surprised her: a firm blow from a wooden mallet. She spun, aetherpistols in hand, to find herself staring at an outstretched and irresistible opportunity. The duardin woman glared at her askance, gripping her hammer and willing her to fire. The human held forth a piece of parchment so old that it looked as if it might disintegrate in the thick air. Sjarsdottir knew the old runes, however, and recognised its significance immediately.

It was a map, scribed in desperation upon the eve of the collapse of the Khazalid Empire. It described the location of one of the lost karaks of the ancient duardin. Karak Thorga. The map was not just a path to fortune, but to the sort of infamy that survived the rise and fall of empires. Shima Sjarsdottir lowered her pistols, and negotiations began.

Sjarsdottir watched the faces of the dead kings of Karak Thorga with satisfaction as she approached the prow. Staring out ahead of the ship, she spoke to the darkness.

‘Cut that a little fine, bright one,’ she said. ‘You’ll give poor Renke second thoughts.’

‘I accounted for her hesitation,’ the darkness replied.

A figure in a hooded cape took two deft, gliding steps along the prow before dropping silently to the deck. She was perhaps twice Sjarsdottir’s height, sun-blessed in the manner of the scions of Hysh. A pair of silver longswords hung from her hips and her hands rested upon them. Sjarsdottir could hardly make out the aelf’s features, but her swords seemed to repel the darkness. Ornate engravings coiled around their hilts, vanishing beneath gloved hands to re-emerge at the base of two faultless blades. These embellishments described landscapes, lakes, rivers and soaring mountains, temple-cities and boundless sunlit plains. The detailing on each weapon had its mirror on the other, but the specifics varied according to some incalculable aelven whim.

The swords were treasures: god-wrought weapons in the hands of Realm-lord Nauré Ardellain, who had once been called Bladelord of Syar; once Seneschal of the Leynfast; and who had once, during an independent phase, been the sellsword known as the Eventide Razor. Shima Sjarsdottir, for her part, favoured the honesty of simple titles.

‘I’m confident you had it all in hand, my navigator,’ Sjarsdottir said. ‘Even so,’ she continued, ‘I’ve no haste to take on new crew in Glymmsforge, or Ulfenkarn, or barter my marrow away to the uzkulrik for passage out through Gothizzar to Maker-knows-where. These are black skies, even for you, and I’m keen that we’re well clear of them before I go hunting for another pilot.’

The aelf tilted her head. ‘You are more than capable of operating this vessel,’ she said. ‘I have seen it. Several times.’

‘I am,’ Sjarsdottir said, nodding. ‘I can rig its endrins, too, and I can land a skyhook in a pinch. I can do a lot of things. Doesn’t mean I must. A few of us have the good fortune to walk many paths, bright one.’

‘Hmm,’ Ardellain replied. The two of them had engaged in some variation of this debate countless times over the course of their partnership. In this instance, Sjarsdottir was satisfied that she had the better of it.

The Drakkul whipped free of the pass and burst into open air. Ardellain looked away to survey the darkness and Sjarsdottir turned on her heel to return along the deck. She smiled beneath her mask as grumbling ship-hands snapped back to their work.

The Drakkul was far from the only sky-vessel to break free of the Code and turn renegade, and many free crews included unusual allies. Even so, there were few crews like hers. Sjarsdottir valued talent over longevity and placed no great stock in shipboard harmony. She knew that the endrinriggers and arkanaut mercenaries she’d drawn into her orbit grumbled when they believed she could not hear. She knew that their grumbling grew loudest when they were forced to rely on the enigmatic guidance of the Drakkul’s navigator. And she knew that all of that fractiousness, properly channelled towards the right goal, was a propellant as potent as the most rarefied aether-gold.

She lost crew every time the Drakkul moored at a sky-port, of course. Yet this too served her purposes. The reputation of the renegade Shima Sjarsdottir had spread to every free port and corsair’s enclave in the Mortal Realms, and it had been carried there primarily by the indignation of those who rankled at the myriad unseemly ways in which the admiral of the Drakkul conducted her business. Sjarsdottir was content with this arrangement. No crewmate left her service without reward; it just so happened that many duardin clung more dearly to their grudgements than to any number of shares. Both could be exchanged for ale, in the right circumstances.

Another blaze of light illuminated the deck, disturbing Sjarsdottir’s ruminations. She glanced back to see that Ardellain’s swords were crossed, light pulsing through them with urgent force. Sjarsdottir did not wait for Renke to get the message.

‘Halt!’ she called out. ‘Now!’

Sudden deceleration sent the deck tipping forward, the Drakkul’s endrin-masts groaning in protest. Sjarsdottir braced low and found her balance, but a ship-hand further up the deck lost his footing and began to tumble. Sjarsdottir watched him slide towards her, then saw his fall arrested with a jerk as his tether-line snapped taut and sent him clattering against the railings. Stagger-footed, but knows his protocol, Sjarsdottir noted. The fallen crewman picked himself up as Renke corrected the Drakkul’s bearing with a drifting turn.

Sjarsdottir’s eyes glanced to the front of the ship.

‘Navigator!’ she commanded. ‘What have you seen?’

Ardellain strode the length of the prow and reached Sjarsdottir in three loping strides. How she’d kept her footing on a tilting spar of polished iron was simply one of the many confoundments that one dealt with when working with aelven crew.

‘Not seen, but known,’ the aelf replied. ‘We are approaching a boundary. Its nature is unfamiliar to me.’

‘Is it dangerous?’ Sjarsdottir said.

‘Its nature is unfamiliar to me,’ Ardellain repeated.

Sjarsdottir knew her navigator well enough to understand when her condescension was intended and when it was simply the truth. She also understood that unfamiliarity, to a being of insight and symmetry, was its own category of experience. She cycled her lenses. Whatever it was that Ardellain had sensed, it bore no aetheric signature that she could recognise.

Sjarsdottir sniffed and considered her next question.

‘What did you feel?’

‘We are approaching a boundary,’ Ardellain repeated. ‘Lamentation-as-resistance, resistance-as-lamentation. These are known qualities of this realm – the distinction is a matter of composition, not fundamentals.’

Sjarsdottir was still as she listened. She understood that Ardellain was speaking, in the main, to herself, but she did not interrupt her.

‘Shyish presses in upon something it recognises, but whose individuation it resents, and would deny. The Realm of Death here confronts a defiant reconfiguration of its own essential substance.’

‘Like squeezing a wart,’ Sjarsdottir replied. It gratified her to lower the tone; she wondered if Ardellain knew what a wart was.

‘A curse,’ Ardellain said, continuing to follow her own thread. ‘Something dire has been spoken here. The realm prosecutes a disagreement.’

‘Cursed treasure, then,’ Sjarsdottir said, with a sigh. ‘Of course.Unusual of you to signal a halt in such circumstances, bright one,’ she added.

Ardellain wasn’t listening to her. ‘Something approaches,’ the aelf replied.

The aelf took two long steps and vanished into the starboard rigging. Sjarsdottir mounted the bomber’s step and addressed the crew.

‘Might be something, might be nothing, my dears!’ Sjarsdottir called out, breaking the silence. ‘Make ready to defend the ship. We move upon my say-so.’

There was clatter and clamour as arkanauts readied rifles. The Drakkul’s deck- and hull-mounted carbines were manned and swivelled into position.

Silence fell over the ship as these hurried preparations concluded. Then they saw lights in the distance, far to starboard. No aelven radiance this, but a sinister emerald glow that pulsed like lightning trapped within a storm cloud. The lights rolled towards them, dead set on the Drakkul, revealing a glimmering constellation of smaller illuminations within – a cresting wave of spectral candles.

Sjarsdottir mouthed a curse and her hands went, at last, to her pistols. Her thumbs drifted across the twinned ancestor masks that adorned their hilts. She cycled her lenses until she saw amethyst.

‘Gheistwind,’ she muttered, loud enough that Renke could hear her.

Nighthaunt.

The silence was broken by a dolorous howl, a sound that carried with it the abyssal grief of the punished dead. Above it rose the hard, incongruous, staccato report of horseshoes on cobblestone, which called into the hearts of all who heard it the sense of a funeral procession passing at a distance, upon ancient streets, under rain-laden skies. As they felt it, so it proved: each approaching candle adopted a galloping motion as it closed in on the Drakkul, and then the figures that carried them revealed themselves. Spectral knights that wielded pitted greatswords and soulflame brands rode at the head of a tide of ragged spirits, and at the heart of their formation loomed a shrouded horseman whose aspect was blacker than night.

‘Open fire!’ Sjarsdottir bellowed. The Drakkul’s gunners required little encouragement.

In a moment, the mournful emanations of the dead were drowned by the hiss and crack of refined aethershot. The ship’s batteries unleashed a wide broadside at first, then narrowed their fields of fire, gunners swivelling in their rigging, coordinating wordlessly according to both instinct and protocol. It could be no other way: the voice of the Drakkul was loud, and provided little opportunity for debate.

White-hot aethershot whipped through the spectral forms of the gheists and they howled and dissolved with each hit, leaving coiling whorls of emerald smoke in their wake. Yet as soon as the Nighthaunt vanished, they would rematerialise – a little to the left or right of their previous position, or, most disconcertingly, further ahead, as if prompted to greater aggression by each attempt to repel them.

The dead were gaining speed, and if their numbers had been thinned by the Drakkul’s onslaught, it did not show. Sjarsdottir felt an old dread in the pit of her stomach: the grim resolve of an experienced pilot who understands when a crash has become inevitable and all that remains is survival.

She reached for a speaking-tube and bellowed new orders.

‘All crew to midships! We’re sending these cravens back the way they came, and we’re not feeding them stragglers. Get free of your stations and hold at midships!’

The deck crew of the Drakkul, Sjarsdottir included, made their stand at a defensible brace point at the centre of the ship’s upper section.

A host of spectral knights crested the edge of the ship, making straight for the clustered duardin as the rest of the Nighthaunt broke away to dive into the lower decks. Sjarsdottir gripped her pistols, inhaled a lungful of filtered air, and opened fire. Both shots caught one of the galloping horsemen in the chest, and for a moment the ghastly figure appeared corporeal as it was cast backwards off its disintegrating mount.

Sjarsdottir sensed resolve returning to her crew and chuckled. ‘Nothing to it, my dears,’ she said, stepping out of their formation. She began to reload her pistols with the idle satisfaction of a tinkerer on a slow afternoon, and as the Nighthaunt neared, she began to hum. It was an old tune, one she’d heard as a lullaby, a ballad, a drinking song and a dirge. It recalled a period of imprisonment at the peak of a tall, treacherous mountain, the coming of a bright saviour, and a deep debt incurred. She raised her pistols wide and fired, and this time two horsemen fell. Shot whipped past her from the emboldened arkanauts at her back and, gheist by gheist, the horde was thinned.

Yet on they came, close now, passing through the safe envelope within which the Kharadron most comfortably made war. Sjarsdottir’s eyes were drawn to the looming Knight of Shrouds as the hooves of its spectral steed alighted upon the deck. It shrieked and began to propel itself forward, heedless of the violence directed at it by the aetheric and alkhemical ingenuity of the Kharadron. Its attention fixed upon Shima Sjarsdottir, there at the fore, and it thrust forth its ancient greatsword, dead set on the kill.

Light bathed the deck as two radiant blades descended from the sky-ship’s rigging. They sang against the air as they fell, spinning to fall upon the shrouded knight edge first, one then the other. The light of Hysh broke against the Nighthaunt, and Sjarsdottir smiled, a tune upon her lips.

The partnership of Shima Sjarsdottir and Nauré Ardellain had its roots in the downfall of the corsair prince Berias Klaive – an event that had long since passed into underworld lore but which, at the time, taught Sjarsdottir first-hand what it meant for an iconoclast to lose control.

Klaive had been widely considered the best monster hunter to ply the shrouded oceans of Ulgu, the Realm of Shadow. This reputation was not unfounded. Klaive took his trophies where others could not, vanishing for weeks or months into the trackless expanse of the Penumbral Sea before returning with a leviathan’s corpse hooked to the flank of his great barque and a hold teeming with the beast’s surviving young.

Klaive allowed his own origins to remain a mystery, and as a consequence the stories that were told of him soon came to follow those patterns beloved of Scourge Privateers and their darkling kin. From the dockside flop-houses of Misthåvn to the boulevards of Hagg Nar, the gaunt and desperate dregs of aelfkind told tales of the great preytaker who had been a slave; how the beasts he brought to heel were, if not godbeasts themselves, then not far from it; how this mortal’s skill and ruthlessness had seen the King and Queen of Shadow compete to claim him as their own. Klaive brushed such extravagant innuendo aside, but when he returned to Misthåvn at the helm of a Black Ark of unknown provenance, he did not stop his shipmasters from naming the massive vessel Umbrathain.

It was aboard the Umbrathain that Sjarsdottir and Klaive first met. The Black Ark made no particular affordance for Kharadron vessels, but one of its drake-roosts had been cleared out to provide Sjarsdottir’s ironclad with a place to dock. The stench was appalling and she suspected that she was the target of some aelven barb, but she’d gleaned profit from far more hostile berths than this.

Klaive sought Kharadron assistance for his latest venture and Sjarsdottir had outmanoeuvred a host of competitors for a shot at the contract. In a finely appointed dining hall, the great hunter revealed his target: the colossal sea dragon Heartsterror. Klaive spoke the name as if daring the assembled beast slayers and corsairs to laugh, to smirk their disdain into their high-fluted wine glasses or mutter incredulities under the cover of witch-smoke. Some did all of these things; Sjarsdottir chewed on a cured strip of meat from her reserve rations and listened. Heartsterror was a creature of legend, a beast of the old stories, but Klaive proclaimed with unassailable swagger that he alone possessed the means to track and slay it. He did not reveal his secret, but Shima Sjarsdottir left that first meeting certain that she’d figured it out.

As Klaive worked the room, Sjarsdottir’s eyes were drawn to the only figure that appeared unmoved by his boasts and proclamations. This incongruous being stood among Klaive’s personal guard, tall even by the standards of her aelven peers, poised, cloaked and ornately armed. Sjarsdottir had rarely witnessed such composure. The swordswoman radiated pride – a strident physical surety that was at odds with both the company she kept and her subordination as part of Klaive’s crew. At that time Sjarsdottir’s travels had not yet brought her into contact with the Realm-lords of Hysh, but she immediately recognised a creature whose destiny was divergent from their present circumstances.

A few flasks of Smogskimmer’s Particular – the dregs of a bad batch – bought her a name from one of Klaive’s lieutenants. Eventide Razor. That confirmed it: it was the pompous sort of epithet that fools bequeathed upon over-engineered ships, preening pit fighters and ‘secret’ weapons.

The morning after the feast, the Umbrathain raised anchor and returned to the darkness of the Penumbral Sea, flanked by swift-rigged dhows and prowling barques that bristled with barbed weaponry. The Drakkul shed her moorings and followed, maintaining a high watch over Klaive’s formation. Sjarsdottir kept her crew on a watchful rotation, knowing that the skies of Ulgu were swift to punish those who left their scouts’ nests and gunnery stations unmanned. All the while her own gaze was directed downward, towards the prow of the vast Black Ark, where from time to time she would catch a glimpse of golden lights in its most foremost watchtower – a piercing luminescence that appeared to guide the Umbrathain deeper and deeper into the dark.

They stole upon Heartsterror after seventeen days. The great sea dragon was, evidently, real, and had coiled itself about a spar of sea-battered stone that rose mountainous from the waves. Klaive’s formation slowed, spread out. The beast was truly colossal, comparable in mass to the Umbrathain and substantially larger than any of the other vessels that comprised the flotilla. Sjarsdottir brought the Drakkul to a halt and was directing the crew to ready the skyhook when a black-winged messenger bird alighted on the deck and croaked a directive.

‘Hold-and-heed.’

Beneath them, the Umbrathain initiated the hunt. Salvoes of ballista bolts and arcing torrents of doomfire rose from the huge ship’s deck and from those of several of its support vessels, dark sorcery hissing iridescent against Heartsterror’s thick scales as the beast was roused from its slumber. After that initial barrage the Umbrathain unleashed colossal hooks that bit deep into Heartsterror’s flesh and bound it to the Black Ark with razor-edged cables of aelven steel.

The sea dragon’s eyes snapped open and it bellowed protest to the skies, a burst of abyssal sound that rippled through the deck of the Drakkul. Then the beast did as harried creatures are wont to do, given the choice: it rose upon its coiling mass, dived from its perch, and fled. The chase had begun.

Had Klaive intended to entrap the creature, Sjarsdottir mused, he could have. She caught the unwelcome scent of a scheme.

Once again Klaive’s messenger arrived, landing silently near Sjarsdottir’s shoulder.

‘Hold-and-heed,’ it repeated.

They pursued Heartsterror for a day, during which the sea dragon’s attempts to escape Klaive’s snare were curtailed with minimal losses. A few of the lighter vessels were tossed off-course or broken upon the wrathful upheavals of Heartsterror’s lashing fins. One of the larger barques was lost to a sudden, violent attempt to slip the net, as the dragon feinted in one direction and then surged in the other, catching the reaver ship out of position and dragging it down with a single snap of its jaws. Yet the gap in the line was quickly filled by reserve ships and the pursuit proceeded according to Klaive’s design. From her vantage-point, Sjarsdottir made two observations: the monster hunter’s reputation had its basis in real expertise, and, in this instance, he was not trying especially hard.

He’s fishing for something bigger, Sjarsdottir thought, as they drove Heartsterror into still, night-black water, an expanse so deep and fathomless that it might as well have been the aetheric void. Sjarsdottir began to recalculate the profitability of her position. Klaive had not revealed every card he held: a predictable complication. Yet he clearly sought a prize of value, and believed that he possessed the power to claim it. Even if their aims were no longer aligned, there was very likely something of worth at stake for Sjarsdottir also.

Heartsterror gained speed in the calm water but soon began to drift uneasily from side to side, slowing as it proceeded cautiously into the night ocean. The pursuing vessels matched pace, a sense of anticipatory disquiet growing among them. The messenger bird returned to the Drakkul, and this time it bequeathed new orders.

‘Await-aftermath. Act-on-outcome.’

Something about the creature’s aspect had changed since it delivered its last missive. Sjarsdottir stared at it as it chittered and danced nervously along the rail. Then, as if overcome by pressure, it screeched horrendously and took wing, darting at speed into the sky-ship’s wake and vanishing. Sjarsdottir moved to the railing. Great clouds of black-winged birds were rising from Klaive’s flotilla and fleeing in the same direction. If the Scourge Privateers were unnerved by this display of instinctive terror, then they did not show it. Their vessels surged on, dredging the still waters into foam.

Sjarsdottir approached the Drakkul’s wheel and dismissed the pilot. The pieces had fallen into place. Berias Klaive hunted prey larger than legend, something he could not speak aloud even to those who would leap at any opportunity he had to offer them. He’d sent for aerial aid, Kharadron aid, yet the drake-roosts of the Umbrathain were empty. He’d known the beasts would flee.

He needs a way out, Sjarsdottir realised. If this doesn’t work.

She directed the ironclad into a climb.

And whatever he’s after, it’s beneath us.

Sjarsdottir’s insight put her perhaps half a step ahead of the fate that awaited the other shipmasters, and almost as soon as the Drakkul began to gain altitude the world below her erupted into madness. This was the moment of Klaive’s gambit, the purpose of his myriad schemes, a sequence of events whose knife-edge odds of success had been held in balance in the hunter’s mind ever since he took command of the Umbrathain at a god’s bequest.

That glimmering golden light at the fore of the Black Ark began to pulse. Heartsterror reeled suddenly and made to turn back towards the corsair line. The tethers that bound it were released, and the full firepower of the Umbrathain was unleashed. Ballista bolts laced with the most potent narcotic poisons in Misthåvn’s arsenal screamed through the gloom and pierced the sea dragon’s vulnerable underside. Enraged and desperate, the beast smashed aside a pair of outrider dhows and made to attack the Black Ark – but as it reared to strike, its momentum was arrested suddenly, and then the entire mass of the sea dragon was dragged backwards by something in the deep water.

Klaive’s intent was not to slay Heartsterror – it was to poison the bait.

The churning ocean revealed that the sea dragon’s hind quarters had been seized by a leviathan maw and pierced by a set of snapping mandibles each the size of a warship. The body of the beast was eyeless and serpentine and only part visible as its form merged with the obsidian tumult of the Penumbral Sea. It was when a second head revealed itself, and then a third, and then a fourth, that it became clear that Klaive had driven them all beyond the realm of monsters and into the domain of gods. Heartsterror screamed as it was set upon by a kharibdyss beyond the scale of mortal nightmare.

The onslaught from the Black Ark did not cease, and now extended its field of fire to catch the godbeast also. A number of the larger support vessels followed suit, indiscriminate in the weapons they brought to bear, compelled in equal parts by terror and the mad scale of Klaive’s ambition. Other ships – those sturdy or far away enough to survive the emergence of the great kharibdyss – lent their firepower also, or else made to flee.

Then the true fifth and largest head of the godbeast emerged to feed upon the sea dragon, revealing a distended lower jaw that wrenched away one of Heartsterror’s forelimbs in a shower of titanic gore. This head was haloed by a crest of bone protrusions bleached white by immeasurable age. Many bore signs of violent breakage, particularly those that flanked a deep scar that began at the creature’s cranium and extended deep along its neck. This was not the first time something had sought to slay the godbeast: Klaive’s attempt was part scavenger opportunism, part long-awaited coup de grace.

Aboard the Drakkul, Shima Sjarsdottir watched and waited. To that extent, at least, she followed Klaive’s orders. She assessed the specifics of his impossible plan and for a moment she watched as it worked. Whatever darkling alchemy he’d pumped into Heartsterror’s blood found its way into the massive kharybdiss also, triggering first confusion and then frenzy as one of its smaller heads snapped at the others. The godbeast began to wrestle with induced madness even as it sought to tear the life from the ancient sea dragon, and all the while the sorcerous and technological weapons of the Scourge Privateers pierced, burned and detonated against its flesh.

It was then that the tide turned, beginning with the last act of a stricken legend. Blood-slick Heartsterror located within itself a final reserve of wrathful animus and committed its death throes to revenge. It twisted and snapped at the kharibdyss, and as the godbeast recoiled it bucked forward, freeing its torso, gaining enough reach to lunge and snatch the hull of the Umbrathain in its jaws. The godbeast moved to reclaim its prey and dragged the Black Ark with it, drawing Klaive inexorably into his own snare.

The corsair prince’s losses had become absolute; Sjarsdottir immediately knew how to minimise her own. She snapped her tether-line to the wheel and directed the Drakkul into a precipitous dive. The ironclad swung about the thrashing leviathan bulk of the godbeast and levelled out, thunder-growlers pulsing as a burst of speed sent the ship shooting through sea spray, blood and debris towards a point at the fore of the Umbrathain where a golden light still lingered.

It was a good bit of flying, Sjarsdottir would later recollect. She’d had to replace most of the crew afterwards, but it was a good bit of flying. The Drakkul reached the Umbrathain just as the Black Ark began to sink. Sjarsdottir brought the ironclad to a halt near an isolated watchtower, where a lone figure stood tall and impassive as the world collapsed around her.

‘With me, bright one!’ Sjarsdottir bellowed over the cacophonous demise of the Black Ark. ‘I suspect we’ve both got better places to be!’

The aelf regarded her for a moment – but only for a moment – before leaping onto the ironclad’s extended boarding ramp. Sjarsdottir hauled the Drakkul skyward as the Umbrathain was crushed between creatures of myth and divinity. She’d later wonder if she’d seen Klaive down there on the Black Ark’s upper deck, spending his final moments watching his contingency plan – and his hopes – vanish into the clouds. The truth was that she had not seen him. But she could imagine it, and it pleased her to do so. It was an image as bright and vivid as the engravings upon the blades of Nauré Ardellain.

Those blades now fell upon the Knight of Shrouds like the first edge of dawn, an act of graceful execution that permitted no riposte. The revenant was banished with sudden force as light pierced its spectral form and burned it to howling cinders. A withering hail of aethershot tore into the Nighthaunt, emboldened by Sjarsdottir’s example and, perhaps, by the sight of the Bladelord as she brought the bright sorceries of Hysh to bear against the rest of the howling host. Ardellain flowed among them, almost a spirit herself, a glimmering longsword in each hand, cleaving through the dead with each gilded swing and thrust.

Within minutes the assault on the main deck was over. The Nighthaunt receded, the tide of spirits broken by Kharadron expertise and Realm-lord flair.

‘What did I tell you, my dears?’ Sjarsdottir called out, turning to face her crew. She gestured with a pistol towards the Drakkul’s cargo hatch. ‘Get that open! Full damage assessment. Now!’

‘Shima.’

Ardellain was at her back. Sjarsdottir paused.

‘The dead withdraw, having shackled no souls.’

She took this to be a good sign. Sjarsdottir glanced back at the aelf, and was surprised to see disquiet upon her face.

‘This vessel hangs heavier than it did,’ Ardellain continued. ‘By the weight of one duardin.’

Sjarsdottir looked back at her, incredulous. ‘Since when–’

There was a clamour at the cargo hatch as the crewman sent to haul it open started back. A pair of thick gloves appeared at the top of the ladder, and then an injured Kharadron was hauled up over the lip. Sjarsdottir recognised him as an arkanaut called Onghas. He’d been struck deep but could stand. Yet it wasn’t the sight of their wounded crewmate that had startled the others: it was the figure that had helped Onghas up the ladder.

With a grunt of exertion, a white-bearded stranger clambered onto the deck. He wore antiquated mail with a red cloak fixed at the shoulders. Across his back was slung a greataxe made of what was, to Sjarsdottir’s trained eye, unmistakably gromril, and a fair share of it at that. His was the sort of presence that was impossible to ignore, and he had not been on the ship when it had departed Greywater Fastness.

‘Hold it!’ Sjarsdottir said, levelling both pistols at the newcomer. The remaining below-decks crew emerged from the hatch behind him, followed by the only two passengers that Sjarsdottir was aware of – the rangy Ghyranite human and his Dispossessed companion.

‘Right you are, admiral,’ the longbeard replied, in a tone that expressed both respect and incongruous good cheer.

Sjarsdottir took a step closer, her pistols straight and level. ‘Name!’

‘Oh, aye, forgive me!’ the stranger replied. ‘A scrap with a spectre is oft enough to scatter one’s wits. They’re calling me Rigo, at the moment. Pleasure.’

‘Heavy gear, for a stowaway,’ Sjarsdottir said. Something in her bones told her that this wasn’t the truth, but she was well practised at masking uncertainty.

‘Aye, well, my apologies,’ the old duardin responded, smiling warmly. ‘I’m sure we can settle on a fair rate of payment for the journey already undertaken.’

He’s humouring me, Sjarsdottir thought. She lowered her guns. It unsettled her that her crew’s eyes had not left the newcomer since his appearance, and it also unsettled her that the mood upon the deck was overwhelmingly one of relief. It unsettled her most of all that she felt it too, and that in her core she felt the stirring of that unprofitable feeling called awe.

She hesitated, ceding control of the negotiation to the newcomer.

‘Right. So,’ Rigo began, tapping the fingers of one hand upon the palm of another as if counting out shares. ‘If I concede that I have, thus far, been the beneficiary of services received yet unpaid, then I’d humbly suggest that you, admiral, are in much the same position.’

Shima Sjarsdottir holstered her pistols and took a few slow steps forward, affecting calm. She reached up and raised her mask, revealing a face as lined and venerable as that of her counterpart, and a shock of white hair of her own.

‘And how is that, dearie?’ she said.

Their eyes met and Rigo chuckled. ‘You’ve an okrinri spirit to you, admiral, make no mistake. Yet even the most craftful of us might only apply their skills to one problem at a time. As you saw off those gheists that tried to sweep your deck clear of the living, I might suggest that I performed a similar service below.’

The wounded crewman, Onghas, spoke up.

‘He’s tellin’ the truth. No sense where he came from, but that axe of his–’

Sjarsdottir stopped him with a raised hand, offering her own smile to the white-bearded duardin. ‘No need for that, no need for that. You’ve performed a service to the ship. I’ll grant you that without argument.’ She drew closer, making play of the situation for the benefit of her crew. ‘Let’s weigh its worth. I’ll be generous. I’d say what you’ve done is worth the aggregate signing rates of those who were below decks at the time of the attack.’ She made a ruminative gesture. ‘Divided by two.’

‘Divided by two?’ the old duardin said, his voice raised in offended amusement.

‘You believe none would have survived were it not for your help?’ Sjarsdottir countered. Even renegade Kharadron had pride. She knew her crew wouldn’t like it if Rigo tried to argue with her.

The longbeard tilted his head, thought for a moment, then nodded amiably. ‘You’re quite right, admiral,’ he said, evading the trap. ‘They’re a capable lot, and I’ve no wish to contend otherwise. I’d be happy to accept the value of a single crewman’s signing rate.’

He nodded towards Onghas.

‘If you’ll permit me, lad.’

Onghas nodded gratefully. Too gratefully, Sjarsdottir thought. Well played.

‘I’ve time for any negotiator who can match generosity with generosity,’ she responded, lying. ‘However, a single signing’s worth isn’t sufficient to buy you passage to Karak Thorga, let alone access to what lies within.’

‘As it goes, admiral, that’s quite all right.’ Rigo began to rummage around beneath his mail overcoat, making a clumsy show of it. ‘This ship will go no further towards the lost karak. What lies ahead is a dire threat to you and your fine crew.’ He looked past Sjarsdottir into the darkness, where Ardellain stood. ‘She has a sense of what I’m talking about,’ he added, his characteristic levity suddenly absent. ‘Those gheists were the start of it, but they’re not your true concern. The wretched things hoped you’d press on, punch a hole in that which splits these mountains from the realm, give them a way in. The dead weren’t trying to stop you getting to Karak Thorga, admiral. They were trying to drive you closer.’

Sjarsdottir narrowed her eyes and stared at him. The irritating, lingering sense of respect she felt in the old duardin’s presence told her that he was telling the truth, although she would not have believed the same words if she had spoken them herself. She felt it then: the lure of prey that was too big, the danger of believing that one can ever truly calculate one’s losses when dealing with impossible forces. This was the lesson she believed she’d learned from Berias Klaive, yet she watched herself take a hesitant step over the same precipice.

Sjarsdottir laughed – not her usual rumble of amusement, but a harsh bark that spoke to grudgement as much as mirth.

‘My, we have quite the swindler in our midst!’ she exclaimed. ‘All that just to turn us back. Do you know what that means, my dears?’ She turned her attention to the crew, who watched her nervously. ‘It means we’re in the lead, or close to it.’

She took another step towards the white-bearded duardin, staring him down. ‘All you’ve done is tell me that the treasures of that place are as good as mine. I thank you for that. I’ll consider it payment for letting you leave along the boarding ramp, not through the bomber’s hatch.’

Rigo didn’t look at her, but continued to rummage around beneath his cloak.

‘Chuf, I’ve not got it,’ he said, heedless of Sjarsdottir’s threat. ‘Sivarn, lad, check your coat.’

Sjarsdottir watched as the ragged human reached into his patchwork overcoat and withdrew a piece of parchment. He looked faintly surprised to see it, then handed it to Rigo.

The old duardin unfolded the document and held it out for Sjarsdottir to read, watching her as she did so. ‘Not many still versant in this particular klinkarhun,’ Rigo said, appreciatively. Her eyes went from the parchment to the longbeard, and then back again. ‘For your own sake, admiral, heed the words of an old dawi,’ he continued. ‘You were missing the full picture and now you have it. By the terms of this writ of claim, anything recovered from those halls is mine by right. You could risk your soul for a few scraps, but what good would it do you? There’s nothing you could take that I won’t be able to reclaim, and no fair-dealing dawi can be expected to purchase his own property.’

Rigo returned her stare. There was steel in it now, and she felt uncomfortably small.

‘You’ve brewed yourself a rare sort of notoriety, admiral,’ he said. ‘But I’m not sure you’re in a hurry to add “unprofitability” to the mix.’

This could have, should have, been the moment to withdraw. But Sjarsdottir felt the spark of awe that Rigo inspired in her turn to anger, and then to the reckless iconoclasm of the young and foolish.

‘Renke. The wheel. Now.’

She watched the young pilot make for her station then look back, awaiting orders.

‘Do as he says. Bring us down.’

Renke engaged a burst of speed and drew the ship about in a wide turn, cruising towards the snows of the upper mountainside. Rigo’s posture softened and he took a step back, smiling.

‘Fine form, admiral,’ he said. ‘I knew I saw wisdom in–’

‘Artycle Six,’ she snapped. ‘Rules of the high airs. A vessel from any sky-port may seize airships deemed to be taken by piracy and confiscate all property on board.’

Rigo snorted, amused. ‘Admiral,’ he said. ‘This is a pirate craft.’

Sjarsdottir closed in on him. ‘The Drakkul was wrought in the foundries of Barak-Thryng. It flies under the command of a daughter of Barak-Thryng. This is a vessel of the City of the Ancestors, and its course will not be directed by an outsider. You took the ship by threat. I’m taking it back.’

She signalled Renke to halt.

‘And now, your property is forfeit.’

It was an outrageous gambit, but Sjarsdottir had spoken no falsehoods. The old whitebeard stared wide-eyed at her and shook his head.

‘I’d heard tales of you, admiral, but the truth of it. Wielding the wisdom of your own kin as a dagger…’ Rigo exhaled sharply, and appeared for a moment to loom larger in her eyes than any duardin she had ever met. ‘Might be enough to rouse me to anger, and that’s a scarce happenstance nowadays.’

Sjarsdottir stood her ground. ‘A few of us have the good fortune to walk many paths, whitebeard. Yours awaits on the mountain below, and if you’re as fair-dealing as you claim, you’ll be departing without your writ, your weapons or any other treasures you’ve smuggled aboard my ship.’ She gave another signal and the Drakkul continued its descent. Rigo gave her an inscrutable look.

‘Right you are, admiral,’ he sighed, reaching behind him to unclasp his greataxe.

‘No.’ Onghas took an unsteady step forward and none among Sjarsdottir’s crew moved to stop him. ‘The admiral’s done injustice to an honourable duardin. Krenkha gorogna. I invoke krenkha gorogna.’

Rigo turned to the wounded arkanaut and smiled gratefully.

A vote of confidence in the case of ill governance. Sjarsdottir rankled. In invoking the Code upon the Drakkul, she’d opened herself to this. She cast her eyes around the assembled ship-hands, and felt the pieces fall into place against her. Every move she’d made since the whitebeard appeared had weakened her position, yet she was too committed to concede.

The ironclad began to slow, lowering its bulk over an expanse of snow and rock. An arkanaut yanked a lever, causing the boarding ramp to crash down onto the ice. They’re making a play for the ship, she thought.

Shima Sjarsdottir gathered her strength and reached up to snap her mask back down over her face. Then she turned and faced Onghas. ‘I accept,’ she said, catching the uncertainty in the wounded arkanaut’s posture. ‘As this is a vessel of Barak-Thryng, let krenkha gorogna be conducted according to the old ways. No vote. Combat. These are my terms, and as admiral, they cannot be amended.’

Her hands went to her aetherpistols. The crew withdrew, creating space between Sjarsdottir and Onghas. With visible pain, the arkanaut raised his deck gun.

Old Rigo, greataxe drawn, stepped between them. ‘The lad has the right to name a second,’ he growled, his intent clear.

Beneath her mask, Sjarsdottir smiled.

‘As do I, dearie.’ She stepped aside and gestured over her shoulder. Wordlessly, Nauré Ardellain stepped from the darkness and took her place.

The aelf assessed her opponent for a moment before drawing a single blade. She raised it high and horizontal, dropping into a duellist’s stance, invoking no sorceries. Sjarsdottir had known her long enough to see that she was enjoying herself. If Rigo felt fear, however, he did not show it.

A moment passed in deep silence as the white-bearded stranger and the Bladelord faced off. Then Ardellain moved with swiftness that outpaced the eye, and within a heartbeat the duel was over. She lunged the distance between them and twisted her longsword into a cross-slash aimed at Rigo’s temple. There the blade collided with the head of his greataxe, which rebuked its quicksilver perfidy with ancient indignation. In response the longsword simply disintegrated, its artistry scattered to the night sky in a cloud of silver ash. Ardellain, stunned, left herself open to a counter-attack that never came. The old duardin took a step back and lowered the head of his axe to the deck, resting his weight upon its hilt.

Sjarsdottir watched unfathomable calculations cross Ardellain’s brow as the remains of her god-wrought weapon drifted from view. The admiral knew she’d lost. She just didn’t know how much. She tapped with one hand on the pouches of her arkanaut suit, assessing the state of her reserve rations.

‘Right,’ said Rigo, gruffly. ‘That’s that settled, then.’ He looked back at the human, Sivarn, and the scowling Dispossessed woman at his side. ‘Come on, beardlings, we’d best be off.’

The whitebeard ambled over to the edge of the boarding ramp. Then he turned, looked up, took in the stars for a moment, and regarded the Drakkul’s crew. They stared back at him, having evidently expected him to stay, even take Sjarsdottir’s place. ‘Probably best to keep the admiral under guard for a bit,’ he said jovially. ‘If you need a bit of honest work, fly coreward until morning and be on the lookout for folk making their way down the mountain. They’re weather-beaten and worse, but they’ll pay handsomely for safe passage, and they’re good for it.’

A pair of arkanauts approached Sjarsdottir; others returned to their stations. Ardellain began to stride towards the departing duardin and Sjarsdottir hoped, for a moment, that she might see her other blade flash to life.

Rigo was already halfway down the boarding ramp. He paused and looked back, tilting his head. ‘Aye, elgi. You can come with us, if you so wish.’

Then he looked up at Sjarsdottir, winked, and strode off, companions in tow.

DURKAR’S WAKE

Subcouncillor Anki Thayne eased himself from the saddle and dropped to the thoroughfare with a wet thud. The path to old Durkar’s manse was muddy and overgrown, as was typical of the outer districts of Greywater Fastness. The city had been engaged in a fierce argument with the Realm of Life since its founding. Many among the hard-headed cogsmiths of the Ironweld Arsenal scarcely considered these ragged boroughs to be part of Greywater Fastness at all, instead regarding them as accidental and often desperate outgrowths. A place did not earn the right to declare itself part of the city simply because it sprang up within artillery range. Just ask the trees.

Guildmaster Gerrig Durkar had been neither hard-headed nor desperate. In life he had been a well-regarded figure whose reputation for fair-spirited deal-making won him sufficient wealth to reside comfortably within the city’s inner districts. This was what was expected of him. The city was where Durkar’s business was conducted, after all, and where the Council of the Forge convened to discuss matters of pertinence to the duardin clans who had been so essential to the Ironweld Arsenal’s success. Yet Durkar had chosen, in the end, to build his manse close enough to the city’s outermost boundary that it may as well have been in the forest.

Thayne sniffed the air and, scenting rain, untied his leather pack and slung it over his shoulder. He gave his mount, Utos, a firm pat and began to lead the beast along the winding stone path that led to the house proper. The vines that twined about its curling horns grew heavy with dew.

To the untrained eye, the grounds of Durkar’s manse might have appeared as ill-kept as the rest of the district. Anki Thayne, however, knew the difference between cultivated wildness and the hostile verdure of the Everqueen’s domain. The attitude expressed by Durkar’s estate seemed in keeping with the old guildmaster’s even-handed approach to negotiation.

He’s a loss to this city, Thayne thought, as he mounted the stone steps that led to the manse’s thick heartwood doors.

The subcouncillor raised a gloved fist and gave two heavy knocks. When he received no response, he repeated the gesture. This was sufficient to disturb a gaggle of chittering grennets and send them fluttering away into the wild; Utos lowed contentedly and began to tear at the vegetation that pressed up through the cracks at the base of the stairs.

Thayne waited a long moment, grumbled to himself, and descended the steps. He led Utos around the side of the manse to a small stable.

He had visited Durkar’s home once before. He remembered the surprising size of the place, the way its spacious, welcoming main hall stood in contrast to the myriad cloistered private chambers that comprised the rest of the structure. It was built to welcome and to host, and also to protect, isolate and conceal. In that regard Durkar’s manse was a little karak, in its way, an echo of the holds of the ancient Khazalid rendered in wood, stone and thatch.

Thayne’s wandering took him the length of the building to the expanse of green at its rear. This was evidently the raw edge of Durkar’s negotiations with the Everqueen – there was a richness in the air that had the quality of wet ink. Bright eruptions of fruit and petal overwhelmed an attempt at stonework that formed a promenade leading down from the back of the house. Winding footpaths trailed between bulging vegetable patches and bristling hedgerows.

It was along one of these narrow paths that Anki Thayne spied movement. The figure he saw in the undergrowth was human, neither very young nor old but contorted into that awkward middle stage that tended to pass swiftly among duardin but had a habit of lingering in mankind. His features were obscured by a thicket of wet hair and he wore a ragged overcoat the colour of mud. He paid no heed to the subcouncillor’s arrival; presently, he was speaking slowly and intently to a large, unidentifiable vegetable.

Thayne cleared his throat. ‘Master Sivarn Trell?’

The human shifted uncomfortably. ‘Er, yes,’ he replied. ‘I live here,’ he added, answering a question that had not been asked. Then his eyes brightened as recollection surfaced within him. ‘You’re from the Council of the Forge!’ He loped forward, moving with surprising ease through the undergrowth. ‘Hello.’

Thayne and Trell grasped one another’s wrists and shook.

‘That’s right,’ Thayne said. ‘Anki Thayne. I’m here to see to it that the guildmaster’s bequest is handled without irregularity.’

The human smiled guilelessly and looked back towards Durkar’s manse. ‘Right y’are,’ he said. ‘Let me get you settled!’ Then he snatched up Thayne’s bags and strode off at pace towards the house, beckoning the subcouncillor to follow him.

And there’s the irregularity, Thayne thought.

Old Durkar had been clanless in life. This was not unheard of – the long age of darkness that preceded the coming of Sigmar’s Tempest had shattered many families, and the wars that followed had not been much kinder. A Durkar or two had been present around the time of Greywater Fastness’ founding, reputedly, but they’d been lost to plague and this Durkar, the one Thayne had known, had been raised as an orphan of war.

It was – all of it – war. The city had repelled rotbringers, despoilers, the children of the Everqueen and the realm itself in its struggle for survival. In Greywater Fastness, in those early days, one either rose or one sank.

Guildmaster Durkar had risen. Never too far, mind you, but he’d earned the right to claim a measure of the city’s success as his own. He’d remained well liked until declining health saw him withdraw, for long seasons at a time, to his home on the outskirts, and what he did there none could say. His reputation was such that even the gossipmongers left him be.

Then he had died, and attention had converged upon him once again. To what cause would old kinless Durkar pledge himself, in the end? Durkar’s bequest was unsealed at a special convention of the Council of the Forge. Councillor Irtek had stared at the unsealed document just a little too long, suddenly uncomfortable, muttering something to himself. From his vantage-point at the rear of the chamber, Anki Thayne had seen that the list of beneficiaries was extremely short.

‘Master Sivarn Trell, gardener,’ Irtek had said, at last. ‘That’s it. That’s all it says.’

The gossipmongers had something to work with at last, and scandal spread. Who this Sivarn Trell was, none could reliably say. An outsider, then, of unknown provenance, his bond to the guildmaster little understood. A swindler, perhaps? They uncovered him piece by piece. A council clerk let slip a description of the ragged hand that had penned the note announcing the guildmaster’s death. The drover who had brought the undertakers and dirge-singers to Durkar’s door – thence away again, casket-laden – recalled the human servant who had let them in, said little, but loomed ghoulishly over the proceedings.

These details were enough to cast a shadow over Durkar’s bequest, and the matter engulfed the Dispossessed clans of the city, making it inevitably a concern for the Council of the Forge. Yet there was an understanding among the councillors that all this clamour for inquests and investigations presented its own dangers. In Greywater Fastness, one either rose or sank. Not all of those who had risen had done so as magnanimously as Guildmaster Durkar, and not all of those who pressed for fairness could be trusted to do so with the best interests of the city in their hearts.

Thayne followed the gardener through the rear doors of the manse, which opened into a dusty dining hall with an adjoining larder. From there Trell led the way deeper into the structure until they reached a simple wooden stairwell. ‘I imagine you’ll be most comfortable in the chambers upstairs, Councillor Thayne,’ he said. ‘Gerrig had his own rooms down here which he preferred, towards the end. But there’s comfortable lodging up there, along with his effects and sundries–’

‘Subcouncillor,’ Thayne interjected. The human smiled at him.

‘Aye. He always said that you did important work, you of the council. Respected you for it. I’d be glad to be of help.’

Anki Thayne squinted at Sivarn Trell from the edge of half a dozen questions.

‘I’ll need to see the guildmaster’s records,’ he said in the end.

Trell led him deeper into the house, commencing a tour of Durkar’s studies and libraries that would come to consume much of the remaining daylight. Eventually they arrived at a reading room that had been given over to a specific purpose. The fading light of Hysh filtered through the trees to settle on piled tomes of history, realm-lore and linguistics. It was here that Trell’s aspect changed, however subtly. He thumbed the pages of an open book of runes, and halfway through an account of the guildmaster’s interest in local history, lost his train of thought.

‘Do you understand why I’m here, Master Trell?’ Thayne asked.

The gardener eased himself into a chair. ‘Well, Gerrig’s bequest, isn’t it?’ he said.

‘That’s correct,’ Thayne replied, ‘but surely you must be aware who the guildmaster named?’

Trell pondered this for a moment. ‘The city, I’d expect,’ he answered.

Thayne gave a gruff snort and stared across at the human, seeking signs of guile, finding none.

‘He named you, Sivarn Trell. Only you.’

The human’s face flushed with emotion. Thayne saw a flash of grief that quashed any hope of finding a swift and simple resolution to the question of Durkar’s legacy. This would be a tangled matter.

Trell collected himself. ‘That’s trouble, isn’t it?’ he said, with surprising insight. ‘For the council, and the clans.’

‘Aye,’ Thayne agreed, nodding. ‘Aye, it is.’

They spoke awhile after that, and Anki Thayne was surprised to find an amicable companion in Sivarn Trell. Their conversation continued over bowls of spiced vegetable stew, and then, as if by habit, the gardener unsealed a slightly bitter cask of Old Oakbrow and set it down in one of the retiring rooms with a clean tankard by its side. He himself returned from the kitchens with a dark green bottle in one hand and a pewter cup in the other before settling into a chair that faced the garden. Ale didn’t agree with him, he explained.

Thayne noted that this was a being who was familiar with the small rituals of duardin friendship. He knew when the conversation called for a new notion, and when instead it was time to ruminate on old ones. He knew the value of the tasting-moment that followed the first draw from a fresh cask, and he understood how to break a silence before it could darken the hearth.

This unexpectedly pleasant evening left the subcouncillor in little doubt that Sivarn Trell had indeed been Durkar’s friend and confidant. Yet as convivial as the gardener could be, he avoided the subject of himself by dipping into distractions. Trell was protecting something, that much was clear. Himself, no doubt, but, as Thayne came to suspect, the guildmaster also. What had they spoken about, in their long evenings in this little retiring room? Eventually, Thayne asked the question directly.

Trell hesitated for a moment.

‘Peace,’ he said at last.

And it was then, at the too-late hour when the hearth begins to gutter, the tankard grows light and the body heavy, that Sivarn Trell told his tale.

He had emerged from the woods more or less directly into Gerrig Durkar’s garden. It wasn’t so much a garden at that time as a wing of the house lost to green. He knew folk out in the swamps, but the living there was tough and getting tougher. There was a war song in the dirt, Trell explained, that even he could feel.

He hesitated on this; Thayne raised an inquisitive eyebrow. A brief digression: the Trells were of neither the Fastness nor the forest, but had emerged in Hammerhal Ghyra. The family, while hardly affluent, had links to the Collegiate Arcane, and Sivarn, as a middle son, had benefitted from some formal schooling. It hadn’t stuck with him, he insisted, nor he with it, but he possessed certain aetheric sensitivities that – if nothing else – made him quite a good gardener.

Trell had come to Greywater Fastness to discover if there was some security in iron that he might bring back with him to the fens. Gerrig Durkar had come to the edge of the city because he no longer found any solace in the hiss of its steamworks or the thunder of its guns.

They had both, then, arrived at the manse as seekers, in pursuit of something ephemeral. Peace was the best word for it. In truth, they’d come to few radical conclusions – but they had passed long evenings in conversation, and Trell tamed the garden and did what he could to safeguard the house, and in return Durkar provided him with lodgings and a salary that he could send back out to the wilds. He also told him about the city, and the clans, and how it all functioned, the mechanism of war and resistance that was Greywater Fastness.

Then, Durkar had suddenly taken ill. Trell did what he could, as a healer, until the moment he realised that he must send to the city for aid; the next day, Gerrig Durkar was gone. Trell took up pen and parchment and, with great sadness, sent the missive that announced the guildmaster’s passing.

Trell’s tale concluded, Thayne returned to his lodgings, his mind heavy. He slept fitfully, stricken by unease that seemed to steal up from his gut to nip and scratch at his mind. This would be a tangled matter. These words pursued him into the dark, and he pursued them in turn.

He woke with a start, just before dawn, convinced that he had been shaken from sleep by the sound of cannon fire. A weapons test on the far side of the city, perhaps. The sound had never startled him before.

Had he dreamed? He believed that he had. In dreams he had walked the corridors of the manse until he saw candlelight beneath the door of Durkar’s private reading room. Had somebody been in there, long after dark? He’d pushed at the door, but if he’d seen anything within, his memory would not yield it to him. All the dream had left him with were sensations.

White whiskers, and pipe smoke.

Anki Thayne made a point of avoiding the Old Oakbrow for the remainder of his time at Durkar’s manse.

It did not surprise him to find Trell already outside by the time he emerged, but something had changed in the human’s aspect. He seemed lighter.

‘History meant more and more to him, near the end,’ Trell said, looking up at Thayne from the bottom of the garden steps. ‘His history, and the history of his folk. It fretted him that he’d lost the shape of it.’

Trell climbed a couple of stairs and looked up at the manse.

‘If all this means trouble for the clans, let them come here and share what they know,’ he said. ‘Might be that some of it gives Gerrig’s shade a bit of rest.’

Thayne thought about this for a moment. ‘Not out of the question that a better claim might come forward, should you open the door to one. Would you object to that?’

Real concern passed over Trell’s features, and then he steeled himself.

‘No, Councillor Thayne,’ he said, at last. ‘I think it’d be a weight off my mind.’

So it was that the great heartwood doors of Durkar’s manse were opened. Thayne took Utos back to the city and returned at the onset of evening with the proper announcements made. The next morning, he and Trell set about preparing the main hall to receive guests. They arranged its benches into two arcing banks and set a heavy desk at the head of the room, where Thayne would sit and take account of claims and petitions as they came forth. Together, they reconfigured the heart of Durkar’s home, banishing the empty feast hall and constructing a chamber of enquiry in its stead.

It took some time for the clans of Greywater Fastness to mobilise themselves, but the first party arrived a few days later: Settner Jord and his offspring, whose foundries had a long relationship with the provisioner’s guilds that Gerrig Durkar had overseen. They brought little of use, having the same hand-me-down memories of the lost Durkars that he did. Yet when they asked if they might attend again, Thayne assented. The Jords returned every day after that.

Durkar’s manse played host to Kellinkel stonewrights and Drorn boatsmen, Gurthur sky-port engineers and forge-scholars from the Yadrin and Hullik lines. Each new group that arrived knew about as much of Durkar’s history as each other, which is to say little, and many simply came to pay their respects. In this manner the investigation into Durkar’s legacy became a wake, of a sort. More and more duardin made their way to the manse, driven by respect and by curiosity and by that sentiment common among the Dispossessed – something here passes, but may yet be made right.

Sivarn Trell seemed energised by the gradual dissolution of the enquiry’s purpose. He took a keen interest in those that had known Durkar in life, offering meandering tours of the house. Thayne noted that Trell’s welcoming attitude did much to make him more palatable to the clans of Greywater Fastness. There was a sense of rejuvenation in the air: this was a tangled affair, yes, but an increasingly acceptable one.

Then came stout and black-bearded Riggen Bolk to Durkar’s manse.

Thayne knew Bolk by reputation only, as carefully cultivated reputation had been the means by which Bolk amassed fortune and stature while dissuading council scrutiny. His name had been made in the Ironweld Arsenal, in which he had served as an armsmaster of uncompromising rigour. He arrived at Durkar’s doors clad in the breastplate and pauldrons of his former office, each element embossed with runic depictions of the Maker in his bellicose aspect.

He entered flanked by a pair of guards in well-crafted leathers studded with the insignia of the Rikrbal Trading Company, which Bolk oversaw as First Broker. He brought with him his own runescribe, a wisp-whiskered scholar called Wynrik, whose unwavering deference gave his master the air of a minor Warden King. Then there was Bolk’s personal cook, brewer and their own assistants, and a host of other retainers and kin whose sole purpose appeared to be to achieve a sort of demographic supremacy over Durkar’s manse.

Thayne knew to be wary. He knew that Bolk had exchanged Ironweld authority for myriad favours and advantages. He knew that the name Rikrbal meant one thing within the city and quite another out in the thieves’ cantons and slums, where falling afoul of the Rikers – as they were known – was an easy way to disappear. Fealty to the customs of the Dispossessed could be a way for the unscrupulous to stretch a veneer of respectability over corruption and criminality, and Riggen Bolk had stretched it further than most.

Knowing this, Thayne braced himself at his desk. Trell, for his part, seemed overcome with disquiet. Where previously he had seemed buoyed by the activity within the house, now he skulked at the hall’s periphery, evidently unhappy.

When Bolk came forth to speak, the benches of Durkar’s hall were more full than they had been for years.

‘Hail, Subcouncillor Thayne,’ Bolk proclaimed before the crowd, ‘and hail to ye, kin of the clans and iron-backed partisans of Greywater.’

He turned as he spoke, moving to the side of the desk, giving his address to the room. Thayne felt Bolk’s shadow fall across him.

‘I have consulted the wisdom of peers and ancestors, and I have determined that I must come before you, as one with the power to secure the legacy of Gerrig Durkar as he would have wanted. As is right.’

Thayne noted anticipatory tension in the air. Something here passes, but may yet be made right.

Bolk gave a gesture and the scribe Wynrik came forward bearing a long leather bundle, bound with a golden cord. He held it out for his master to take and withdrew. Bolk rested the object on the desk and began to unwrap it, speaking as he did so.

‘There’s grief in what I must share with you this day,’ Bolk said. ‘Bitterness, and dishonour also. Our kind are no strangers to these things, however.’

He turned a fold of leather, and Anki Thayne spied a flash of brilliant silver – no:

Gromril.

‘Nor do we fear them!’ Bolk continued, thunder in his voice. ‘And nor do we fear the long wait for restitution – for how can we fear that which we were born to, that which is our birthright?’

At this he drew from the bundle a runic hand axe of superlative craftsmanship, raising it into the dappled light of the hall. All present could see that the weapon was ancient. It prompted in the assembled Dispossessed not just fascination, but also pride and indignation. Here was a piece of home. But only a piece.

Riggen Bolk waited until he had wholly captured his audience, and then he told his tale.

In his own way, the origins of Riggen Bolk were as mysterious as those of Gerrig Durkar. This was no accident, he explained. They were both war orphans, both kinless from an early age, and they had known one another well. Durkar, slightly the elder, was the more cautious of the two, while hot-tempered Bolk had seen them clear of encounters with quick-handed sneak-thieves and brutish fensmen. They might, Bolk added pointedly, have been brothers.

Years had passed in this manner and their bond had grown ever closer. Why was this not more widely known? Bolk asked. The answer to that lay amid the horrors of war.

Gerrig Durkar had been fortunate in one regard: he possessed a single relic of his kin, the selfsame axe of gromril that Bolk had brought forth. Yet in his youth Durkar had been no warrior, quite the opposite: his mind was ever set on the problems and opportunities of industry. His ancestral axe remained bound in leather, and young Riggen Bolk did enough fighting for the two of them.

Then green terror had come to Greywater Fastness and left Durkar with little choice but to take up the weapon of his people. The Sylvaneth came at night, taking advantage of a poorly managed stretch of wilderness at the city’s fringe in order to steal into an artillery blind spot. Vicious treelords wrenched a gap in the walls wide enough to grant passage to a tide of shrieking tree revenants, spiteful avatars of the barbarous wild. Their viciousness was such that it sent the folk of the lower city into a panic, surging for the protection of the inner walls. Even the aelves, Bolk noted, recoiled from the cruelties of their supposed kin.

It was then that Greywater gave them its renowned welcome, smashing treelords to flaming splinters with Arsenal cannonades and scattering the horde with punishing Helstorm salvoes. The two young duardin had found themselves trapped in a burning district, their own survival far from guaranteed, but it had been then, Bolk declared, that he knew the course his life must take. He watched vicious dragonspites torn from the air by the guns of the Gyrocopter Corps, felt himself galvanised by the deafening report of drakefire guns and knew that his duty lay with the indomitable Ironweld.

This was a dire moment, however. Riggen Bolk took up a flaming brand to keep the tree revenants at bay as they retreated towards the inner walls; Durkar swung his ancestral axe with inexpert desperation. Then, trapped in a burning alley, their death came for them.

It took the form of a prowling dryad, stalking them with scythe in hand, its body writhing with venomous insects. One of these struck forth at young Durkar and seized him at the neck, biting deep. Durkar lost his nerve then, Bolk noted with regret, allowing himself to be overcome by fear. Treacherous aelf-song shuddered within him, and he collapsed to the ground. That was when Durkar’s axe found its way into Riggen Bolk’s hands, where it rested as weighty as an oath undertaken. Bolk set about the dryad until he was slick with its black ichor, and then he hauled the two of them to safety.

When he woke, Durkar insisted that Bolk keep the weapon, pledging it as partial repayment for the immeasurable debt he owed. Bolk had refused, of course, which prompted Durkar to admit that the sight of it filled him with shame. Their paths had diverged not long after: young Durkar to an apprenticeship within the safe heart of the city, Bolk to the battle-scarred but unbroken walls.

‘I come before you not to lay out the shame of an old friend,’ Bolk concluded, ‘but to reunite a fine-forged weapon with its hall, however infirm its foundations.’

There was a rapt silence and Thayne knew that Bolk had won the hearts of their people. He chose to give voice to neither his sympathies nor his suspicions.

‘May I inspect the weapon?’ he asked.

‘Aye, subcouncillor,’ Bolk replied, resting the axe against the pages of Thayne’s tome of records. The weapon was adorned with fine rune-script in the ancient hand of the Khazalid. Rune-learning had ceased to be part of Anki Thayne’s habitual scholarship many years ago, and he struggled at first with a language that had diverged from his own a great many generations earlier. Then he found it: a single line engraved upon a ring of silver at the base of the blade.

I AM THE WOE OF DURKAR.

It was, unmistakably, the guildmaster’s name. Yet it too required a degree of translation – it was necessary to account for the way in which certain shapes and sounds had changed. ‘Durkar’ was his reading of the word, but Thayne was aware that another scholar might, at another time, have derived a different name altogether. It occurred to him then that the relic might be a greater clue to the history of Durkar’s kin than Bolk knew, particularly if one had access to–

The reading room. White whiskers, and pipe smoke.

Thayne shook himself free of this unbidden line of thought. He glanced up at Bolk, aware that the assembled duardin awaited his verdict, and picked his next words carefully.

‘You have spoken well, Master Bolk,’ Thayne said, ‘and you have my thanks. This is a priceless discovery.’

Bolk gave a nod. Thayne felt the will of the gathered Dispossessed in the air. They’d call it justice, when they resolved to grant Riggen Bolk sole title to Durkar’s legacy. Yet the word that came to Thayne’s mind was coronation, and something about it felt wrong. So Thayne did what any shrewd operative of the council would do, and played for time.

‘I’m afraid the secrets here inscribed call for greater scholarship than I can muster,’ Thayne said. ‘With your agreement, Master Bolk, I’ll hasten to the city this evening and seek out the runemasters of the council. Tomorrow, we shall reconvene to share what will no doubt be invaluable findings.’

The day’s proceedings were brought to a swift end and Thayne took up the axe and sped at pace to the stairway that led to Durkar’s chambers. There, he collided with Sivarn Trell. There was desperation – even outrage – in the human’s features. When it looked as if Thayne would not stop, Trell made a grab for his tunic.

‘Bolk’s a villain,’ Trell snapped. ‘You can’t let him have it, any of it. Gerrig only mentioned him once or twice, but I could tell he loathed him–’

Trell stumbled after Thayne as the duardin briskly mounted the stairs.

‘He told me about the axe!’ Trell exclaimed, his voice rising. ‘He said it was stolen!’

‘Quiet!’ Thayne hissed, looking down at Trell. ‘This. Is an affair. For the duardin.’

‘He was no coward,’ Trell pleaded, softer now. ‘He just lost his stomach for death.’

Thayne gave the human a sympathetic glance and continued up the stairs.

The door of the reading room was ajar when Thayne reached it, tomes of history and language open upon the table. The volume closest to the chair was an aged rhunkron, an account of diverse and ancient runic forms. Had it been in that position when he’d first entered this room? He could not recall. He was looking, Thayne realised, at the dialects of ancient Shyish.

He took the runes he knew as Durkar and traced them back to their ancient equivalent, then forward again. An hour passed in haphazard but determined scholarship as Anki Thayne attempted to understand how else the name might have been recorded in the long centuries since. He lit a pipe, tracked vowel-shifts and changes in pronunciation that followed generations spent in exile – charting a bitter exodus that began in the far mountains of the Realm of Death and concluded, an age later, in the swamps of the Realm of Life.

Anki Thayne reversed that irreversible journey – and, before his eyes, Durkar became Thorga.

That night, he mounted Utos and sped at pace to the record houses of the Council of the Forge. He ventured deep into the cavernous vaults that sprawled beneath the city and, ensuring that he had not been followed, let the name Thorga lead him to a barred and bolted strongroom that had been locked since Greywater Fastness’ earliest days.

Only the rats bore witness to what he found there, but he emerged with two pieces of parchment secreted within his document case: a map, and a writ of claim.

It did not surprise Thayne to find the manse even busier the following morning. Yet among the newcomers that now pressed into Durkar’s hall, two caught the subcouncillor’s eye.

The first stood out because she had evidently arrived from the opposite direction to everybody else. She was a young duardin woman with long hair braided at her back and an emerald cape held at the shoulder with a brooch of twining antlers. There was tension in her as she moved among the city folk, this daughter of the woodland, and she gripped her wooden mallet with both hands as if ready to ward away any who drew too close.

If the young woman seemed out of place, then the longbeard that followed shortly after seemed out of time. He arrived at the trailing end of the throng, finely dressed in travellers’ mail and a scarlet cloak. His beard was ice white and expansive, and secured in place with simple rings of burnished bronze. The gathering duardin instinctively moved aside to allow him to pass, only to be met with a gesture of unruffled geniality.

‘No need for that, no need for that,’ the stranger said, directing himself towards a free space near the back of the hall. ‘I’m merely a friend of the family, here to pay my overdue respects.’

Thayne felt an intuitive sense of awe in the newcomer’s presence. His eyes were drawn to the wooden pipe that hung from the stranger’s belt. He felt a sense of possibility – hope – dawn within him, along with a memory of clockwork. Not a specific device, but the uncanny sense of finely engineered mechanisms at work.

‘Rigo, is that you?’

It was Helthia Skeln who had spoken, matriarch of the Skellarbrau Consortium. This was a surprise, as she was widely considered to have been struck mostly blind and near deaf by sheer age.

‘Hellie!’ the stranger replied, after a moment. ‘Aye, I suppose I must be. How have you been, lass? How fared the seventy-six? A tough brew to follow, I thought!’

‘Quite well, old friend!’ Skeln said, contentedly. Then she took her seat once again, as they all did, and turned her attention to Anki Thayne.

He looked out at a sea of faces. Respect, curiosity and a sense of destiny had filled Durkar’s manse with the Dispossessed, and now they looked to him to put right a tangled matter – where right was as much a matter of feeling as truth. Black-bearded Riggen Bolk regarded him most closely of all, there at the front, flanked by his guards.

Anki Thayne cleared his throat, but it was the forest girl who spoke.

‘I’ve a tale to offer, councillor,’ she said, standing. Disquiet bristled among the duardin. There was a practised formality to her words, but if it stemmed from guile or nervousness, Thayne could not tell. She stepped forward.

‘My name is Myrddi Wutten, of the Wuttenfolk,’ she said. ‘The tale I tell is of my clan. It tells of who we were before adversity saw us forever sundered.’

Thayne regarded her closely. ‘And who were your people, Myrddi of the Wuttenfolk, before these hardships?’

She caught his eyes then, and spoke directly.

‘We were the last kings of Karak Thorga. Or so I thought, ’fore word of your Guildmaster Durkar reached my ears.’

Thayne’s breath caught. Riggen Bolk snorted with distaste. In the corner of the room, Sivarn Trell lurked and fretted, and Myrddi Wutten told her tale.

The Wuttenfolk were proud among the forest clans, pragmatic wilderness-dwellers who held dominion over a wet stretch of Verdia, several weeks of dangerous travel from Greywater Fastness. Unlike the city-duardin, they had adapted to the wilds of Ghyran by mastering the arts of wood, flax and resin, with which they built holdfasts the equal of any stone redoubt. They applied the same craft to their weaponry, and challenged any steel-clad hammerer to tell them that they did not honour the Maker in their own way.

The Wuttenfolk were not native to these lands, she explained. They had fled to Ghyran from Shyish at the onset of a calamitous age, bringing with them the treasures, pride and scars of a people deeply wronged. They had called themselves the Thorgiri, then, scions of the great Karak Thorga, lost to ruin. The ancient mountain-city was their birthright, and each generation swore oaths of reclamation in its name.

The assembled duardin softened at this; the girl spoke to common grudgements, and evoked a common cause.

After generations of desperation the storm broke, and lightning honed by the Maker’s own hand swept the swamps and forests. Yet while Sigmar’s onslaught drove back the forces of plague and desolation, it did not destroy them: indeed, in those dawning years of the age, it prompted many vicious retorts. The Thorgiri fought long and well until one bleak day their boldness drew the wrath of a beastfray of surpassing ferocity, and they were overcome.

Much was lost in those black hours when the world was reduced to gor-madness and slaughter. Later, the survivors – now calling themselves the Wuttenfolk – would pick over the remains of old battlefields in an attempt to reclaim scraps of who they had been. Yet their most precious relics evaded them: ancient documents that revealed the path to lost Karak Thorga. These, they bitterly assumed, would never be recovered.

Myrddi Wutten explained that word had reached her of a happening at the house of Guildmaster Durkar. To her ear, versed in the runelore of the Wuttenfolk, the name was eerily familiar. Could a group of Thorgiri survivors have made it here, in the early days of the city? If they did, what secrets might they have hidden, at a time of such danger and uncertainty?

‘I know not what you’ve found,’ Wutten concluded. ‘Though if there’s a chance that my instinct has led me true, I’d thank you to tell me so.’

Thayne tugged at his beard. He’d told no one the secret of Clan Durkar, and the best evidence of their legacy – the relics that Wutten had described – had been tucked away beneath his mantle since he had discovered them. None save him knew the truth; yet this girl, she knew it – and now, the whole room knew it.

He performed the calculations of the dutiful council representative. Kin was kin, city bound or not; the clans would accept that. There’d be grumbling, but there’d be no room for grudgement, and that meant peace. Thayne was wary of paying too much heed to his own misgivings, but it would be something to deny Riggen Bolk the prize he so clearly sought. Thayne made his decision, and planned his response.

‘The records I have uncovered confirm the truth behind Myrddi Wutten’s words,’ Thayne prepared to say. ‘Her people are Durkar’s people.’

Yet before he could speak, the eyes of the white-bearded stranger found him. They were grey and still and ancient, and there was a commanding depth to them. At first, he felt as if he’d collided with a great wall, but as imposing as the stranger was, Thayne sensed no danger. He felt like a beardling snatched by the scruff before it could take a tumble.

The white-bearded stranger’s eyes softened. Then he stood, and turned his attention to Myrddi Wutten.

‘Well told, beardling!’ he announced, taking a step out of his seat and ambling towards the centre of the chamber, his hands on his hips. The assembled duardin grew uneasy. Wutten shifted warily; Trell’s head shot up.

‘Your folk have a simple way of tale-telling, and I appreciate it very much. It has the ring of truth about it, too.’

Rigo looked over at Thayne, prompting him with a short nod.

‘The records I have uncovered, er…’ Thayne began to say. ‘They, er, confirm…’

‘That she’s telling the truth?’ the stranger asked.

‘Yes!’ Thayne exclaimed, his eyes darting from the girl to the stranger to Riggen Bolk, whose outrage began to gather about him like a thunderhead.

‘In a few compelling details, perhaps,’ Rigo said. ‘The last scions of Karak Thorga did indeed take the name Durkar when they came here, did indeed let their truth grow cold in the council’s vaults. I’d always thought the gesture a bit grand and self-defeating as these things go, but that was an age of grief and triumph in equal measure, and foolish things were often on the lips of the dawi.’

He fixed on Myrddi Wutten again.

‘It saddens me to tell you, however, that our tale-teller is also, in every other aspect, a clever liar. Tale-tellers are often thus, but in this instance, I cannot let a canny bit of fiction fly.’

Thayne watched Wutten’s eyes dart to the side of the room as if seeking a way out.

‘From whom did you receive these tales, beardling?’ Rigo asked. There was authority in his voice, but warmth also.

‘My kin,’ she replied, with guarded discomfort.

‘Kin, aye?’ the white-bearded stranger responded. ‘That’s not what you said. You said clan, lass, and those aren’t quite the same things. Not when it comes to a matter such as this.’

Wutten uncrossed her arms. All in the room regarded the pair of them intently. Anki Thayne’s own attention was captured by the white-bearded stranger, and he did not notice Sivarn Trell begin to move from his position in the far corner.

‘How long, then, have you carried these tales with you?’ Rigo asked, gently. She attempted to say nothing, but found herself telling the truth.

‘Since dawn,’ Myrddi muttered beneath her breath, quiet enough that the assembled duardin fell to whispering as those who had not heard her answer craned forward to beg it from those nearer the front.

‘Aye, I expected as much,’ the stranger said. ‘I must say, lass, that you’ve made a good play of it, with scant time to do so. Yet a lie’s a lie, unbecoming of both your own folk – blameless in all this, I might add – and the worthy dawi in whose house we gather.’

The stranger was utterly composed, but there was an agitation in the room that threatened to grow into unruliness. Thayne cleared his throat noisily, and spoke.

‘Calm, friends!’ he called out. ‘Calm. I’m grateful for this Rigo’s interjection. You named yourself friend, and to my eyes, this is proven.’

The stranger gave a nod. Thayne pressed on. ‘Even so. Though she may have misled us as to the origin of these truths, truths they are.’

He withdrew the parchment case from beneath his mantle, laid it against the pages of his tome.

‘I have here the documentary evidence, retrieved by myself and seen by no other. How did you come by this knowledge, Myrddi Wutten? If it’s not yours by right, who gave it to you?’

‘Ah, she told you the truth there,’ the stranger said. He looked at Wutten. ‘Whether she intended to or not. Kin, not clan, was it?’

She made a face, growled quietly, and moved to drop her hand to the hilt of her mallet. Then Sivarn Trell approached and laid his own hand on her shoulder.

‘Care, Myr,’ he said. ‘It’s done.’

She cursed him freely and fiercely. Now that he saw them together, Thayne saw what Rigo had seen: two woodsfolk, alike in ragged aspect. At present, Myrddi Wutten looked as if she was going to murder Sivarn Trell; if anything, this only made their bond more apparent.

Trell looked over at him then, remorse in his eyes.

‘I’m sorry, Councillor Thayne,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t – I didn’t want to, but I couldn’t let him–’

‘How, Trell?’ Thayne replied. ‘Spare me why. How?’

‘Magic, lad,’ Rigo said. ‘Umgi magic. There’s a fair sniff of it hereabouts. He’s been busy, I think, warding this place. Perhaps his intentions were fair, for the most part.’

Rigo turned the force of his attention on Trell, now. ‘Scrying, though – far sight’s a skazi trick. Dangerous too. Is that all you are, beardlings? Thieves and clever liars?’

‘No,’ spat Myrddi Wutten.

‘Yes,’ replied Sivarn Trell.

The human looked weary. ‘We came here because we thought we’d find it empty. When it was just old Gerrig, we figured he was another city-born stiff-neck, easily finessed.’

This did not go down well. There was open rancour in the hall, now, held at bay only by the presence of the white-bearded stranger.

‘Then he goes and takes a liking to him,’ Wutten muttered. ‘Soft-hearted waste of time.’

Trell looked to Thayne, seeking sympathy. ‘I told you true,’ he pleaded. ‘We became friends, Gerrig and I. I figured I’d help, honestly help, at least for a bit. I figured Myr would understand, after she’d cooled off, and–’

‘There’s no justice in this!’ exclaimed Riggen Bolk, rising to his feet with his guards at his side. ‘Subcouncillor, if you will not see these faithless outsiders dragged from here in chains, then I will do your duty for you!’

‘Justice, is it, aye?’ said Rigo. His magnanimity vanished then, and shadows appeared to gather about him. He turned, and Bolk’s resolve cracked suddenly under the force of the white-bearded stranger’s ire.

‘Too many clever liars mixed up in this business,’ said Rigo. ‘However, I’ll give young Wutten this – she planned her deception quickly, in desperate circumstances. Your tale, I think, was longer in the making.’

Riggen Bolk stood his ground, but Thayne saw fear in his eyes.

‘I didn’t!’ Bolk protested. ‘Durkar, I knew him, and–’

‘You took what was his,’ Rigo said. ‘When he was at his weakest. There might have been a bit of garaz to you once, my boy, but there’s no boldness in cruelty. How long was it, Riggen Bolk, before you understood that the prize you’d taken from a young dawi might allow you to lay claim to his fortune after he was dead?’

The longbeard did not wait for him to answer. He dominated the centre of the hall, now, his presence commanding the attention of every soul in the room.

‘And how long was it before you grew impatient?’

Bolk’s guards found themselves unable to raise their clubs, and Riggen Bolk found himself unable to move. Rigo’s voice lowered to a rumble.

‘In my experience, you can learn much of a dawi’s fortunes by the state of his cellar,’ Rigo said. ‘Before I joined you, I took it upon myself to assess the situation downstairs. Saddens me to say that poor Durkar spent his last days drawing from the same batch of Old Oakbrow. That’s a Rikrbal brew,’ he added with distaste. ‘Yet thin as it is, I’ve never caught the scent of blightroot in a batch. Not before now.’

The stranger’s accusation was clear. Shock and animosity spread among the duardin. The pressure that Rigo exerted closed in upon Riggen Bolk and pushed him, at last, to panicked outrage.

‘If the old fool was too weak-whiskered to stomach it,’ he bellowed, ‘perhaps it’s right that it killed him!’

Bolk seemed surprised at his own honesty. He took an uncertain step backwards, away from the stranger, made to turn–

There was a shriek, followed by clamour in the hall. Thayne’s attention was drawn away from Bolk to the massed duardin who sprang up from their benches and pressed for the walls. Bolk stumbled as flagstones cracked beneath him. Shouts went up.

‘Greenseer!’

‘Witch!’

A coiling vine of the uncontained wild burst through the floor of Durkar’s manse and seized Riggen Bolk by the neck. It yanked hard and pulled him backwards to the ground with a crack, then began crushing the life from him, twisting according to the movements of the outstretched hand of Sivarn Trell.

Thayne saw him then as he was, not as the gardener but as the Collegiate mage. The green had reached his eyes and there was nothing but bright madness in them now. Rigo turned to intervene, but before he could do so Myrddi Wutten was there, in Trell’s way, seizing his wrists and wrestling him back from whatever precipice he walked. Thayne saw something else, in that moment: grief and fury. Whatever Trell’s intentions had been towards Gerrig Durkar in life, none had acted faster to avenge his death.

‘Enough, Trell!’ Thayne exclaimed. ‘Enough!’

Somehow, the matter of Durkar’s bequest no longer seemed as tangled as it once had. Resting his hands either side of his tome of record, Anki Thayne settled the room, and then he settled Durkar’s affairs.

Riggen Bolk had come seeking justice? Justice would be done. Guildmaster Durkar had no kin save the war orphans of the lower districts? Let those who now suffered similarly benefit from the profits of his life. The fate of Karak Thorga he pledged to the care of the white-bearded stranger, whose intervention had undone the work of three liars. Thayne’s judgement did not pass without a degree of discontent, but on this final point, there was no argument.

Later, as they returned to the thoroughfare, Durkar’s manse looming empty behind them, white-bearded Rigo took in a lungful of night air and turned to Sivarn Trell.

‘For what it’s worth, lad, there’s still peace to be had for the kings of Karak Thorga,’ he said. ‘Your friend included. Though you’ll need to undertake the journey that poor Gerrig could not.’

Trell shifted, his hands stuffed in his pockets. ‘I’ll do it,’ he replied, a sense of inevitability in his voice. ‘I want to do it, but–’

‘Ye can’t be trusted with it,’ Myrddi said, her eyes on Rigo, narrowed with a suspicion she could not name. ‘So I’m coming with you, to make sure.’

Trell looked at her gratefully, and Rigo, apparently satisfied, ran a gloved hand through his long white beard.

‘Honourable, beardlings,’ he said. ‘Good and honourable, all things considered.’ He looked towards the city. ‘You’ll not be walking to Karak Thorga, mind you. Not most of the way.’

Rigo ruminated for a moment, then winced at the plan that had begun to form beneath his furrowed brow. Thayne felt it again, in that moment: the sense of a great mechanism at work.

‘Head to the docks,’ said the white-bearded stranger, with a sigh. ‘Be there by morning, and find Shima Sjarsdottir.’

KING OSGEK’S PRIZE

Justec the Thirty-First, warrior poet, last and latest scion of House Aranthine, had played to warmer crowds than this. The hall was cold and growing colder, illuminated only by the braziers that burned to either side of the throne. The king perched atop it was withdrawn, curled inward around a darkening mood. His courtiers were more attentive, enlivened by the novelty of the tale-teller in their midst. They pressed towards Justec the Thirty-First as if he were a source of light and warmth himself, and he repaid their attentions with a song.

Tonight he sang another tale of the knights of Aranthine. This was unquestionably self-indulgent of him, but he had found that the old songs resonated most powerfully in this chasmal, waning place.

‘Steeds barded, battle-bedecked

See! The pride of Aranthine…’

The song followed a party of sibling warriors, knights of House Aranthine, as they rode forth from their mountain holdfast and descended to the lowlands of the Realm of Death. They were four brothers and four sisters. To Justec, the singer’s namesake, eldest son, fell the honour of bearing the golden scales of the Judge of Graves. To Vejec, the eldest daughter, fell the honour of bearing the Thunderer’s totem. For the great House Aranthine esteemed these two gods above all others, and gave equal devotion to each.

The knights drove their horses hard across barrow-dales and through fields of lambent winnowseed. They rode ceaselessly, taking no rest or respite, drawing the awe of the lowlanders as they passed. Tokens and tributes gathered in their wake, glittering in the dry soil, soon to be snatched up once again by the same weathered hands that had cast them forth.

At this point the song turned its focus back to the holdfast, on the eve of the siblings’ departure. The High King of the mountain had sent forth emissaries to entreat with his vassal, the Lord-Regent of Aranthine. The song told of the scowling, stone-set visages of the duardin, the rods of office they carried, their weapons of deep-forged and rune-etched gromril.

‘Beast! Foul-stalking predator

Befalls the pass at Morwych

Sorrow’s source – slayer-mark upon it!

So decrees the King of Thorga…’

The siblings entered the valley at Morwych two abreast, commencing with the youngest, the twins Fethe and Hynda. When Justec had first learned this song – and he had known it for so long at this point that he felt as if he had always known it – he had often lost his way here. The traditional rendition insisted on a long digression into the myriad formal obligations of siblings. Justec the Thirty-First had no siblings, and had always found this stretch of ancient moralising both utterly inconsequential and, more to the point, very dull. In his own, well-regarded performances, he tended to skip it completely – but he kept the part about the young twins going first, because he felt it added a certain bite to what came next.

The beast they found at Morwych was like no foe the knights of House Aranthine had ever fought. It was a chimeric expression of the madness of a darkening age, its form terrible and singular. Fethe and Hynda charged forth, bold spears held firm. One of the chimera’s heads, with the visage of a snarling wolf, snatched for Hynda’s mount. She was cast down, then engulfed by a bulbous draconic maw and devoured. Fethe was seized by a snapping beak and tossed to the serpent that coiled at the beast’s hindquarters, his screams silenced by crushing coils.

Grief overcame the knights of Aranthine. As swiftly as death had come for Fethe and Hynda, so came the fury of their siblings. In rushed four: Gyrfa, Jullon, Chorsel, Irianthe, war-honed warriors all. They circled the monster, spears darting, hungry tips of silver seeking purchase. Yet the chimera, rampant, had an answer for each of them. Gyrfa was brought low by a swooping wing, bone-barbed; Jullon was crushed beneath rending hind-talons. Chorsel’s mount bucked in terror and threw him, and his skull cracked upon the rocks of Morwych and he did not rise again. Brave Irianthe was taken up in the creature’s claws, her fate too appalling to describe.

Justec and Vejec, eldest, icon-bearers, spurred their mounts and pledged themselves to vengeance or to see their siblings again in the Amethyst Hall. The Thunderer was with Vejec and storm-wind carried her to the fore, ahead of her brother, sparks scattering where the hooves of her mount struck against the dry rocks of Morwych. Yet the Judge of Graves was with Justec, and instilled in him patience, and death-wisdom.

Vejec rose in her saddle as she closed on the beast. She cast aside her shield and raised her spear high, two-handed. At the last she leapt, and the Thunderer was with her. Lightning flashed in her eyes and sallied forth from the heavens also. As the beast snapped up at soaring Vejec, a heavenly bolt struck down to catch knight and twisted creature both. In its searing wake no trace was left of the Aranthine warrior, and the beast, star-scorched, had been struck blind.

Wise Justec left his mount behind and approached slowly, step by cautious step. He placed the scales of the Judge of Graves upon the rocks of Morwych and rested the tip of his spear upon them. A grave toll sounded at this mystic touch and death seized the heart of the dread chimera, and its mongrel soul was dragged to the pit which is the fate of the fel-formed.

His duty done, Justec took up his sister’s thunder-totem and rode back to the mountain, last of the knights of Aranthine. From that bleak day onward, each Lord-Regent of Aranthine would have but one son, and one son only: and Justec would be his name.

Justec the Thirty-First had a little fun with the ending this time, blending the final verses of ‘The Chimera of Morwych’ with a similar passage from ‘The Flight of the Ice-Thieves’, which he had sung for the court several days earlier. Most of his family’s traditional songs tended to end more or less the same way. He’d been told, once, that he’d eventually come to see the artistry in this: that day had yet to arrive. He wasn’t sure if his little subversions meant anything to his present audience, but he didn’t mind. It made him smile to do something that would annoy his father, wherever he was.

There was always a moment of uncertainty at the end of a song. As long as he held their attention, Justec could expect his hosts to keep a certain distance. He glanced towards the base of the throne. The court’s whims would follow those of their king, he understood – the particular choler of the day. Sometimes, the king’s distant affect would deaden the air and set the courtiers clamouring, and Justec would sing again to placate them.

At other times – as now – the eyes of King Osgek would come alive with agitation. He would begin to rise in his seat, and the court would scatter, and Justec the Thirty-First would join them, stepping slowly and deliberately backwards towards the rough-hewn passageway that led to his cell.

He was careful to keep the throne in the centre of his view. This was, in part, an act of deference – a makeshift courtesy assembled from half-remembered scraps of his formal training in etiquette. It was also pragmatic. The throne, and the king who sat upon it, was the heart of the rot that had taken root in the ancestral halls of House Aranthine. Indeed, Justec suspected that it had been built atop the ancient high seat of the Aranthine Lord-Regent. Breaks in its irregular shape revealed carved stonework, but it was hard to glean much given the grisly abomination assembled over it.

The charnel throne of King Osgek was little more than a bone pile, bound in leathery sinew and daubed with ichor. The stench was appalling – offending senses that had otherwise grown accustomed to the foul miasmas of the flesh-eaters’ lair – and in this manner its madness stretched out to permeate the entire hall.

Justec retreated to the edge of the chamber and slipped into the shadows of a passageway. A group of skulking ghouls observed him closely. He was never alone in this place, but the flesh-eaters had not attempted to physically harm him for some time. He moved swiftly along the crumbling passageway, made two turns, and arrived at the half-collapsed corridor that formed his cell.

He was relieved to see that his possessions had not been disturbed. His buckler and duelling-spear rested against the wall, a glimmer of bronze and steel in the dark. There was nothing to stop him taking up arms against the flesh-eaters, save that such an effort was very evidently suicide. His attention went to his travelling pack, and he reached down past assorted belongings – a whetstone, a knife, a shawl – to the precious things he’d concealed beneath them. Withdrawing a handful of seeds and a piece of dried fruit, Justec ate. This would be the day’s meal. He was desperately hungry, but tried not to think about the choices he would need to make when his rations ran dry.

His journey had been rash, and – as he was now forced to admit – a mistake. He would very likely die here, in the ruins of the subterranean holdfast that had once been the home of his people. Yet that was at least a break from the pattern, when it came to the sons of House Aranthine, and as he leaned back against the wall of his cell and attempted to rest, it occurred to him that he had tried to change his fate. That had to count for something.

He carried a relic about his neck, bound tight in a leather strap. Its weight pressed against his chest. It was a banded drinking horn rendered in blue-green crystal that swam with trapped light. Its wide mouth was ornamented with a ring of silver bearing runes in the ancient script of the duardin; at the other end it tapered to a narrow point, capped with a curving barb that could be thumbed aside to reveal an outlet. Its hue and depth reminded Justec of the waters of Lake Lethis. Once, when he was young, one of his father’s associates – a merchant called Mosrel – had examined it covetously and told Justec that it was something holy, something of the realm. The word he used was shadeglass. Justec’s father had little patience for mystics or speculators, and he didn’t see Mosrel again. Yet the word stuck with him – and if nothing else, his father’s reaction confirmed that the merchant had told him something of significance.

Justec’s early years had been spent on the Aranthine estate, within the borders of Lethis. His father, Justec the Thirtieth, had been something of a rogue in his youth but swiftly adopted the role of mentor and patriarch upon the birth of his son. Of Justec’s mother, little was ever said. The rest of his childhood company comprised the servants and dreary scholars that his father brought forth to tend and tutor him. As soon as he was old enough to ply the taverns and duelling-grounds of the city, he did so at every opportunity. Song and spear brought acclaim and excitement to the life of Justec the Thirty-First, and he devoted himself to these pursuits above all others.

The streets of Lethis taught him much that his tutors could not. Yet even in his most reckless adventures, Justec’s youth was not so different to that of his father. Once or twice he had encountered somebody old enough to have known his grandfather, and had heard much the same about him, too. There was a pattern to House Aranthine, it seemed, one that transcended simple tradition and took on an increasingly sinister aspect the more one thought about it. Theirs was a narrow, strictly patrilineal line, a narrow vector by which a set of gifts were passed forward across the ages: a drinking horn, a set of songs and a name.

Justec had tended to think of them as gifts, when he thought about them at all; now, in his present circumstances, he began to think that there might have been some wisdom to the vine-drunk tavern grumblers who’d called him cursebearer.

Emissaries had come to Lethis to secure ships and supplies for a war-party led by King Hakhard, a Warden King of the Dispossessed. Justec had never heard of him. Word spread quickly that Hakhard’s goal was one of the lost mountain-cities of the Khazalid, which had been revealed to him by some kind of prophet under mysterious and no doubt aggrandised circumstances.

This was all perfectly diverting until Justec heard that this lost city was named Karak Thorga. The name was well known to him, having featured in almost every legend of his family. House Aranthine, so the songs insisted, was a vassal of the High Kings of Thorga, and their ancestral home was located in the mountains that encircled that legendary domain. Its location had been lost with the karak an entire age prior – but if one could be reclaimed, so could the other. Justec the Thirty-First got the approximate location of Karak Thorga from a drunken boatsman, packed hastily, stole the drinking horn, selected a swift horse and was gone before his father could get in his way.

While the duardin made their laborious preparations, Justec rode hard towards the periphery of the realm, towards a rumour of mountains. Beyond that he did not know where he was going, but he was sure he didn’t need to. He’d learned all of the songs of House Aranthine, after all, including the boring ones: the ones that lost themselves in mountain-lore and wayfinder minutiae. All he needed to do was get close enough for the songs to guide him the rest of the way to the lost halls of House Aranthine, where answers, adventure, renown – change – would be his.

He’d been right, to an extent. He’d found the mountains, and then he’d found the hall. He had made it not twenty yards inside when the flesh-eaters came for him.

They butchered his horse, and hauled him before the king. Terror and disgust drove a shard of reckless madness into him, there in the dark, and he believed that he could hear a word – a name – in the screeches of the ghouls that thronged about him as his pointless death drew close.

‘Os-gek! Os-gek! Os-gek!’

That was how he came to know the creature that now ruled in his family’s stead. King Osgek screamed at him, circled him, bared bloody teeth and tore at his own scalp, but he did not approach. He retreated to his throne, staring at Justec all the while. As unnatural quiet descended over the court, Justec the Thirty-First – convinced he was soon to die in the most appalling way – had begun to sing.

He did not know why he’d done it, nor did he know why his art kept the flesh-eaters at bay – but he bartered songs for survival every day after that, until time became meaningless save for the diminishing stock of provisions that kept him alive.

Justec woke with a start, but he hadn’t slept long. He could scarcely track the passage of day or night. Occasionally the ghouls would permit him to wander to some of the outer chambers, where tall shafts carved into the rock allowed light and snow to drift in from the mountainside. These were rare occurrences, however. The comings and goings of the court’s hunters was a more reliable way to track time. They tended to depart just before dawn and return before mid-morning, or so he surmised.

The halls were quiet as Justec made for the collapsed stairway where he habitually relieved himself. The stench of ghoul-flesh caused him to pause as he exited his cell. The reek was immediate, proximate. He cast his eye towards the main hall, then deeper into the darkness, then his heart stopped as he looked up to see an emaciated wretch craning towards him from a tunnel opening a few feet above his head. He collected himself and continued along his way, hearing the creature drop to the stone behind him, keeping pace. It was surprising what one could get used to.

He entered the collapsed stairwell and was about to unbutton his breeches when the ghoul grew eerily silent. This was new. He looked back slowly and caught the shape of it in the shadows of the archway, dim light glimmering in its eyes. It was descending into a hunched posture. This was how the flesh-eaters had behaved when he had first come across them, Justec remembered. The ghoul was tensing every muscle in its curse-wracked body. It shuddered with anticipation.

It’s starving, Justec observed.

It’s hunting–

It was on him before he could finish the thought, leaping high, teeth bared. Unarmed, it was all Justec could do to bring his arms up and grab for the creature. The ghoul snapped its jaws against his forearm and dug its claws into his shoulder as he wrestled it away from him, pitching forward out of the stairway and smashing into the wall of the passage. The impact separated them, but the ghoul was between Justec and his cell, his weapons. He hunched defensively; it came at him again. He swung at it with his fist, and its claws raked his cheek. They screamed at each other, the noise resounding through the ruin. He aimed a kick at its head and it grabbed at his outstretched leg, bit deep into his calf, and dragged him to the ground. Then the ghoul was on top of him, striking for his jugular.

A shadow fell over the starving ghoul, and long, powerful arms swept it aside. The creature chittered in fear and Justec raised his head. King Osgek loomed over the two of them, but his attention was fixed on his wayward courtier. The ghoul cowered and shrank towards the wall. Osgek stepped in slowly, then lunged, seizing the ghoul by the shoulders and wrenching one of its arms from its body. Justec was showered in gore as Osgek bit down hard onto the ghoul’s cranium and tore its head free with a single twist of his jaws.

Justec repressed the urge to be violently sick and pulled himself backwards along the floor of the passageway. Osgek regarded him for a moment, extended to his full height, and began to approach, dragging the ghoul’s cadaver idly behind him.

He raised the ghoul’s severed arm and held it forth. Mirroring the deference that he had seen in the other courtiers, Justec reached up and accepted the king’s generosity. The rent flesh was abhorrent to the touch. Osgek watched him for a moment, then tore a fistful of flesh from the ghoul’s body, raised it to his mouth, and began to chew.

Propped up on his haunches in the darkness, Justec shivered. He’d survived thus far by avoiding, physically and psychologically, a true confrontation with his bleak circumstances. Presently, he was finding this difficult.

Osgek regarded him, then raised his head and sniffed the air. There was a clamour in the far passageways that Justec had come to associate with the return of a hunting party, but the scratching and shrieking that reached him now had a different, more urgent quality. Then he heard something else: barks of distress and gruff, muffled noises of protest, the tremor and tremble of voices – new voices.

The hunters had found something.

There was tumult in the hall as the hunters’ captives were dragged down the ramp of piled debris that led up to the outer passageways. They were all duardin – battle-marked but physically intact, garbed in wayfarer’s gear spattered with blood and melting rime. The fear that stilled their protests and drained the colour from their cold-reddened cheeks was the same that had afflicted Justec when he had been seized. There was a twisted sense of rite and ceremony to the way the flesh-eaters fed, a demented pantomime that both delayed their gruesome intent and somehow made its inevitability more dreadful.

Silence descended – the silence that preceded the judgement of the king; the silence that Justec the Thirty-First had broken in such unlikely fashion when he had first been brought before the court.

Osgek snorted disdainfully, made a senseless croaking sound, and gestured with an outstretched talon to a dark opening in the periphery of the hall. Justec had ventured in that direction only once. It led deeper into the mountain, to a series of reeking, pitch-black charnel pits dug for the purpose of storing the flesh-eaters’ stock of meat. He had been chased from that place, but in truth he would scarcely have passed a moment there that he did not need to. It was there, evidently, that the duardin were to be kept. Ghouls pressed in on them, herded them into the darkness, snatched at their hide shawls and coats of mail.

Justec saw tributes being laid at the foot of the throne. Swords and hammers, axes, shields, and breech-loaded rifles. The throng began to disperse, revealing that a single duardin had been held back. He struggled in the grip of a ghoul of surpassing size and strength, his comrades shouting back at him as they were led away. Justec caught a name.

‘…Lendrik!’

Lendrik spat blood and awaited death with composure. There was a moment of quiet – a gnawing, hungry absence. Justec heard the crack of jaws distending, accompanied by ravenous gasps from the wretches at the court’s periphery. They would soon, all of them, feast. The horror of it was unbearable. Something in Justec’s self-preservatory resolve broke, and in breaking revealed a different quality – courage.

As the court closed in on poor doomed Lendrik, Justec the Thirty-First, last and latest scion of House Aranthine, drew their attention with song.

He sang ‘The Flight of the Ice-Thieves’. Again. Justec hoped against hope that the ghouls wouldn’t notice; it had simply been the first tune to settle on his lips.

‘Cold-wind flows from ’Thorga

Colder grows the hall

Of the steel-true knights of Aranthine

At age’s unjust end…’

He stepped into the hall, raised his voice. This was not his most confident performance. He stumbled through the third verse and skipped to a refrain he knew – a passage that described the withdrawal of the Thorgiri duardin, their cooling hospitality in the waning years of the lost kingdom. Had he started singing ‘Ice-Thieves’ because he’d been toying with it earlier, or because duardin featured heavily in it? He did not know, but he did not stop.

Justec felt darting eyes on him as he reached the centre of the hall. He was a short way from Lendrik, now. The captive cast a glance backwards, defiant fortitude giving way to confusion. Then King Osgek snarled, thrust forth his hand, and Lendrik was seized up and cast down at Justec’s feet.

‘Who, what–’ Lendrik began to say, before shrieks of aggression cowed him once more to silence.

They’re offering him to me.

One horrendous realisation after another stole Justec’s composure, and the song faltered.

They believe that I’m one of them.

Beyond his immediate disgust, Justec sensed opportunity.

He raised his hand as King Osgek had done, extended his fingers, and stared towards the pit where the rest of the captives had been taken. It was a desperate gamble, with scant chance of buying the duardin anything more than a few extra minutes of life. But that had to count for something.

Justec raised his voice again as Lendrik was hauled away. His mind raced. Truthfully he had no idea how to use the authority at his disposal, or if it was even really authority at all. Then his heart sank as the ghouls returned from the charnel pit with a different duardin in tow. Her features were set with bitterness. She held fast, making the ghouls wrestle for every inch of movement.

The minutes that Justec had bought for Lendrik had come at the cost of another. Of course they had.

He thrust his hand out again, attempting to mimic Osgek’s commanding animus. It was a feeble pantomime, but it drew the same response. The flesh-eaters stopped, looked from Justec to the king, slavered and snarled. The duardin in their grip stared at the human who had achieved momentary, unsteady dominion over the court. Her eyes narrowed and Justec sorrowed at the hatred he saw in them.

Yet the ghouls followed his command, and this duardin was also dragged back to the pit, granted momentary reprieve. The next was younger, with a beard of braided umber and genuine fear in his eyes. Justec dismissed this meal also, and the courtiers grew agitated. Their response was a bestial thing, a jabbering fractiousness born of madness, but Justec sensed the meaning in it. As ludicrous as it seemed, the flesh-eaters were offended. He’d been a bad house guest on occasion, over the years. More than once. His hand outstretched, denying every gift offered to him, he felt that way again.

The next duardin was so similar to the previous one that Justec believed the flesh-eaters were trying to offer him the same tribute twice, but then he caught subtle differences in dress, attitude, and the fashioning of his beard. Siblings, he thought. Twins. His mind, unbidden, returned to ‘The Chimera of Morwych’. When he sent the duardin away something snapped – first in the hungry flesh-eaters, and then in King Osgek. A courtier closed on Justec and shoved him with the hilt of a bone-club. His blood chilled.

He was running out of options. He had once again sped, in haste, into a dead-end.

The ghouls began to drag the duardin away to join his brother, only to find the next captive already being brought forward. Justec thought this to be another sign of the court’s thinning patience before he realised that this latest victim was walking towards them unaccompanied.

He was an elder, white-bearded, clad in a red cloak and a suit of mail. He moved slowly but purposefully. There was seriousness in his deep-lined face, but no fear. The word that came to Justec’s mind was disapproval.

The duardin captive started in surprise.

‘Rigo?’ he exclaimed. ‘They got you too…?’

The elder duardin reached out and touched the captive’s shoulder.

‘Not yet, Juttei, lad,’ he said. ‘Not yet.’

As the ghouls dragged Juttei into the shadows, more came forth to compel Rigo forward. He appeared unconcerned by their attentions. He reached the foot of the charnel throne, but he did not have the air of a hostage or a gift of meat offered up for slaughter. As Justec’s had been, Rigo’s presence in the hall was that of a visitor. Here came ‘The Chimera of Morwych’ again – the emissaries of Thorga, stone-faced, dispatched to the halls of Aranthine…

‘A wretched affair this, Lord-Regent,’ Rigo said, in a voice heavy with censure.

Flesh-eaters cowered, hissed, clamoured. King Osgek tensed dangerously, craned forward from the throne, lowered his gaze to meet the eyes of the white-bearded stranger. Yet Justec wondered if he saw something new, then, in the gaze of the king: anger, yes; madness, yes; but concern also.

‘I’m not frequently given to parley with the curse-broken,’ Rigo said. ‘The fine khal – that was to you entrusted – given over to rot and madness.’

These words were directed at King Osgek, but Justec felt himself caught by them also.

‘Yet you’ve an ear for tales, it seems,’ he continued. ‘That’s meat I can serve. Though you may find the taste bitter, given the grim appetites you’ve acquired over the years.’

He did not sing, this duardin, but he spoke with a voice that settled over the court just as Justec’s had done.

‘I’ll tell you the truth of the knights of Aranthine, if you’ll hear it,’ Rigo said. ‘Umgi warriors pledged to the karak of these peaks. Servants of two gods and one line of High Kings. Battle-bonded, proud riders. Betrayers and thieves.’

These last words rumbled from the old duardin. Justec felt shame curl in his gut.

‘The embers of a bright age were already cooling, when the end came for Thorga and Aranthine,’ Rigo said. ‘Or so it is remembered.’

His tale-telling had an instructive quality, but it was not without its own poetry. Justec had never really developed an ear for duardin verse, but it flowed from the white-bearded stranger with even-tempered force – an authority that overcame the manias of the court.

He spoke of a time of endings, of ruination that approached slowly at first, then all at once. Far Karak Thorga held to its isolation, and its traditions, as bulwarks against the night. The Lord-Regent of Aranthine, for his part, dispatched parties of bold warriors – his own heirs – to fight at the side of their gods of death and storm. Many did not return, and those that did brought tales of beasts rising in the wilderness in the guise of men, of winds of wrath, madness and decay that swept the land.

The horrors described by their vassals awoke ancient grudgements in the Thorgiri duardin, stoked zealotry in their rune-priests. A glittering host of Khazalid warriors marched from the mountain-city, passing beneath the great stoneworks of their ancestors to make war against the timeless enemy. They were magnificent then, Rigo noted with sadness. The pride of their age. The High King of Thorga sent emissaries to the Aranthine hall, and bound their battle-worn standards to the cause.

What followed was calamity: a tragedy that shattered the concord of the gods and exacted an unimaginable toll upon the mortals who bore witness to it.

‘The Thorgiri king brought that woe back to his desolate hall,’ Rigo said darkly. ‘There to seize upon it, to fixate upon the unfixable as only the dawi can.

‘Fouler gifts befell Aranthine,’ he continued. ‘War and despoilment stole their heirs until only one remained. Devout he was, in his service to the Undying King, but the bite of Ushoran was his reward. This he granted to his dwindling court, to his only son, his heir. Madness was the recourse of the last Lord-Regent of Aranthine. Madness and oblivion.’

These final words provoked an outburst of rage from Osgek that Justec had never seen before. The regent hissed, leaping down from the throne, fangs bared. His animus woke something in the court and they surged towards Rigo, shoving Justec aside, shrieking and shuddering in anticipation of the feast. Justec winced and turned away as the whitebeard vanished under a mass of claws and fangs. His stomach turned. He heard flesh tearing, bones breaking, sensed the blood-heat of fresh slaughter–

Followed by silence. A hiss of disquiet; the throng dispersing. Justec opened his eyes, saw Osgek peering down at the area in front of the throne where Rigo had been. A number of courtiers had been crushed or torn apart in the mad rush to feed; even now, their bodies were being snatched at, dragged into the crowd by hungry claws.

Of the white-bearded duardin, there was no sign.

‘Enough of that,’ said Rigo, emerging unharmed from the tunnel that led to the charnel pit. ‘Where was I?’

Once again the stranger came before King Osgek’s court, and once again he told his tale.

The hours that followed were the strangest and most extraordinary of Justec’s long captivity. The white-bearded duardin would speak, and the court would listen. A little more of the tale would emerge each time, until something – a detail, an inference – provoked the king’s wrath. The court would rush to feed, as they ever did. A few more ghouls would be slain, and the stranger would vanish, only to return again moments later, untouched and unconcerned.

How the white-bearded duardin accomplished this did not concern Justec – he’d been born to a land of spirits, sung tales of shadowcraft, and seen mysteries rise from the waters of Lake Lethis under the light of phantom moons. He understood miracles, in his way. What he didn’t understand was why – what was Rigo trying to achieve? Then he realised that the answer was perhaps very simple, and not especially far from the rationale that had kept him from despair over the course of his own captivity. He was buying time.

Hours passed strangely in the stranger’s presence. It might have been days, for all Justec knew. He found it notable that the stranger paid him about as much attention as the court did, which is to say almost none. The other duardin had noted the human in the midst of the flesh-eaters, but Rigo’s attention was reserved for the king.

Until it wasn’t.

‘The Aranthine lord was consumed by fear, even as his curse took root,’ Rigo said. ‘The death of an age is no thing for a mortal soul to witness, no matter its travails.’

The last regent’s faith granted him enough insight to dread the deathlessness that came for him, Rigo explained – so he sought another kind of immortality. His people recounted many legends of the treasure-holds of Karak Thorga, which were said to house ancient relics of the realm. Among these was a gift from the noble Katophranes, lost to time, a cornucopia that preserved the endless bounties of the soul.

The Lord-Regent of Aranthine, growing desperate, sought the company of his son, his namesake. He begged him to seek an audience with the High King of Thorga, to use his guile to gain access to the treasure-vaults. The son, compelled by duty and believing that this one misdeed could save his people, did so. The Thorgiri gates were opened to him. He entered as a guest and departed as a thief, his actions deepening the lamentations of the doomed city.

The halls of Aranthine offered no warmer welcome upon his return. The regent snatched for the artefact that his son had brought him, examined it, worked his death-lore upon it, determined with dismay that it could offer him no protection – for it had already bound itself to the soul of another.

‘The son hadn’t saved his people,’ Rigo said. ‘Though that was his truthful intent. He’d saved himself. The Katophranes were given to a selfish sort of cunning, common to those who trade in the raw minerals of death. This relic he stole, it bound itself to his soul, and his alone, and the protection it provided was not eternal life, not by a long measure.’

Justec realised that his hands had gone, instinctively, to the drinking horn about his neck. The pieces fell into place just as the duardin spoke them aloud.

‘The soul of the second son of Aranthine was not spared from death’s mechanism,’ Rigo continued. ‘It was caught in it, a chip of duraz in the gears, returning again and again. Maker knows how many rotations that stuck little stone has undergone. Madness and ruin has long been the enemy of proper time-keeping.’

Thirty-one, Justec thought.

Rigo ran a hand through his beard, wrinkled his nose, regarded the flesh-eater king quite seriously.

‘You have a memory of it, I suspect, somewhere in that zaken mind of yours. You quailed at what you were becoming, and dispatched your child to steal your salvation from those you’d pledged to protect. There’s shame in that, and there’s shame in the fury that followed his success. You knew, didn’t you? That it hadn’t worked, that your fate was hard-set.’

Osgek glowered down at the duardin, another outburst imminent. Darkness closed in around Justec, whose circumstances now felt as labyrinthine and unnavigable as they ever had. Had his father known? he wondered. That the unyielding patterns of House Aranthine were simply the better of two bad options. That the horn, the songs, the name were not gifts, but the components of a shell – a tight suit of armour that warded against the aberrations of the Aranthine soul, the enemy within.

He looked up at Rigo, seeking wisdom from the whitebeard, and was surprised to see that the duardin had glanced backwards towards him. Their eyes met.

‘There’s no choosing between curses,’ Rigo said, his brow furrowed, his voice low. ‘The kings of Thorga learned that the hard way, just as the knights of Aranthine did. Yet there’s no mortal so ill-fated that their fate cannot be reworked. This is the Maker’s promise.

‘The dawi know that there is a time for songs, a time for feasting, and a time for strife and boldness,’ Rigo continued. ‘This is a time of strife, Justec of Aranthine. Whether or not it is a time for boldness is yet to be decided.’

Rigo spoke to both of them: flesh-eater king and warrior poet, madness and its echo. Osgek howled, the levies of his foul mood bursting, and once again the court rushed to devour the white-bearded stranger.

Justec the Thirty-First took advantage of the distraction, pressing through the mass of bodies towards the passageway that led to his cell; the flesh-eaters tore at one another, driven to even greater barbarity by Rigo’s final words. The fury of the king did not abate them, but stoked their madness further. When quiet finally fell upon them, and the duardin was once more revealed to have vanished, the court had thinned by a dozen ghouls or more. King Osgek stared into the darkness that led to the charnel pit, seething, awaiting the stranger’s return.

He did not come.

Osgek mounted the throne in two leaping bounds and perched atop it, stirred to bellicosity by the unbidden return of memory, the momentary abatement of his madness. He screamed into the darkness, then bade his court forward. There would be no slow repast. They would gorge themselves, sate the hungers of the present and for a moment be free of history. Ghouls flooded into the pit, wrenched the entire company of captive duardin from their grim confinements and dragged them once more to the great hall. There was struggle and protest, but Osgek’s resolve flooded through his courtiers, forbidding escape.

The duardin were harried before the king, and the king extended his hand, granted his blessing, signalled the start of the feast–

A clamour sounded at the rear of the hall. No music this, but the clash of steel on bronze, spear against buckler. The return of a knight of Aranthine. The son, or an echo of him, came forth in challenge, first at a stride, and then at pace. There was uncertainty in his eyes that spoke to a mad sort of courage; he positioned himself between the king and the duardin and yelled defiance. King Osgek returned the gesture, and descended to meet him.

Justec stepped sideways, evading the weight of Osgek’s first attack and deflecting a raking claw with his buckler. The strength behind it was unbelievable. He circled, darted out with his spear and caught the king at the hip, drawing black blood. The cacophony of the carrion court pressed in on both of them. He took advantage of his smaller profile, trying to imagine himself back on the duelling-grounds of Lethis, calling on the princeling confidence with which he’d sought to chase away the dour airs of his house.

He ducked a blow, weaved to Osgek’s flank, flourished his spear. The king, having feinted with his first attack, thrust forth his other arm and smashed into Justec’s chest. He was lifted from the ground by the force of the blow, his buckler scattering away. Justec crashed into the base of the throne, felt breath escape him and shards of weathered bone pierce his back. Winded, he attempted to stand, staining the ancient seat of Aranthine with his bright blood.

Osgek stalked towards him with the same slow, dreadful authority that he had possessed when he had delivered the king’s justice to the starving ghoul. Justec stared him down, rose to a knee, brought his spear up, tip levelled defensively at the king’s heart.

Then his eyes were drawn to the ramp of crumbled stonework that led to the outer passageways. Ghouls were descending it at an urgent pace, hissing and chittering. The disturbance drew the attention of the court, then Osgek himself. These newcomers sped for the shadows of the hall – their intent was not to protect their king, Justec realised, but to seek safety.

They were fleeing something.

A duardin appeared at the top of the ramp. It wasn’t Rigo. His dark hair hung loose over scarred musculature flushed with exertion. He was daubed in ichor, an axe in each hand, and he hurled himself down the ramp in a series of loping strides, bellowed, and crashed bloodily into the court.

Justec seized his moment and stood, driving his spear hard for Osgek’s chest. The king turned and the blow struck him at the shoulder, piercing deep, binding them in a death-struggle. The captive duardin did not hesitate either, but dived for the weapons laid at the foot of the throne. They hacked at their bindings as the ghouls came for them, frenzy descending over the hall.

Clinging to his spear, Justec braced against the weight of the flesh-eater regent. He was no beast-slayer. Osgek snapped and clawed at him, not quite finding purchase, but gouging at the flesh of Justec’s upper torso. The blood of Aranthine and the ichor of the carrion king became one; had always been one. They crashed down from the throne to the floor of the hall, where the duardin mustered a ragged defence against the flesh-eaters. The booming report of rifles shook the hall as crazed melee gave way to battle outright.

Osgek spun with a wrenching movement that loosened Justec’s grip on his spear, then lashed out with a kick and forced him away. Justec gathered himself, withdrew to gain distance, a crazed clarity rising in him. He was aware of the duardin all about him, fighting for their lives; he was aware of the flesh-eaters, and the furious axe-work of the interloper in their midst, whose momentum carried him onward still. He watched as Osgek hauled the spear from his shoulder and cast it to the ground. Justec’s heart thundered, and a whisper in his blood called upon him to set about his foe with his hands, nails, teeth.

Another voice spoke stillness, quieting the madness in his breast. As King Osgek closed in on him, Justec pulled at his garments and loosened the strap about his neck. He fumbled for a moment; the flesh-eater regent battered aside thronging ghouls and leaped, jaw distended–

Justec the Thirty-First struck out fiercely with the curving tip of the drinking horn. Osgek snapped for his head, but there was no strength in it. His own weight carried him deeper onto the relic, which punched through his ribcage and pierced his heart. Justec thought he saw a pulsing lambency, spirit-light, in the dark glass. He yanked downwards and something cracked, and the horn began to fill with blood, red blood, which gouted forth in a torrent without end. The life went out of King Osgek, then, and Justec wrestled himself free of his ancestor’s body and pulled away, blood-slick, still gripping the drinking horn.

He staggered towards his discarded spear and took it up. The duardin, he realised, were moving towards him, as the ghouls shrieked and withdrew at the sight of their fallen king, or else were forced aside by the berserker in their midst.

The axe-fighter had carved a swathe through the flesh-eaters in pursuit of his comrades; he reached them now, his own ragged exhaustion the mirror of theirs. Lendrik lowered his hammer as the newcomer approached.

‘Rat-Tail?’ he said, with surprise and relief. ‘Where are the others? Where is the rest of the company?’

‘Not coming,’ grunted the one he’d called Rat-Tail. ‘Just me.’

If this raised additional questions, the duardin survivors did not ask them. They gained a measure of composure, turned their attention to the matter of escape. The court had been thrown into disarray, but this was only a brief respite. More ghouls poured down from the outer passageways to join the fray in the hall, and it became evident that the survivors would not be leaving the way that they had entered.

‘This way,’ said Justec of Aranthine, bloody drinking horn in one hand, spear in the other. They looked at him, uncertain.

‘Trust me.’

Understanding stirred within him, and knowledge also. He drew it from himself as easily as verse. He knew these halls; had walked them in another age. Or at the very least he was the recurrence of one who had. Whatever curses warred within him hadn’t claimed him yet, and there was time, still, for a little courage. He began to lead the duardin towards the passageways that led to his cell, letting deep memory guide him.

‘Wait!’ exclaimed the duardin called Juttei. ‘Where’s Rigo?’

‘Rigo’s here?’ Rat-Tail replied, confused.

‘I think he had his own way out,’ Justec offered.

The flesh-eaters closed in on them as they made for the passageway.

‘You’re sure about this…?’ asked one of the other duardin, her eyes turned to the human.

‘My name is Justec,’ he replied, smiling faintly in a way that did not complement the grisly state of his garments. ‘And yes. These are my halls.’

A look passed among the duardin, but they pressed on nonetheless, Justec and Rat-Tail warding off their pursuers in a fighting retreat.

‘Might be time, Syln!’ the duardin woman called out, after they’d gained some distance. A greybeard with grizzled features pushed through to Justec’s position, a hissing cylinder of dark metal in his hands.

‘Sorry about your hall, lad,’ he said, tossing the device overhand into the mouth of the passageway. ‘I was saving that one for the Carrion King,’ he added, with a note of satisfaction. ‘This is more to my preference.’

The survivors broke away as a concussive blast rocked the holdfast and brought down an avalanche of mountain rock upon the surging ghouls, sealing off the passageway to the great hall. In a moment the heart of Aranthine was gone from Justec’s sight. More than likely, he would never see it again. He and the duardin at his side brought spear and axe to those ghouls that had survived to pursue them into the dark and then turned, sprinting through once grand passages lost to decay. He steered them clear of cave-ins, made a left turn and then a second right, up a flight of narrow stairs, guided by the maze-lore of a childhood that had never been his, but revealed itself to him now.

Eventually they scented wet rock and mountain air. Light that you could taste. When the survivors of King Osgek’s court emerged onto the mountainside they did so suddenly, through a narrow shaft concealed between black boulders. Justec of Aranthine and Rat-Tail were first, followed by the others, winded, wounded, but alive. They stumbled into a gully swept with snow.

It was dusk, but even the fading light made Justec wince after so long underground. He laughed, an incongruous noise that had as much pain as mirth in it. At his side, Rat-Tail excised his own animus with a gruff snort.

Then they saw him: a white-bearded duardin clad in cape and mail, axe of gromril firmly in hand, gazing down at them from the ridgeline above. To one side stood a human man and duardin woman, and to the other – at some distance – loomed an aelf whose hands rested on the hilt of her silver longsword.

‘Fine bit of work, lads,’ old Rigo said. ‘Now, if you’ll indulge an old dawi, we’ve got a real curse to see to.’

NO GOD’S LAND

Six travellers wove a ragged path along the hidden trails of the mountain, their disparate aspects manifest in the diversity of footprints they left in the thinning snow. They were strangers, for the most part, their entwined fates understood only by the one that marched at the head of their formation.

He’d been called Rigo, the last time somebody had remembered his name, and this suited him for the time being. He leaned on the hilt of his gromril battle-axe as he walked, setting a steady pace. There was no mountain in the realms steep enough to deny his sense of purpose. He had wandered slopes like these since before there were Mortal Realms at all, his soul bound inextricably to the chill of the high airs, the grinding endurance of rock, and the memory of eight ice-capped peaks, lost to fathomless time.

Prospector. Of all the guises he had adopted, this was the one that suited him best. It was a mantle he’d worn often. The duardin tended to listen to those who could sense when a mountain might be hiding something from them: a glittering ore vein, a resonant cut of stone, a bit of fire in its belly. Old Rigo’s prospecting had taken him far, these countless years, and over time the value he sought was found in stranger and stranger places. For a while he uncovered that which glittered, resounded and burned within his own people; later, as the heavens turned to their current configuration, he’d discovered an eye for stranger qualities, in stranger folk.

The ones he’d brought together on this lonely mountainside were strange folk indeed. They had to be. For this mountain, he knew, hid something regrettable.

His people, the duardin, had long since been fragmented by the hammer-blow brutalities of history. This had happened more than once over the ages, but these new divisions ran deep, stretching away into the shadows of an age of pain. Yet for all the scars inflicted by the fall of the Khazalid Empire, its memory was a source of hope, too. It was in the nature of the dawi to keep a tally of that which had been lost, after all, and to place great faith in the possibility of restitution. When the duardin retreated behind their veil of grief, they did so in order to gather strength for the era of retribution to come.

Grudge-bearer. He’d been that once, too. It was a title he claimed no longer, and in relinquishing it, he had lost the right to it. A canny little mechanism, that. From the inside, it looked like order – a reliable piece of clockwork, an automatic loom that wove the fate of the duardin according to trusted patterns. From the outside, it had come to look like a snare.

The six of them strode now towards a kingdom lost to mortal memory at the passing of an age. Karak Thorga. Old Rigo held within him a memory of its glories, its idiosyncrasies, the bitter edge of austerity that it had inherited by virtue of its dominion over a grave-cold expanse of the Realm of Death.

Perhaps unfair to lay that particular quality at the old necromancer’s feet, Rigo mused.

Here was the irony at the heart of the dawi: prospectors looked to the affairs of the future, and grudge-bearers settled the affairs of the past. Yet time had a habit of dwindling the stock of prospectors, so that none remained to look forward, while inflating the stock of grievance, so that all remained was to look back.

Old Rigo moved backwards, now, in order to close an ancient wound. Yet the mending called for strange tools, and these he had sought out with a prospector’s eye. A broken Fyreslayer; an aelven iconoclast, the sort that could make her own decisions; a pair of Ghyranite thieves, bound by compassion despite themselves; a twice-cursed umgi princeling, whose soul had been caught in the gears of time an age prior. These were the ones that Rigo would permit to breach the halls of Karak Thorga – not the Warden Kings, nor the treasure hunters, nor the sky-pirates, but them.

Larn Rat-Tail, the axe-fighter once called Larnik Vuul-Kerrik, exiled runeson of Kerrik lodge, was engaged in a frustrating, wordless negotiation with the aelven swordswoman Nauré Ardellain. It suited both of them to bring up the rear of Rigo’s ragged formation, yet this was a position that only one could occupy. As a consequence, and to their mutual dissatisfaction, they brought it up together.

‘Can’t imagine you’re seeking something in these peaks,’ Larn muttered at last, as the path widened out onto a white, glacial expanse. ‘You’re following Rigo.’

Ardellain did not look at him, nor did she answer his implied question.

‘You are the child of a sundered pairing,’ she said, after a pause, both hands resting idle on the hilt of her silver longsword. ‘I am not.’

Rat-Tail let his beard and tangled mass of hair hide his expression. He’d encountered aelves before – not often, but often enough to know that they were not always as needlessly enigmatic as this. It was no great matter; silence suited him.

Ahead of them strode the human that Rat-Tail had encountered in the lair of the carrion king. The boy had been fighting in his own way to protect the duardin captives that the flesh-eaters had seized during their raid on Daltheim’s company. His name was Justec and he held himself with an air of nobility at odds with his ragged circumstance. His attention was ever set on the deeper parts of the range, Rat-Tail observed. He sought something here. Moreover, he seemed to know where he was going.

Captivity had left Justec thin and filthy, and the boy might have frozen to death on the mountainside had he and Rat-Tail, and those they had rescued, not emerged from the darkness of the charnel tunnels directly – and miraculously – into the path of Rigo and his companions. The old whitebeard had kept them moving, that first dusk together, steering them away from the domain of the flesh-eaters. The ghouls had lost their leader, but there was no guarantee that the king’s death would sate their unnatural hunger.

The full score of them had found shelter in the lee of a black rock face, hewn unnaturally flat where it had been quarried an age ago. Old Rigo exerted a force of leadership that he seemed able to ignite and extinguish at will, like a torch flame. That night he burned brightly. The survivors of Daltheim’s company were exhausted and needed nothing more than a hearth around which to gather, rest, and tend to their wounds. Old Rigo called one into being out of flint and kindling, and presided over them with the genial air of a tavern-keeper.

It had felt like an age since Rat-Tail last made camp with his own folk, although in truth it had only been a few days. He’d been a mercenary in Borgni Daltheim’s employ; after the attack, with Rigo’s guidance, he’d decided to become something else. He’d found a bit of focus, faced with his kin’s plight and the daunting odds of his own survival. In the warm light at the edge of Rigo’s camp, he wondered if he might lose that focus and return to the fugue that had preceded it. His rune scars – the insistent, physical reminder of the oaths and expectations he had shed when he forsook Grimnir’s path – still itched, but they no longer burned.

He’d done a fair share of killing lately, he thought to himself, looking out into the night. Maybe it was as simple as that.

Rigo had interrupted his musing, suddenly at his side in the darkness. ‘Well done, drengi,’ he said. ‘You had the right of it – there’s doom about these mountains, but you’ve thwarted a measure of it. Ach, more to be done. What’s your gut telling you now?’

Rat-Tail had glanced away across the peaks, directing his attention towards the mountain that concealed the lost karak. Something out there called to him. Yet as the fire in his skin had eased, of late, so too did the shadow of the mountain seem to withdraw and curl about itself, gathering its strength.

‘It lingers,’ he replied. ‘Though I think its interest in me wanes.’

‘Good,’ said Rigo, his tone uncharacteristically flat. Rat-Tail saw him in profile, white whiskers burnished orange by the light of his smoking pipe, scarlet cloak set ablaze in the glow of his simple hearth. Something inside him grew quiet in sympathy with the longbeard. Rigo’s eyes were far away.

It wasn’t the flame-bearded echo of his father that Rat-Tail saw then, nor the echo of the warrior god that he had long since forsaken, but something else, something lost, something heavy. Memory and doom-sense stole up on Larn Rat-Tail, then crept from him to the stranger at his side, there to manifest as a series of images as faint as dreams: the white-bearded king of a fine hold, whose heart burned with fierce love and fierce grudgement until all that remained of him was a mound of cooling ashes.

A brief clamour had returned Rat-Tail to his senses. Rigo patted his shoulder and turned to face the fire, where the young human had fainted and fallen to his side. Justec was half-starved and chilled to the bone, having abandoned most of his possessions in the escape. The throng parted as Rigo approached and, with a single, smooth motion, unclasped his scarlet cloak and laid it over the human’s prone form. Justec slept soundly after that, and awoke rejuvenated.

At dawn, amidst the busyness of preparations and departures, Rigo had told the lad to keep the cloak. Ever since, the boy had walked tall, spear in hand like a watchman. Given Justec’s appetite for conversation, Rat-Tail found himself wondering if Rigo might have spared him slightly less hospitality.

‘You mean the gods, don’t you?’ said Justec, looking back at Nauré Ardellain, whose talk of sundered pairings had meant nothing at all to Rat-Tail. He slowed his pace, closing the gap between them. The aelf tilted her head.

‘You were listening,’ she said, stepping forward.

Rat-Tail, sensing his moment, withdrew to the rear of the column.

Nauré Ardellain, once known as the Eventide Razor, once Seneschal of the Leynfast and Realm-lord of Hysh, had not expected much by way of conversation from the Fyreslayer exile. She’d walked the realms alongside mercenaries before, and understood that mundane matters remained, by necessity, at the centre of their worldview. There were few things more mortal than coin, and though the scions of Grimnir ascribed divinity to the ur-gold that they sought, it was Ardellain’s unspoken opinion that this was ultimately an act of debasement, not veneration.

Gods, in her experience, did not willingly break themselves down into fragments that might more easily fit a mortal hand.

This one – Rat-Tail – bore no ur-gold at all, which was unusual. She wondered if this was a sign that he was particularly incompetent, or particularly pious. Both, perhaps.

The young human, Justec, was curious about her. This, too, was not unexpected. She was used to being the only scion of Hysh in any given company, and it was the nature of light to draw the eye.

‘Yes,’ he continued, smiling at her. ‘You reminded me of an old rhyme–’

‘Not really the time for a song, lad,’ interjected the duardin. Justec ignored him, gave his spear a short flourish, and spoke the words to the sky.

‘One of shadow, two of light

One of craft – his brother, might

Two of beasts, body-bound

One of death, barrow-found

One of life, in greening lands

Holy Thunder, guide their hands–’

‘This verse is unfamiliar to me,’ Ardellain replied. This interested her. The words were crudely formed but held a measure of truth. Old truth. Their sense of the ordering of the heavens was an antiquated one, rare now in an age of upheavals. It was notable that they had been uttered by Justec, whose youth and humanity would both have precluded such perspective in normal circumstances. She eyed the scarlet cloak that hung about the boy’s shoulders and reminded herself: This is an age of upheavals.

‘Sprang to mind, that’s all,’ Justec replied, without guile. ‘The old gods often come in twos, in the songs.’

‘Two is a binding number,’ she agreed. The dark-haired duardin made a meaningless grumbling sound, somewhere behind her, but Justec appeared buoyed by her approval.

Ardellain’s eyes returned to the horizon, her hands pressed, one atop the other, against the hilt of the sword that hung at her left hip. Her hands wanted nothing more than to drift apart and find their grip upon both her blades, but she denied the urge. One of the disadvantages of a long life was that old patterns could take significant time to unravel; adjusting to a new reality took practice. Yet diligent training and relentless self-discipline had been her entire experience of life, once. This was the attitude that she tried to call up from her past now: the dedication and seriousness of the Vanari aspirant, the orphan of Syar driven to forge herself into a Bladelord at any cost.

Once she might have found it unthinkable to be returned to the position of learner. The reality of it, however, felt like freedom. She had been travelling for many years, but it was not until her encounter with the white-bearded duardin that her true journey had resumed. The decision to follow the stranger had been an automatic one, and it was not until his growing retinue stopped to make their first camp that she had allowed herself to ruminate upon the change. By his own calculation, Rigo had steered them into the path of Justec, Rat-Tail, and the ragged party of treasure hunters that they’d hauled from a hole in the ground.

Shima’s rivals, she thought. She refused to give the sentiment space to grow beyond that. Her old friend would be fine. Shima Sjarsdottir was confined aboard her own vessel; it was not a matter of if she would retake the skyship, but when.

Ardellain had felt no particular need to rest, and duardin repast had little to offer her, so she slipped away from the group and surveyed the location of the dark escarpment that Rigo had chosen as their shelter. This decision, too, had been carefully calculated. Had they ventured deeper into the mountains by the most evident route, she observed, their next resting place would have been found further within the range, inside the unmarked boundary of Karak Thorga.

This threshold, which she understood from centuries of honed aether-sense to be cursed, fascinated her. Each realm held to its own latent properties, and defined harmony in its own way: here, something truly fractious had been called into being out of the raw stuff of Shyish. She sensed no danger from it, but from Rigo’s actions she observed that he did. And he had steered the beings under his protection away from it, for the time being.

His hospitality had a purpose, as hospitality always did. Rigo prepared the rescued duardin adventurers of Daltheim’s company for a journey back down the mountain, steering them away from the lost karak, and did it with such easy conviviality that they seemed to truly believe that the decision to leave was their own. Ardellain understood that she would accompany the whitebeard the rest of the way to Karak Thorga, as would the Ghyranite duardin woman, her human partner – evidently some form of wizard, his efforts to mask his own arcane sensitivities laughably transparent – Rat-Tail, and Justec.

Why them? she wondered.

Ardellain had eventually found herself atop the black rock face that sheltered the others. There, buffeted by a crossing wind, she allowed herself to finally unclasp the fine leather scabbard that hung empty at her right hip. The sword that it once held had been the twin-echo of the blade that remained, and she had not been without it for more than a century.

The swords were a divine gift, one that had elevated Seneschal Ardellain above the rarefied heights of her peers, made her something more than a Realm-lord of the Lumineth. They had bound her, in body, soul and art, to the will of those that forged them. They had confirmed her place in the grand ordering of reality. Above most, below a few.

She saw herself reflected in their symmetries, and resented the flattering definitions they imposed. She railed at the hypocrisy of those who had bestowed them, the perfumed darkness of the gloaming realm that honour hides. They had not pursued her, when she quit her post and exchanged light for shadow. Nor had consequence caught her when she abandoned shadow for the freedom of the open air.

The swords had been payment, and precious as they were, ultimately they were little more than coins. They had debased her. The white-bearded duardin had proved it when he had unmade one of her precious, god-wrought weapons with a thought.

That was something only a god should be able to do.

Yet the act had set her free.

That was something no god would do.

Alone in the dark she had let go of the scabbard. The wind caught up the thin fold of aelven leatherwork and hastened it away into the night, into the memorial chasms of death.

In the present, Justec was still talking and she had, she supposed, been listening. He spoke conversationally of his people’s own relationship with the gods, the particular way in which they’d honoured Sigmar and the Undying King, a combination unheard of in these tumultuous times.

They found themselves mounting a ridgeline, and the six of them crested its highest point and descended to the far side. Above them loomed a mountain, at its base a towering curtain wall of sheer black stone. A shiver ran down Ardellain’s spine. She had crossed the threshold eleven strides ago. They all had.

They had breached the curse boundary, and entered the domain of Karak Thorga.

Sivarn Trell, gardener, felt it in the aether before he felt it in his chest. A change in pressure; the clear and unmistakable sense of something being snatched away. He’d felt similarly when the vessel they’d boarded at Greywater Fastness had traversed the sky-paths above the Reach and made the transition to the Realm of Death. That sensation had been striking but it was not necessarily unpleasant. For somebody with a touch of the green in him – as Myrddi would put it – it was inevitable that he’d feel his sudden detachment from the Everqueen’s domain.

Yet it was not painful. It was like a gasp of sheer, dry, cool air on one of the days when the firewinds brought their sweltering touch to the wet verdancy of Hammerhal Ghyra, the city of his birth. He wouldn’t call it refreshing, the touch of Shyish, but it was a curiosity to venture somewhere where the dirt concerned itself with endings, not beginnings.

The sensation he experienced at the edge of Karak Thorga was not painful either, but it unnerved him immediately. Something resonated through him and away. He felt intuitively that he had been seen by a presence that searched through him like a burglar making hasty, indelicate work of a once locked chamber. Not all thieves acted out of malice, but this one did.

The feeling reminded him that he had chosen to venture into the Realm of Death and, despite the relative ease of their passage so far, that they could die here. That was, after all, in the nature of this place. Myrddi would be furious with him if it came to that. He wondered why she’d chosen to come. She was still angry with him, after all.

In his pack rested the gromril hand axe that had once belonged to the duardin guildmaster Gerrig Durkar. It had been forged here, in Karak Thorga, at a time when Durkar’s ancestors knew themselves by another name. In another life, it might have fallen into Trell’s possession as a consequence of a bit of quick-fingered thieving or dextrous connivery. That had been their intent, when he and Myrddi had first ventured close to Greywater Fastness in search of an easy mark. Yet that was not how things had turned out, to Sivarn’s surprise and Myrddi’s grudgement. Gerrig Durkar was a good man, troubled by loss and lost, in turn, to cruelty. Though he was no duardin, the axe had come to Trell at a friend’s bequest, and with it came a sense of obligation: to take everything that was good about himself, to seize up the power at his disposal, and find a bit of peace for his friend’s spirit. To seize that green gift of his and do something right.

He’d had a sense of what that meant around the campfire, in the darkest part of the night, as embers burned low. Rigo had left the duardin adventurers to their rest and vanished off somewhere, as he was wont to do. The stranger folk that Rigo had gathered around him had, likewise, withdrawn to their own secluded spots. Myrddi had told him to pay close attention to them. She wasn’t given to being cryptic, normally, so he took it instead as simple instruction. She evidently believed that Rigo was up to something, and he’d had no doubt that she’d figure it out.

Myrddi snored softly a short distance away and the noise made him yawn. He stifled the sound, but felt the pull of sleep begin to take him. There, at the edge of dreaming, the life-spirit woke and his awareness stretched out to encompass the pack of wounded animals gathered about the fire with him. He drifted away to the sensation of strength regrowing in each of them, like a garden blooming under his gentle direction. Sivarn Trell smiled as he slept, and jade magic flowed about him quietly.

It was never this simple in Ghyran, where all acts of nurture flowed like tributaries into the endless struggle between life and decay. The Everqueen’s dominion permitted no compromise, and spared little affordance for creatures like Sivarn Trell – born to the city but drawn to the wild, unhappy to be contained behind walls but too fearful, too mortal, to make themselves agents of nature’s wrath. All of the roads that life had offered Sivarn Trell led to war, and so he had abandoned the road.

When he woke, light was breaking over the mountains and Rigo was making a jovial show of readying the duardin for their journey. He patted down packs and adjusted the straps of weapons and the clasps of ragged cloaks. He pointed away towards the lowlands, then up at the sky, muttered truths about the weather, and tasted a proffered sip of morning ale with a conspiratorial gleam in his eye.

Then, with gruff affirmations of gratitude – first to Rigo, then to taciturn Larn Rat-Tail and the boy Justec – the adventurers were off, and only the six of them remained. Rigo watched the duardin’s passage away down the mountain. The others, Trell realised, had their eyes squarely on the longbeard, even the aelf Ardellain. Myrddi was right – old Rigo had something in mind for each of these people, and not one of them knew what it was.

The others crossed into the shadow of Karak Thorga behind him. His eyes went first to Myrddi, who gave a full-body shudder, and then, instinctively, to the old duardin. Trell hadn’t known him long, but he liked him. He’d seen nothing faze him – not the worst of Greywater’s underbelly nor the gheists that had come for them aboard the Drakkul. It disquieted him, then, to see a knot of pained mortality on the longbeard’s brow. He moved to Rigo’s side and bent his knees to address him eye to eye, a habit formed over long years of duardin companionship.

‘I’m fine, lad,’ Rigo said, anticipating Trell’s concern.

‘I expect that’s so,’ Trell replied. ‘But we’re here, aren’t we?’

‘Aye,’ Rigo replied with a sigh. ‘Before us lie the Thorgiri gates. Beyond, the steps.’

Myrddi Wutten, of the Wuttenfolk, knew. At first she’d only suspected, and she’d chastened herself for it. It was a childish, fanciful thought, and a distraction. She’d been raised on stories and runelore, and the moment the white-bearded stranger had stepped into her presence, she’d been pestered by a thought that would not leave her:

His name isn’t Rigo.

To her people, the Wuttenfolk, the gods made themselves known in two ways: as stories and as calamity. When pox-winds blew or hostile verdure overtook the wetlands, that was the doing of the gods. When thunder shook the fens and roused the brayherds to slaughter, that was the doing of the gods. If truly the Maker worked to safeguard the future of the duardin, his gifts of stone and iron had not reached the hands of the Wuttenfolk. If the warrior god’s spirit still lingered somewhere in the realms, then its fiery touch was scarcely felt across the rainswept expanse of Verdia.

Yet they told the stories all the same, salted with grudgement if not outright disrespect. Survival had made pragmatists of the Wuttenfolk, and they were proud of it, but tale-telling was in the souls of the duardin, and the children of the clan were swaddled in runelore from the moment their eyes opened. Myrddi Wutten’s ancestors had carried old stories with them when they’d escaped into the wild at the onset of a dark age, and she regarded these tales as treasures, long after life had made a pragmatist of her, too.

Sivarn, soft heart that he was, had his attention fixed on the white-bearded stranger. She’d not voiced her suspicions to him. She didn’t fear that he wouldn’t believe her – she knew that he would, and that this would escalate an already complex situation in a way that might bring out the rash side of him. The side that was prone to getting them in trouble.

Yet here she was, standing to the side of a figure that might as well have been one of her Aunt Crella’s shadow puppets, taking in the sight of a city out of myth.

Karak Thorga was defended by a curtain wall of dense black stone, bound with dark iron. Brutish wedges jutted from the structure at regular intervals, stretching forward to grip the ice and rock at its feet. It was a hard-edged piece of work, softened only by the snow that gathered thick about its battlements. Two statues loomed ahead of the gatehouse. Each depicted a towering ancestor wearing a masked helm crowned with horns. They stood with their hands resting upon the hilts of their weapons. One wielded a greataxe, his helmet orbited by a ring of jagged flames. The other held a hammer, and the stone about his shoulders had been ingeniously carved to resemble linked hoops of fine metal.

The Warrior, and the Maker.

The entryway that lay between the two statues was shrouded in darkness, but the snow was thin there, in the shadow of the great wall and its twin protectors. As the rest of Rigo’s company gathered around her, Myrddi pressed forward, suddenly compelled to be the first to reach the Thorgiri gate. She unbuckled her mallet and felt reassured by its weight. She was no figure of legend, nor did she bear runes in her flesh or hold the secrets of the sky in her mind. She certainly did not carry herself with the stiff pomposity of the city-dwelling Dispossessed. Yet she was Myrddi Wutten, of the Wuttenfolk, and if fate had delivered her into the land of stories, then let her be first to walk it.

As she reached the gatehouse, however, she realised that she’d seized upon this whim in haste. The iron-banded door was ajar, pressed inward, and the deep impression that its passage had left upon the ice indicated that it had been opened recently. Then her eyes caught something else: dark patches in the snow, scuffs and disturbances that radiated around her and away. The Wuttenfolk were good trackers, and had a belligerent way of settling disputes. Both of these traditions converged in the after-image she witnessed at the foot of the Thorgiri gate. Folk came to blows here, she thought. Someone bled.

‘Mind your haste,’ came Rigo’s voice. She turned, and he was moving towards her, Sivarn keeping pace a short distance behind. Yet the whitebeard did not grow to occupy the entirety of her vision, as he sometimes appeared to do. There was a faltering quality in his step, and more of his weight went into the hilt of his battle-axe. Rigo looked old, truly old, for a moment, and Myrddi’s suspicions about him were shaken. She suddenly felt very alone, and somewhat foolish.

The wind howled, and the frosted ground trembled. There was a harsh crack, and as Myrddi locked eyes with the white-bearded stranger, a pair of horned shadows fell across the two of them.

She had time to look up and see the two statues falling inward, crossing one another at an unnatural angle, their overlapping mass converging on old Rigo. She heard a shout, footsteps, and at the last she looked for Sivarn. There was fear in his eyes – a shock of desperate green. He took a step forward, but something grabbed him from behind and hauled him back. A loping red shape collided with old Rigo and tumbled away with him into the shadow of the wall. Myrddi threw herself to the ground–

The descending mass of stone simply stopped, so close to her that she could smell it. Unnatural light banished the shadows cast by the falling statues. They had collided as they fell, and should have collapsed inward to crush her, but at the point of impact, in the instant when their conjoined weight was held in momentary balance, they had been arrested by a single, precise intervention.

Light pulsed from an outstretched blade that held both statues in tension with one another. Beneath it, the aelf in her hooded cloak strained, adjusting her footing. Fissure cracks like sunlight glimpsed through closed fingers began to spread through the stone. Myrddi stood, gathered her strength, brought her mallet up in a fierce overhand swing. The stonework above her, rendered fragile by sorcery, shattered into brittle pieces and fell away.

Ardellain brought her sword around in a scything arc that bisected both statues at the midsection, causing them to split evenly around her. Myrddi, bruised but alive, fell back onto her haunches. The first voice she heard was Sivarn’s.

‘Myr!’ he yelled, a note of panic in it, lumbering up from where the Fyreslayer had dragged him to the ground. She saw the relief in his eyes. Ardellain and Rat-Tail exchanged a nod of acknowledgement, and then the aelf’s attention turned to the gatehouse. Myrddi turned also.

‘I did tell you it was cursed, Justec of Aranthine,’ said Rigo. He was sitting against the wall, winded. Without a word, Justec unbuckled the scarlet cloak and, as the old duardin rose to his feet, he accepted it from the human and drew it about his shoulders. The whitebeard’s eyes went to the rubble-strewn gatehouse, whiskers bristling at the mess they’d made of it. Myrddi felt Sivarn approach, then the others, and as they followed that red cloak into the dark, her suspicions vanished.

Myrddi Wutten knew.

Justec the Thirty-First, warrior poet, last son of House Aranthine, had been blind to the danger before Rat-Tail sprinted past him, compelled by instinct. His attention had been drawn away from the aelf by the sight of the holdfast at the foot of the mountain. Despite having never set foot in this place, he knew it well.

Cold-wind flows from ’Thorga

O’er gates barred and black

No treasures guard they, but grudgement keep

At age’s unjust end…

The awareness had been growing in him since his escape from King Osgek’s court – since the awakening that Rigo had prompted. The knowledge contained in the songs of his house began to intermingle with real memory. He was the thirty-first recurrence of the person who had fled through this gatehouse long ago, clutching an artefact that was supposed to free his people from the curse of Ushoran. In the end, it had only saved one soul – his – and levied its own cost in doing so. There was, as Rigo had put it, no choosing between curses. Justec kept the drinking horn close to his chest even so, clinging to the notion that there might be some boon to be won by restoring it to the ancient hold from which it had been taken.

In uncovering the truth he’d opened up the possibility of a different ending for himself. The thought seemed to justify, in retrospect, the recklessness with which he’d sought the lost karak, a course of action that had almost seen him devoured by his own forebears. Now he walked in storied company: mercenaries, Bladelords, wanderers from other realms, and white-bearded Rigo, whose significance seemed to grow by the moment. In him he saw what his ancestors must have seen in the High Kings of Karak Thorga, so long ago. He thought that this must be the key to the mysteries that followed wherever the whitebeard went.

When Justec had woken to find Rigo’s cloak draped about him, he believed that something of the ancient bond between Aranthine and Thorga had been restored.

So it was that Justec strode forward, determined to return to the halls of Thorga as comrade, not betrayer, marching proudly in the company of a lord of the duardin, not skulking in the shadows of their treasure halls. Yet the moment had been interrupted by Rat-Tail’s sudden burst of speed. The duardin barked a warning as he dashed for Sivarn Trell, who strode onward heedless of the danger.

‘Halt–’

That was all the half-naked duardin had been able to say before the earth shook and a sound like a desperate inhalation resonated through the Thorgiri gates. The world seemed to bend as the two great statues fell inwards, and Justec – still caught up in knightly reveries – had sprinted towards the danger. He flung himself at the old duardin, felt the stone close in on him, and heaved the two of them towards the wall, shielding Rigo with his taller frame. There was a flash of light, voices raised, a great shattering–

‘Up, umgi,’ said Rigo, with uncharacteristic chagrin. Justec stepped back, dropped to a knee. It surprised him how weather-worn the old duardin looked. Something of his gravity was fading, but Justec saw a flush of red in Rigo’s cheeks as he patted about his chest for his pipe.

‘The guardians of Thorga just tried to bring themselves down upon you,’ Justec said, quietly. There was the edge of a question to it.

‘I did tell you it was cursed, Justec of Aranthine,’ Rigo replied, leaning on the last phrase as if to remind Justec of his own part in all of this.

Justec reached to his shoulder and unclasped the cloak. It felt appropriate to restore the gift to its owner. He stepped away, nodded, gave the whitebeard space to adjust the mantle to his liking. The old duardin took in the ruin that had been made of the Thorgiri gate, grumbled, and proceeded through the open gap. None but Justec were close enough to see him stagger as he crossed that ancient threshold.

They emerged on the far side of the curtain wall at the foot of a great staircase that occupied the full width of a finely quarried gap in the mountain. In his mind’s eye Justec saw the grim visages that had once flanked each step, now rendered featureless and soft-edged by generations of snowfall. He and Rigo mounted the first stair as the others filtered through the gateway behind them, and Justec sensed that now was the moment to ask his question.

‘These are your halls, aren’t they?’ he said quietly. ‘As those of Aranthine were mine. The spirits of your ancestors, they’re here.’

Rigo chuckled, looked up at him. There was a glimmer in his grey eyes.

‘Quite the opposite, lad,’ he said, with a note of sadness. He raised his pipe and lit it, though the chill air deadened the flame. ‘I’ve not come here seeking the treasures of the past, nor do I seek to avenge those wrongs that brought this place to ruin.’

He paused a moment, his eyes moving to the bloodstained drinking horn bound to Justec’s chest. ‘You’re not here to make things right, Justec of Aranthine,’ he said at last. ‘You’re here to help them change.’

Justec tapped his spear against his shoulder, turned the words over in his mind. ‘There’s no mortal so ill-fated that their fate cannot be reworked,’ he said, quoting the words that Rigo had spoken to him amidst the horror of King Osgek’s court.

‘Quite right,’ replied Rigo, his geniality returned. ‘Though I must admit, my boy, in your case… Well, I think you might be pushing it.’

Then he was off, up the stairs, making a show of pace. Justec waited a moment, then moved to follow, heedless of the bloodstains at his feet, the dark impressions in the snow that led away towards the looming entrance of the lost city.

The malice that lurked at the heart of Thorga loathed the one they called Rigo – loathed what had become of the duardin, loathed all that had been wrought by the Maker’s hand. It loathed each part of the fractious tapestry of order, the fragile and eternally incomplete work of peace. Because it loathed him, it wished to make him part of itself. Such was the nature of grievance: it desired only to see itself reflected in the eyes of others.

The curse desired to occupy that part of him that was righteous, which held to faith in the gods and believed itself capable of honouring them with thought and deed. It sought to feed upon that hidebound aspect of his nature which fuelled its resentment, and in feeding, grow.

Yet the curse could not seize that which had been forged for its purpose by a god. It could only hate it, shun it, cast it out. And so Rigo had abandoned that part of himself at the border, and walked this last stretch of the journey as an old prospector and nothing more. He felt every step. The duardin had the knack of meeting their last years with dignity, but it was a skill he’d never truly had to put into practice. He fought back an overwhelming urge to sit, draw on his pipe and grumble. He was running out of time, and he needed them – the five of them, his broken tools – to feel the necessity of the task ahead.

He’d seen the blood in the gatehouse, and followed it up the steps. He knew what it meant, and it pained him. It meant he’d failed at least one of his people.

Old Rigo reached the chasmal entrance of Karak Thorga, at the foot of the great mountain, and caught his breath. Snow drifted a short distance into the shadowed entryway. He heard Justec mount the steps behind him, followed by Myrddi, Sivarn and the others.

‘You. Oathbreaker.’

The voice resonated from deeper within. It might have truthfully been directed at any of them, he considered. Yet he knew that the words were directed at him. He sighed.

‘I’m sorry, lad,’ he said, with regret. ‘I’d hoped for a different ending for you.’

The figure that emerged from the shadows was tall by duardin standards, his overcoat ragged with rime, beard unkempt. In his right hand he gripped a heavy falchion, stained with blood. In the other he bore an iron shield impressed with a scowling ancestor mask. A deep slash marred its features.

Rat-Tail growled. ‘Daltheim.’

‘Coward,’ Daltheim replied, with venom. Then his eyes went from the slayer to the prospector. ‘You fed your lies to him, too, then.’

‘I’ve told you no lies, Borgni Daltheim,’ Rigo said. ‘There was never any glory in being the first to this claim.’

‘Glory?’ Daltheim took a step forward. His eyes were sunken, his face sallow. ‘Was it glory, then, that you promised Greft, and Possik, and the others, that sent them scurrying off? When they said there was nothing for us here, it was your voice I heard.’

‘You were right in that,’ Rigo replied quietly, ‘and each word they told you was true.’

Daltheim scoffed. ‘They’re all oathbreakers. Honourless. Each of them. Fit for nothing but a swift ending.’

‘That’s Phirgo’s shield,’ said Larn Rat-Tail.

‘Was,’ Daltheim corrected. ‘He had no conviction. Vigguir neither. Warrior strike them down, and Maker let something worthier be wrought from their deaths.’

Rigo furrowed his brow. ‘A treasure hunter that tempers his trespasses with devotion,’ he said. ‘That’s always been the quandary of Borgni Daltheim, hasn’t it?’

‘You are the trespasser here,’ Daltheim replied. ‘It is you that dishonours the halls of your gods and ances–’

‘There are no gods here, Borgni Daltheim!’ Rigo thundered, his voice echoing away into the depths of Karak Thorga. ‘Not any more. And the bitterness of our people has made you its puppet.’

Daltheim raised his blade and roared with derision, but Larn Rat-Tail was already between them, axes drawn. Justec advanced to his side, spear low. Rigo felt the others take up position around him, and then he sensed the shift in the aether. No doubt Ardellain felt it also. Grief-maddened spirits of the Thorgiri Khazalid consolidated their conquest of proud Borgni Daltheim, and flowed from the shadows to amass by his side.

A sinister emerald glow gathered against the fading light of the far horizon. When Borgni Daltheim left this place, he would carry with him the grievances of the ancient Khazalid, and his passage would mark the first unravelling of the veil of grief that shielded Thorga from the realm. When the Warden Kings and their hosts arrived, this fate would befall them also, and they would march from the mountain as the dawi had countless times before, in ages lost to memory – grudge-bound and grim set. They would adopt the panoplies of war, and the veil of grief would come down entirely, and the spirits of Karak Thorga would be free to avenge themselves upon the Mortal Realms.

Yet there would be no era of retribution for the spirits of the Thorgiri. Only servitude, eternal bondage at the mercy of the Great Necromancer, the god who had made death and grievance his sole domain.

This was the ill fate that Rigo had traversed the realms to rework. His broken companions had ventured to Karak Thorga without knowing the true purpose of their journey, but soon they would, and in knowing it, Rigo hoped, they would discover the means to reforge themselves, too. This, he held in his heart, was the Maker’s promise.

Larn’s axes came up and redirected Daltheim’s heavy slash into the cracked stonework of the floor, allowing Justec to lunge forward with a testing blow that resounded against the scowling visage on Daltheim’s shield. The taller duardin brought his blade up defensively and threw his bulk forward, pressing between them to make for Rigo directly. Whispering presences amassed in the shadows, then surged forward, manifesting as grey spectres.

Rat-Tail saw spirits of the dead, bound to malice by the doom that lingered about the mountain. Justec of Aranthine saw the household guard of Thorga, as finely armed and armoured as they had been the day his soul had last walked this hall. Sivarn Trell saw pain in the eyes of old Durkar’s kindred, and his heart sank. Nauré Ardellain saw proof of a malignant asymmetry within the Realm of Death, and readied herself to be its remedy.

Myrddi Wutten, for her part, saw Borgni Daltheim. She saw the killer that had been first to the gates of Thorga. She saw his fine coat, his blade of folded steel. She saw yet another partisan of the Dispossessed, blinded by self-serving righteousness. She saw that he had, in his righteousness, overlooked her completely. With a heavy swing of her heartwood mallet she broke his right leg at the knee. His weight carried him forward, and he crashed to the floor. Then, before anybody could stop her, she brought her mallet down and cracked his skull against the flagstones of Thorga, as one might break the neck of an ailing beast. It was an inglorious end for an adventurer as storied as Borgni Daltheim, but life had made a pragmatist of Myrddi Wutten, and she delivered his death with swift finality.

A wrathful dirge flowed from the spirits of the approaching Khazalid. Ardellain called the light of Hysh into her blade and stepped forward.

‘No.’

Rigo’s voice was firm. She glanced back at him. The whitebeard stood resolute, scarlet cloak hanging even, axe low. He had the composure of a statue.

‘The bitterness that lingers here perceives only those whose souls are honoured by the gods,’ he said, firmly. ‘Any of the gods,’ he added. His whiskers bristled with what might have been amusement, despite the gravity of his words. In his eyes, something glimmered. ‘Between the lot of you, you’ve managed to lose favour with almost all of them. You’ve nothing to fear.’

Rigo closed his eyes. ‘Don’t waste your boldness on a few unhappy souls, my friends. Spare it for the wound at the heart of these halls.’

There was a pause, a moment of uncertainty, as the five of them turned to look at him.

‘The treasure hall, Justec,’ Rigo said at last. ‘You know the way.’

The gheists surged forward to crash into the whitebeard, one after another, expending their anger against his stubborn frame. Their dirge grew louder as their wrath intensified, until their hatred exhausted itself and withdrew, once more, to the shadows. When they were gone, Rigo was quiet and still. For a moment, none of them approached him. Then his strength gave out and he collapsed to the stone. Justec rushed to his side and Ardellain followed.

Myrddi and Rat-Tail stepped forward slowly. Both of them had felt the hatred of the Thorgiri in their own blood, a rising animus that stopped just short of overtaking them.

Sivarn was fussing over the old duardin.

‘Rigo!’ he said. ‘Rigo, can you hear me?’

‘His name’s not Rigo,’ Myrddi snapped at Sivarn, at the aelf, at the human boy, moving them aside. She looked to the slayer, seeking recognition from one of her own kind. There was umber in his eyes, and suddenly he appeared to her to be far away, split from her by a schism that would permit no mending.

The sensation stole the animus from her words, and when she finally spoke them, they came out low and soft.

‘He’s the stranger, from the stories,’ Myrddi began. ‘The white-bearded ancestor.’

She spoke the next word carefully, forming the syllables one after another like a sentence.

‘Grombrindal.’

The old duardin heaved breath into his lungs with a shuddering gasp. With his left hand he snatched out to grasp Myrddi at the shoulder, and with his right he caught Rat-Tail at the wrist.

Grombrindal looked into their eyes. His voice was firm, insistent.

‘This place offers only ill-formed mendings. Bitter oaths, spoken by elders lost to grief. Do not honour them. Do not lose yourselves, trying to make them whole.’

The eyes of the five of them were on him, now – five oathbreakers in the dark at the edge of night, gathered around a fading ember of divinity.

‘Be bold,’ said Grombrindal, at the last. ‘Bring peace to this place. Bring it to an end.’

Myrddi felt the white-bearded ancestor’s grasp suddenly ease, grow cold. Not one of them blinked, but in the space of a thought Grombrindal was gone, his body reduced to a low mound of mountain snow. A ragged howl shook the mouth of Karak Thorga, and the wind caught up the powder and scattered it to the dark.

BITTER OATHS

In a secluded part of Sigmaron, beneath the vaults of Azyr, there is a workshop. There are no finer tools in the Mortal Realms than the ones that are found there, and no finer craftsman than the one who wields them. Tonight, the Maker is alone. From his mind flow weapons, fortifications and great soulworks. These divine implements are the playing pieces with which the wars to come will be fought – and won, with any luck, more often than they are lost.

It is in this way that the Maker keeps his hand on the scales of order; but the wars of the future demand more from him always, and so the pressure he must exert grows with every passing year of the age. As a craftsman, he sees the flaw in this, the vulnerability it exposes. It is a vulnerability that all gods share. To be a god is to be pure in purpose, no matter how righteous or malign. Even the clockmaker must serve a function within the grand mechanism of fate.

Something swirls and eddies in the low light of one of the Maker’s forges, and his eye is drawn to it. A flame as white as snow dances about a coal-black patch of darkness. The Maker peers into that darkness and sees a mountain, chilled by grief. The forge musters its response: convergent armies of blazing red and gold, whose pride it will be to bring bright light to the mountain once again. Yet the Maker knows that this cold fuel is not the sort that burns, but the kind that chokes and smothers. There is a malicious will to this fault in the fire, he recognises, which would see the entire forge extinguished. It is only a matter of time.

The Maker smiles. The clever white flame has committed itself to the problem of the mountain, and it has gathered within it five cooling embers, little more than motes of ash. These, the mountain recognises as its own, for they are almost as cold as it is, and have little in the way of power with which to threaten it. But the white flame has a craftsman’s wisdom, and knows that almost is not the same as truly, and that little is not the same as nothing. In his design, imperfection is the point. For what is an ember, if not a flame-in-waiting?

The Maker knows that broken tools may yet hold the solutions to future problems. Fate has a funny habit of revealing the power in purposeless things.

It is only a matter of time.

Five oathbreakers regarded each other in the shadow-swept entrance hall of Karak Thorga. The two duardin, Larn Rat-Tail and Myrddi Wutten, stood closest to one another, flanking the space on the rime-touched stonework where, moments earlier, a figure of myth had revealed itself to them – and, seemingly, given itself over to death.

Grombrindal. It had been Myrddi who had spoken the name. A name she’d held since childhood in the fens of Ghyran, through the bleak realities of life in a realm at war with itself. The name had resounded in her mind since her first encounter with the whitebeard on the outskirts of Greywater Fastness. She and the woods-mage Sivarn Trell had come seeking cityborn to swindle. Death had been the outcome. Death and the reawakening of Trell’s helpless compassion, the part of him that she treasured and resented in equal measure.

Instead of leaving Durkar’s manse with something worth stealing, they’d pledged to see the old guildmaster’s spirit put to proper rest – here, a reality apart from the forests of her birth, in Shyish, the Realm of Death. Myrddi had agreed to the journey because Sivarn needed her, and because she knew – as, in their hearts, all duardin know – that the white-bearded ancestor goes where his people have need of him. Her people, the Wuttenfolk, had long since lowered their expectations of the gods. Myrddi had always been fond of the stories, however, and felt compelled to follow this one where it led. The gods might overlook the Wuttenfolk, but the eyes of the white-bearded stranger had found her.

Now he was gone, overcome by the curse that had set in at the heart of the lost karak. It was a spiritual blight that fed upon that which it despised most: the bond of hope and trust that bound mortals to their gods. It had overtaken the treasure hunter Borgni Daltheim, who had held to faith despite his pride and avarice. He was dead now, by Wutten’s firm hand.

Larn Rat-Tail, runeless exile, remembered the stories now. He’d never been given to many words, even in youth, when the hammers and songs of the Zharrgrim had each impressed the lore of his people into him. The white-bearded ancestor. He’d only heard the name once or twice, and never given it much mind. Fyreslayers forged their own fate, sought it in each hard-won fragment of ur-gold. When he forsook Grimnir and learned to listen instead to the doom-sense within him, he didn’t lose that particular brash aspect of his heritage. If anything, exile had made Rat-Tail far less likely to sit and wait for aid from his elders. Yet here he was, shocked to stillness by the death of the one he’d known as Rigo.

When the whitebeard had grabbed his wrist, he’d felt the strength in it.

Bring it to an end, he’d said. Rat-Tail did not know if the others felt these words as he did. There’s a doom about these mountains, he’d told Rigo, once. I’m going to face it.

Face it. Bring it to an end. When he ceased to be Larnik Vuul-Kerrik, he had become Rat-Tail – a nothing-name, born of bitterness. Old Rigo – Grombrindal – had called him something else.

Slayer.

A slayer, Larn Rat-Tail considered, brought things to an end.

‘We must proceed,’ said Nauré Ardellain. The aelven Bladelord was speaking to Justec of Aranthine, who presently clung to his spear and stared at the space where Grombrindal had been. She directed her words towards him, but she did not face him. Her gaze was directed up through the tall arched entryway of the lost karak towards the sky. Her refined sensitivities as a Realm-lord of Hysh alerted her to that which mustered beyond this cursed domain.

An emerald malevolence awaited the return of the living to lost Karak Thorga. It awaited the hunger with which the grieving spirits of this place would seize upon the fervour of the faithful, and the feast it would make of the brief, grim restoration of Khazalid pride that would result. It might have even been the unmaking of Ardellain’s former employer. Shima Sjarsdottir’s pride was the tether that bound her to her City of Ancestors, the way she honoured the gods despite the renegade path she walked. The white-bearded duardin had sent her away from here, imprisoned in the hold of the skyship Drakkul. He’d done this, Ardellain now realised, to protect her, or at the very least to steer her onto a different path.

In Sjarsdottir’s stead, in place of any other who might have been first to walk these halls, Grombrindal had conspired to bring about a gathering of faithless oathbreakers. Very well, Ardellain thought. Let her do a god’s work. Not as a servant, but as a successor in waiting.

‘We must proceed,’ she repeated.

‘She’s talking to you, lad,’ said Rat-Tail, looking at Justec.

Justec had strode into the halls of Karak Thorga without much thought to what he’d feel when he got there. He remembered this place, or at least, an awakening part of him did: the sense-memory of the recursive Aranthine soul, whose oldest iteration had been a welcome guest in the karak. It hadn’t been unpleasant to discover this new aspect of himself, because knowledge and certainty rarely is. Besides, his ancestor’s memories of Karak Thorga were happy ones. Lodgings in chambers reserved for honoured guests; warm brisket and a sip of rich, heady ale; the rambunctious, precarious way in which human and duardin children played with one another.

He’d been here at another time, too, however. A time of grieving. When cold wind had flowed from Karak Thorga, at age’s unjust end. He’d trespassed then, slipped from his modest chambers, taken the private stair to the treasure hall, stolen the shadeglass drinking horn–

The treasure hall, Justec, the whitebeard had said. You know the way.

He did, and he carried the shame of the one who had abused that knowledge, too. Now, the shades of the Thorgiri duardin regarded him with bleak indifference. Having expended their wrath against Grombrindal, they had retreated to the shadows cast by the high colonnades of the entryway. The gheists were little more than wisps of spectral grey, hardly corporeal, but Justec felt as if he knew their minds. He’d always had a good sense for when an audience was about to turn on him. The ghosts of Karak Thorga looked at him as if he were a song they’d heard a hundred times before.

You’re not here to make things right.

The old duardin had said that, too.

You’re here to help them change.

Justec turned to Rat-Tail, then Ardellain. ‘Yes, all right,’ he said, gesturing with his spear towards a side passageway. ‘We should go that way. There’s a servants’ passage that will take us higher.’

Sivarn tilted his head. ‘I expected the treasure hall to be below,’ he said.

‘Aye,’ assented Myrddi, with a note of suspicion. ‘Me too.’

‘Oh, yes, it is,’ said Justec. ‘Behind gates of bronze, iron, stone and gromril, one after another. Eight of them.’

The eyes of the others were on him.

‘They’re locked,’ he added. ‘So we’ll go up, to the halls of the Vassal-Lords, and then down again, to the gallery of conquests. There’s a hidden passage there that emerges just past the seventh gate, for the convenience of the High Kings.’

‘How d’you know all this?’ Myrddi replied.

Justec hesitated.

‘He’s cursed,’ said Rat-Tail, already moving.

Whatever Justec’s intentions, Sivarn noted, he did seem to know where he was going. The strange company in which he found himself pressed on in single file up winding stairs and across servants’ landings thick with dust. They navigated by the light of Ardellain’s silver sword, which seemed to bring a faint touch of daylight to any room she entered – like a slice of evening cutting through a shuttered window. It had been a while since Sivarn had been in the presence of magic that wasn’t his. Light was cleaner, he thought, than life.

He wasn’t sure what to make of the one who wielded it. He’d had plenty of contact with aelves, in his time. It was scarcely possible to cultivate the lore of leaves in Ghyran without drawing the attention of the Sylvaneth. He’d known for a fair while that it was best to leave them to their dominion, to their war of life, and accept a lower place in the order of things. A little healing, a little far-sight, a greenward touch here or there; the Everqueen had always permitted him this, as long as he didn’t push it. He wondered if the Realm-lords of Hysh were quite so imperious. He supposed they must be. After all, he’d only just met one, and she’d already established herself as the sole source of light in the room.

Justec navigated the passageways of Karak Thorga in a way that seemed intuitive to him but was a mystery to the rest. Were it not for the encroaching gloom that compelled them to silence, the experience might not have been so different to the winding journeys that Trell had undertaken in his tours of Durkar’s manse. That had been a cheerful time, despite the sadness of the old guildmaster’s passing. He’d enjoyed being able to act as a guide to that labyrinthine place, celebrating the life of a friend with those who held, as he did, the intricate conventions of the duardin as something precious.

They passed swiftly through the grand chambers that Justec had called the halls of the Vassal-Lords. The light of Ardellain’s sword caught the edges of fine furnishings bleached grey by time, the telltale glimmer of a fortune in goldweave and gromril. Myrddi gave a short, gruff snort and Trell knew exactly what she meant by it.

Imagine if we’d the time or means to loot the place, it said.

Imagine if you weren’t such a soft-heart.

He patted her on the shoulder, and her hand came up to grip his. They departed the halls of the Vassal-Lords and began to descend. Justec led them through the fading magnificence of the gallery of conquests, then paused before the gilded skull of the largest gargant Sivarn Trell had ever seen. Ducking beneath the irregular slabs of its upper row of teeth, Justec felt about for a panel, pressed against it, and revealed a tunnel that forced the humans and Ardellain to stoop low as darkness swallowed them.

They descended a perilously steep and narrow staircase and cut through another servants’ passage to emerge at the flank of a grand, processional stairway. Before them, as Justec had promised, loomed the eighth and final gate protecting the treasure hall of Karak Thorga. The light caught the fine engravings upon its surface – renderings so detailed that it was as much mural as door, a treasure in and of itself. It depicted the grand army of Karak Thorga at the height of the Khazalid Empire, warriors in heraldic battle-gear facing the viewer as if arrayed across a battlefield. Those on the front lines stood slightly proud, true statues rather than engravings, impressive in their belligerence.

‘Striking, isn’t it?’ said Justec, to nobody in particular.

‘Hmm,’ Myrddi replied. ‘How do we get it open?’

Justec’s breath caught. ‘Er,’ he began, gesturing pointlessly towards the crack where the two halves of the gate met.

He didn’t know. He’d had a good idea for how to bypass seven of the gates that protected the treasures of Karak Thorga. In his memory of this place, the eighth had simply been open. Yet of course it wouldn’t be; the songs said it wouldn’t be. When grief befell Thorga, the great doors were sealed. He rebuked himself. He’d done it again – strode onward in haste, got some of the way there but hadn’t–

‘It is flawed,’ said Ardellain, stepping forward. She swept her light across the surface of the mural, her senses taking it in. Then she focused on one of the statues at the base, a warrior who gripped a hammer in his right hand and whose left hand was open.

‘No other figure stands empty-handed,’ she observed. ‘Only this one.’

‘Yes. Yes, that’s right,’ said Justec. He hummed a little, called up the words.

‘Make thieves of the last of ’Thorga

From each a treasure take

Seal mountain’s heart with debt and grudgement

At age’s unjust end…’

They looked at him. ‘It’s in the song,’ he offered, by way of clarification. ‘When the city was abandoned, the last of the Thorgiri became thieves themselves, so that its bitterness might endure forever.’

This was one of the parts that he’d learned to either over- or under-play, depending on his audience. Duardin tended not to care for it, unless the mood had turned especially maudlin, at which times it could land quite well. He looked about to determine which sort of moment this was. Rat-Tail flexed the muscles in his back and drew an axe, set on testing the strength of the lock another way. Myrddi grumbled. Sivarn, by her side, appeared preoccupied and was reaching deep within his pack. Then his head shot up, and Justec was surprised to see him smile.

Sivarn withdrew a heavy object in a fold of cloth and stepped forward, unwrapping it to reveal a runic hand axe of ancient gromril. Myrddi followed him as he moved past Ardellain and approached the empty-handed carving. He lowered the hilt of the weapon to the statue’s palm.

‘I am the woe of Durkar,’ he said, a note of uncertainty in his voice.

‘Thorga,’ Myrddi whispered.

‘I am the woe of Thorga,’ Sivarn repeated.

The hand of the statue closed to grip the axe, just as Rat-Tail’s own weapon tested the space between the doors. There was a deep, resonant sound like the working of a colossal mechanism, a noise so far-reaching and fundamental that it seemed to emanate from the mountain itself. Then, with a slow inward motion, the last of the eight gates protecting the treasure hall of Karak Thorga swung open.

As the five of them descended the steps into the cavernous vault, Myrddi Wutten felt the gloom press in on her. This was a treasure hall, but nothing within it glimmered. It was a vast absence girded with buttresses of mountain rock. Aelven radiance picked out further passageways into shadow, but her thief’s eye saw no promise in them. What this place treasured was cold austerity, Myrddi realised. She looked to Sivarn. His eyes were half-closed and his hands were open at his sides. He’s feeling something, she realised. Then she saw that the aelf’s free hand was outstretched also.

A malicious force resided within the treasure hall of Karak Thorga. Sivarn had sensed it the moment the gate opened. It was no sorcery he knew, but it was something of the aether, and a potent something. It was old, it was angry, and he had trespassed in its home; he felt its eyes upon him. He made a placatory gesture – made himself small – and kept moving towards the source, which appeared to him in the darkness as a mound of carved stone.

The pieces fell into place quickly for Nauré Ardellain. Here, before her, lay exposed the component parts of the curse of Karak Thorga. In the physical domain, the empty expanse of the hall was broken by a single piece of Khazalid craftsmanship: a large statue of a seated beast, its forelimbs outstretched. Its two heads were obscured behind masks of beaten gromril, crowned with horns, and ornamental armour had been fixed to its stone hide with golden rivets. Upon its back was a structure like a palanquin, accessible from the floor by steps carved into the flanks of the beast-construct. Upon the palanquin was a throne and an altar, and upon the altar was an ancient book, bound open with chains of dark metal.

In the physical domain, all was still. In the domain of death, duardin souls reeled and fretted, tormented by the malice that resided within the pages of the tome. In the aether, an intelligence stirred, neither divine nor mortal. It was a force of sheer will, both ancient and newborn – something birthed by the sorrow of those who had once resided here.

‘It’s living magic,’ said the human mage. He spoke to her directly. ‘The curse. It’s living magic.’

‘Awakened by the coming of the Arcanum Optimar,’ Ardellain said, addressing Sivarn as she would a peer.

Sivarn nodded. ‘The Necroquake.’

It is doom, thought Larn Rat-Tail. It is here. He drew both his axes, though he did not yet know why.

Justec felt eyes upon him. Hundreds of eyes. They saw him now. Panic rose in his chest, and the drinking horn hung heavy about his neck. He’d taken it from here, hadn’t he? Somewhere in here, an antechamber, yes, in the shadows–

Myrddi had never had much patience for it, when Sivarn found another wizard to talk to. She saw it all: the statue, the throne, the dammaz kron. She picked up her pace. She’d never seen one before – a real dammaz kron. The truest of her people’s treasures.

A great book of grudges.

‘Careful, Myr!’ Sivarn called out, as Myrddi climbed the steps to the throne. She gave the dark chains binding the book a testing pull, but they did not move. Up there, atop the ceremonial seat of the ancient High Kings of Karak Thorga, she felt purpose stir in her.

‘Aelf. The light,’ she said. Demanded. Ardellain stepped forward, raised her blade.

Better honest flame than aelven sorcery, Myrddi thought. Even so, the light was sufficient to pick out the runework upon the pages of the kron.

They were densely inscribed, rendered in a fine, angular style. The runelore of the Wuttenfolk was freer than this, but not much so, and it had not diverged – as other duardin dialects had done – quite as far from its Khazalid roots. Myrddi’s understanding was imperfect, but it was enough.

And something righteous filled the gaps in her knowledge.

Deceit. A great lie. That was what concerned the final page of the dammaz kron of Karak Thorga. The parchment was broad enough, and the script upon it fine enough, to make a detailed record of the grievances of a lifetime, and yet it rose high above a mound of pages just as broad, just as full. The ages of grievance enclosed in this great book of grudges were beyond Myrddi’s ken, but the weight of words pressed into her gut. Here was an accounting of all that might never be made right, the terrible, precious burden that passed from one duardin generation to the next.

The final page had been scribed by the last High King of the mountain, his words thick with despair. Myrddi began to mutter the sounds and shapes of ancient Khazalid, and then she spoke the words aloud. Her words were heard by her four companions, and by the spirits of the Thorgiri, and by the malign force of will that the king’s words had called into being. Here were the truths of Thorga: a tale of great loss that began and ended with the same, strident declaration.

The High King of Karak Thorga names all gods for oathbreakers.

The mountain-city’s isolation had always afforded it a measure of protection from the vagaries of time. The Khazalid of Karak Thorga took pride in this, and in the traditions that stability sustained. That stability was credited to the gods. The largest part of Thorga’s devotion was reserved, as might be expected, for Grungni and Grimnir, the Maker and the Warrior. The brothers were understood as two halves of a whole, and the Thorgiri sought to alloy their qualities within every weapon, structure and devotional object they created. Boldness and artifice. Skill and sacrifice. The Thorgiri were proud enough to believe themselves capable of achieving a mending, of a sort, through this singular dominion over all aspects of the duardin soul. In this way they dreamed of achieving a greater restitution, the restoration of something felt but not explicitly understood – a loss that had occurred so deep in their own cultural memory that they no longer had the shape of it.

Yet devotion to Grungni and Grimnir carried with it a debt to Sigmar, also, who had freed the brothers from long imprisonment. The glories that followed were likewise to be credited to the others that the Thunderer, in his wisdom, had brought before his throne. So did the hidebound High Kings of Karak Thorga see fit to extend vassalage – and even grant territory – to those whose traditions diverged from their own. Foremost of these were the knights of Aranthine, questors who rode steeds swift as lightning and whose bright lances were raised in honour of death itself.

It was the knights of Aranthine who first brought word to Karak Thorga of the calamities being wrought by the Dark Gods, whose names had returned to mortal lips after an aeon of silence. The coming of Chaos was an affront to every value held by the duardin of Karak Thorga, a threat both practical and spiritual. Yet they had no fear, because they knew that they and their allies must by necessity be the equal of this emerging threat. They had shaped themselves, after all, in the image of the gods, whose unassailable concord had repelled the Ruinous Powers before, and would do so again.

The army that marched from the Thorgiri gate was hope and pride made manifest, the loftiest expression of Thorgiri craftsmanship. They marched down from the mountains of death, banners high, and thence, it is said, to the gates of the heavens themselves, there to stand defiant at the side of the true gods.

There to witness the true fragility of the gods.

There to see the concord of the gods shattered through deception, jealousy and fear. To understand that order had always been an illusion, a shadow cast upon a wall, the gods little more than clever liars, swiftly banished by the radiance of dire truth.

There to witness horrors beyond the mortal mind.

There to be slaughtered, until only a handful remained.

The last king of the mountain and his attendants returned to a hall already redolent with suffering, as the spirits of the slain flooded the halls of their home, drowning the dirges of the living with their despair.

It took the last of what should have been an indefatigable reserve of duardin animus to bring the king to his dammaz kron to issue his final, bitter oath.

The High King of Karak Thorga names all gods for oathbreakers.

Myrddi could not help but feel it, as she spoke the words. The truth in it, and the helplessness. She’d spun a story, not long ago, told a lie that wove the history of the Thorgiri into the travails of her own folk. Yet the truth was closer than she liked to admit. The animus of Karak Thorga sought out the unjaded part of her that held to the idea that the Maker still worked his will upon the realms, the part that had wrestled with her more pragmatic nature when confronted with the enigma of the white-bearded stranger. It rattled her belief, what little was left, and shook her down for anger it could use.

The others were staring at her. Not as they should, with respect, but out of concern.

‘Myr?’ Sivarn began. Justec cut in.

‘It says nothing of Aranthine?’ he asked, in an uncertain voice. ‘No… grudge?’

She locked eyes with him, adjusted her cloak, and let her mallet rest heavy in her hand.

‘Only that your kind are oathbreakers also, cowards and trespassers,’ she said. She moved to the steps of the grudge-throne and began to descend.

The next words to cross her lips were not her own.

‘Fit for nothing but a swift ending.’

Myrddi rushed at him, and instinctively Justec’s spear came down to fend her off. Larn began to run towards them, but Justec didn’t know his intent. Sivarn stumbled after him, helplessly.

In Myrddi’s eyes, Justec saw the true depth of the disdain in which he was held, felt the crushing weight of it, the scowling, stone-set visage of a duardin given over completely to grudgement. His resolve broke and he stepped back; she called him coward, and he fled, following the path of an ancient trespass into darkness.

Rat-Tail collided with Myrddi and Sivarn felt as if his heart would burst. He saw green and the force of it cracked the stonework at his feet. Then he saw that the Fyreslayer had come at her with the hilts of his axes, not the blades, and this stilled his anger just enough to grant him a moment’s focus. The curse’s attention had found Myrddi, and the shades of the ancient dead began to manifest about her, desperate to overtake her mind completely. Sivarn didn’t know what to do. He watched the spirits close in, their numbers growing, their disparate aspects and appearances reflecting generations of Thorgiri culture. Then among them he saw a face he recognised: a king of Thorga, he supposed, though his manner of dress was simple and his scowling expression was not the one he’d worn in life. The shade of Gerrig Durkar swarmed alongside the spirits of his kin. He’d found his clan at last, and at last, Sivarn’s heart broke.

‘An unbinding. There is little time.’

Nauré Ardellain loomed over him, undistracted by the desperate struggle at her back.

‘Attend me, wizard,’ she said. ‘I will sever the living spell from the book. You must counteract the death magic that holds sway here.’

Sivarn blinked moisture from his eyes. The aelf was insistent, as he so often understood aelves to be.

‘A rite of life. You will perform one.’ It was not a question, but Sivarn answered anyway.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes,’ he repeated. ‘Right, yes.’

Ardellain took two loping strides and leapt, vaulting off one of the statue’s heads and scaling the grudge-throne. The light went with her. She swept her blade around in an arc, then called the power of Hysh through black rock and into the blade. It keened through her, deepening the shadows of her own body, and then she brought the blade down, into the chains binding the book of grudges. A howl washed through the Thorgiri dead.

Sivarn Trell took a long, deep breath, and extended his hands. He took one last look at Myrddi, who clashed with Rat-Tail still, and closed his eyes. He let the jade realm take his sight, and he made no attempt to direct its course. His mind raced through earth and darkness and emerged at the foot of a colossal oak tree, its branches heavy with verdure. Those who bore witness to him there had little sympathy for his position, but they accepted his supplication, and when Sivarn Trell’s eyes opened again, the green had taken them completely. His feet planted firmly on the stone, the gardener made a seed of himself, and the jade magic eddied from him, growing in intensity until a tornado of elemental life raged within the dead heart of Thorga.

Rat-Tail’s eyes were on Myrddi Wutten. She had the gift of killing, and real strength. Doom had its grip upon her – the doom that he had pledged to bring to an end. Yet honour and instinct both told him that the old whitebeard had not brought him here to slay another of his own kind. He fought defensively, catching and redirecting her aggression, as he had against Borgni Daltheim. Daltheim, who Wutten had so swiftly and decisively killed. A mote of familiar anger rose in him, then: a bristling at the recklessness of those that Grombrindal had called, in his strange way of speaking, dawi.

His rune-scars itched, and he growled. The anger wanted to spread, and he wanted to let it. She swung for his head and he rebuked her more fiercely this time, ducking the blow and forcing her back with a sweep of his blades. Then a flash of radiance from the grudge-throne blinded them both, followed by a wrathful outburst from the dead. As his vision cleared he stooped low, expecting Myrddi’s next strike, but her head was turned. Her focus was on Sivarn. A tide of viridian sorcery flowed from the human. The wave washed over them and Larn felt the anger within him gutter; the shadow recoiled from Myrddi and surged towards the throne.

Recognition struck him. Doom-sense, and memory. He felt the heat of the bright hearths of the Zharrgrim priests, the sulphur that hung in the air as they worked their invocations and brought forth their miracles of rock and magma. Heat likewise rose in him, told him to pay no mind to the throne, nor the aelf that bestrode it, but to the beast that woke beneath it, animated once more by duardin fervour and the desperation of a cornered malevolence. Something boiled in the belly of the mountain and flowed up into the body of the statue, radiating crimson in the eyes and mouths of its twin masks, heating its armour plates until they glowed. The construct rose to its feet, lifting the throne with it. It was the size of an adult magmadroth, and similarly proportioned. A roar shook from it, and it twisted to face Sivarn, the target of its wrath. Ardellain deftly kept her balance as the throne bucked and twisted beneath her.

Here is doom, thought Larn Rat-Tail. Here is death. And here am I.

The hairs on the back of his neck stood on end. His scars burned. He began to run, and the oath that formed within him was simpler than language, simpler than any rune that had ever been hammered into him. He pledged simply to protect his people; the first and last duty of the slayer. The discomfort that had sweltered in his skin these last years did not rebuke his commitment, but found affinity with it. His scars burned, and then they blazed, and the fire reached his axes, a searing rebuke to the corrupted flame within the grudge-construct.

The first son of Kerrik lodge screamed as he leapt into the path of the rampant statue, axes raised, blades aimed level at the gap where its rightmost head met its body. He struck true and with sufficient force to knock the beast off-course. Hauling his weight upward, with one blade embedded, he hacked down upon it, again and again, until the stone yielded to him and the head fell free, molten metal flowing from the breach. The construct bucked and wheeled about, and Larn swung with the axe in his left hand, which caught beneath the statue’s remaining mask. With his right arm he struck for its eyes, but found no purchase. He hung from the beast’s neck, feeling its flaming, unnatural blood gout over him. Then, and only then, did its attention fix upon him. It stood, rearing on its hind legs. With one of its forelimbs, it swatted at him, and with the other, it caught him by his free arm. He grimaced as it made to rip him from its body, yet something brave, contrary, and reckless in him refused to let go. In doing so, he challenged it to tear him in half. He swung his legs up and gripped the lower part of the construct’s head. Then he felt the bones in his right arm break, his muscles stretching and tearing.

Something cracked in his shoulder, and then Larn Rat-Tail saw only light, felt only pain, knew only death.

Sivarn Trell knew only life. He was its source and conduit, its vessel. He knew that it was no longer his place to direct its course. At last, no matter how ill-fitting the circumstances, he deigned to occupy his proper place in the ordering of things. All would be as it would be. He had some awareness of himself as a weary animal, and a little awareness of the wounded creatures that surrounded him in this lifeless place. A great, unnatural predator, a presence that loomed in his mind like a shadow, made prey of one of these wounded creatures, tore it asunder. Even this bestial act was part of life.

‘Sivarn!’

A voice called to him from beyond the green. A voice he knew. A shape pressed towards him, cloaked in emerald. A shape he knew. A pair of hands found his wrists. Hands he knew.

She wrestled with him. Myrddi wrestled with him. Myrddi wrestled with him, and Rat-Tail was dying.

He was the source and conduit of the green, and though he knew that it was no longer his place to direct its course, he did so anyway. He convulsed and Myrddi shrieked, tried to pull him to the ground and succeeded. He fell, freed his arm, and thrust it towards Larn Rat-Tail. He tried to speak but his heart’s blood flowed from his mouth, and Myrddi, having only seen it get this bad once before, knocked him unconscious.

Something writhed and flourished at the edge of Rat-Tail’s mind before rooting itself in the raw red meat of his ruined shoulder. He did not know the name of the force that called him back from death, nor did he question the tightness that now seemed to bind the right half of his body. His nostrils flared as strength returned to him, and he gripped the grudge-construct’s head with his legs and bit down on the rim of its gilded mask. He pulled his remaining axe free and brought it down again with berserk force. The statue’s head loosened, and he swung again, then brought his feet around and braced against its body, seeking leverage, forcing the breakage.

Monsters did not die easily, but step by agonising step, Larn Rat-Tail brought about the end of this one. One last blow and its head came free; the strength went out of the struggling construct and it collapsed to the floor of the vault, the throne – and Ardellain – still atop it. Larn fell away, landing heavily.

Madness descended upon the treasure hall of Karak Thorga. The destruction of the grudge-construct did not quell the spirits’ wrath. A ragged whisper emanated from them, like breath through gritted teeth, becoming a hiss of fathomless outrage.

Five oathbreakers had slipped into the heart of Karak Thorga, yet there their true perfidy had been revealed. Red fire burned in the mauled slayer; jade compassion, freely given, still flowed from the body of the mage. Atop the collapsed throne, pure light flowed from the god-wrought weapon of the Bladelord as she strained for leverage against the malign consciousness that coiled itself about the cursed kron. The axe of Grimnir; the vessel of the Everqueen; the will of Hysh – these souls drew the aggrieved dead like beacons. The hatred of the Thorgiri was such that it pushed its way into the carved stonework of Karak Thorga itself, and the chamber began to shake and rumble. The ancient dead would wield the black bones of the mountain as a weapon if they could, and entomb the living in the depths of their resentment.

In the shadows, Justec of Aranthine saw something else in the eyes of the dead. He saw hunger. The spirits of the Thorgiri craved something more rarefied than flesh, but their madness was the mirror of the mania that the bite of Ushoran had bestowed on his own line. He lingered in the entry of the antechamber from which another Justec had stolen the artefact that had spared him from this fate. That artefact was in his hands now, still tactile with the dried blood of the flesh-eater king, his ancestor and echo.

What would it really mean, to undo a trespass committed an age prior? To return the drinking horn to its hall, and expose his soul to the madness that waited for him? This grudgement was a small thing, compared to the last great oath sworn by the High King of the mountain. Justec had never much been one to consider the consequences of his decisions before he made them. It was this rash, contrary spark that he’d been told would fade in time, when the strictures of House Aranthine finally caught up with him.

Justec’s eyes went from the gheists to a different passageway, beyond the eighth gate, one that ancestral memory told him led up to the High King’s chambers, and a way out via the mountainside. From there he could return to Lethis, perhaps. It would not be so bad to resume the pattern of his people: to have a son, to pass along the name, the songs, the drinking horn, and tell him nothing at all of the truth.

There’s no choosing between curses, Rigo had said.

There, lurking in the shadows, Justec chose.

He took one step back, then another, then turned. Tension burned in his chest. Ahead of him loomed the likeness of an ancient Katophrane, masked, rendered in black stone, its hands outstretched, waiting…

He could not answer every debt demanded by the dead, but he could answer this. It might not be much, thought Justec the Thirty-First, but it had to count for something.

Nauré Ardellain strove to make herself pure, to become a perfect prism for the power of Hysh. To unbind living magic one had to confront it with the idea of its own destruction, the existence of a reality where it simply ceased to be. There were few more strident arguments in this regard than the blinding totalities of pure light. Yet the mind that lingered within the book of grudges was powerful, and its specificities ran deep. For all the power she drew upon, Ardellain was a single, mortal source. She could match the power of the curse, become its mirror, but she could not overcome it.

Then, something shifted. The consciousness that inhabited the kron lost a small part of itself as one of its many avenues of grievance closed. One of its grudges had been settled, and its power waned by the most marginal degree. Nauré Ardellain required no greater opportunity than this. She was the Eventide Razor, the blade that separates light from shadow, and in that moment, she made a single, clean cut.

Myrddi got Sivarn and Rat-Tail to their feet as a flash of radiance burst from the top of the throne. A terrible, dolorous howl rose from the spirits of the dead as Ardellain recoiled from the dammaz kron, visibly drained. Justec emerged from the darkness, ashen-faced, and Myrddi suppressed the desire to rebuke him for his bout of cowardice. Even so, it was a relief to note that the anger in her heart was her own. Whatever the aelf had done, it seemed to have worked.

‘It’s in the air, Myr,’ Sivarn said, stirring, his greensight upon him still. She touched his shoulder. He was drenched in sweat, his heart racing. The world around them shook, and she felt cold air touch her through gaps in the quaking stone.

‘What do you mean, love?’ Myrddi asked.

‘The curse is in the air, it’s in the rock, it needs only time to find itself again,’ he said. ‘It will find itself again.’

His eyes were far away. ‘I’m sorry, Gerrig,’ he said. ‘I can’t…’

There was a blast of cold air through the great doors of the treasure hall, and it carried with it a drift of mountain snow. Its bright incongruity drew their eyes, the five of them, and stilled the unquiet spirits of the dead. They did not blink, but in the space of a thought they witnessed the return of a king of the duardin to the halls of Karak Thorga.

He stood before them clad in ancient finery, a crowned helm of gold and gromril upon his brow. His scarlet cloak was hung with fine-wrought hoops of bright copper, and medallions glimmered in the white expanse of his beard. The malign intelligence that repelled all divinity from this place had been banished, and could deny him no longer.

Grombrindal strode into the vault, his attention fixed on the grudge-throne and the dammaz kron, still open on its final page. His hands were empty and there was no anger in him, only a stillness born of ancient wisdom. As he passed the five of them, however, he paused, his head tilting ever so slightly. His whiskers were upturned in the faintest suggestion of a smile.

The white-bearded ancestor approached the book of grudges with solemn purpose, the spirits of the Thorgiri parting at his coming. His intent would have been unthinkable to the being he had once been.

He never ceased to marvel at it, the habit of this age to tip an old dawi on his head and tell him that down was up.

Mounting the throne, Grombrindal took up the book of grudges and held it high.

‘The woe of Thorga is at an end,’ he said.

He gripped the top of its pages, and tore the book in two; something in the mountain gave way, and at the far end of the hall, the collapse began. As a rain of stone approached him, Grombrindal turned his attention to his five oathbreakers.

‘Best of luck, young ones,’ he said.

And then he was gone.

They ran, hauling exhausted bodies up the carved steps that led away from the treasure hall to the private chambers of the Thorgiri high-born. Justec loped ahead, guided by memory. Pausing to allow Larn and the others to keep pace, he smelled hearthfire and tasted ale. This was a happy place, he thought, as grey dust fell about him from rents in the ceiling. He tasted another hunger too, in the absence of the drinking horn, but tried to push it from his mind.

The black rock of the mountain bit down upon the halls of Karak Thorga with death-blow force. The floor shook; Ardellain emerged at the top of the stairs, moving at pace, followed by Myrddi, Sivarn and Rat-Tail. The wounded duardin was slick with blood, and vegetation writhed in the stump of his severed shoulder; there was fire, pain and madness in his eyes, power that kept him on his feet. The Ghyranites were exhausted.

‘We can’t stop!’ Justec cried, gesturing towards a further passageway. Fate closed in around them. A servants’ passage led into darkness then out into the sudden cold light of day. They emerged onto the High King’s Step, an ornate balcony exposed to the open air from which Thorgiri rulers once dictated their will to the armies that gathered far below.

Justec had not known what they’d do when they reached the edge – his plan had ended at them making it outside. Only in that moment did he realise that the freedom to leap from a collapsing mountain was not freedom at all, when one really thought about it.

The eyes of Larn Rat-Tail were fixed on the horizon-line formed by the balcony; the eyes of Nauré Ardellain were set on the sky. Yet when they reached Justec’s side at the lip of the step, their eyes converged on the same sight: a serpentine trail of banners and torches cresting the mountain and descending to the wrecked gatehouse of Karak Thorga.

At the head of his army, the Warden King called Hakhard the Patient mounted his Oath Stone and stared up at the mountainside, consternation upon his greying brow. At his side stood his sons and daughters, his runescribes, and his Master of Grudges. The collapse of the ancient karak stirred fury and shock in the host of the Dispossessed at his back. It enflamed the hearts of the Fyreslayer auxiliaries in Hakhard’s service, and the runes in their flesh burned in sympathy. Even the arkanauts of the colossal ironclad Bryngron, whose expansive holds had seen the Warden King’s forces safely across the most treacherous part of the mountain, felt spirit-deep grudgement at the sight.

Ancient indignation reached across disparate traditions to unite the duardin as few other forces could. Then, King Hakhard caught the sight of five figures looking down at him from a promontory halfway up the quaking mountain, and a bitter oath formed upon his lips.

Behind them, the ceiling collapsed. A cloud of rock-dust billowed outward, blinding them to the death that descended towards them down the mountainside. Only Nauré Ardellain retained a measure of her senses, but all this served to do was confirm the impossibility of their position. Larn Rat-Tail’s long-delayed doom washed over him. Myrddi Wutten and Sivarn Trell reached for one another, and Justec of Aranthine closed his eyes. The deafening sound of the collapsing mountain stole the old songs, and the last words that came to him did so unbidden.

‘There is no mortal so ill-fated that their fate cannot be reworked.

This is the Maker’s promise.’

A shadow swung about the mountainside. Ardellain’s head tilted, then she drew her sword and thrust it upward. The blade pulsed with sudden, urgent radiance. A low discordance undercut the sound of the collapsing mountain, and a prow of riveted iron punched through the storm of dust and swung about to present the descending boarding-ramp of the Drakkul.

‘With me, dearies!’ Shima Sjarsdottir bellowed over the thunderous demise of Karak Thorga. The renegade admiral’s mask was raised, revealing deep-lined features creased with amusement. In her eyes, opportunity glimmered. ‘I suspect we’ve all got better places to be!’

THE MAKER’S PROMISE

PROLOGUE

ICON-BEARER

Dunes of shattered stone crested and fell at Jeskaine’s feet. Beneath them lay the remains of a settlement that had once been well known to her. Its old patterns revealed themselves in the dust as she traced the vanished streets and concourses of a place where a few generations of mortals had lived out short, frantic, entangled lives. The town they had built here should have lasted many generations more. It should have outlasted her, but Jeskaine had endured while the stone, the metal, the blood, the heart and soul of the place once known as Bladesmith’s Return had not.

A few shells of buildings held their shape yet. It was towards these broken hulls that she was drawn, though she suspected it would not take much to send them crumbling to the ground. She was approaching the settlement’s outer regions, and soon she would crest the rise at its southern boundary – the natural ridge that fringed the promontory upon which Bladesmith’s Return had been built. From there she would be afforded a view of the jagged cliffs that fell away to the sea at the edge of Odrenn Fang.

Perhaps that will be the place, Jeskaine thought. Perhaps that will be the time.

No, countered a voice within her. Not yet. This voice spoke in her chest, in the resonant places of her ribcage, from within the shell of battered sigmarite that housed her Stormcast form. She did not feel Stormcast now. The voice she heard echoed from her mortal self, which clung to life despite the lethal wounds it bore. She heard it in her aching shoulders, beneath her pauldrons, and in her calves, which were clad in heavy greaves and covered by a Knight-Relictor’s tunic.

In her right hand she gripped the silver chain that bound her relic censer. It was cold, heavy, inert – bereft of divine power, and little use as a weapon. Why did she carry it? It was little more than a burden, the icon of a forsaken office. No martyr’s bones burned within it. But she felt as if her own bones were burning a little more fiercely with each step she took. She had ceased to be the relic’s bearer, and become the inheritor of its purpose. Another bitter transformation.

The voice spurred her on even as her mind sought sanctuary in these grim ruminations. This inner awareness, which was not the Thunderer’s gift but a revenant of her own lost past, sustained in her a certain sensitivity to the rhythms of life and death. As a Stormcast Eternal, she was no longer part of the mortal weave. Yet this had made her more sensitive to its rhythms, if anything. It was as if she had stepped from the stage and joined the audience, and could now hear the chorus of mortality in its entirety.

In times of peace she heard it as a melody, and at times of war she heard it as a dirge. Now, in a lingering aftermath that could be truly called neither of these things, she heard only an irregular drumbeat, the rattling of an overloaded mechanism. Many, many people had died when Bladesmith’s Return fell. Still more were dying, she sensed, as they fled north into the wilds, where horrors waited for them. Each life’s ending reverberated in the aether, but the sky did not open to receive their souls.

As it would not open to receive hers.

The clouds above Bladesmith’s Return were heavy, foul, malevolent. They had the dire gravity of a corpse mound, and gathered thickest above the crater where Silvermorn Hold had been. Unnatural even by the standards of the Realm of Metal, they growled ravenously. When the Stormkeep was lost, a whole host of Stormcast souls had been sent surging upwards, lightning-borne, into those clouds, and there they had been suddenly, painfully extinguished. Such a thing had been thought impossible once, for Stormkeeps were conduits for the lightning sorceries of Azyr, a force capable of overruling the dire edicts of death. No longer. The doom that had come for Vindicarum was abroad in the realm. The Cursed Skies had gathered above Silvermorn Hold, and all within had suffered terribly as a consequence. But it had been the mortal folk of Bladesmith’s Return who had truly paid the price.

Long ago, after the founding of the Stormkeep, the settlers came. Humans and duardin with an ancestral bond to the Realm of Metal were ferried from Azyr to the edge of Odrenn Fang to lay the foundations of the town. The Dispossessed clans of the duardin led that effort, for they had diligently sustained the art of stonecraft and metalwork in their long years of exile, and knew best how to hammer the bleak wastelands of Chamon into liveable shape. The humans brought their own history with them, and rebuilt and relit the weapon forges for which the folk of Odrenn Fang had once been renowned.

Thus, Bladesmith’s Return.

The offspring of that generation were well equipped for the trials to come, and eventually they prevailed over the beasts that prowled south from the Dyrwood, and the raiders that washed in from the Stained Sea. Yet peace brought its own form of turmoil. Initially, this manifested simply as a fractious pride that developed among the townsfolk – a determination to do things their own way, to be something more than serfs to their Stormcast protectors. Jeskaine and her peers had sympathy for this. They had come to Chamon to bring an end to tyrants, not take their place. The Stormcasts kept to their Stormkeep as a matter of principle, and in this way peace was maintained.

But then came the first accusations. The first cult icons. The first slayings.

Murders in the dark, then executions in the open.

It became necessary for the Stormcasts to intervene. For what other purpose had they been forged, but to give mortals a chance to live free of Ruin? Yet even with incontrovertible evidence of evil laid out before them, they understood that they must act even-handedly. The icons they found were sigils of the Changer, Tzeentch, the Chaos God of lies and scheming. Those who had campaigned in Chamon since the beginning of the age knew that all such provocations were a trap, in one way or another.

The Stormcasts rooted out the evil and then, seeking peace, withdrew behind the walls of Silvermorn Hold once again. Yet there was an understanding among Jeskaine’s host that Bladesmith’s Return had been marked – that one could not subvert the will of the Ruinous Powers without inviting retaliation and escalation. They kept ever-more-careful watch over Bladesmith’s Return from then on, knowing that the forces of the arch-manipulator would be compelled to make another attempt.

Another generation of mortals grew up in the shadow of this vigilance – more pious than their parents, more diligent. These folk were seen as severe by the far-wandering traders and skyborne Kharadron who sought them out for their skills and the quality of their craft, but the truth, as Jeskaine saw it, was that they were still learning who they were. Even now, after all this time, humans and duardin alike were reckoning with the consequences of the unmaking and remaking of the world their ancestors had known. To protect them as they undertook this journey was her sacred duty, she felt, both as a Stormcast Eternal and as someone whose own mortal journey had ended.

The Dark Gods might covet these souls, she resolved, but they would need to overcome her, first. In her pride, she believed that the God-King had forged her into something immutable, eternal.

She would live long enough to understand that this, too, was a trap.

When at last the Changer’s reprisal arrived, it came in the form of a vast Arcanite warhost. They descended from darkening skies upon silver discs, trailing witchfire… and ignored Bladesmith’s Return completely.

And laid siege to Silvermorn Hold.

Coordinating their strike to coincide with the manifestation of the Cursed Skies, the Arcanites struck at the Stormkeep with powers amassed over the course of centuries: artefacts plundered from ancient vaults, rubrics and sigils refined by an age of cruelty, secrets whispered in the liminal places where daemons dwell. All of it was gathered at Silvermorn Hold to be unleashed as a spell of unmaking – something to be done once, and once only, at a time ordained by the oracle-masters of the coven.

Silvermorn Hold housed a spark of divine lightning, a reserve of the Heldenhammer’s power that allowed it to fulfil its purpose as a bridge between the Realm of Chamon and far Azyr. This trapped power flared in response to the corrupting sorceries brought to bear against it, seeking escape. Yet under the smothering malevolence of the Cursed Skies, it had nowhere to go. As the siege intensified, Stormcasts died, and their own fulminating souls joined that mass of unstable energy as it swelled within Silvermorn Hold.

Jeskaine spent the battle fighting desperately to guide the souls of her fallen kindred through the Cursed Skies. Yet her efforts were not enough. The chorus of life and death became deafening, and her censer burned out, its own power drawn into the greater storm. Abandoning this effort, she joined a company of warriors as they sallied through the gates of the Stormkeep and made for the town, seeking to safeguard the mortals that cowered there.

They would fail at this, also.

It wasn’t witchfire that destroyed Bladesmith’s Return, but the thunderous detonation of Silvermorn Hold. By a process like alchemy, the Arcanites had turned the town’s greatest security – its divine foundation – into a weapon. This was the loftier malice at work, the deeper cruelty. Their ploy exposed the trap lurking in every Stormcast Eternal, the danger they posed to those they purported to protect.

Those who survived the destruction of the Stormkeep battled tirelessly in the aftermath, as Stormcasts must; they gave their lives to see the townsfolk to safety, and they swore oaths of vengeance and strode forward to expend themselves among the worst of the foe. Yet the death of a Stormcast is not a peaceful thing, and each of their own endings left its mark upon the landscape. The wave of destruction that had been unleashed by the detonation of Silvermorn Hold continued with every individual Stormcast who died thereafter. Small craters made a bleak wasteland of this place.

Jeskaine knew that this would be her fate, too, in time. In the last moments of the battle, she’d been caught in the path of a tide of multispectral flame, the work of an Arcanite Magister whose sorceries chittered and whispered as they stole through cracks in her armour to bite at her skin. Her body was wracked with pain, and Jeskaine felt certain that she would die there and then, adding her own soul to the tally of the lost. Yet though the damage inflicted was deep, the spell would not let her die. It was a cruel joke, she supposed – a last goading spark of malice from the dark mind that had unleashed it. Certainly, the Magister had been laughing as he died, as Jeskaine’s anger found focus and she brought her war mace down to smash the life from him, until the warping energies in his body melted her weapon to slag.

Either way, she had no doubt that she was dying. And if the fate of her kindred was any indication, no Reforging awaited her in far Azyrheim. She would end here, perhaps, amid the ruins of Bladesmith’s Return, and then die a second time, in the clouds, a victim of Ruinous sorceries not once, but twice.

No, said the voice inside her, once again. It too was goading her now, refusing to let her rest, as if it had found common cause with the spell that boiled in her skin.

Not now, not here, not yet.

Her wandering took her through what had once been the town square. There had been a tower here, and a guildhall. Both were blasted ruins now, but their bulk was such that it was possible for her to vanish into their shadows, despite her size. In this manner, she proceeded in darkness for a while, though her relic censer retained a little of its silvery luminescence, even in the absence of the greater power it once contained.

There was tumult in the distance, always: a rumble deep within those roiling, unnatural clouds, the sound of debris subsiding. Shouts, perhaps, of fear and alarm, though it was unclear to her if these were real or echoes of memory. Then…

Digging. Metal on metal.

Close.

These sounds shook Jeskaine from her reverie and returned her to the present. The noise had come from the far side of a mound of broken bricks, a short distance from where she stood. She saw now what she should have seen already – that this debris mound had been rebuilt and rearranged, and now formed an even ring that hid whatever it was that made noise within.

She approached and began to climb, and as she did so she heard low voices, as well as something that she did not immediately recognise. At irregular intervals, there’d be a piercing hiss, or a low mechanical rumble that persisted for several seconds before fading. These were not familiar sounds, but she’d lived several lifetimes in proximity to Bladesmith’s Return; she knew forgework when she heard it.

As she reached the top of the rise, she slowed, not wanting to lose the element of surprise if there were foes on the far side. Yet as she did so the activity within the hollow abruptly ceased. She heard a whisper.

‘Quiet!’

The voice had a gruff tone, unmistakably duardin.

If this is another trap, so be it, Jeskaine thought. Foes would be a welcome sight – someone worthy of receiving the thunder that threatened to erupt from her in her final moments.

She rose to her full height and stepped on top of the debris mound.

She beheld no foes.

Five duardin stared up at her from the bottom of the hollow. Two were known to her: Pelli Ummont and her son Torris, old clansfolk of Bladesmith’s Return. Jeskaine’s mind had wandered so far from mortal concerns that it was a strange thing to see a familiar face. The other three duardin were unknown – they were Kharadron, and wore masked flight suits. The cream and crimson of their uniforms marked them out as part of the sky-fleet of Barak-Thryng. The sky-port was far from here, somewhere above the mountains, but it was not uncommon for tradespeople and scout vessels to land in Bladesmith’s Return.

Behind the duardin was the hull of one such scout vessel, a gun-hauler in battered livery. Its spherical endrin was detached, lying to one side, its inner workings exposed with tools laid out nearby. This was the source of the sound she’d heard; they were trying to fix the ship. Jeskaine was familiar enough with duardin runelore to parse the inscription on the vessel’s prow.

Shale-Skipper.

‘Lady Jeskaine?’ Pelli asked warily. The duardin woman’s expression was hard to read. She was covered head-to-toe in brick dust, and one of her eyes was sealed shut by a nasty bruise. Torris had fared better, by the looks of it. The younger duardin seemed incongruously happy to see her, and he tugged on his ochre beard and smiled.

‘Hail!’ he called up suddenly. One of the Kharadron started in alarm, and Pelli hushed him urgently.

‘How did you survive?’ Jeskaine asked.

‘The ship–’ Torris began.

‘These folk was making use of our workshop,’ Pelli said curtly. ‘Lost power when the clouds came in, barely made it down. We sheltered ’em for a bit, let them use the gear. Thought one more gun in the air wouldn’t hurt, given what you lot was dealing with. But then they knew you were going to lose – lose bad.’

One of the Kharadron stepped forward, raising their mask to reveal a lined face and a greying beard.

‘There was an aetheric spike right before your fortress exploded,’ he said matter-of-factly. ‘Rattled our sensors. We had a few moments to respond, so we got everybody inside the hold. Ship’s built to weather the high airs, we knew she’d make for good enough shelter.’

‘So it proves,’ Jeskaine replied.

‘Nothing left of the workshop, after,’ Pelli said. ‘Or the house.’

‘Or the town, I fear,’ Torris added. ‘Who else have you found, Lady Jeskaine?’

‘Only you,’ she said.

His expression fell as he began to process the unthinkable.

‘What of your own people, then?’ he asked after a moment.

Her people. This was a reasonable choice of words, she supposed, though she scarcely thought of them as such. Until today, her peers had been bound to her by a shared sense of duty. They were all scions of the same miraculous act. Comrades, perhaps, able to share victories and lament losses together. But they’d shed the mortal simplicities that might have once made them people. Until today, she supposed. Today, she’d lost her people.

‘I believe I’m all that remains,’ she said quietly.

Torris nodded. ‘Aye, well, they’ll be back, I suppose,’ he said, distantly, as if some part of him knew that this was no longer so.

Jeskaine said nothing.

‘Will you join us, Lady Jeskaine?’ Pelli asked. ‘Down here, I mean. Up there, you’re rather easy to see.’

Jeskaine turned to take in the crater-strewn landscape, then shook her head. She was dying, she knew, and her death could be the death of them. But Pelli was right, also. Up on the debris mound her battered sigmarite plate made her a beacon to any foe that might yet linger in the ruins, or that might descend on silver discs from the clouds.

‘But–’ Torris began.

‘Duty forbids it,’ Jeskaine said firmly. ‘I will wait below, however, and watch over you until you’re ready to depart.’

‘Then you’ll join us?’ Torris asked.

‘There might be room,’ the Kharadron said, cautiously, as if weighing up the terms of an agreement. ‘I would not be opposed to it. The High Admiral’s done good business with your kind. We were sent to guide her back through these damned clouds, before we were brought down. She’d–’

‘That will not be necessary, captain,’ Jeskaine said. ‘I will remain here.’

With this she turned and took the first steps of her descent. She heard Torris call after her.

‘It’s no trouble, Lady Jeskaine,’ he said. ‘It’d be an honour to help.’

‘Stay in the safety of your shelter,’ she told him. ‘I will stand guard.’

Performing this last small act provided Jeskaine with some respite from the weight of all she had witnessed. The voice that spoke within her grew quieter, now that she had a duty to fulfil, and the spell that yet conspired to kill her burned less fiercely with her mind set on something as simple as guard duty. This will be enough, she resolved. She could content herself with seeing Pelli, Torris and the others to safety. Then…

No. Not now, not here, not yet.

She kept her eyes upon the ruins of Bladesmith’s Return as darkness slowly set in. Somewhere, beyond the Cursed Skies, Hysh was vanishing behind the horizon. If there were enemies abroad, they sought different prey now.

Sometimes Jeskaine would catch a flash of silver in the sky, and wonder at the greater scheme that the assault on the Stormkeep must have been part of. These things were never simple. They were never done. With the brayherds, perhaps, they might be. Or orruks. Never with Arcanites. And this had been their domain for an age – ever-mutable Chamon was susceptible to fell influence, and had been drawn closer to the Dark Gods’ dominion than any of Sigmar’s faithful liked to admit. They had built their homes and fortresses on warped ground, and hoped that their presence might deter something inevitable: change.

Something was coming, she sensed. The sorcery that had severed her from the heavens, first unleashed at Vindicarum, had changed things. Bladesmith’s Return would not be the last settlement to suffer for it. Perhaps she should go to Barak-Thryng, she thought. The sky-port was vulnerable, too, with so large a host abroad in the skies. She could get word to the Admiralty, and thence to Sigmaron.

No. That was the Knight-Relictor talking, the warrior. The person in her knew that there’d be no time for that.

Death wasn’t far off now. Even if she could find space for herself aboard the Shale-Skipper, which was rigged for a crew of three much smaller bodies, her demise would doom all aboard.

This was better. She could content herself with this.

‘Lady Jeskaine?’

Torris Ummont had climbed the mound of debris at her back and almost managed to surprise her. So much for simple guard duty, she thought.

‘Are you sure I cannot convince you to come?’ the duardin asked. ‘Captain Tokha says the ship’s almost ready. I’m sure my ma would feel much safer if–’

‘I am sorry, Torris,’ Jeskaine interjected. ‘It is too dangerous.’

The young duardin gave a slightly petulant shrug. ‘What’s danger to you? It’s all danger to me. I don’t want to fly.’

She turned and looked up at the vulnerable shape of him, exposed and alone in the place where she had stood a few hours before.

‘I am cursed,’ she said, and Torris flinched away. ‘I must limit the damage done. I am sorry.’

And that was the end of it.

Neither Torris Ummont nor his mother came to say goodbye, but that was for the best. She felt the ground rumble as the repaired gunhauler took flight. She watched it rise into the air, straining and unsteady, then pitch upwards, turn, and gradually gain speed as it accelerated over the coast. Captain Tokha chose to steer clear of Silvermorn Hold and angle back, making for Barak-Thryng the long way. Not an imprudent choice.

Jeskaine’s journey had no clear destination, but she resumed it nonetheless. She did not wish to meet her end in the shadows of the ruined town. She walked south until at last she reached the cliffs, and there, finally, she allowed herself to fall to her knees. Beyond, she beheld the sea stretching away to the horizon. The realm was greater and more timeless than she was, and in this, she found a measure of comfort.

Red and black bolts of vicious lightning surged in the clouds above her. Beyond them, night had fallen. The cliffs were edged with iron and copper where erosion revealed the rich mineral wealth lying just below the surface of the realm. A resource for the next people to try to bring peace to this part of Odrenn Fang, perhaps.

Kneeling, Jeskaine clutched her relic censer to her chest, communed with the voice inside her, and warred with witchfire. All the while, she prayed, extending her soul to the Heldenhammer, further from her now than he had ever been since the shock and fury of the moment in which she was first Reforged.

She did not know how long she waited for death, nor how long she prayed. At one point she thought she heard the echo of aether-endrins, and it gave her solace to know that somebody might survive to tell the story of Bladesmith’s Return. Then, she spent another age in the company of witchfire, death, and lightning.

There were other, stranger sounds, too, in time.

Then, at last, the crunch of gravel…

And finally, footsteps.

Jeskaine opened her eyes to darkness, and through the clouds she perceived the faintest traces of starlight. Then she saw something even more remarkable. A lone duardin was walking towards her, along the cliff-edge, heedless of the danger. As he approached, she stood, and took a heavy step backwards. He paused also, hunched slightly. Uncertainty registered on his features, as if this was not the encounter he had anticipated.

‘What happened here?’ he asked.

She had no answer for him. He stared at her a moment, his eyes narrowing. He raised his hand to run it through his thick, dark beard. An axe hung from his hip, next to a dull shard of crystal.

‘The white-bearded stranger,’ he said. ‘You’ve not seen him?’

‘No,’ Jeskaine replied, as if this were a question of any meaning to her.

No, echoed the voice within her.

Not now, not here, not yet.

CHAPTER 1

ALWAYS ONE MORE

Margew Venki’s insides squirmed. Sweat sogged his beard and misted his lenses. Beneath him, the iron bulk of the Frorlenhand hung heavy, the sky-hauler’s endrins straining. Whoever had laden it most recently had done so carelessly. His vessel would list sometimes this way, sometimes that, as if untethered cargo were sliding about its hold.

Who has done such lousy work? Margew grumbled inwardly. He reached up to adjust his mask, only to find his tether-line was snapped so tight to the wheel that he could not move his hands. Ah, right, he thought. Must’ve been me.

Even his thoughts were ill-balanced, oily and troublesome. His vision swam.

Before him, the great sky-port of Barak-Thryng glittered and twisted, a miracle of steel and stone suspended above the Spiral Crux. The City of the Ancestors appeared to him a dream, even as he sped towards it.

Home, Margew thought. At last.

‘It’s bouncing, Jhori.’

Endrinrigger Jhori Lintolk snorted. Elbow-deep in the innards of a swivel-gun rig, he patted around until his hands found the angular extremities of a dislocated actuator. He braced himself against the floating gun emplacement’s exterior and gave a firm push, and the actuator popped back into position. Jhori grunted with satisfaction. He’d earned a pint today. He could not say the same for his apprentice.

Pushing away, he let his aether-endrin carry him into open air for a moment. Above him, Teffi Ginstock steadied herself among the tower’s upper batteries and stared into the darkness. It was a cold, ill-favoured sort of night, great banks of cloud rising from forgotten peaks to barricade the sky-port.

‘Bouncing, aye?’

‘Real irregular, Jhori!’ Teffi replied, with the energetic urgency of youth. ‘Swinging this way and that.’

Jhori sighed. ‘Let me see.’

He drifted to the side and peered into the distance. Talk among the Perimeter Corps had been of metaliths within sight of the city. Nothing unusual. The same forces that kept Barak-Thryng aloft were alive throughout Chamon, ebbing and flowing according to the galvanic rhythms of the Spiral Crux.

Jhori narrowed his scopes on a dense patch of cloud. Despite knowing what he was looking for – a distant splinter, like a scratch on his visor – he saw nothing. Then his breath caught. The metalith had eluded him because it was so close it filled his vision.

It was in the cloud.

It was wide, flat on top and jagged beneath.

And it was bouncing.

Jhori heard whooping laughter on the wind. His blood chilled, and grim resolve tightened in his breast. He knew the duty he owed to his apprentice, to his kin, and to his city.

‘Teffi,’ he said, his tone low. ‘Go. Fast as you can. City, now.’

The apprentice endrinrigger’s head popped up over the battery above him, her head tilted in confusion and concern.

But Jhori was already moving. He swung his legs into the swivel-gun rig and disconnected his aether-endrin, letting it float away. He slid into the gunner’s seat. Recalibrated articulators responded smoothly, and he turned to face the oncoming metalith.

Behind the floating island the cloud bank parted, bathing all of Barak-Thryng in the light of the Bad Moon.

The city of Margew Venki’s birth had never seemed so radiant to him as it did when it welcomed him home. Barak-Thryng was a dour place according to some, but now, as it roiled and wavered before him, it appeared as it had in his youth – a glittering spectacle.

Maker’s whiskers, he thought, but that batch of Irontop Regular must’ve been strong, to have me wet-eyed and wondering, so.

Except I’ve not had a drink since–

Something foul settled on his palate. He began to remember.

The trade-captain is dead. The whole crew, dead by the hands of the ones who crept up from beneath the rickety old berth in the Dyrwood. It was them, with their shackles and their rusty knives, and their brews that made you see things.

Felt better to get back into the sky, didn’t it?

Nice full belly.

Nice full ship.

Margew blinked away distress and tested his grip on the wheel again. He couldn’t move his fingers. The Frorlenhand listed and rumbled with anticipatory energy as it sped towards the dockyards on the outskirts of the Azrilazi trade district.

Here was a place where travellers converged. Their vessels formed an irregular mass among the berths on the edge of the city. At its heart towered the bulk of the great Khrundal-class battleship Gromthi-a-Grund, pride of Barak-Thryng.

Too fast, Margew thought, his mind swimming. Then, again, more urgently: Too fast! Who set this rate, who charted this course?

He blinked, and his unsettling memories abandoned him.

Ah. Must’ve been me.

The city of Margew Venki’s birth had never seemed so radiant to him as it did when it welcomed him home.

Before the alarm could be raised, the sky-hauler Frorlenhand collided with the Azrilazi dockyards, keeling sideways and skidding to a halt. Fungal miasma gouted from the stricken vessel, bearing with it a lunatic tide of pitted blades and grinning green faces.

Izmok the Scratcher, self-appointed shaman-king of the Dyrwood, shrieked and clapped and urged his swarming stabbas forward. He was here. The moon was here. Here he would find the prize that was promised – not this great grimeless metal mess of a city, oh no, but the ship. The ship that the witch had shown him, when his shrooms and scratchings had, at last, ripped out the last of her mind’s glimmerings. Steal a ship to get a ship. That had been his great cleverness. A little ship for a big one. A ship to get to the city, then a ship to get to the moon.

He raised his lucky knife and wailed. Izmok the Scratcher’s time had come.

The arkanauts of the Perimeter Corps might have been caught wholly unawares were it not for the salvo of flares that rose from the outermost defensive tower in the final moments before impact. A corona of red light preceded a last, defiant burst of aethershot as the drifting island’s bulk smashed through the first part of Barak-Thryng’s defences. Then the geomantic forces within the metalith began to tangle with those that held the sky-city aloft. They repelled one another, and the island began to rise, higher and higher, until its bulk eclipsed the leering moon.

Those whose boundings and boingings had sent the metalith teetering towards Barak-Thryng cared not that the drop would likely be fatal. The Bad Moon told them to jump, and so they jumped, the whole lot of them, becoming a rain of grot and squigflesh as they tumbled through the skies.

It was Squigboss Krinkit who leaped first, his mangler squigs snarling and biting at the air as they fell. He screamed the whole way down, his body inflated with glee, because to fall was to bounce. The moon had said, For nine nights shall you bounce, and upon the ninth, you will know me. Then fall down upon the stunties, and leap back up to me!

I’m goin’ to the moon, Krinkit thought as he plummeted, pulling pointlessly on the reins. Squigboss Krinkit’s time had come, too.

All over the city, the alarm went up – in the Azrilazi dockyards most of all, where cannon fire shook the gantries of vessels at rest, the battleship Gromthi-a-Grund among them. In the ship’s shadow lurked the trophy-barges of Borsen Thond, which had gathered dust since the adventurer vanished a season prior.

We should be rid of them! those concerned had complained to the Admirals Council. Bad for business. And the stench–

Are the berths not paid up years hence? the counterpoint had come.

Well, aye, but–

Then all is as it should be.

And so the matter had been settled, as duardin matters often are.

And so the matter festered, as duardin matters often do.

In the depths of the largest of these trophy-barges, the calamity stirred movement in long-abandoned crevices. Among these skulked Skritbag, chieftain and seer. He twitched and giggled and began to claw at the dormant moult of his beloved Arachnarok. Slowly, he began to unmake the spun cleverness that had convinced Borsen Thond that he’d killed the great spider.

Thond had been wrong. Skritbag had made a tasty fool of him.

Now, Skritbag listened to the clamour outside, and the scuttling in the moon, and knew that his time had come.

Almost.

Give it a minnit, he resolved. I’ve eggs to see to.

Teffi’s endrin gave out as she fell into the tradeways at the edge of Azrilazi. By instinct, she aimed for the streets of hammered steel that formed the superstructure of the elevated trade district. Here were almshouses and workhalls that had been built according to the Code long ago, with the same hidebound rigour that the Kharadron of Barak-Thryng applied to all their doings. To Teffi, these promised greater safety than the makeshift cabins and tangled gantries that subsequent generations of traders and travellers had erected as their homes and businesses, using iron and stone of no certifiable quality.

Even so, good Thryng steel did not make for a soft landing, and the foe that now rampaged through the district cared little for the finer distinctions of Code certification. Teffi unhitched herself and stumbled forwards, and immediately a mad-eyed grot was upon her. Acting upon instinct, she fired her rivet gun point-blank into its guts.

Jhori wasn’t behind her. Jhori wasn’t coming. She’d heard his final salvo, and the crushing impact that followed. Swallowing grief and fear, she ran.

Instinct carried her away from the open street and into the tangle of alleys and stairways that bordered it. She heard distant cannon fire and knew that she had made the right decision landing here. The inner defences of Barak-Thryng were without peer – they would hold. But Azrilazi would not. Either the grots would take it or they wouldn’t, but the strafing fire of the hun-ghrumtok would leave it in ruins regardless. The Code was clear. Azrilazi was an outer district, open to outsiders, which in the strictest interpretation would open it to Four Point Five: Aid allies unless doing so would prove pointless. That being established, Nine Point Seven would come into effect: Excessive firepower is permissible.

Which was all well and good, but Azrilazi was Teffi’s home. It was where her father lived, in his beloved tavern, the Twins-and-Tankard, itself a relatively new addition to the dockyards. That was where she must go, she knew, as she ran. Though good Kharadron sense told her to seek sanctuary in certainty, her heart drove her towards kin.

Smoke from stricken vessels swept the tradeways, and her ears were full of the sharp report of aether-carbines. The Longshore Marshals, coordinating pockets of doomed defence all around her, had been given little time to brace for invasion. The foe were themselves in disarray, capering as they ransacked the city, surging without direction. She saw grots scurrying into open pipes, heedless of the fact that most of these led to the under-furnaces. Those that did not, however, led to the bilges. We’ll be scraping them out of there for ages, Teffi thought.

Eventually she emerged at the head of one of the tradeway stairs, a wide causeway that led down to the docking spars below. The Twins-and-Tankard was a lone building located between two of the larger yards. The berths nearby were big enough to house the largest sky-ships in the fleet, and Teffi had grown up in the shadow of austere, storied vessels. Indeed, above the tavern’s door rose a burnished depiction of the Warrior and the Maker, a sigil of the City of the Ancestors that had once adorned the prow of such a craft. Now, to her, it signalled Barak-Thryng’s defiance.

Teffi could make out a thin line of arkanauts, rifles in hand, their backs to the tavern. It was towards these that she ran, crossing the first docking spar, head low. As she reached them, she saw that the defence was being coordinated by an arkanaut bearing a spotter-sergeant’s insignia.

‘Brenk?’ Teffi asked, breathless. ‘What are you doing here?’

‘Frustrating sort of a day, Teffi,’ replied Spotter-Sergeant Brenk, wearily. ‘Fancied a drink, but couldn’t get past the door. Some realm-plodding longbeard’s at the bar, holding court, telling tales. I couldn’t get a look-in. Place is heaving.’

‘Whole district’s heaving, Brenk,’ Teffi said.

‘Aye, well,’ he grumbled, tinkering with a valve and testing the pressure in his carbine, ‘still fancy that drink, don’t I?’

They turned together to stare out into the darkness, where the horde amassed, teeming from the shadows to swell upon the docking spars, spreading across the yards and overtaking one vessel after another. Teffi’s eyes went to the tavern door, and then to the spotter-sergeant, and she joined the line at his side, her fingers feeding bolts into her rivet gun. She’d followed her heart far enough. She knew her duty, now, just as Jhori had.

Patrons began to spill from the tavern’s interior, and she looked for her father among them. Many still had their tankards in their hands. The bulk of the emerging throng did not move any further than the doorway of the tavern, and Teffi wondered if she might need to direct them towards safety. She looked to Brenk, who seemed equally bemused. Then there was a disturbance that drew their attention back to the door, where a flaming crest of red hair wobbled into view.

‘Make… make way for Rhyngrim! Rhyngrim, runedaughter of Sigyorn!’

This belligerent, unsteady cry was loud enough to split the crowd. There was a particular smell to a Fyreslayer in their cups – like old hops left too long on a stovetop – that was in this case so powerful that it found Teffi’s nostrils through her respirator.

Yet, despite the assault on her senses she was glad when the drunkest Fyreslayers she had ever seen pressed forward to join them. There were three of them, and they still had their balance, along with priceful weaponry. They moved with purpose, and it was then that Teffi realised that the tavern-goers were moving with purpose, too.

It was then that she saw the emptying of the Twins-and-Tankard for what it was.

Not an evacuation, but a disembarkation.

Following the Fyreslayers came Teffi’s father, Nytten. She wanted to call out to him, but it was too loud, and his attention was elsewhere. He walked alongside the last of the tavern’s patrons, a bristle-whiskered elder who Teffi did not recognise. The stranger closed the tavern door, then gave it a testing pull. Then he patted Nytten Ginstock on the shoulder and turned.

First, Teffi saw a traveller in good boots and a well-made but unadorned cloak. The stranger paused, sniffed the air, and his nose wrinkled in deep grudgement. Then he closed his eyes and rolled his shoulders, and Teffi blinked, or perhaps her lenses misted, because suddenly the cloak was gone, and what she saw next stilled her heart.

It was an impossibility. It defied every bit of good sense hammered into her by the Code, and by the strict tenets of the academies of Thryng.

It was a truth, also. Something deep in her bones knew the rightness of it.

In that instant, Teffi saw an ancestor returned to the City of the Ancestors. She saw a warrior in ancient mail, shining axe in hand. She saw a flowing cape of crimson. She saw rings of silver, gold, copper and gromril in a vast white beard.

And she knew why it was that her father’s tavern had been heaving.

‘Right!’ the stranger began, drawing all eyes to him as he strode forward. ‘There’s grobkaz in the air tonight, young ones. Foulness in the sky, and wretched things at our door. So there ever is, so there ever was.’

He paused, and for a moment seemed to take on the appearance of a mountain, a holdfast, a legend carved in stone.

‘On nights like these, our foes think themselves lucky. They think our era has ended, that we’ve grown too slow, too divided, to seize time’s workings and arrest the motion of the ages. They are wrong, young ones. They are wrong!’

Teffi heard renewed shrieking in the air, felt the decking at her feet tremble. The white-bearded stranger moved past her and turned his back on the tide of grots that spilled through the miasma towards him.

‘To arms, bold ones!’ he cried, slamming down with the hilt of his axe. ‘I call on you to be the ire that rocks the mountains. I call on you to give the grobi your rebuke! Give them drengi fire, and dawi mettle, and all the iron the sky can yield!’

The grots were almost upon him, but he held his ground, immovable. He drew one last deep lungful of night air, and bellowed as he turned to face the foe.

‘Khazukan kazakit-ha!’

These words were foreign to her. They matched no strain of Kharadrid that she knew. Yet they thundered within her even so, amplifying the same soul-deep certainties that the stranger’s presence had inspired.

A roar went up from them all, first from the Fyreslayers, and then everybody else – off-duty arkanauts and travellers of all stripes, armed with hammers and pistols, tankards, table legs and chairs. Each bellowed the war cries of their people, a dozen duardin dialects intermingling. Then the throng began to move, the whitebeard at its head, and Teffi realised that she was joining them, charging into battle in the wake of the inspiring stranger.

It was always something to find himself back among the foe, a weight of good gromril in his hand, his people around him, proving themselves to be as stubborn as they had ever been. The duardin were many people, and one. The Maker had seen to it that his white-bearded wanderer reflected this, and had the power to reflect it back upon those who beheld him – to be Ashkarn, Wytskarn, Witromm or Rigo, whoever it was that the moment called for.

Yet he was simply Grombrindal now, among the grobi once again, axe held forth. He had come to remind them who he was, too, for he knew that the mind of a grot was a meagre, shrivelled thing, and needed prodding if one wished to stir anything grander than puddle-deep reflection within it.

On this night, however, Grombrindal felt that the time for prodding had long since passed. This was an hour for chopping.

Grombrindal collided with a cluster of spear-clutching Moonclan, scattering them before him and ending the lives of three with a single sweep of his axe. They scrabbled backwards and he pressed onward, cracking skulls against the decking. The patrons of the Twins-and-Tankard filled the gap behind him, striking and bludgeoning as they went.

There was a roar and a rush of heat as Rhyngrim of Sigyorn flung herself into the melee. Then the harsh crack of carbines heralded the arrival of Brenk’s arkanauts, who fired as they charged, overcoming the hidebound pragmatisms of their Code to join their kin at the heart of the fray.

Grombrindal’s whiskers bristled with satisfaction. In this age of upheavals there were, nonetheless, moments that set his feet upon solid ground. He snapped a grot’s spine with belligerent force before twisting to intercept a bounding squig. His axe caught between its teeth and sliced the beast in half. The heat and foulness of its demise mingled with an illusory sense of mountain chill. For a moment these high airs gave him a sniff of the high peaks of old.

His little army caught up with him and formed lines at his sides. They hadn’t taken much convincing to rush to their home’s defence, for duardin rarely did.

The resilience and ingenuity of the dawi, the cruel tenacity of the grobi – they were each bound to an eternal mechanism that tested one against the other, again and again, forever. And here, now, as ever, it fell to him to be fate’s engineer – to reach deep inside the guts of that eternal machine, find the fault…

And push.

The duardin defenders of Azrilazi formed ranks and pressed through the horde, drawing the grots’ attention as they battered their way towards the outer berths. For a moment, it seemed as if Grombrindal’s host would proceed unimpeded. Then there was a high, commanding wail from somewhere deeper in the horde. The tide of grots abated momentarily. A whooping cheer went up, and the Moonclan line burst apart to reveal a pack of fanatics whirling iron balls on crude chains.

‘This again,’ Grombrindal muttered.

He took a step forward as withering fire from the arkanauts thinned the foe – but on the fanatics came, heedless of the danger.

‘Hold true!’ he bellowed. ‘Steel yourselves, young ones!’

The runedaughter did not heed him, but listened only to the fire in her blood. She and her Hearthguard rushed forward, intercepting the first of the fanatics and vanishing in a whirl of iron and fire. By the time Grombrindal reached them, one of the slayers was on the ground, his beard matted with blood. The runedaughter was over him, punch-drunk and reeling, roaring defiance.

Another pack of fanatics came at her sideways, and in her rage she did not see them. The white-bearded stranger stepped past her and caught the first ball and chain around the hilt of his axe. He grunted with the impact, then steadied himself. The ball’s momentum, arrested suddenly, shot down the chain until the grot that wielded it was swept off its feet. Grombrindal raised his axe above his head and swung the creature like a flail, sweeping it into the path of its kin. Whirling chains and whooping grotflesh entangled with one another until the whole mass of them came to a skidding halt.

Grombrindal placed his hand on Rhyngrim’s shoulder. ‘Be mindful, young one,’ he began. ‘In your dealings with grobi, know that there’s always–’

Something massive collided with the Moonclan mob – a bounding pair of colossal squigs that chomped indiscriminately as they went, sending the foe into disarray. Grombrindal sniffed, gave a firm pull, and untangled his axe. There was a new discord in the air, distinct reeks intermingling.

Two clans, each a surprise to the other.

He sensed another presence within fate’s mechanism, its will competing with his own.

I’ll deal with you later, he thought.

Squigboss Krinkit bore down on the glittering stunty-chief, stuffed with glee. It was a moon-made miracle that he hadn’t burst with the thrill of it – the screaming descent, the bounding rampage, and now, a great munching to be done.

There were grots in his way. Foot-scrabbling little punies, happily squashed beneath his bounding manglers. Krinkit hauled on the reins, willing his twin steeds to do that which they were already doing. There was no stopping them when the chomping urge was upon them.

One of his manglers snapped forward and was met by a bladed edge of gromril that cleaved down through its cranium and embedded itself deep in its skull. The stunty-chief held his ground, letting the beast’s mass smash into him. Krinkit’s other mangler twisted to avenge its sibling, but staggered, tumbling sideways. There was little that Krinkit could do but let go of the reins and fly headlong into the fray.

This time, he did not bounce. He slid along the decking until at last he came to a wheezing rest at the base of a pair of armoured boots. His eyes snapped open, and the last thing he saw was the moon, eclipsed by the barrel of a rivet gun.

Teffi pulled the trigger and shielded her lenses from the blast of viscera that resulted. A roar went up from the folk at her back, and they began to press forward to where the white-bearded stranger took apart the massive squigs with a firm, practised hand. She felt a presence at her back, and when she turned she found herself looking directly into the eyes of her father. He was slick head to toe in dock-grime and grotblood, and he was beaming.

‘My girl!’ Nytten Ginstock said. ‘Do you see? He’s here!’

He pointed to the whitebeard, pulling her forward with him. In his other hand he gripped the heavy truncheon that he kept behind the bar for special occasions.

‘Who is–’ she began, her lips forming the question even as her father’s attention returned to the battle.

‘He’s here!’ Nytten repeated.

‘Aye, well, so’s the fleet.’

Teffi turned to see Brenk, his lenses set on the clouds. She followed his gaze to a point above the district walls, and it was then that she saw them – ironclads and gunhaulers moving at pace. The hun-ghrumtok. Teffi’s mind went to the Code.

Four Point Five.

Nine Point Seven.

‘Not long now,’ Brenk said, with an arkanaut’s dour pragmatism. Then he shook himself free of this grim cast and called out to the whitebeard.

‘Stranger!’ he yelled, over the din of the melee. ‘We’ve not long. There’s grudge-settlers in flight.’

The white-bearded stranger regarded him for a moment. He nodded. Then he met Teffi’s eyes, and the grey depth of them banished her fear. He was looking into her, she sensed. Seeking the worth that she could contribute.

‘This way,’ she said, quietly at first, then louder. ‘The Gromthi-a-Grund. They’ll raze the docks, but they won’t risk the battleship. Artycle Three, Point Two…’

Brenk nodded. ‘To the ramps!’ he bellowed.

As the bombers closed in on Azrilazi, they ran, the ramshackle lot of them, pressing through grots surging in the same direction – away from the promise of fire, towards the great battleship.

Yet the Gromthi-a-Grund appeared to them as if it was receding – drifting away as they drew closer, looming unsteadily, as a mountain does. The Moonclan set upon them with increased ferocity, and it was all they could do to maintain their momentum as the first bombers released their payloads upon the miasma that had engulfed the dockyards.

It was then that Teffi saw that the battleship was receding. More to the point, it was leaving. Of course it was. Other crews would understand, as she had, what the Code demanded – that the battleship must be saved. And so it would be, even as others raced towards it in the vain hope that it might save them, too.

Yet this was no orderly launch. Boarding ramps gave way and tumbled into open air before Teffi’s eyes, and mooring anchors were torn out of the dockside with wrenching force. No pilot of the Corps would be so careless. These are desperate times, Teffi supposed.

Eventually, only one boarding ramp remained – the largest of the cargo loaders, intended to deliver heavy freight to the top deck. The patrons of the Twins-and-Tankard converged at its base as it began to strain against the force of the battleship’s departure. Lunatic grots descended on them with increased ferocity. Brenk’s carbine was dry, and he took to holding the horde at bay with its heavy stock. Teffi loosed the last of her rivets into the face of a marauding grot, then reached for her father. She knew her duty.

‘Up,’ she told him. ‘Up the ramp. Go, now.’

Nytten looked at her, and she saw the exuberance in him fade.

‘My girl…’ he began, softly.

‘None of that, none of that,’ interjected the white-bearded stranger. ‘Up! Up, the lot of you. Here’s where I hold, and you climb. Together.’

It hadn’t been quite like this in Izmok the Scratcher’s imaginings. The witch hadn’t screamed of squig-rivals, nor of battle-doings and irritating duardin obstinance. It was no matter, no matter at all. The Bad Moon had always favoured Izmok, and it favoured him now with a sharp bit of luck: the stunties were running towards the prize he sought, guiding him to it and clearing the way.

Thrilled, he leaped and whooped, held out his knife and sent more stabbas in to do their stabbing, so that he might have all the glories that had twinkled in his mind since he was little more than a snot in the dark.

Stumbling stunties took to the ramp that led up to the ship’s deck. All except one. As the last of them boarded the ship, a solitary figure remained behind, his visage a stone-set scowl. This one’s defiant last stand began at the ramp’s base and proceeded step by step until he was halfway up. He took the heads of a dozen grots with each careful step backwards.

Then he raised his head.

Deep grey eyes struck into Izmok the Scratcher. His pace faltered. This white-bearded one called forth something buried long ago – an ancient terror that waited within him like a deep-cave fungus.

Oh, nah, Izmok thought. Ah, oh, nah. But he was carried forward on a tide of his own moon-maddened kindred, borne upwards despite the protesting wisdom that had been awakened in him.

The white-bearded duardin set about Izmok’s horde with ease, an army of one, all of his own ancient animus brought to bear against a foe that he had stood against since time unremembered. One by one he cut them down, until Izmok the Scratcher was driven before him. That great silvery axe came up, and then down–

And stopped.

A strong hand shot out and gripped Izmok the Scratcher by the neck, then lifted him into the air. He shrieked and scrabbled, clawing for life.

‘Aye, well,’ said Grombrindal, over the shaman-king’s protests. ‘This is how it tends to go, grobi.’

Then he tossed him sideways with great force, and Izmok the Scratcher was flying – not upwards to the moon, but sideways, then down.

Down, down, down.

Until the Dyrwood welcomed him home.

Teffi joined Brenk and the drunken Fyreslayer at the winch and lent her strength to their effort, hauling the last ramp upwards, the white-bearded stranger with it. Maker, but he’s heavy, she thought. Then at last he stepped aboard, and the Gromthi-a-Grund drifted away from the trembling dock. A horde of grots pressed to the edge, pushing and jostling to escape the bombs that detonated at their backs. There was a roar, and a flash of flame filled Teffi’s lenses. When her vision cleared, she looked instinctively for her father. She found him at the railing, staring into the smoke that rose from Azrilazi. Looking for his tavern.

‘All the important parts will survive, old friend,’ said the white-bearded stranger, bloody but resplendent. ‘The Emberkin Sixty-Five will pop in all that heat, mind, but it wasn’t an especially good year.’

‘You’re not wrong,’ replied Nytten Ginstock, softly. ‘But it’s no matter. The Sigyorn lass already drank it all.’

The white-bearded stranger laughed – a deep, warm rumble – then quieted, gathering his resolve once more. As if on cue, the Gromthi-a-Grund lurched unnaturally, and all aboard staggered about. Teffi reached her father and snapped her tether-line to the railing, steadying them both. The Fyreslayer Rhyngrim lost her balance and fell. Then they heard a tapping, scraping, scuttling sound within the ship’s hold, an unnatural creaking…

A tap-tap-tapping upon the vessel’s underside, and the creeping of a great many-legged beast…

‘Command deck’s sealed!’ somebody yelled. ‘Door’s stuck something foul.’

‘What’s that sound?’

‘Who’s at the helm?’

Teffi’s eyes were on Rhyngrim as she climbed to her feet, assisted by the outstretched hand of the white-bearded stranger.

‘I had a bit of wisdom for you, runedaughter,’ he began, testing his grip on his battleaxe. ‘Before I was interrupted. In your dealings with grobi, know that there’s always one–’

The hold burst open, and the Gromthi-a-Grund listed sideways, tumbling into open air. For a precarious, stomach-lurching moment, the ship fell. Then the power within its mighty endrins flared, and the pride of Barak-Thryng launched itself moonward.

Skritbag’s time had come, at last.

CHAPTER 2

MOONBOUND

He woke to foulness and pain, to a blood-matted beard and a broken arm. It was a wonder he had woken at all. Brightness broke through the ship’s shattered hull, sending forth piercing bands of brilliance that cut through smoke and miasma to shock him conscious. The air was alive with the dancing promise of flames drawing ever closer. Stifling heat enclosed him.

And yet, against all odds, Margew Venki lived. The pilot’s cupola had shielded him when the Frorlenhand crashed, as it was supposed to.

Now, upturned, it pinned him in place.

I don’t want to burn.

Few thoughts more complex than this made their way across his mind. He strained, he shifted, and he kicked, with the little strength left to him, and eventually he felt movement. He wriggled a short distance. It felt like living. Then he felt sudden, sharp resistance. Pain.

His arm spasmed, and he yelped. He could move his legs, but his arms were straining, agonisingly bound–

To the wheel.

Of course they are.

But not by you.

He remembered, now, the sinister ones who had bound him thus. Anger swelled in him – a bitter, animal sort of hatred. This feeling demanded that he survive, and so he twisted and turned, just a little, and resumed his kicking. Down, hard, this time, into the spokes of the wheel, until one by one they loosened, and then began to snap. He turned, bit down on the pain, and ripped half the wheel away with his good arm.

Above him, the hull of the upturned Frorlenhand rumbled. The world trembled with the staccato impact of bombs and the distant roar of endrins. His heart pumped fear into his veins until it swelled up into his throat and forced him to cry out.

‘Help me!’

But no sound that he could make could possibly rise above the tremor and tumult of the burning dockyards, nor the righteous work of the fleet. Even so, the act of screaming was enough to get Margew moving, out from under the burning cupola, and onto his feet. He began to run. He dragged himself over a bent and twisted part of the Frorlenhand’s railing and through a gap, half the ship’s wheel skittering behind him on the end of his slack tether-line.

Then Margew Venki set foot once again upon the dockyards of Barak-Thryng, and beheld piles of grotflesh, rising fires, and destruction everywhere.

There was another rumble, another roar, and his eyes were drawn upward. A great vessel overshadowed him, its aspect all a-kilter, its rate all wrong. Stricken, perilous, as his own ship had been. Unsteadily moonbound, receding rapidly on a doomed course.

His heart swelled with sympathy.

Good luck, Margew Venki thought, heedless of the flames that closed in on him. Whoever you are.

Wot fortune, wot blessings! thought Skritbag, chieftain and seer, as he sped and scrambled through the cavernous innards of the monstrous ship. In his wake came his clutch, his carefully cultivated brood, his teeming treasures: a warband’s weight of spiderkin, fresh-birthed in the wake of his sleeping queen, his nine-legged Empress.

She was awake now, and the moon was high, and Skritbag knew himself a lucky grot. Of course, the truly lucky made all their luck themselves, and he’d made plenty down in the dank depths of Thond’s abandoned barges. Now, he got to relish it all at once. His Empress was relishing it too, he knew. He sensed her presence on the outer hull, creeping slowly. She was large, a pinnacle of power, a goddess with nothing to fear from the blades and shot of cowering stunties; yet she was a spider also, and spiders were clever hunters, shadow-seekers, ambush-makers. Skritbag’s Empress was both of these things, and Skritbag felt her satisfaction wash through him as she found somewhere high, safe and dark to conceal herself.

Behind him, a tide of spiders flowed through every bulkhead and vanished into every pipe and shadow. There were so many! They sealed each passage as they went, trailing clotting wads of web-stuff that clung to intake vents and hardened in the hinges of doors and hatches.

Most of Skritbag’s brood were as real as he was: ichorous and pointy-limbed, some stout and others lithe, all flush with venom and viciousness. Others, however, were woven from motes of moon-magic, clever little sorceries called forth by the profundity of thought that Skritbag enjoyed when his Empress was awake – and Skritbag was full of profundity tonight.

He tripped and clonked his skull against a bulkhead, and when he stood and began to pick at the wound, he beheld a strand of glittering webbing that unspooled from his temple until another skittering spider-blessing emerged from him, silvery and translucent like a cave-fish. He giggled at the sight of it, then tossed it away to join its kindred.

As he climbed towards the upper decks of the ship, Skritbag danced in rhythm to the gentle tap-tap-tapping he sensed upon the Gromthi-a-Grund’s outer hull; he and his Arachnarok wove this next and greatest spell together. Through their combined fervour, the sky-vessel was slowly enclosed in a great, invisible web, like a fat-bodied fly strung up for slaughter. So bound, it was drawn upwards, slowly at first, then with wrenching force. Dragged towards the great unhatched moon, and the hungry children that waited within.

Let them preenin’ scuttlers see this! he thought gleefully as he emerged through a narrow hatch into the place he supposed was the ship’s command deck, for it was full of rods and gizmos. Let ’em call me Skritbag, pirate and pioneer!

He began to yank upon these rods and gizmos, and the ship surged upward, roaring angrily, as might be expected of a creature full of spiders.

Wot fortune, wot blessings!

Rhyngrim was aflame, and her world was smoke and steel and spiders. She’d wanted to listen to the whitebeard’s words, she sincerely had – but one moment she’d been finding her footing on a deck free of foes, and the next the deck had surged up to meet her, and then there were foes everywhere. Every rune impressed into her skin and every bit of hard-won battle lore in her skull told her what to do next:

Have at them!

The ale said the same thing. And so that’s what she did.

She flung herself forward, away from the whitebeard, through the burst-open cargo hatch, and down into darkness. The Fyreslayers of Sigyorn lodge knew what it took to rid a place of a Spiderfang infestation. It took fire. Relentless and uncompromising fire, and a willingness to delve every depth, plumb every shadow.

It took blades, too, and plenty of muscle. And guts and grit and–

Screaming.

She bellowed as she made the descent, her ancestral war-pick across her back and a throwing axe in each hand. She punched her way down, down, down through the flood of spiders that poured up towards and past her. She was supported by nothing but surging, biting chitin; she was falling even as she carved and hacked at them, her passage punching a burning hole in the horde. The stench of burning hair and the screech of stricken foes followed her down into the ship’s hold.

What was it that the whitebeard had been trying to tell her?

Ach, never mind. Slaying to be done.

She landed with a thump, punching elbow-deep through the thorax of a big one.

Don’t count as taking a tumble if you break the back of something nasty.

A fresh bit of her own wisdom, this. She’d tell it to Maegard later, when the old berzerker was back on his feet. Maybe he’d like it enough to scribe it down.

Rising, she drew her weapon, igniting the brazier that separated its pick and chisel, and with a snarl of flame she lashed out at the host of horrors that came for her. The floor was trembling and its surface was uneven, overcome with treacherous pipework and bulging steam vents. Rhyngrim of Sigyorn was no stranger to dark, dangerous places, and she’d been ferried to war aboard Kharadron sky-vessels many times. Even so, the world she had landed in seemed strange to her, twisted somehow, notwithstanding the skulking horrors and eerie strands of living webbing that sought her out with each step she took.

You’re sideways, Rhyn.

She flexed her shoulders and flashed her war-pick into the air, catching a silent leaper square through its mandibles, then reached for its thorax with a free hand and ripped the creature in half.

Beholding its lifeless eyes for a moment, a new awareness dawned in her.

‘Am standing on the wall,’ she muttered. The ship had tilted as she fell, rising to catch her.

She bared her teeth to the darkness. She could feel that the air was full of foes. Rhyngrim and her Hearthguard had been on campaign for a long, long time. Battles tended to blur together after a while, and she could no more distinguish one from another than she could pick a particular dish out of a vast feast. But tonight was special, she knew. Tonight, she’d remember.

Probably.

What had the whitebeard been trying to tell her? Who was he again? A brewmaster? A story-spinner? Something like that. Good fighter, for a tradesman.

There’s always one more.

‘Ach, that was it,’ Rhyngrim said, as she swept her blazing war-pick before her, breaking the legs of another hissing creature.

One more flagon, one more fight, one more foe.

‘You!’ she called out into the darkness as she slew. ‘You! Crawling grot, kin of creepers! Rhyngrim of Sigyorn comes for you!’

And then she was away, blazing a warrior’s path into the screeching dark as the world twisted beneath her feet.

When the ship began its precipitous ascent, the runedaughter had fallen in one direction and Teffi Ginstock had fallen in another. She skidded a distance down the deck until her line caught, and then, with all the surety that an endrinrigger’s apprenticeship could grant, she swung herself into the ship’s railing. She reached out to steady her father, but Nytten Ginstock was no fool. A skybound folk didn’t get very far if they couldn’t handle a bit of turbulence, and the life of a tavern-owner tended to instil its own sense of how to stay on one’s feet. He jammed his truncheon into a gap in the rail and held fast, lending his own strength back to his daughter.

Beneath them, the Gromthi-a-Grund strained upward, its course ever more perilous, bent on a fool’s trajectory.

‘Pilot doesn’t know what he’s doing,’ Nytten huffed.

‘I think the ship’s been stolen, father,’ Teffi replied.

Nytten’s brow furrowed in consternation in a manner particular to duardin of advancing age. It was a look that said both that cannot possibly be and that is regrettably so, with a touch of I suppose this was to be expected. These concepts cease to be mutually exclusive when one has lived a certain count of years, and tallied up a certain count of grudgements.

Teffi looked down. Beneath her, Brenk’s arkanauts had heeded their own training and done as she had, making for the railing and grabbing hold of others before they could fall. The wounded Fyreslayers were with them, along with a score of ashen-faced tavern-goers, whose resolve was now being rigorously tested by the perilous situation they found themselves in.

Among them, she saw no sign of the white-bearded stranger, but present dangers afforded little time to mourn his passing. Crawling horrors flooded from the hold to engulf the ship’s upper midsection. Aethershot whipped upwards to repel them from arkanauts who held their carbines low and one-handed. The roar of a decksweeper gun cleared the air and bought Teffi a moment to think.

Clouds swallowed the fires of the Azrilazi dockyards as the ship climbed. For a moment, Teffi regarded the luminous span of the sky-port in its entirety, and then it too was lost to altitude. She drew an icy lungful of night air, then snapped her mask down over her features. When she spoke next, her voice resonated through her respirator. She spoke over her father to the Kharadron below with the voice of the person she was becoming – no longer his little girl, but an endrinrigger, a skyfarer, a privateer.

‘Brenk!’ Teffi called out. ‘Follow me, while we’ve still got a bit of cover! Riggers’ mounts, then bulkheads, then bridge! If we don’t retake the helm, we’re lost!’

The spotter-sergeant tested his grip on the railing, unsnapped his line, and nodded. Rank was no factor in times of crisis.

One Point One. Leaders shall be chosen by proof of skills.

Teffi braced, then leaped into open air, crossing the gap between the outer rail and the crenellated superstructure at the ship’s rear. This part of the ship was a fortress unto itself, housing the Gromthi-a-Grund’s enclosed command deck and maintenance passageways that led to the largest of its endrins. The bulk of that colossal sphere loomed above her, casting the upper reaches of the superstructure into deep shadow. Bare decking rushed past her for a few heart-pounding seconds. One hook-mount whipped by, and then another, and then she caught the third, her fall arrested with sudden force.

Bit rough and ready, but not a bad little combat landing, she thought. The voice was Jhori’s, and for a moment her chest filled with a feeling like vertigo. He was dead, somewhere far below her. Her apprenticeship was over.

Time to be brave.

A stout shape flashed past her before colliding with the superstructure a few hooks below her position. Spotter-Sergeant Brenk clung on to the mounting one-handed, holding his carbine clear of his body with the other. Teffi saw the light of the Bad Moon in his lenses. His vision was fixed at a point ahead of her, towards the Gromthi-a-Grund’s bow.

‘Brenk? What’s wrong?’ she called out over the din of endrins.

She felt gravity shift beneath her and she swung towards the deck, craning to look in the same direction as the spotter-sergeant.

Far ahead of them a figure stood on the gunner’s step at the prow of the ship, silhouetted against the leering moon as the vessel pitched upward, perilously vertical. In one hand he gripped his axe, and with the other he held the rail. His cloak whipped in the wind behind him, and his sheer stubborn gravity compelled the nose of the battleship downwards.

There is no shifting a duardin that does not wish to move. That, at least, was a truth that had survived the cycle of ages. Grombrindal bent this truth into a purposeful tool as he held his impossible position at the prow of the Gromthi-a-Grund. The battleship had been forged by the Maker’s children. It knew him down to the metal, and to his unwavering will, it listened. He called to its nature as a holdfast of the duardin, compelling it to its duty.

Be free of madness. Protect your people.

Inch by inch, the ship’s course began to level out. Inch by inch, the fates of those aboard were secured, at least for the moment.

The ship groaned and protested. He sniffed the sorcery that had been woven around it, tasted the spider-curse and scowled. There was foulness underfoot, and something perilous burrowed its influence into the ship’s fundamentals. So it went with the Gloomspite clans: even in defeat, grot-kind tended to leave a mess in their wake.

In his eyes glittered the light of a blazing war-pick, swung in darkness. In his shoulders he felt the strain of those who descended towards the helm, foothold by perilous foothold. Their strength was his, and his strength was theirs.

Grombrindal had sensed doom converging on the City of the Ancestors, just as he had felt it converge on countless duardin strongholds in ages gone by. He was sworn to moments like this. They were written into his nature. Here was a place where the mettle of the duardin would be tested, and so here he was bound to be. To lend his strength, and reveal the strength of his people. To find the fault in fate’s mechanism, and push.

He was bathed in the leering yellow light of the Bad Moon. Ever the prospector, he searched its fathomless, craven malevolence for the secrets it held, but perceived only emptiness. Here was a barren sort of power. A call to madness, a beacon for fools.

He huffed. ‘Altogether too much power invested in a senseless act,’ he muttered. ‘Far too much.’

The Gromthi-a-Grund levelled out just enough for him to turn, release the railing, heft his axe, and turn his back on the moon. Young Ginstock had the right idea. The ship could still be retaken with a bit of honest work.

To war, then, for a little while longer, he resolved.

At Grombrindal’s back, the Bad Moon blazed with renewed ferocity, as if its light had been for his eyes alone, and now it raged at the absence of his attention. For a moment, its features were indistinct, lost to the light. Then a mote of darkness was born in its heart – a slim aperture at first, but one that grew rapidly until it split the moon from top to bottom. Flames caught at the moon’s edge, gouting away from its periphery in leaping, serpentine, multihued tendrils.

And then it blinked.

Bad Moon’s supposed to be an egg, not an eye, Skritbag thought, as he stepped forward from behind his rods and gizmos and approached the command deck’s window. He did so with reverence, but trepidation also. Suddenly, his solitude felt perilous. He’d reached this place through scuttling cleverness, sealing himself inside the command deck at the rear of the ship before his stunty stowaways could lift a finger to stop him. Now, he was alone. Where was his Empress? She would know what it meant, that the moon-egg had become a burning eye.

His Empress was abroad, somewhere, hunting, hiding herself, but she would know an egg when she saw one, and she would chitter and rejoice to know that he, Skritbag, had delivered her to the Spider God’s final clutch, the prize of all Spiderfang, the moon-egg…

Looks a lot like an eye, Skritbag.

His stomach sank. He felt the presence of doubt. Clever grots tended to have lots of doubts; they stopped you from getting eaten, sat on, chopped up, skewered.

It’s a big eye, innit, the doubting voice said. A big burnin’ eye, and not an egg at all.

But it sees you, Skritbag, came the retort. Here was the skittering, ambitious voice that bound him to his nine-legged Empress, and had sent him questing alone away from the nest, into the path of Borsen Thond, and up, up, up into the sky.

But does it? What does it want?

Here was doubt, again.

But this is my moment, my doing! Skritbag told himself, clinging to hope. My web, trembling!

It’s not your web, Skritbag.

Then whose web is it? he fretted. Whose web is it?

Skritbag stumbled away from the window, instinctively seeking a place where the light of the burning eye could not find him. Heat prickled on his skin. He shivered, though he was burning inside. The argument in his head raged.

What do you think, Skritbag, seer and pioneer? What is known of the fate of grots, past and future?

This voice was more than doubt. It hurt to hear. ‘Am different,’ he jittered, to the empty command deck. ‘My fortune, my blessings…’

What fortune? What blessings?

‘Empress!’ he screamed, as the burning voice grew too loud to bear. ‘Empress!’

A blessed darkness settled over him, and he raised his head. A shadow had descended to block the light that crept over the rim of the window – something large, deadly, beloved. His Empress had come to him in his moment of need. Her prowling had taken her up and around the rear of the Gromthi-a-Grund, seeking perilously dangling prey, and then, as the ship’s course had shifted, she had scaled the tall structure in which Skritbag was sealed. Now, she crept forth from the shadows beneath the vessel’s large endrin. Slowly, but growing ever bolder by the second, Skritbag stood and gripped the ship’s controls.

Whose web is it, Skritbag?

‘Depends who wove it,’ he replied, to nobody. ‘It’s a big ’un.’

If you knew, what would you do?

Here, at last, was a question with an easy answer. ‘Why, I’d follow ’em!’

A grin bloomed across Skritbag’s features and his chest swelled. The shock of the power that awakened in him caused him to lash out towards a nearby bank of rods and levers, and the Gromthi-a-Grund pitched sideways with such force that one of its stabilising endrins was torn away. The aspect of the ship once more began to tilt dangerously.

The burning eye turned with it, and Skritbag began to laugh.

Then call me Fateweaver.

A sudden shift in gravity sent Rhyngrim stumbling first one way, then the other, wrestling with her latest foe as she did so. She smashed the spider against some pipework until it stopped moving, then spun and rushed towards her next kill. Then her bearings were lost to her once again, and all of her weight was thrown forward. With a brawler’s finesse she transferred this unintended momentum to her war-pick, and her next blow struck with such force that her weapon became embedded in part of the ship’s inner workings. Foul steam burst into her eyes and sogged her hair as she wrenched it free, the sudden eruption of heat causing the spiders that closed in on her to seethe and recoil. She didn’t mind it much – it was no magma vent. But it irked her, and this was enough to ensure the death of the next monster to throw itself at her, and the one after that.

She’d lost track of time. A bad habit of hers, not uncommon among those who made war in deep places. Sort of thing that would have had her scolded by the Zharrgrim priests in the long years of her rowdy girlhood. Nobody could fault her timekeeping now, mind. The runedaughter of Sigyorn went where she pleased, fought where she pleased, for as long as she pleased, or for as long as there was ale or ur-gold in it.

How many’s that now? she wondered, as she split a spider in two with her chisel’s cutting edge.

One more, she reminded herself, chuckling darkly.

She stomped down and squashed a little one.

One more!

She vented her animus with a bellow and, sprinting clear of the ship’s steaming innards, rushed along a bulkhead to where a clutch of critters congregated.

Could do this forever, she thought, as she exulted in her skill, her strength, her simplicity and righteousness of purpose.

Could do this forever. More spiders came for her. She sensed them everywhere. There was no limit to them.

Could do this forever.

Teffi and Brenk wrestled with a jammed ingress hatch as the ship tilted beneath their feet. Clouds whipped by far below, lit sickly green and yellow by the blazing moon. The Gromthi-a-Grund’s hull groaned in protest. It was a huge ship, Khrundal class; there were manoeuvres that could not be expected of it, and this was one of them. It didn’t take an endrinrigger to sense the danger.

Bits are going to start falling off, Teffi thought. Her eyes went instinctively to the fore-endrins, the stabilisation fins, the gunner’s rigs, with their volatile magazines…

Too much to fix. Focus.

Brenk’s shoulders tensed as he tried the hatch once again, then he punched the bulkhead in frustration. The other survivors of the Azrilazi dockyards were above them now, still clinging to the railing as chittering terrors attempted to scale the hull towards them. She saw her father bat one away with his truncheon, sending it tumbling into the clouds. Brenk’s arkanauts were forced to fire cautiously to avoid hitting one another, and their ammunition reserves were running low.

Just moments ago they had beheld an impossible thing, the two of them. They had watched in wonder as the white-bearded stranger corrected the course of a battleship in motion. In a night of miracles, this was the first that Teffi accepted openly. She could try to be rational about why she knew with such certainty that the stranger had adjusted the Gromthi-a-Grund’s bearing through force of will alone. Whoever was at the helm was clearly no friend of theirs, after all, and had shown no proclivity for steady-handed flight. Yet it was the quality of the ship’s motion that confirmed the miracle to her.

For a moment, the great battleship had moved as the whitebeard did. There had been peace, stillness, and solidity. The decking had risen to meet them gently for once, and the feeling of boots-on-ground had relieved the ache in their arms. A burden had been taken from them.

But then, suddenly, things got worse. Cruelly, inevitably worse. A sorcerous blaze swept the ship, and its deck trembled once more.

Teffi tore her eyes away from the prow, only to be temporarily blinded by the unnatural light reflected in Brenk’s lenses.

Focus, Teffi. Nothing’s changed. Take the helm, or we’re lost.

The spotter-sergeant tested the hatch’s handle again, single-minded in his determination to gain access to the ship’s interior. The other survivors of the battle of Azrilazi watched them from across the deck, still clinging to the outer rail. Then Brenk brought his elbow down upon the handle, hard. They both saw it give by the most fractional measure. This was something. Hope. Teffi threw her entire weight down onto the lever, and somewhere inside the mechanism she felt the telltale clunk of a bolt shifting out of position. The hatch opened an inch, revealing thick strands of webbing. She found her cable-cutter on her belt and struck into the gap, preventing it from closing, then started to saw away at the clinging strands. Brenk leveraged the door even further with the barrel of his dry carbine, and slowly at first, then all at once – inch by inch, then with violence–

A monster descended the battleship’s superstructure towards them.

It was the largest spider that Teffi Ginstock had ever seen. Its carapace was red and black, marbled with dazzling patterning around its wide, flat head, which was crowned with eyes that burned with that same blinding yellow-green light. It knew it had been seen. Its predator’s ruse dispelled, it rushed down towards her with terrifying speed.

She heard Brenk shout in alarm. She thought she heard her father. Then mandibles punched into her suit at her shoulder and hip, and she was wrenched away from the hatch. Her line snapped. The great spider drew her upwards.

She shrieked.

She heard heavy aethershot.

She heard endrins.

Her head twisted as the creature pulled at her. For a moment, she found herself peering away into the clouds.

Within the clouds, a shadow swelled.

Ironclad class.

In the shadow’s heart, there was a pinprick of light.

Inbound fire.

Panicked breath caught in her respirator and misted her mask. Teffi’s eyes rolled back, and she fainted.

As the ship pitched beneath him, he held his ground. As sorcery swept the deck, he held his ground. This was duardin stubbornness no longer, but something far more potent. It was grudgement.

Grombrindal growled, emitting a noise like a cliffside subsiding. His hands closed firm around the haft of his greataxe. The foe had revealed itself at last, emerging from its hiding place to gloat, as old foes ever did. He turned slowly, deliberately, to face it. Then, he muttered an oath – something coarse and simple in an old tongue.

You should have seen this coming, the enemy whispered.

Yet there was no way you could. The way has been changed.

Before Grombrindal’s eyes, the image of the Bad Moon completed its fell transformation. It had always been a projection, an illusion. An empty power, a call to madness, and a beacon for fools. Not so different from the real Bad Moon, Grombrindal supposed, but that was the heart of the trick, wasn’t it?

It would be possible to claim that he’d been drawn to the beacon, too.

‘I will not be toyed with, daemon,’ Grombrindal said, his voice low.

Of course you won’t, and yet, of course, you will.

To what other purpose would you put a playing piece?

The blazing eye grew until it swallowed him entirely, and then, in the space of a thought, it began to shrink. Suddenly he beheld it as if at a great distance – not as a moon, nor as a burning sigil, but simply as one jewel among many atop a twisted staff, whose haft vanished away into a tumult of darkening skies. This staff was held aloft by a pair of taloned claws. Above, against the aether, craned a spectral pair of leering, avian heads, eyes alive with malice.

No mere trickster, this, but the chosen form of a greater daemon of Change. The afterimage of a spell, cast at a great distance, yet fading now–

Oh no, not far. Oh no, not finished. The board is just now set.

By eternity’s measure, this game ended long ago.

And it ended the way it always does.

With ruin.

And promises broken.

In his heart, Grombrindal felt the struggle, strife and fear of those who fought for their lives aboard the Gromthi-a-Grund. He felt the fury of the runedaughter who fought tirelessly in the depths of the ship’s hold. He felt the pain and terror of those close to death, who were yet heedless of the true danger they were in. Little Teffi Ginstock, no more than a beardling to his ancient eyes, set upon by a cruel predator.

So many mortals, and so ill-fated, and yet…

He sensed silver in the air, and sorcery. The wind shrieked with a voice that was not its own. Something descended towards and past the stricken Gromthi-a-Grund – many somethings, bypassing him with mocking celerity, descending towards…

Barak-Thryng.

Of course. Threads of doom were converging on a stronghold of the duardin, as they ever did. Beckoning him to intervene, as he ever would.

‘This was all your doing, then, I suppose,’ he said wearily, in an admonishing tone.

Something hissed in the decking beneath him, a sinister little affirmation.

‘I’d sniffed something,’ he said, derisively. ‘One scheming little shadow or another. I know you now. Kairos, called Fateweaver. It’s an old name.’

By a daemon’s name is a daemon called. But it’s too late for that. I’m here.

‘I bear an old name, too.’

And here you are, lost in the clouds.

As I descend, to see to the shattering of old promises.

With this, the illusion dissipated.

Grombrindal watched the light fade, then turned and began to run. There was still honest work to be done tonight, in aid of those who struggled for their lives aboard the stricken battleship. It was then that he sensed something amiss. Something in the aether. Another complication. He turned to see a shadow in the clouds, growing larger by the moment.

At the shadow’s heart, he saw a pinprick of light. In the aether, he heard the rumble of discordant endrins. A dark-hulled ironclad punched through the gathering gloom at a perilous rate, its swivel-guns angled forward, spitting fire that whipped over the white-bearded stranger to strafe the body of the descending Arachnarok. Its livery was not that of Barak-Thryng.

At least, not any more.

It sped towards them on an attack trajectory.

No…

On a collision course.

At ramming speed.

CHAPTER 3

A TIME FOR BOLDNESS

Staggering away from the wreckage of the Frorlenhand, Margew Venki emerged into a landscape made unreal by war. Calamities piled atop one another. Flanked on both sides by bright-burning walls of flame that formed where rivers of leaking fuel converged, he sought cover in a section of blasted pipework exposed by the avenging bombs of the fleet. Yet this was no sanctuary. Immediately his senses caught the edge of fungal musk, some residual miasma left in the wake of the Moonclan grots he had unwittingly ferried here. The smell was utterly repellent to him now, made worse by all of the associations it carried. Shame, desperation, death.

I brought about all this? Margew thought. It was almost too much to bear.

After a moment he forced himself back onto his feet. He stumbled a distance through a blasted gully of twisted metal, still carrying half of the Frorlenhand’s wheel, his mauled arm hanging limp and tender at his side. He saw himself reflected in the bent and broken dockyards. He and Azrilazi were twins in misfortune, and what hope could possibly remain for either of them?

He braved a slanting pile of debris, testing its integrity with a tap of his boot before making the short climb. It wasn’t enough to raise him above the devastation, but it afforded him a view of the high inner walls of Barak-Thryng. Aethershot poured upwards in vast volleys from the sky-city’s defensive batteries and towering windfasts, streaks of light tearing rents in the enclosing gloom. Barrages of missiles rose more slowly, trailing white smoke as they spiralled into the upper air. Their detonations illuminated the undersides of dark clouds, struck through with bolts of scarlet lightning, and Margew saw teeming shapes descending – flashes of silver accompanied by tendrils of blue and green flame.

Sky-vessels whipped by overhead, amassing above the other dockyards, an emergency muster coordinated with all the haste and efficacy that the Code demanded.

The city was under siege. Soon, the battle for Barak-Thryng would begin.

But not in Azrilazi. Not for Margew Venki. He was alone, he supposed, in this place already lost to the enemy. The flames were drawing closer. Despair gripped him.

But he didn’t want to burn.

He forced his gaze downward and searched the haze for hope.

Danger and darkness danced before him, and then, as he turned, sudden eye contact shocked the breath from his lungs. There was a face in the fire. A brazen effigy of Grimnir stared him down in wordless challenge. It had fallen some distance, it appeared, and now lay half-embedded in a crumpled section of dockyard. The back of its head was partly occluded, but Margew caught a glint of well-polished steel and understood that he was looking at not one statue, but two. It was the custom of Barak-Thryng to always depict the gods together.

Behind Grimnir rose the scowling visage of the Maker, Grungni, his bright eyes set starward. Here was something holy. More to the point, something hollow. It must have been part of a ship’s prow once. Now, it could be a shelter.

Margew took a deep breath, shielded his face, and raced into the flames.

Skritbag ducked instinctively as the oncoming vessel strafed the battleship’s upper section. He shrieked to let the fear out. Then, he found a nice thick strand of courage to tug on.

Stunties only sent one ship to stop me! They dunno who they’re dealin’ with!

His scabrous little hands now knew their way around all the rods and gizmos. They’d been taught many delightful things in the long minutes since he found a bright new moon to follow. Light danced in his eyes. Skritbag extended a lazy nail to his temple and plucked, and what emerged from him this time was a broodling of a new sort. It was pinkish, mottled black, with legs like stiletto knives. It skittered a distance away from him and scaled the wall, seeking egress from the command deck via a hatch in the ceiling.

Skritbag plucked again, and winced. This time, it hurt. But another spider came, just as nasty as the first. And that first one… Skritbag bared his teeth with amazement as he beheld the transformation that overcame it. The spider shuddered, there was a flash–

And then it split. In two.

I can have twice as many spiders as I want! Skritbag thought, as a droning sound filled the Gromthi-a-Grund’s command deck, growing louder by the moment.

Wild-eyed Skritbag, newly sworn to fate’s service, continued to idly pluck horrors from himself as he adjusted the battleship’s trajectory. He chuckled as he did so, a harsh sound, something new:

Kha! Kha! Kha!

He’d flown up, up, up, since stealing the great ship. Seeking the moon, he thought. Seeking destiny. He still sought his destiny, but now he knew that destiny meant flying in a different direction.

Down, down, down!

Rhyngrim thought by now that she must have exhausted the battleship’s stock of spiders. For each she slew, two or three or four took its place, or so it seemed. The ship rolled and tossed her about, and she made war all the while. She sustained scratches, now and then – nothing serious, but she bled even so, and each was enough to sap a little bit of her strength. Sometimes it’d take two whacks rather than one to fell one of the bigger monsters, and this would frustrate her enough to encourage a change of approach. She sought a way forward, to the heart of the foe, to the one whose slaying would mean victory, respite, celebration, payment.

Yet here was a foe without a heart, to be fought in tunnels without end. There was no light save her own fire, no sound but her own exertions and those of the stricken vessel in which she fought.

Must’ve delved the whole damned ship by now, Rhyngrim thought. But she couldn’t be so sure. As the vessel climbed, pitched and dived, she fought sometimes on the walls, sometimes on the floor, sometimes on the ceiling. Forward had lost its meaning. It didn’t occur to her to lose hope, however. Enemies died all around her; that meant a certain sum of foes that would proceed no further, that would not escape to imperil those to whom she presently owed allegiance. She had no doubt that her tally of slayings surpassed anybody else aboard. How could it be otherwise? A runedaughter’s markings speak of countless slayings done, and swear her to countless slayings yet to come.

Not only could she do this forever, she would.

But to what end?

She was distracted from this sobering thought by the next monster to cross her path, which glittered iridescent in the darkness of the hold, radiant with inner light. She splattered it, and it burst into flames, and these flames had an acid touch that even she could feel. She spat on its corpse, then leaped over it and away. The ship banked, and she crashed into a wall, then turned on her heel to behold more glittering terrors rushing her down.

There was a crystalline quality to their little bodies, and they glimmered like a deep-cavern ore vein, ripe for the hammer and chisel. There was a special danger to them, she sensed. And they streamed towards her, eager for the kill.

That’s reason enough, Rhyngrim thought as she brought her pick down, shaking the whole ship with the impact.

The thump-thump-thump of her mask against the battleship’s decking returned Teffi Ginstock to her senses. Her chest felt tight, and tightness intermingled with chill where the monster’s mandibles had punctured her suit. But she wasn’t dead. For a moment she’d really thought that she might be. Then she remembered the inbound ironclad, the barrage of strafing fire…

The monstrous spider must have dropped her after that. She wheezed as she skidded to a halt, lying on her back. Tentatively raising her mask, she gasped cold air. Chaos resonated in the aether all around her – the din of desperate combat, shouts of alarm, animus and desperation, the ceaseless drone of endrins, and screeching, endless screeching, growing louder.

A hand was proffered to her, and by instinct she took it. The grip was firm, anchoring. Her heart slowed to a manageable rate.

‘Artycle Three, Point Two, was it?’ the whitebeard asked her, with warmth that belied the dire situation they found themselves in. ‘Dare say you might consider a loophole or two tonight, Teffi Ginstock.’ He stared into her. ‘Lives over ships. We’ll start with that, eh?’

He reached up and unclasped his crimson cloak, drew the garment around her, and pinned it at the front. It hung unevenly over her environment suit, but immediately she felt better for it.

‘Thank you,’ Teffi said. The whitebeard smiled.

‘There are older, simpler codes to follow, young one,’ he replied. He adjusted the fit of the cloak on her. As his fingers brushed across it, his touch revealed a dense lattice of runes woven with improbable precision and grace. He considered them for a moment, then looked at her.

‘I… I can’t read those,’ she began.

‘Attend to the needs of the young, it says,’ he answered, hefting his battleaxe. He paused for a moment, then turned away from her.

‘Also, quite a bit about not knowingly serving spoiled ale,’ he added, as if this were a matter of concern to them now.

‘I’ll let my father know,’ Teffi replied, slowly.

Noise and tumult washed over her once again. The Gromthi-a-Grund was beginning to pitch downward, but its distribution of weight demanded that this manoeuvre be more of a flat-bottomed fall than a nose-dive. As such, the surface of the deck was, for once, relatively even. She heard running, the irregular drumbeat of stumbling feet, and then she looked back and suddenly found herself in the arms of her father.

‘My girl!’ Nytten said, gripping her shoulders. His eyes went to the cloak, and he hesitated. For a mad moment Teffi feared that she saw censure in his eyes, that he’d ask her to give the garment back. But the look he gave her next was urgent.

‘Teffi, it’s not the fleet, it’s–’

The other survivors had rushed forward with him: Brenk’s arkanauts, who between them shepherded the defenders of Azrilazi back into the company of the white-bearded stranger. They saw a safety in him that the ship’s railing could no longer offer. As they jostled to form up at the stranger’s sides, Teffi and Nytten found themselves pulled in different directions.

He’d wanted to tell her something. He often seemed to want to tell her something, she observed. The cloak’s warmth soaked into her. She closed her eyes, and steadied herself in darkness. For the moment, the flickering light she beheld was that of a hearthside, foreign but deeply familiar.

Then she opened her eyes to an alien reality. The stricken battleship, falling. The massive Arachnarok, its wounds still burning, hissing, readying its next strike. Bright terrors that emerged from cracks in the decking and bled through every open vent and hatch, propelled forth from some force within the ship.

‘To arms!’ bellowed the white-bearded stranger, his own weapon held high. ‘Hold your ground!’

There was shouting, then, and belligerence. She snapped her mask down, fast. Then her father found her once again, in the midst of the melee.

‘Teffi, brace!’ he tried to tell her. Then, louder, ‘Everyone, brace! It’s her.’ Then, to all who could hear him, ‘We’re being boarded!’

It suited them to lead as a pair, in perilous moments such as this, though neither of them truly knew when the practice had started, and certainly neither had formally agreed to it. Yet years made habits of the strangest things, and colleagues of the strangest folk.

The Drakkul’s prow ram was long and sharp, of Admiral Sjarsdottir’s own design. It was built to skewer larger ships, to force a confrontation at close quarters without risking damage to the ironclad itself. It could shear away or be wrenched free of its mounting without excessive loss, and was, as such, a far more pragmatic forward mounting than the ancestor figureheads typical of Kharadron vessels. Yet opportunities to use the ram were few and far between, and therefore the last few moments before the renegade ironclad collided with the vast hull of the Gromthi-a-Grund held a note of uncertainty. Shima Sjarsdottir’s iconoclastic ingenuity was being put to the test once more. None aboard could avoid the question:

Will this work?

Nauré Ardellain, navigator and mercenary Bladelord, knew that it would. More to the point, she had enough faith in her abilities to know that she would be fine.

Larn, the exile now sometimes called Grunslayer, knew that it would work, too. He tended to survive these sorts of things, one way or another – moments of foolish daring and red-hot danger that rekindled the fire in the warrior who had been Rat-Tail.

Ardellain held her balance atop the boarding ram until the gap between the two ships became infinitesimally small – until the final unmapped moment before collision, where time hangs suspended and fate casts its runes into the air. Then, and only then, did she leap, letting the Drakkul’s momentum carry her forward over the railing of the battleship’s upper deck, sword held high and horizontal, trailing the radiance of Hysh behind her as she went.

Larn could attempt no such manoeuvre, but he could put on a burst of speed when he needed to, and being one-armed, he’d already had to choose between axe and tether-line. This was no sort of choice at all. He began to sprint as the collision became inevitable, half-clad, black beard already matted with exertion, his weapon low but ready.

The Drakkul’s ram broke through the hull of the Gromthi-a-Grund at speed, at a pursuing angle, piercing the ship just below the upper deck, where vital systems – and more importantly, volatile ammunition stores – were unlikely to be. The entire ship reverberated with the impact, then rose up beneath his feet, and he was thrown forward like a projectile cast from an imprecise catapult. Larn roared as he rose into the air, ready to crash down into the enemy.

He gained greater altitude than Ardellain did, and accelerated faster, too. She alighted upon an empty section of deck and sprinted forward, light-footed. He soared high, bellowing, set to overtake her. From here, he could take in the nature of the doom that had befallen the ship. Daemon-touched crawlers streamed from dark places to assault the pocket of duardin resistance that had formed in the shadow of the Gromthi-a-Grund’s aft superstructure. The big one – the Arachnarok that had been visible even at great range – crept downward, choosing its place and moment to join the fray. Larn’s angle was off, else he’d happily have collided with it.

Yet even the great monster could not hold his attention long, for there at the fore of the survivor’s throng, glittering in his mail, was Rigo. Grombrindal. A friend, once. An intercessor who had altered the course of Larn’s life. All their lives. Now, at last, they had found him.

He caught those grey eyes even at a distance, saw concern beneath a furrowed brow. The look on Grombrindal’s face was not one of approval, but it was familiar.

What are you doing, lad? the look said. Where are you going?

It was then that Larn Grunslayer realised that he was very likely going to overshoot the deck.

A shadow of agitation on the edge of pain blossomed in the stump of his right shoulder. He grimaced. The scars there darkened to deep green at the wound’s extremity, forming an afterimage of the spell that had once saved his life. Then, those green scars blossomed, and sorcery fizzled against his resistant duardin frame. From one second to the next, the eruptions of spring gave way to the heat of summer, then the numbing hearth-warmth of autumn. Next came winter, and the chill of packed earth.

The hardness of cold stone spread from his shoulder to his neck, then his chest, then down his legs.

Growing heavier by the moment, he turned to stone, and fell.

‘Don’t overdo it! I need you sensible.’

Myrddi had already unsnapped her own tether-line, and now she busied herself with his. Sivarn blinked away his greensight and saw that his right arm was rigidly outstretched, towards the place where Larn had been. His fingers didn’t want to move.

‘Did it work?’ he asked.

‘Aye, love, yes, it worked,’ Myrddi snapped. ‘You dropped him right through the hull. P’raps all the way out the other side, if we’re lucky. Come on. There’s danger.’

She beckoned him to follow and ran to join the rest of the crew, mallet in hand. The Drakkul’s complement of arkanauts made haste to the prow and tossed grapples over the battleship’s railing. The first boarders were already on their way up the lines. Above their heads, sweeping bands of radiance cut through the night and cast the edge of the Gromthi-a-Grund into stark relief. The aelf was about her business, having needed none of Sivarn’s help at all.

He tested his fingers again. The spell had turned his extremities stony grey. His connection to the Realm of Life was a sympathetic bond, he had come to understand. This hadn’t been clear to him in Ghyran, where such power was everywhere. He had now felt that power inflected by the influence of other realms, other magics. In Chamon, life was a form of galvanism – the gift of lodestones and deep metals, things alien to a gardener. Shyish had been just as strange to him, however, as had Ghur, in its way. Yet what this strangeness had revealed was that there was a spark of divine life in all folk – something he could cling to when all other commonalities faded. He’d learned that this was a conduit of power he could draw on, even as he expended the very last of his favour with the Everqueen.

This was the power he’d used to change Larn’s course, and so his own body had started to turn to stone, too. Because of his sympathy. His soft heart, Myrddi called it. Perhaps he could explain to her the irony.

‘Sivarn! Come on,’ Myrddi said, looking back at him.

‘Yes, right,’ he replied. ‘Just…’

He closed his eyes for a moment and concentrated on the feeling in his fingertips. Doing as Ardellain had taught him, he unbound the spell that lingered there. He felt warmth return to him, and trusted that somewhere the same would be true for Larn Grunslayer.

‘All right, I’m ready,’ he said, loping forwards. ‘Let’s go.’

‘Hold one squad back!’ Shima Sjarsdottir bellowed. ‘Form a defensive line at midships. We’re up against the unnatural once again, dearies. Something new! There’s no protocol for skybound Spiderfang, and I’m not losing the ship to a grot. Let’s leave that particular humiliation for the elders of Barak-Thryng, shall we?’

She tested the release on her twinned aetherpistols as she peered through her lenses at the battle for the Gromthi-a-Grund. Both ships were descending now, at pace. Falling, more accurately.

‘Maintain as much vertical thrust as we can without shearing the prow,’ she said, more softly, to the pilot at her side. Renke nodded affirmatively. ‘See if we can’t arrest this fall by a shade. But do shear the prow if it comes to it, understand?’

‘Aye,’ Renke responded. ‘I’ll see her clear, admiral, one way or another.’

‘Good.’

Retaining Renke’s service had been a surprise, but Shima Sjarsdottir was glad of it now. The young pilot had guts, and a quiet wit. Neither had been overtly apparent when first she came aboard, but time had revealed much. Time, and strife also. And him. He had catalysed something aboard the Drakkul, her clever stowaway, in the short span of his visit. Many of those who had been aboard the ship that night in Shyish were still with her, as Renke was – bonded to the Drakkul and to one another by the memory of their encounter with a figure out of legend. Bonded to her, too, despite her lack of love for such connections.

And despite their attempt at mutiny. Or hers. It depended on who you asked.

Madness reigned aboard the Gromthi-a-Grund.

So this is the manner of my homecoming, Shima thought. Could be worse. She liked the madness of it, the chaos. Such things held her aloft. They kept her free of the grasping tendrils of fate and duty. Free from the elders of Barak-Thryng.

Yet now she was falling steadily back towards the city of her birth. The city, indeed, of a decent span of her adulthood. The city that had called her Admiral Sjarsdottir. She’d stolen that title along with the Drakkul.

Good years, since then. Long, strange years, before and since her encounter with the white-bearded stranger. She was an old woman now, there was no denying it. She was an elder of Barak-Thryng.

She sighed, and patted Renke on the shoulder.

‘I’ll be in the hold,’ she said. ‘But I won’t be long.’

Renke’s head tilted, but if she had questions for her admiral, she did not voice them. Shima backed away from the wheel, then descended into the darkness of the Drakkul’s interior via the hatch at midships. She moved at pace along an upper passageway before reaching the controls for the vessel’s forward storage bays. These had been cannon-mounts once, long since stripped and replaced with extra stowage. They were designed to open inwards, to afford for the loading of ammunition, and outwards, to deploy the weapons themselves. She knocked on the inner hatch once, hard, then pulled the lever that opened the outer door.

‘Let’s have just a little bit more madness, shall we?’ Shima said. ‘Before we all must come to our senses.’

Grombrindal knew that there was no particular knack to fighting the servants of a Lord of Change. No trick. Tricks were traps, when one warred with a foe who fed on such things. Simple things might keep you alive: a good weight of gromril, a disciplined battle line, a high wall. By his estimation he had one and a half of these.

He brought his axe to bear against a tide of spider-horrors, splitting them against its edge. He stamped down on the dancing flames that burst from their bodies, denying that which sought ingress in the aftermath of their demise.

It wasn’t the way of mortals to stay sated with simple things. Gods neither, for that matter. And it was in this manner that daemons inevitably found new footholds in reality. If one was lucky, they’d turn against themselves before their designs could come to fruition, feeding on their own cleverness, the excessive complexity of their own schemes. If one was unlucky, this would happen afterwards, when the toll of the lost was too great to consider the foe’s self-immolation any sort of victory.

Brave, frightened mortals fought at his side even so. He felt the precious weight of their lives all around him. The bonds they formed tonight should have been the making of them – another small mending in the tattered tapestry of the duardin. Sometimes you had to boot a few grobi off a mountainside to know who you were, and this was the truth he had hoped to bring to the single-minded daughter of Sigyorn, to the Ginstocks, to duty-weary Brenk, to all those who had found themselves adrift in that lonely corner of the great city.

It was his purpose and his promise to give these gifts, to secure the lives of those who received them, and leave. Above all else he remained a prospector, a wanderer who saw to the needs of his peoples’ future.

Yet here he was, still in his battle-raiment, still fighting. The present moment had distended to swallow him, growing stranger and stranger and resisting finality.

As if to underscore the point, the next spider to cross his path split in two before the edge of his weapon could reach it. He missed, which was unusual enough, and then the divided creatures sped past him, seeking the wounded ones that sheltered deeper in their formation. He turned to see Spotter-Sergeant Brenk bring the butt of his carbine down on the back of one with tireless force, and the other was hacked to pieces by Maegard, the wounded Fyreslayer. Yet even this small breach was enough to disturb the discipline of their battle line, creating more points of ingress for the daemon to exploit.

‘Hold!’ he bellowed, breathing the fire of the ancient Khazalid back into their chests. And they held, a little while longer. But in doing so, the battle continued; the spider-horrors split and split again, and the suspended moment of peril in which they dwelt grew big enough to swallow them all.

He couldn’t leave them. But a timeless wisdom told him that there would be no ending for them unless he did.

Aethershot swept the deck as a new cohort of arkanauts surmounted the rail. Sjarsdottir’s pirates. They followed in Nauré Ardellain’s wake, blowing holes in the tide of horrors. The Eventide Razor followed her blade-dance where it led her, guided by symmetries that only she perceived. He liked her. She’d taken an honest swing at him once, which was generally the best way for an aelf to earn his respect. She was at her apex, as a scion of Hysh – living in the bright ascendancy of her powers, fully indulgent of the principles to which she held. She wouldn’t understand that this was her peak, of course. Aelves never did.

But that was a matter for later. This was now. In this moment, Nauré Ardellain was a silver-edged scourge that cleared the way for Sjarsdottir’s crew to race to their aid.

But why is she here? His part in her life had been played; her destiny was her own.

The newcomers fanned out and widened their field of fire, aiming wide of the other duardin. A stout figure in warm leathers barrelled through the middle of them, mallet swinging, face flushed with belligerence. Myrddi Wutten was running right for him, but she refused to look at him, instead giving her full attention to the foes in her path.

She’s angry, he observed. This wasn’t her idea.

Behind Myrddi emerged Sivarn Trell, still wearing the same too-large overcoat he’d been wearing in the shadow of Karak Thorga. The woods-mage seemed utterly out of place among the Kharadron, but unlike his partner he searched for Grombrindal in the crowd, and found him. There was surprising steel in Sivarn Trell’s eyes.

Ah. The idea was his.

CHAPTER 4

IN GOOD COMPANY

Beneath the twinned effigy of the Warrior and the Maker, the sigil of his city, Margew Venki found a pocket of cool air, and breathed. Sustained peril had left his heart racing, but peril couldn’t last forever, could it? He clutched the Frorlenhand’s broken wheel to his chest. He’d found shelter in a part of the dockyards too dangerous to be of much interest to those who made war in the city beyond. Here, in the shadow of the Ancestor Gods, he might be safe.

Unless enemies came.

Or the fires caught a fresh fuel line, and cooked him where he sat.

Or the docks themselves gave way, either through structural failure or a Code-mandated scuttling, and he was sent hurtling down to be dashed against the ground below.

These were not thoughts that put the mind at ease, and they did not let him rest. Seeking respite, he turned his attention to the effigy itself. Where had it come from? He’d seen a freestanding post outside which might once have been part of the structure of a building. Perhaps a dockmaster’s office. That’d make sense of it. He’d always been wary of such places, for bureaucracy was the thing he had liked least about a hauler pilot’s life. But now the memory of it came with a swell of sadness. He wouldn’t mind receiving a lecture about shareholders’ rights, if it meant an opportunity to stop thinking about death.

I’ll be getting a lecture from whoever finds me, he thought. If they glean the truth of what I’ve done.

They wouldn’t, he was sure, unless he told them himself. Should he? He wanted help, and help meant acceptance, and acceptance should mean honesty. But he had a choice, in the end, about how much he’d say if he was found. He could simply say he’d crashed here amidst all the chaos. That was true, wasn’t it? He didn’t have to say more than that.

Pain shot through his broken arm, and by instinct, he twisted away from it. The broken wheel bound to his other wrist clattered into view, and there upon it were letters precision-etched upon steel plate:

E N H A N D

Alone in his temporary shelter, Margew Venki huffed. There was no undoing the bindings. There would be no getting away from it, would there?

Larn came to his senses already fighting, chopping away fiercely with his runic axe to carve a path through the creatures that piled atop him as he crashed senseless through the Gromthi-a-Grund’s decking and down into darkness. Instinct called him back onto his feet, then bade him drive away his assailants in a broad circle. He’d fallen to the bottom of a cargo silo much like those aboard the Drakkul.

Up. He had to get back up. If he was down here, then his companions fought alone. His place was with them. Ahead of them, ideally, in the thick of the foe. He could do little for them down here.

He’d learned something of the logic of a Kharadron vessel in his years aboard the Drakkul. Ignore the technological ingenuity of the skybound duardin for a moment, and similarities to his own folk became apparent. These vessels could fly, but they were still fortresses. Their builders favoured heavy, defensible hatches that drew the eye, and cleverly formed side passages that allowed their own kind to move swiftly from one strongpoint to another. The deep temples of the Zharrgrim worked the same way, not that the fire-priests would ever accept the comparison.

So he ignored the horde that pressed towards him down the widest part of the cargo silo, and leaped instead for the bottom rungs of a ladder that led to an open hatch on the wall above.

It took discipline to resist the killing urge, but he pressed on into darkness. Fire burned in the rune-scars around his fist, and spread from there to the markings upon his blade. He’d made his peace with Grimnir – or at least, he’d made the sort of peace that is possible with a god of warriors.

He slew. He slew for what he felt were the right reasons. He slew the things his kin could not.

And the Warrior, wherever he was, permitted him a little fire, from time to time.

He sprinted the length of a narrow accessway, scattering horrors before him. Then he turned into a thick nest of the things. They were boiling away from him already, which to his mind meant they sought a different foe. Ardellain, perhaps.

Or the whitebeard.

Larn charged into the thick of them, axe ablaze, only to find himself in the path of a cutting edge that carved back through the horde towards him. He brought his axe down to repel the blade before it scalped him. Fyresteel met fyresteel, and the flame kindled by the impact incinerated a host of horrors and singed his beard. Instinct bade him duck low as the piercing edge of a war-pick came for him again, then he brought his axe up, striking the weapon upon its furnace, driving his assailant back.

She roared at him. He roared at her. Flames burned in her eyes, caught in the tips of her towering crest of red hair, and gleamed in the runes that marked every inch of her muscular frame. If he retained a spark of the Warrior god, then she tended an inferno.

‘What manner of thing are you?’ she growled, driving his axe downwards and throwing an elbow towards his temple.

‘I’m no foe,’ he replied, weaving and punching towards her with the hilt of his axe. She swung for him again and he stepped past her, her war-pick cutting down through the space where his right arm had been.

She spat in frustration, then stumbled as the ship moved beneath her feet.

‘You runeless?’ the Fyreslayer said with derision. There was a blank intensity in her eyes, and through the reek of oil and ichor Larn caught the disarmingly familiar smell of strong ale.

‘Where’s your arm?’ she continued.

‘I’m with Rigo,’ he ventured.

‘Who?’

‘Grombrindal.’

She gave no response to this but swung again for his head, hard, forcing him to duck.

‘Whitebeard – above, on the deck,’ he said. The Fyreslayer slowed a moment; her next attempt on his life had a cursory, testing quality.

‘That’s where they’re fighting,’ he said. ‘That’s where I’m going. To help them.’

She blinked. ‘Plenty of foes here.’

‘Only creepers in these tunnels. Big one’s above.’

‘Big one?’

Larn held her gaze and nodded. ‘I swear it, runedaughter.’

Her belligerence slowed for a moment. She lowered her weapon.

‘You know the way?’

‘I can find it. Follow me.’

Another cacophony of shrieks reached them through the cavernous tunnels of the ship. Larn saw the runedaughter’s attention drawn away by the promise of more slaying to be done.

‘Follow me,’ he repeated.

Then above the din he heard a new clamour – the clash of metal upon metal, followed by a rising, bestial wail. His stomach sank, and he gestured to the Fyreslayer with fresh urgency, drawing her away.

‘We have to go,’ he said. ‘Now.’

Ardellain unmade the spark of sorcery in the body of each warped beast she struck. There was daemonfire in them, change magic. They were lower-order creatures of Ruin, little more than motes of cunning and malice, and their arachnid forms spoke to the rudimentary nature of the mind that had formed them. But the presence of change daemons, in particular, spoke to more fundamental powers at work. Her aetheric sensitivities left her in no doubt that they stood at the precipice of a far more dangerous incursion. That these were the circumstances in which they re-encountered the white-bearded stranger was no doubt significant. It was a riddle to unravel, but there were other unravellings to attend to in the meantime.

With one hand outstretched and the other gripping her silver blade, she wove a sigil into the deck of the Gromthi-a-Grund. Her path took her first to the fore of the ship, vaulting through the tide of horrors, threading her limbs through the crush of their searching claws and mandibles. She struck with such fluidity that there was no meaningful difference between motion and violence.

When she reached the fore of the ship, she turned and proceeded back along the far side. Thus were two sides of a triangle formed; she lunged inward, towards the centre of the deck, completing it. Then she spun on her heel and drove the tip of her blade through the back of one of the larger monstrosities as it emerged from the ship’s interior, seizing the magic within it. She whipped her sword free, then brought the flat of it down on the deck, hard. So was the sigil seared into reality – a runemark of Hysh, lightcaller, daemon’s bane.

There was a flash, and a significant part of the horde simply ceased to exist – in that reality, at least.

Ardellain paused to take in the state of the others. Shima’s crew had already begun to reinforce the duardin on the deck, those that surrounded Grombrindal. There were still foes for them to fight, but these were ordinary spiders, albeit large ones, of little–

A half-naked duardin flung itself free of the open hatch in front of her, all steam and sweat and steel. Larn? she thought. No.

Then another one, much the same.

Larn.

For a moment she weighed the likelihood that he might have duplicated himself somehow, been split by change magic or Trell’s inelegant craft.

‘Nauré!’ he yelled at her, as his counterpart charged away towards the throng. ‘Where’s the big one?’

With a chittering shriek, the massive Arachnarok threw itself down to the deck from the shadows of the Gromthi-a-Grund’s upper midsection, scattering spiders and duardin alike. Those bold enough to recover their nerves quickly opened fire on the beast as they retreated; others huddled low, gripped their weapons, and made an assessment of their chances. It had been a long, dangerous, frightening night since they’d found themselves in the company of the white-bearded stranger in a quiet corner of Barak-Thryng.

He stood ahead of them now in his glittering mail, unmoved by the coming of Skritbag’s Empress.

The thought crossed more than one mind: Perhaps he’ll slay the beast single-handed.

Whether or not he could was immaterial; he didn’t. First one figure, then another, pressed forward to stand at his side. They were an unlikely band:

The young endrinrigger in her borrowed cloak, ichor up to her elbows.

The woods-mage and his outlander companion, utterly out of place.

The spotter-sergeant, the tavern-keeper.

The one-armed exile. The burning daughter of Sigyorn.

The aelf.

One by one, each took their place in the company of the white-bearded stranger.

Larn Grunslayer rushed ahead of Grombrindal on one side, Nauré Ardellain on the other. It suited them to lead as a pair, but the Fyreslayer Rhyngrim was only a few paces behind. They lashed out at the Arachnarok with burning brands and god-touched weapons – drove it back, at first, then forward, towards the others. Aethershot raked its body and drove it one way, where it lashed out at Myrddi Wutten and received a heavy blow in rebuke. Viridian light flared from the fingertips of the woods-mage, and he wove a tangling snare at the beast’s feet. Tendrils of searching verdancy warred with the unnatural sorceries at work in the Arachnarok’s body.

Skritbag’s Empress hissed and withdrew, rising up on its four hind legs. Its remaining limbs were colossal weapons, sharp as spears. Foremost and deadliest of these was a horrendously mutated forelimb – one leg that branched into two at the femur, terminating in a pair of hooked talons. The Arachnarok bounded forward and attempted to bring this raking weapon down on top of the duardin. With a bellow, Grombrindal took a heavy step forward, battering the limb aside with a swift strike from the hilt of his battleaxe. The impact reverberated through the deck of the ship. He intervened twice more in such a manner, denying the monster’s search for easy prey. He cared not for its size, nor the tally of duardin lives it might have taken prior to this point. It would take no more from his people.

The duardin scattered to the sound of shrieking, staccato laughter, emanating from somewhere above them, within the command deck.

Kha-kha-kha-kha-kha!

The Arachnarok then tried to drive one of its hind legs down upon Teffi Ginstock, but she rolled aside. The strike opened a window of opportunity for Larn Grunslayer, who embedded his axe in the creature’s extended limb. The spider hissed, and still, from above, came that laughter:

Kha-kha-kh–

The eerie sound ceased abruptly. Ardellain struck for the creature in tandem with Rhyngrim, as Brenk’s arkanauts fanned out to circle its flanks, driving it forward towards the whitebeard, who interposed himself between the great spider’s aggressions and the vulnerable folk at his back.

He’d held his ground, fighting defensively. Now, he struck with lethal intent. His edge of gromril came around in a scything arc and took the Arachnarok’s mutated foreleg in a single sweep. Foulness gouted towards him, but he stepped aside. Then he drew a lungful of breath and roared, and swung his axe in a one-handed uppercut that caught the monster below its mandibled jaw. It struggled to free itself as the others waylaid it.

An unnatural howling shriek rang out from the Gromthi-a-Grund’s command deck. The sound was inhuman, but the rage, grief and fear in it were unmistakable.

Grombrindal let the Arachnarok struggle. The sorcerous light in its eyes began to fade – but encroaching death did not diminish its malice, nor its hunger. It struggled forward, allowing the whitebeard’s axe to slice deeper into its thorax. Its jaw distended and the razor teeth that lined its mandibles fanned wide to crunch down upon him. The whitebeard growled as he passed into the shadow of Skritbag’s Empress.

It wasn’t Larn Grunslayer or Teffi Ginstock who raced to his side then, but one of Sjarsdottir’s arkanauts. A lone figure burst through the pressing throng of survivors, who yet fought for their lives against the last of the Spiderfang horde. Interposing his body between Grombrindal and the maw of the beast, the stranger let one of the Arachnarok’s mandibles catch on his shoulder plate and thrust his carbine into the creature’s mouth. He fired until his ammunition was spent, until he had blasted a hole in the monster’s cranium from within.

And with this act, at last, Skritbag’s Empress died.

The arkanaut staggered backwards. Winded, his hand went to an old wound. Grombrindal wrenched his battleaxe free of the Arachnarok’s corpse, then steadied the one who had landed the final blow. Realising that he was being aided by the white-bearded stranger, the arkanaut started away, turned…

And knelt.

‘Enough of that, lad,’ Grombrindal said, as the others began to approach.

‘I know who you are,’ the arkanaut said.

‘Aye, so stand up. Onghas, isn’t it?’

‘You… remember?’ Onghas said, rising.

‘Pah, that you’d think my memory so short. It’s a surprise to see you, boy.’

Grombrindal kept his gaze fixed on the arkanaut. Here at least, was a simple matter.

‘You saved me once,’ Onghas said. ‘It is… meaningful, to me, that it was I who got to do this slayin’ for you.’

‘Don’t think yourself in debt to me, lad,’ Grombrindal replied. ‘It doesn’t work that way. It was twice, though, if you’re keeping tally.’

He looked about at the rest of the arkanaut’s crewmates, whose motivations would no doubt be more complex.

‘In any case, this is a long way to come to repay something that warrants no repayment.’

Onghas lowered his gaze.

‘If I can ask,’ he began. He looked uneasy for a moment. ‘Will you… remember me, ancestor? Will you hold to my memory, for doing this thing?’

Grombrindal laughed warmly. ‘Beardling, I remember all of you. I cannot help but remember all of you.’

He stepped back, and took in the sight of the ragged lot of them.

‘So out with it, then – why are you here?’

Sivarn Trell took a step forward, but before he could speak, there was another rising shriek from the command deck. This time, the sound was cut off abruptly. Larn looked to him urgently.

‘He was belowdecks, Trell,’ the exile said, breathless. ‘Heard him coming. He’ll already be–’

‘Hunting,’ Ardellain interjected, already moving towards the hatch that led to the command deck.

She tried the handle, and found it unmoving. She tested the tip of her silver sword against the hinge, then thought better of it.

‘Larn,’ she said.

The exile’s eyes lingered on Grombrindal for a moment, and then he was away, at the aelf’s side, straining against the door. Teffi Ginstock chased him with the urgency of a duardin who knows when a simple thing is about to be done badly. The flurry of activity at the door drew the eyes of the throng. There was jostling, a flash of fire, and the door swung free.

Heads turned, but the whitebeard was already gone.

Skritbag screeched and scrabbled, but there was no escaping the gaunt terror that had come for him. One moment, he had been alone, destiny-bound, triumphant. Then, he had heard a shriek – a terrible sound – and it had stolen his new laughter from him. A pale, muscular shape tore its way through a web-snagged hatchway to reach him. The monster was no more concerned with Skritbag’s cleverness than a cave-crawler is, and it tore through all of his wardings and webbings, sorcerous and sticky though they might be, as if they were not there.

Skritbag had done much with cleverness alone. He’d flown high and sown terror among the stunties without so much as drawing his knife. He drew it now. The monster was armed with a bent and rusty spear, which it jabbed towards him, slicing his shoulder. Skritbag shrieked and batted away the weapon with his own blade, then rushed forward, within the weapon’s reach, and went for his enemy’s eyes.

Blind it and run! Skritbag thought. Fear needled its way across his brain.

His knife struck wide, slicing deep into the creature’s pallid cheek, releasing a spray of dark blood that spattered them both.

Yes! Another quick shankin’, then–

The creature was fast, and unrelenting. It ducked Skritbag’s second strike, then raked its own taloned claw across his neck. Before Skritbag could register the reality of this fatal blow, it had already drawn its spear back, then punched it forward through his guts. The monster lifted him up, then smashed him against the floor once, then twice. Finally it squatted down, reached out with both sets of claws, and began to rip Skritbag’s head free from his body.

There was time left for one last thought, as the end came. But the final idea to cross Skritbag’s mind wasn’t his, for the monster had given Skritbag an idea of its own.

As Skritbag died, he looked up and saw a humie warrior. A knight, kneeling in the shadow of a white-bearded king.

And then Skritbag saw nothing at all.

His hunt was at an end. Sitting, he took his rest, and ate. Divine sight had guided him to the foul sorcerer through thicket, tunnel and beast. He had climbed the tower, challenged his foe, and prevailed. He’d earned a new scar for his troubles. But now, he savoured the moment of victory.

The Summerking calls you home, child, said his blood.

My king is the High King of the Mountain, replied his heart, as it pumped that same dissembling blood around his body. He felt a cold shadow fall over him.

My home is the Aranthine Hall.

CHAPTER 5

THE PROMISE

Huddled within his shelter, Margew Venki could not sleep, but he allowed himself to dream. To remember. His many fears – all of the myriad ways his life could end, moments from now or further off – receded, he found, if he set his mind squarely on the past. Provided that past didn’t catch up with him, in any case.

He thought about Trade-Captain Drikksen and the rest of the crew of the Frorlenhand. They’d been a daring lot, hadn’t they? Not the loftiest, nor the most profitable. Nor, indeed, the most professional. But they’d made good business out of some strange berths. What was a smuggler’s run to the Dyrwood for a crew who’d braved the storms over the Strait of Fangs, or tracked down missing metaliths in the Grymmpeaks?

It’d been the end, he supposed. For them. For his part, well… It had brought him home.

Outside, he heard distant cannon fire, and the swell of endrins.

He imagined arkanauts in their hundreds, kin of the Grundcorps, manning the walls, up there upon the cloudscrapers, and fulfilling their duties aboard innumerable fighting vessels.

He’d been an arkanaut once, before he received his pilot’s commission and chose to pursue a hauler’s path. Who had his sergeant been? The name escaped him, now. Utterly unforgiving, they were. And humourless.

Bodren. That was the name. Bodren.

He imagined he could hear Sergeant Bodren, up there in the sky, bellowing orders. Then, as was the way of dreams, he found that those orders were being bellowed at him.

Sit up, lackwit. Heed your surroundings, or there’ll be no crew that’ll take you.

Margew’s eyes started open, and instinctively, he sat up.

Outside, he heard distant cannon fire. The swell of endrins.

And the tap of talons.

On metal.

Teffi Ginstock was the first to reach the helm. Though it had taken more strength than hers alone to get the hatch open, only she and Brenk knew where the command deck actually was. And so she led, and they followed.

They followed her red cape up a winding set of gantry stairs, hacking their way through dense patches of disgusting webbing. She proceeded as urgently as she was able, because she could feel that the ship was still in barely arrested free fall. The Gromthi-a-Grund had climbed fast, which gave them time. But not a lot of time. The ground was a fixed point, after all, and reaching it would be bad. Really bad.

And things had started falling off. That was bad, too.

The others shared her haste, but paid no heed to the state of the ship. Some other urgency drove them. Who were they? They were strange, and they’d arrived in a strange way, and though they’d shown bravery, she was not sure that she trusted them.

She got her cable-cutter stuck in an especially dense tangle of webbing and struggled to wrest it free.

‘Here,’ said a voice at her side. ‘Mind yourself.’

A duardin woman with her hair in a long braid extended the head of a long-handled wooden mallet over the place where Teffi’s cutter was stuck, then wrenched down hard. She was strong and the tangle came free. Teffi’s cable-cutter fell to the gantry, and she stooped to collect it. The stranger bent down to help her back up. Teffi looked to her, but saw that the woman’s eyes were drawn to the cape that had been draped around her shoulders.

The woman sighed. ‘How much further?’

‘Not far,’ Teffi replied.

A few minutes later they reached the door to the helm, from where the scream had come. The sound she heard now was hard to discern. It was a low voice, perhaps. She could not make out any words. She pressed down on the handle and pulled the door back, fearing that there’d be some new host of spider-horrors on the other side.

There wasn’t. What Teffi beheld there was stranger, but no less a shock to her.

She had seen the whitebeard perform miracles already, but she could not account for his presence at the helm. He stood there resolute, though more simply garbed, near the Gromthi-a-Grund’s wheel. He was unblemished, but there was gore and viscera everywhere.

And at his feet was a creature in rags. A pale monster, kneeling, holding a bent spear out towards the whitebeard, open-palmed, in a bizarre show of submission.

Teffi’s eyes went from the monster to the wheel, and the controls that flanked them.

‘First things first,’ she muttered, steeling herself. She took a step forward. But then the others were racing past her – towards the monster – their voices raised. First and most urgent of these was the human mage.

‘He’s no danger!’ the man called out, pressing forward. He was followed closely by the one-armed duardin warrior. ‘Don’t hurt him!’

Teffi shifted to allow the wizard to pass her, then began to assess the state of the ship’s controls. There was a lot wrong, and not a lot of time in which to fix it. At least, not a lot of time to fix it properly. Jhori used to admonish her for her overabundance of haste – but he wasn’t here, and the moment called for doing, not thinking. She began to adjust valves and levers into what she felt was a more optimal configuration. But as she did, she could not help but have her attention drawn towards the scene unfolding at her back.

The wizard steadied himself on the edge of a control console as he circumvented the grisly aftermath of the boy’s actions.

‘Justec,’ Sivarn said, insistently.

The ghoul’s head twitched, but its eyes were set on Grombrindal, whose expression was dark, unreadable. The panelling beneath Sivarn’s feet vibrated as the whitebeard spoke a single word.

‘How?’

‘He’s cursed, just as you said he was,’ Larn replied bluntly. ‘It’s got worse,’ he added, as if this needed to be said.

Justec the Thirty-First, last heir of House Aranthine, cowered at Grombrindal’s feet in a twisted approximation of deference. A steady stream of mumbling sounds emerged from him, but there was no sense to them.

‘No danger, so you say, Sivarn Trell,’ Grombrindal said. ‘Always a little bit too easy to lie, for you, isn’t it?’

The whitebeard drew his long-handled pipe from his belt and raised it to his lips.

‘He’s not harmed us,’ Trell insisted. Myrddi looked at him askance but said nothing.

‘For a time – after Thorga – he was fine. Good. Decent…’

‘After Thorga, you were free,’ Grombrindal retorted, letting his voice carry a bit of thunder. ‘After Thorga, your destiny was your own.’

‘His wasn’t!’ Trell shouted, with surprising force. Myrddi’s hand went up to calm him. For a moment, the air was alive with fast-fading green sparks.

‘Ours scarcely more so,’ she added. ‘We’ve spent years on the run.’

‘You were on the run already, Myrddi of the Wuttenfolk,’ said Grombrindal, pulling on his pipe.

‘Not grudgemarked by a Warden King, we weren’t.’

Then Nauré Ardellain stepped forward, and lowered her hood.

‘You will say that the fate of Justec of Aranthine was determined long ago,’ she said. ‘He told us the tale, while he still had his mind. Many times.’

‘Songs, too,’ Larn added wearily.

‘You will say that the choice he made to end the Aranthine recursion, and by extension the curse within the lost karak, amounted to facing his destiny.’

‘Don’t attempt to cheat me at runecasting, elgi,’ Grombrindal retorted. ‘That’s a game I grew tired of long ago.’

‘Even so,’ Ardellain continued. ‘You are, if not divine yourself, then god-touched. It is likely you knew what would become of Justec of Aranthine. And I disagree.’

Grombrindal glowered at her. Then his whiskers bristled in amusement, and he let out a sigh.

‘You disagree,’ he repeated. ‘Ah, of course you do.’

His posture softened, and he took a step back from the four of them. Justec crept forward incrementally, as if to follow. The motion was almost childlike.

The whitebeard looked down at the wretch at his feet, his expression once again unreadable. Then he looked up at them. ‘You’ve come to me with a grudgement, then, I take it? To be made whole?’

Trell took a step forward. ‘We’ve come because he doesn’t deserve this.’

‘It is understood that the curse of Ushoran has few remedies,’ Ardellain added.

‘Boy needs help,’ Larn said, at last.

‘All true, beardlings,’ Grombrindal said, in a voice firm enough to put an end to their rapid interjections. ‘All true. Yet you’ve found me here, tonight, as foes throw themselves at the defences of the city beneath us. As good folk die according to the whims of a daemon of fate. This is a poor night to appear before me with talk of destiny, no matter your lofty agenda or good intentions. So I ask you again, how? How is it that you have found me?’

There was silence for a moment, save for Justec’s muttering. Then Larn Grunslayer reached into the pouch at his hip and withdrew a shard of crystal, half-crushed.

‘We looked,’ he said. ‘With this.’

As Teffi Ginstock and Spotter-Sergeant Brenk wrestled with the Gromthi-a-Grund’s controls, and Rhyngrim of Sigyorn prowled the passageways beneath the command deck seeking phantom foes, the four of them, Grombrindal’s oathbreakers, told their tale.

For a while, they had been bound together by necessity. The Drakkul had saved them from the collapsing mountain, a possibility that Nauré Ardellain had only anticipated at the very last moment. That had been the whitebeard’s parting gift to them. His final cleverness had been to ensure that the renegade admiral was imprisoned within her own ship, and there, as Shima Sjarsdottir had explained to them later, he had visited her. As the Drakkul raced away from the cursed karak, set on a new course by its mutinous crew, the stowaway who called himself Rigo told her of the fate of the folk who faced death and danger in the heart of the mountain – her Ardellain among them. A deal was reached, the bolt of the brig was unlatched, and then the stranger was gone, as if he had never been there at all.

The Drakkul crossed the threshold of Karak Thorga just as the curse was lifted, and there, high on the side of the collapsing mountain, its admiral found her new crew. They outpaced the guns of the Bryngron and the ire of King Hakhard the Patient, who spat curses in their wake and ensured that word of their deeds reached far and wide – and that their actions were called treachery in the retelling. A dire grudgement was levelled against them, and then this, too, kept them together.

Shima Sjarsdottir made profitable enough use of this unfortunate turn of events. The capabilities of the Drakkul were broadened by their presence, and though there were few safe harbours for them, the realms were wide, and there were always exploits to be embarked upon. Together they could be mercenaries, smugglers, spell-hunters or thieves, or any combination of these things. They were free, for a while, the five of them, Sjarsdottir, and the rest of her crew. Until the severity of Justec’s condition made itself clear.

In the early days, the boy was a major reason that they stuck together. He was hard to dislike, and there was enough iron in him to earn the respect of Larn and Myrddi, neither of whom had much time for poetry and song. His ancestral memory held a surprising wealth of military acumen, and he could handle himself in a fight. In a slow, unremarked way, Justec the Thirty-First made himself essential to this particular ship, to this particular crew. Even Sjarsdottir saw it.

Then he began to change. He lost his appetite, yet grew stronger as his muscles began to atrophy. He lost his way as he tried to recall the poems and songs that had previously flowed so easily from him. He began to mutter to himself, and in times of danger he fought more recklessly than he had before, and with greater savagery. He became, in that time, a superlative hunter, with a supernatural sensitivity to sorcery. More than once, Justec’s ability to seek and slay behind enemy lines had proved an asset. But it was also this that confirmed Ardellain’s worst suspicions.

It was she who revealed the nature of Justec’s affliction to the group. Together, they weighed their options. For a time, they considered there to be only two: to leave Justec behind, or slay him themselves. There was little enthusiasm for either, for it was understood that these two acts were, in the end, the same. Conventional wisdom insisted that the flesh-eater curse had no cure. They were forced to consider that their companion might be dead already.

None were happy to accept this, but Sivarn Trell was most opposed. He railed against the logic that called such a fate inevitable, just as he’d once walked away from a road he felt led invariably to war. If they couldn’t help Justec, he argued, then it fell to them to find someone who could. If no mortal held the answer, then they’d have to find a god.

They each had their reasons to mistrust the gods. After all, that was why they’d been brought together. But there, in that detail, was the answer. The gods would not help them, they were sure. But he might.

Rigo. Grombrindal.

But of the whitebeard, all they heard were tales and rumours. All their searchings yielded were old chronicles – legends of a stranger who appeared as a friend to the duardin in their direst moments of need, then vanished as mysteriously as he had arrived. There was no pattern to his manifestations that they could perceive, no place they could reach that he might call home.

For a time, their search for Grombrindal was something pursued in the scarce moments of calm that life on the run afforded them. But this would not be enough. Justec eventually became insensible, then dangerous. He required careful containment. Had his transformation not made him useful in a different way, then it was unlikely that the admiral would have let him remain on the ship. Sjarsdottir seemed proud, in her particular way, of this obscene new weapon at her disposal.

Yet it had also been Sjarsdottir, in the end, who set them on the stranger’s trail. If they couldn’t hope to find Grombrindal through his past patterns, then they would need to seek him in the patterns of the future. The admiral had some familiarity, she revealed, with the glimmer-trade of far Excelsis, in the Realm of Beasts, though she herself no longer partook of the seer’s vice. The city traded in shards cut from the Spear of Mallus, a pillar of enchanted stone said to have fallen from the heavens long ago. The energy held within these fragments granted momentary glimpses of the bearer’s future.

Possible future, Ardellain countered. But nonetheless, the plan had merit. They would, all of them, need to search these visions for a future in which any of them re-encountered the stranger. To do so, they would need a supply of glimmerings.

Thus the Drakkul emerged through a sky-path above the Coast of Tusks and came to Excelsis. The city had weathered a tide of destruction, and those that survived had few scruples about who they hired to help them in the aftermath. Gradually, Shima’s crew gathered their stock of glimmerings, and began their search.

Myrddi’s visions were strange – like fireside stories, or dreams.

Sivarn’s were tense and troubling, struck through with the Everqueen’s animus.

Ardellain found little in the stones that she could not already see.

And Larn Grunslayer perceived doom’s aftermath wherever he looked. Wastelands and death.

Yet one by one, they each found him.

In Myrddi’s dreams, she found Grombrindal at the heart of a duardin caravan as it pressed through the foothills of the Krondspines, and worked with him to reunite it with the Sigmarite crusade of which it had been a part.

In Sivarn’s visions, the whitebeard walked the halls of the Conclave of Hammerhal Ghyra at a time of strife and suspicion. The air was thick with animosity, but his presence – and Sivarn’s – inspired decency, and calm.

Larn Grunslayer saw the whitebeard rally the folk of a town called Bladesmith’s Return, forging bonds with their Stormcast protectors that would see catastrophe averted. He stood at their side as Ruin descended from dark skies, and saw the darkness banished.

Together they sought these places, these people. Yet when the shadow of the Drakkul passed over the caravan in the Krondspines, it was clear that disaster had already struck. Its people had been snatched away by swamp-lurking orruks, or else slain on the spot.

In Hammerhal Ghyra, distrust and discord were everywhere, but of the white-bearded stranger, there was no sign. Eventually it grew far too dangerous for them to remain there, hunted as they were, and they were forced to move on.

The passage to Chamon was slow and difficult. They arrived in Bladesmith’s Return as night fell, and there beheld only doom’s aftermath. Larn insisted on venturing into that dead wasteland alone, even so. And at the cliff’s edge, he found a lone survivor – a Stormcast Eternal.

Who had never heard of a white-bearded stranger.

Who scarcely spoke at all, save to say:

They are coming for Barak-Thryng.

And then:

I can see the stars. The skies are clear.

‘Then she died,’ Larn explained. ‘Force of it shook the cliffside. I thought us lost, after that, but–’

‘The city was not far,’ Ardellain added. ‘I was already aware of the sorceries being brought to bear against it. We followed the Arcanites at a distance, and when the daemon revealed itself to you, your presence was revealed to me. That is how I found you.’

‘So simple as that,’ Grombrindal said, as their story concluded. He searched their eyes, but saw no guile in them.

The ship was descending more calmly now, thanks to Teffi Ginstock’s interventions. The girl was a better pilot than she let on, but not so adept at masking her agitation. She’d been listening to them, and now she was visibly tense. She muttered something to Spotter-Sergeant Brenk, and he took the wheel from her. Then she pushed through them and rushed away. She was running by the time she reached the doorway, driven to urgency by a dawning awareness.

Teffi Ginstock had realised what her father had been trying to tell her, and now she sped to find him. Grombrindal watched her go, his cape trailing behind her.

‘Young Onghas came all this way simply to repay the debt he felt he owed me,’ Grombrindal said. ‘I will tell it to you as I told it to him. Whether one seeks to return a favour, or request another, it does not work that way. It cannot. This is not a transaction.’

He ran his hand through his beard.

‘I do not say that to be unkind. I lament what has become of the boy. But this thing you have done for him, or tried to do – no good comes from such hasty delving. This thing you are attempting is best left to the gods–’

Ardellain opened her mouth, but he refused the interjection.

‘And gods should not act with impunity,’ he said. ‘There are limits, young ones. Order has rules. So must the gods.’

They had begun to descend through clouds suffused with darkness. Sparks of red lightning caught against the ship’s underside, sparking to flame in places and scorching deep, dark marks into the great battleship’s hull. The Gromthi-a-Grund shook.

‘There is the proof of it,’ Grombrindal grumbled to himself. He took a step towards the ship’s wheel and rested his hand upon it, willing the old vessel to hold its shape a little while longer. Ardellain sensed the danger they were in, too, he recognised. Her eyes were far away, her words – whatever they may have been – stolen by the unnatural forces that tore at them. Her fingers wove sigils into the air.

The Gromthi-a-Grund passed through a scarlet hell for a moment, guided by nothing more than ancient duardin mettle, and subtle aelven sorcery.

Then, there was light. Natural light – fire rising from a city in the sky.

‘Just as I say,’ Grombrindal said, at last. ‘The gods have rules. If we allowed it to be any other way, then we would already live in a realm of daemons.’

None of them had an immediate answer to this.

‘Looks bad,’ Brenk said, bleakly. ‘Not seen it this bad before.’

As a group, they beheld the unfolding siege of Barak-Thryng. War had consumed the city in the Gromthi-a-Grund’s absence. Trailing plumes of warpflame streaked down from the Cursed Skies to impact across the span of several districts. Scattered pockets of resistance were offered by squadrons of sky-vessels, and flashes of fire could be seen where the Grundcorps made their stand.

The daemon has revealed its hand, Grombrindal thought. He couldn’t be sure that those who stood before him weren’t also to be counted among Fateweaver’s playing pieces. It had not been their destiny to find him; it was something that they had forced to happen. What they had done for their friend had taken courage, yes, but it was ambitious too, and they had been willing to draw on unmapped powers in order to do it. That was so often how Ruin found ingress. It was how worlds ended.

Sivarn Trell broke the silence. He was calmer, and chose his words carefully.

‘Listen to him, Grombrindal. To Justec. Please. Really listen to him.’

The whitebeard turned and saw insistence in the gardener’s eyes, but a deep well of feeling also. He looked down to regard the gaunt, curse-broken, mumbling figure at his feet.

He considered him for a moment. He was not without sympathy for the boy. He hadn’t chosen his ancestors. Grombrindal drew on his pipe, then raised his hand, bidding Justec to stand.

‘On your feet, then, Knight of Aranthine,’ he said, as if he were truly a Thorgiri king of old. ‘Let’s have a song from you.’

The ghoul that had been Justec rose up on its hind legs, then to its full, looming height. It kept its head bowed in reverence as it did so, holding its spear loosely vertical, like a palace guard.

The sounds that spilled from it were not words, at first. Just noises, the bubbling forth of an inner madness.

Yet there was a pattern to them. A rhythm.

Grombrindal took in the shape of him, the problem of him, and he began to listen. Really listen, as Trell had put it.

He peered through the curse, and for a moment he perceived the world as the person before him did. Then, and only then, did he hear the words.

There is, Justec said.

There is no, he repeated, too fast one moment, too slow the next.

Then, at last, he spoke clearly.

There is no mortal so ill-fated that their fate cannot be reworked, said Justec of Aranthine, offering the words in prayer. This is the Maker’s promise.

‘That was all he would say, over and over, before he lost his words completely,’ Sivarn explained, his heart heavy. ‘How could we do anything else but try to find you? They are your words. It was your promise to him.’

And it ended the way it always does.

With ruin…

And promises broken.

Grombrindal gathered his resolve. Behind him, Barak-Thryng burned. Before him stood more quandaries and conundrums than he could hope to solve simply.

Fateweaver is feasting tonight, he thought.

He took in the sorry sight of those who had sought him out, and felt the fear in the hearts of those who gathered belowdecks, who had followed him seeking safety and found only deeper calamity. He could not leave them, not yet. Any of them.

‘We will start with this, beardlings,’ he began, at last. ‘You too, spotter-sergeant,’ he added, addressing Brenk.

His eyes then turned to Larn. ‘Those below are your people, too. Danger has come for them. I charge you with your duty, drengi. Fate has placed you here, in peril’s path. Meet that peril. You and the runedaughter, both. Wherever she’s gone…’

He glanced away, then turned to Nauré Ardellain. ‘If you seek an alliance, aelf, then let your actions be the proof of it. I propose no loftier agenda than this – a daemon’s sight has settled upon this place, which is home to mortalkind. Let us see it banished.’

He looked to Sivarn, then, and past him, to Myrddi. ‘You two are in deep, as I think you know. There are folks here who could use a bit of your chancer’s luck. Help them. Don’t get yourselves killed.’

Then he once more assessed the problem of Justec the Thirty-First.

Grombrindal took a deep breath, and ran his hand through his beard. His expression became severe. ‘A cold wind flows,’ he said simply.

Justec mumbled, then took a step back, offering an ungainly pantomime of a bow. Grombrindal turned to face all of them.

‘Aid me in this, all of you,’ he said. ‘Do what is right, here and now, and I will do the same. There is more need here than any of us can match alone.’

A silent tension held in the air for a moment.

‘Aye,’ said Larn Grunslayer, before the others could respond.

Sivarn looked to Myrddi. She smiled wearily, and patted him on the arm.

Ardellain turned away.

‘I’ll inform the admiral,’ the aelf said, already leaving.

Teffi descended the gantry stair at pace, leaping down several steps at once, before barrelling through the outer hatch and onto the deck.

She’d eavesdropped on the strangers’ tale. How could she not? Only half-listened, really, at first. Then, she began to pick up names, places, people.

The ship that boarded us is the Drakkul, she thought. Its captain is Shima Sjarsdottir.

She ran. Those they had rescued from Azrilazi had been afforded a moment of respite by her work to slow the ship’s descent, and now they gathered at the rail, horrified at the carnage unfolding below. Teffi pushed through them, looking for her father.

Then she saw him.

He’d already descended to the Drakkul, climbing down a grapple line despite his advancing years. He stood there below her in the company of a woman that Teffi Ginstock did not know, but knew.

Admiral Shima Sjarsdottir stood opposite Teffi’s father. Her mask was raised, revealing her deep-lined face and shock of white hair. She turned to look up at the girl at the railing.

‘Hello, granddaughter,’ Shima said, beaming. ‘Funny coincidence, this, isn’t it?’

CHAPTER 6

FATEWEAVERS

At the base of the effigy was a small gap, just wide enough for a determined duardin to crawl their way through. This is how Margew had found his way into his shelter, and it was how he would leave again, when the time came.

Now, he regarded that small ingress point with terror. Creatures had come, and from the sounds they made, these were no grots. Above the din of distant war, he heard a chittering form of speech, alien to him. He heard the rapping of searching talons on metal – many talons, a whole host of them, a war-party abroad, searching, malicious.

He held his breath, terrified. He clung to the broken wheel, for it was the only weapon at his disposal. They were close now. Strange noises enclosed him as the invaders flowed around the place where Margew had hidden himself.

If they were grots, they’d find him here. Grots got into every nook and crevice. But he could defend himself against a grot or two, he thought, if it came to it. Part of him very much wanted the opportunity to prove it, given all that he had suffered. Yet these were no grots, he was sure. Theirs was a different kind of strangeness, and that raised questions to which Margew had no answer. As the shadow of this new enemy passed over his hiding place, these amassing questions gave way to curiosity.

He peered out cautiously, glad to see that the fires had not grown much since he had hidden himself away. In some cases, they had diminished, and pockets of Azrilazi were starting to cool. There were no enemies in his immediate vicinity. But there, through the flames, prowling in packs around the dockyards, he could see them: rangy, muscular beastmen in ornate, filigreed armour, carrying sinister weapons. Their heads were crested with rising plumes of feathers, and terminated in sharp, hooked beaks. There were enemies in the sky, too – sorcerous disc-riders – and figures that might have been human, were their bodies not so unnaturally swollen with Chaotic blessings.

Arcanites. The innumerable flux-cults of Chamon were a perennial danger. A crew could scarcely hope to cross the Kairic Heartlands without running afoul of them eventually.

There were no Arcanites in my hold, Margew thought. I’m sure of it.

He was forced to consider, then, that he might not be wholly responsible for the calamity that was unfolding all around him.

It was not an unwelcome thought.

This will take a bit of finesse, Shima Sjarsdottir thought, as she crossed the deck of the Gromthi-a-Grund. It’d be no simple thing to bring the ship into dock – not with the damage it had sustained. Not with its current rate of descent, and not with the Drakkul still embedded in its side, providing necessary lift but ensuring that its aspect was all off.

Past the point of calculation now, aren’t we.

The girl who chased after her looked a lot like her father had in his younger days. And Nytten Shimasson, for his part, had always had something of his mother to him. There they were again – those grasping tendrils, reaching for her. Fate, duty. It could be no other way in the end, she knew. But it mattered to her that she’d managed to run as far as she had. She’d left Nytten behind on the Drakkul, but his daughter would not be deterred.

‘Don’t huff and puff, dearie,’ Shima said, without glancing back. ‘Leave that business to your father. Anyway, he has the right of it. The Gromthi needs proper piloting, not merely managed descent.’

She did not need to see her granddaughter to sense her indignation. Shima smiled softly. Words such as these, from the lips of an elder – they’d have driven her mad, too, in her youth. The girl paused as they reached the bottom of the stairs that led to the command deck.

‘You’re qualified to fly a Khrundal class?’ she asked, after a moment of loaded silence.

Sjarsdottir waved the question away.

‘Artycle One, Point One, dearie,’ she said. ‘Fundamental stuff. Leaders shall be chosen by proof of skills.’

There was the slightest vibration on the gantry stairs, and then Ardellain rounded the corner ahead of her. The aelf stopped gracefully, but abruptly.

‘Good,’ Ardellain said. ‘I’ve come to bring you to the bridge.’

‘That’s where I was already going,’ Shima said, playing up the grumbling stubbornness of her advanced years. She stepped past Ardellain and continued on her way. ‘I take it our mysterious friend has drawn you into his employ, again,’ she called, then stopped as if arrested by a thought. She jabbed a finger towards her navigator. ‘I’ll wager that one-armed fool was the first to say yes. I’d bet your commission on it. Am I wrong?’

‘You are correct,’ Ardellain said, resuming the climb in Shima’s wake. ‘He is right, however,’ the aelf added.

‘Is he, aye?’

‘This isn’t merely an Arcanite raid. Barak-Thryng faces a significant daemonic incursion. There are things to be done here. Things I can do.’

Their conversation carried them the rest of the way to the helm. Teffi made her displeasure known with each indignant step of the climb, her endrinrigger’s boots thumping against the steelwork. But she voiced no further questions. When Shima stepped onto the command deck, she beheld her crew fanned out around the whitebeard in a way that confirmed all of her suspicions about his influence over them. He evidently had some influence over Justec, too. At least her mad little ghoul was behaving himself.

Shima headed straight for the wheel.

‘Step aside, sergeant,’ she said to the arkanaut standing there. Little wonder that things aren’t being done properly, she thought.

‘Hello, Rigo,’ she added blithely, as she took over the controls and began to correct the Gromthi-a-Grund’s course.

Shima Sjarsdottir had walked many paths – or so she had told Nauré Ardellain many times in the long years of their partnership. She had come to understand that just because a person could do a thing, it did not mean that they must. Such logic had never quite stuck with the aelf, regardless of her own wayward spirit. You could take the realm away from a Realm-lord, Shima had found, but it was harder to take the lord.

Yet this problem, here, tonight – this problem, she would address. The Gromthi-a-Grund had been a storied vessel in her own youth, and this wasn’t her first time aboard it. The battleship was in dreadful condition, of course. It should not have been taken out of dock without a full complement of endrinriggers, an aether-khemist, a good navigator, a pilot.

Neither should the Drakkul, in fairness, she reminded herself. What is proper doesn’t preclude what is possible, just as what is possible doesn’t preclude what must happen.

She gave the wheel a little spin, and felt the battleship bank beneath her.

‘Ship won’t be able to support its own weight on a docking spar,’ she said, ‘not in this state. Unless you want stranding in the mountains below, I’m bringing it down on some part of the city strong enough to carry us.’

She held her gaze dead ahead, tracking the descending angle of the bow, calculating the distance between them and the rising lights of Barak-Thryng. She felt their eyes tunnelling into her. His eyes also, but her granddaughter’s eyes most of all. Shima huffed theatrically.

‘City’s under siege, my dears,’ she said. ‘That means a good likelihood of foes on the ground. That means a combat landing, and that means get to your positions.’ Then, with emphasis, ‘Positions that aren’t here.’

Shima heard hesitation, then fuss. Then murmured assent, the tread of boots, and finally voices, receding. She kept her eyes on the stricken sky-port, planning the particulars of a long-delayed homecoming.

And when she glanced behind her, she was alone.

Teffi kept moving. It was easier to keep moving – towards the needs of the moment, towards what was right. Yet she couldn’t shake the feeling that she’d just followed her grandmother’s orders without a second thought. Did Shima Sjarsdottir truly have that much power over her? Shima Sjarsdottir had only ever been a story, and not a happy story at that.

The admiral who forsook the Code and fled the city, leaving scowling gods in her wake.

Long ago, before she was born, Teffi’s father had taken those scowling gods from where they had fallen, raised them above his tavern, and named the place in their honour. This had been his way of declaring which side of his own history he was on. Teffi had been named Ginstock for her mother’s clan, and eventually Nytten started using the name as well.

She brushed these thoughts away, and hastened to the whitebeard’s side. After all, until tonight, he’d only been a story too.

As the Gromthi-a-Grund returned to Barak-Thryng under her grandmother’s command, Teffi watched Grombrindal begin to gather together the rag-tag collection of souls who might now be said to serve under his. He led them down to where the others gathered at the edge of the railing, overlooking the Drakkul and the fast-approaching city.

The air had grown thick with smoke. It wasn’t the hearty, warming smog that rose from the foundries in times of industry and sat on the palate with a note of oak and copper. This was acrid, stinging stuff – the smoke of homes in flames, of aether-gold reserves burning, of loss. She stared a moment into the haze and tried to make sense of their trajectory. Despite the gloom, she could make out the lights that demarcated the first set of inner walls, then the shadows where the first great bridges would be. The Gromthi-a-Grund banked counter-spinward over these, at a distance, approaching the sky-port’s edge. Teffi had charted a similar course when she’d escaped the coming of the metalith and fled for the Twins-and-Tankard.

Sjarsdottir’s aiming for Azrilazi, she realised. There was Code-sense to this, as well as the unavoidable irony of the renegade admiral returning a stolen ship to the same place she stole it from, all those years ago.

Two stolen ships, she noted, looking down at the Drakkul.

‘Teffi, lass, I shall need you to do me a favour,’ Grombrindal said. She started, rattled to be addressed directly.

‘There’s another who needs the strength of that cape about your shoulders,’ he continued. ‘Would you share it?’

Uncertain at first, Teffi nodded, then unfastened the brooch at her shoulder. She bundled up the scarlet fabric as gently as she was able, and held it out to the whitebeard. Grombrindal simply nodded in response, towards the rear of their formation. Teffi’s eyes widened a shade, but then she turned and followed his eyeline to where Sivarn Trell and Larn Grunslayer stood. The wizard and the exile each flanked the creature they called Justec. It skulked between them, wretched, even more out of place aboard a Thryng vessel than they were. She looked to Grombrindal to confirm his intent.

‘The boy is battling an invisible foe, beardling,’ Grombrindal said. ‘Don’t be afraid. The fact that he has fought it to something as significant as a standstill is no small act of valour. What help we can offer him, we should.’

Nervously, she nodded, and then with Sivarn’s help, Teffi drew the cloak around the ghoul’s shoulders. Something like momentary peace passed through Justec’s frame. He slumped a little lower, dragging his spear, the wretched state of him incongruous with his fine new garb.

Teffi suspected that there was purpose to this incongruity, a bit of strategy. Those arrayed before Grombrindal now – arkanauts and pirates, wounded Fyreslayers, tavern-goers and travellers – might have been compelled to rash action had they caught sight of the monster as he was. Garbed thus, Justec of Aranthine became just another strange detail of a night full of terrors. There was trepidation as the two groups merged, even so. How could there not be? The city burned beneath them, and yet it was to the city that they returned.

‘Right,’ Grombrindal began, gesturing for them to follow him to the last of the Gromthi-a-Grund’s surviving boarding ramps.

There was a clang, and a clash of iron, and Rhyngrim of Sigyorn kicked her way free of the ship’s interior via another hatch she’d found. In one hand she held her war-pick, low and bloody. In the other she dragged a pair of broken bodies in dark robes.

Moonclan grots, stowaways. Nameless, dead.

‘There was two more, actually,’ Rhyngrim said, tossing the grots’ corpses down onto the deck at Grombrindal’s feet. She stretched out the muscles in her shoulders and cracked her neck, then pushed on through the crowd. Her wounded Hearthguard raised their fists in salute as she passed them. She ignored Teffi completely.

‘Ach,’ Rhyngrim said, her bile rising once again as she looked down at Barak-Thryng. ‘What’s this, now?’

The Gromthi-a-Grund had departed the City of the Ancestors under perilous circumstances, but it returned to a city remade by danger. Its defenders had heeded the Code to the letter, orchestrating the defence of their home according to protocols built into its very foundations. The Kharadron of Barak-Thryng were not simply mindful of the Code; it was who they were, and it was what their city was, too. The sky-city was a feat of engineering, yes, and fine smithing as well – but it was also an act of runecraft. It was a declaration of principle, scribed upon the sky. And with a few adjustments, the meaning of this inscription could be altered. With the closing of gates and the deployment of its defensive batteries, the City of the Ancestors ceased to be a place of trade and travel, and became a fortress.

A timeless enemy had designs on Barak-Thryng, however, and this enemy knew the Code, too. It knew what good order demanded. It understood the reaction that aggression must provoke, and so the bait was set. The Gloomspite assault on Azrilazi prompted a particular set of measures, directed the attention of the city in a particular direction, and committed the Admiralty to a particular course of debate. As the bombs of the hun-ghrumtok rained down on the besieged dockyards, and the gates were shut just so, and the admirals began to ask themselves how could this be, Fateweaver’s Arcanites struck.

They rode winds of Ruin on silver discs, accompanied by skybound shoals of shrieking daemons. They descended along aetheric slipstreams left in the wake of soaring Lords of Change, a host of Allscryers in whose outstretched wings glittered an eternity of alien starlight. They outpaced the Cursed Skies as they converged on Barak-Thryng – and those same fell energies now stymied the arrival of any who might come to the aid of the City of the Ancestors.

Someone would try, no doubt. But they would return to a broken bastion, and a people sundered. As it had been once, so it would be again.

Such was Fateweaver’s blessing: to perceive the past through one set of eyes, and the future through another, and see a road to ruin in each direction. A path both infinitely complex, and utterly straightforward. A path rich in secrets, but that spoke to a single, immutable truth:

Chaos, ascendant, eternal.

Renke’s eyes darted between the city rising towards her and the distant helm of the Gromthi-a-Grund. Onghas and the other arkanauts glanced back at her along the Drakkul’s deck.

‘Tether-lines, now!’ she called out. ‘This’ll be rough!’

They gathered around their brace points and held fast. The Drakkul’s straining endrins pulled against the weight of the larger vessel, and she could hear the tension in the prow ram that kept them bound together. Just a little extra pressure and that connection would break. Yet she could tell that Sjarsdottir was taking the Drakkul’s extra lift into account – it was likely that the Gromthi-a-Grund could not fly straight without it – and in any case, now was not the time to test that particular theory.

Sjarsdottir angled the battleship down, aiming for a stretch of shattered structures at the city’s perimeter. They passed over a burning dockyard towards the ruined tradeways beyond.

She’s looking for something sturdy enough to catch us, Renke realised. There was sense to this. It was also entirely reckless.

Renke gripped the wheel tight and held the Drakkul as steady as she could. She wouldn’t have minded a little of Ardellain’s navigation. But there was value in doing things in one’s own way, from time to time, she supposed.

The iron bulk of the Gromthi-a-Grund collided with the Azrilazi tradeways bottom-first. The great sky-vessel dug a trench for itself through blackened ruins and steaming pipework as its weight began to settle. Then, at the last moment, the Drakkul’s prow ram sheared off, and the smaller ship dropped its larger counterpart the rest of the way. Thunder shook the dockyards, and ash rose from the crash site, swallowing the Gromthi-a-Grund and the Drakkul both.

They released the boarding ramp as soon as the battleship settled, sending it slamming down into the shadowed ruins below them.

‘Fighters forward!’ Grombrindal bellowed. ‘The enemy comes!’

By Teffi’s reckoning, they weren’t far from where she herself had alighted only a few hours ago. Where would she be now, she wondered, if she’d not come seeking her father?

Fighting, she supposed. Somewhere else.

The whitebeard stormed away down the ramp, leading the Fyreslayers, the aelf, and Brenk’s arkanauts. The spotter-sergeant found her before she could follow him.

‘Teffi,’ he said. He held his own carbine in one hand, and in the other he held out his aetherflare pistol. ‘Only so much you can do with a cable-cutter on a night like this.’

She nodded, and took the weapon from him. It was lighter than her rivet gun, but better suited to the purpose at hand. He rushed away ahead of her to rejoin his company.

At Teffi’s back gathered those too poorly armed or wounded to be much use in what was to come. Rhyngrim’s Hearthguard had been in a bad way since the battle for Azrilazi, and as much as they might have wished to follow their runedaughter into battle, she told them to stay behind, heal, and ensure that the full tally of her slayings was accounted for when the night’s doings were done. Teffi was just glad that there were still warriors left behind to protect the vulnerable. Armed as she now was, she knew what side of that particular divide she must count herself on.

Atop the wide boarding ramp, Teffi loaded a cartridge into her aetherflare pistol and fired. Pale blue light rose over the heads of Grombrindal’s party as they advanced below her. As the flare reached its apex, a quirk of alchemical ingenuity saw it burn out in a flash of brightness, its colour changing from blue to gold. Thus would it be known that the flare had been fired by an arkanaut of the city; that the crash of the Gromthi-a-Grund meant the arrival of allies, not enemies.

Teffi Ginstock suspected that it meant both, but she charged off down the boarding ramp anyway.

Larn hit the end of the ramp running. There was a healthy swell of doom in his chest, though no enemy had yet revealed themselves. He heard the song of aelven steel in the air, and felt a rush of heat from the runedaughter. Not a bad vanguard, the three of them. Fighters forward, Grombrindal had said.

And so it went.

The Gromthi-a-Grund had buried itself in a raised section of the city, crushing stonework and bending girders as it came to rest. What survived had the aspect of a rat’s nest – a twisting landscape of fallen gantries and half-collapsed storehouses. In places, bomb craters exposed the hissing pipework of the sky-port’s under-workings. The blasts had shattered every window and aether-lantern in the place, leaving it shadow-swept and treacherous. Good hunting ground for any kind of monstrosity.

Larn sniffed miasma in the air – that musk particular to grot-kind, that lingered in their aftermath. This place had been lost to the foe before Sjarsdottir dropped a battleship on it. That much had been clear from the air, and now he tasted the truth of it. Good bit of judgement, Larn had thought, when he realised where the admiral was planning to put the ship down. No doubt she’d stubbornly deny that she’d deliberately done the right thing. Even so, they once again found themselves just about on the right side of good, despite there being nothing in the Code and no particular tradition that could tell them which way good was.

Larn followed his gut, as ever. And his gut said, Have your blade ready, slayer.

He gripped his axe-hilt tight and gained speed as he sprinted forward. Something shifted in the ruins – the slightest, most incremental disturbance – and he hunched low, angling himself into its path.

There was a glimmer in the dark, then an avian shriek as loping beast-warriors surged forward to meet him – leering Tzaangors, armed with long spears.

Three foes.

One each.

Nauré Ardellain let a gilded spear tip pass over her head. She tasted the sorcery in it – sophisticated yet primal, compelling in the particular way of changecraft. No balance to it, of course, but that was the point. The promise of such power was of more such power, like a wildfire ever-spreading. A trap for the wielder, she acknowledged, though no less deadly for it.

She spun and whipped her blade around behind her back, passing it from one hand to the other. Then she swept outwards and upwards, bringing the silver edge around in a reverse grip. The Tzaangor warrior should have lost its head in that moment, but it twitched backwards with uncanny speed and her blade caught nothing but the air where its neck had been. It fixed her with a stare and as Ardellain adjusted her footing its avian babbling began to cohere into secrets.

Unfreedom-upon-you, Seneschal-sentinel-shadowbound, aimless-aspirant-Ardell–

His own foe butchered, Larn’s axe took out Nauré’s Tzaangor at the knee, and as it fell forward she drove the tip of her sword up through the roof of its chattering beak and into its brain. Heedless of the Arcanite’s attempt to enthral her, the other Fyreslayer, Rhyngrim, punched out with the hilt of her weapon and smashed her opponent into a wall, then swung around and impaled it through the chest.

Ardellain’s senses flooded with sorcery. The aether screamed. More Arcanites surged forward through the ruins – human acolytes in ceremonial garb, stalking Tzaangors, weapons raised. She and Larn watched them converge on Grombrindal and the others from both flanks. Without a word, they each picked a direction, and bolted apart.

Myrddi held the line at Grombrindal’s side. She was so far from home at this point that very little could faze her – so far from the outlaw life she’d chosen that little mattered beyond the needs of the moment.

The needs of the moment were, presently, don’t die, make sure Sivarn doesn’t die, and keep an eye on the boy, in something approximating that order.

She’d known who the whitebeard was from the moment they’d met, long ago, as mourners filed into that lonely manse at the edge of Greywater Fastness. She’d not let herself believe it at first, precisely because she’d wanted to believe it. She’d wanted to think that the hearthside stories of her people might have a grain of truth in them. That there might be more to the realms than swamp and struggle. That the gods might yet concern themselves with the fate of ordinary folk.

She’d credit herself with this: she was right. Now she was in a city in the sky, and there were madmen trying to kill her. They raced towards her from the darkness, half-naked, their features hidden behind golden masks that mimicked the cruel beaks of the beastmen at their side. She had no idea who they were, or why they had chosen such a path for themselves.

But they were smaller than the beastmen, at least, and the Wuttenfolk knew a thing or two about killing those.

As the first wave reached her she darted forward to catch her opponent off-guard and swung her mallet into the nearest human’s face. Such a blow was intended to stun a bestigor – to knock it off its feet, ideally, or else crack a horn or two and send it reeling. In this case the blow drove the Arcanite’s mask into his skull, killing him instantly. To one side, Grombrindal roared defiance and repelled a group of attackers with the hilt of his battleaxe. To the other, Sivarn set his focus upon a deeper part of the enemy line and began to call upon his greensight.

Soon, she saw why. The Arcanites had sent forth one group to test them as another held back, chanting, their blades raised. Balls of blue, green and pink flame began to dance in the air above them, growing in intensity until they shot forward – one searing bolt for each soul in the whitebeard’s formation.

Sivarn spoke a word in an aelven tongue and swept his hands out, his overcoat blowing back with the force of the counterspell. As each fell projectile flew past him, the fire within it erupted into motes of harmless sunlight.

He was such a fool, her Sivarn, that it was easy for her to forget that he was also quite a good wizard.

Their sorcery unmade, the acolytes rushed forward to join their counterparts in the melee. Myrddi took another few steps forward.

Make sure Sivarn doesn’t die, she resolved.

It was then that she realised she had entirely lost track of the boy.

He sallied forth as the gates swung wide before him, revealing the enemy. Down from the high towers of Thorga, garbed in honours, did he descend, spear held forth, battle-bedecked.

See! The pride of Aranthine!

He took a high ridgeline, moving at pace, circumventing the place where the High King of the Mountain rallied his court. Here was a foul foe, each capering fanatic a servant of sorcery unto themselves. It was apparent that the victory he had already won had been merely a prologue to this greater battle, just as the High King of the Mountain had said it would be. It was ever the way of the duardin to know such things.

Your true king awaits you, child of summer, insisted his blood. Feed, then forsake this madness.

This is no madness, his heart retorted. It is song.

Spear held tight, he chose his approach, and the words began to flow from him.

Cold-wind flows

Colder grows the hall

Of a steel-true knight of Aranthine

At age’s unjust end…

Something shot over Sivarn’s head – a beastman whose visage was crowned with a multihued crest of feathers, mounted atop a silver disc that vented green flame at its base. Similar energies flowed from the crystalline staff in its grip. Sivarn sensed the spellcraft under its command. Its hatred singled him out. It extended its will into the aether, in challenge to him.

He hated duels.

Sivarn raised his hands and gathered his strength, his eyes half-closed.

A pale shape trailing scarlet threw itself from the upper shadows of a ruin. There was a flash of bronze as Justec collided with the sorcerer. Then there was a high shriek – a cacophony of snarls – and the disc and its rider were both dragged sideways, crashing through the wall of a facing building.

Grombrindal made himself the central point around which the battle must be fought. He busied himself shielding the most vulnerable, safeguarding one life after another.

This was a testing assault, he knew. The mind that sent these broken beings to their deaths did so to goad him, to slow him down, to see if needless cruelty might provoke him further. He shielded himself against the daemon’s will with simplicity of purpose, for the time being. Lives and destinies entangled themselves all around him, and so he became a thing of stone and gromril – wall and weapon, both.

Ahead of him, Larn and Rhyngrim fought their way through to a clearing that might have once been a courtyard, part of one of Azrilazi’s open marketplaces. Grombrindal led his host in their wake, save for a group of arkanauts who remained on the boarding ramp, warding the Arcanites away from the Gromthi-a-Grund. The two Fyreslayers fought well together, Grombrindal observed. Larn was fast, dextrous, strategic. He had good instincts, and knew when and where to apply his strength. Rhyngrim was all strength, and that had its own sort of wisdom. And for all her pride, she was apparently content to ignore the visible dishonour of the warrior who fought alongside her. War ever made allies of unlikely folk. Ale too.

Far to his flank, he perceived flashes of light where the aelf danced through darkness. She fought alone, seeking to sever the foe’s means of reinforcing itself. He kept his eye on her, even as the immediate business of battle kept his attention forward and his axe busy. This was a dangerous place for one sensitive to sorcery.

An explosion in the air above them rattled the ruins, followed by a rumble that caused the steel panels beneath their feet to tremble. Above the din, Grombrindal could sense a new presence – something more than mortal sorcery, daemon-wrought, with the quality of laughter, descending fast.

Its endrins failing, trailing flame, the Drakkul emerged from the smoke and passed low over their heads, pursued by bolts of sorcery. The ironclad banked sharply before colliding side-on with the ruins a short distance from where the battleship had come down. Aether fire rose from its upper decks, cutting through the gloom, seeking something in the air – the pursuing force that had brought it down.

Grombrindal’s hair bristled. He scowled in grudgement. He turned back and raised his voice as he called out to those still on the boarding ramp.

‘Spotter-sergeant! Get everyone into the shelter of the ruins, now!’

Brenk nodded, and gestured up to his company of arkanauts. Word spread to the survivors still on deck, and the huddled mass of them began to descend at speed, covered by carbine fire. As the Arcanites were driven back, those under Grombrindal’s command once more converged, joining the Fyreslayers near where the Drakkul had come down.

Grapple lines were thrown over the edge of the ironclad as her crew made the descent, Nytten Ginstock among them, falling unsteadily, truncheon in hand. His daughter made her way towards the throng at Brenk’s side, warding away the foe with each bright blast from her pistol.

Then they heard the laughter.

Kha-kha-kha!

Heralded by that mocking sound, a burning silver disc punched a hole through the miasma above Teffi’s head. Atop it squatted a long-limbed daemon whose face – if it could be called that – was the image of a leering moon. It burned bright yellow-green with an internal radiance. Brenk’s arkanauts opened fire on it, as did the crew of the Drakkul, but their salvoes of aethershot burned away in the heat of the flames that flared at the daemon vessel’s underside.

Hail, godling’s spawn, the daemon hissed. J’Zsalo am I, Speech-Shaper.

Each word the daemon spoke burned inside her mind. Teffi reeled, blinked away distress, then spun around, disoriented. When she opened her eyes, she felt herself isolated, though the crowd thronged around her, each face a unique picture of horror, hands clasped to their heads. She felt a predator’s eye fall upon her, as it had upon the Gromthi-a-Grund, in the horrifying moment before the Arachnarok had descended. She turned, and forced herself to look upward.

The disc began to tilt until it was upside down. Its daemonic rider clung to it unnaturally, as if gravity were no concern to it at all. Its leering face did not move, however, but remained uncannily upright, as the Bad Moon had, gaze fixed forever downward.

On her.

She tried to find her footing, but she could not feel her legs. She felt a tug at her shoulders, as if she were still wearing her endrin harness. She began to float. She turned, and pale moonlight filled her eyes.

A spell gathered at the tips of the daemon’s fingers, which she saw now were hollow, like the barrels of a decksweeper, or organ pipes. Dancing flames rose from them as the daemon wove its sorcery. The magic took the shape of a burning sigil as Teffi hung in the air, spellbound. Then it grew teeth, and shot towards her.

She felt the wind knocked from her chest as Spotter-Sergeant Brenk tackled her out of the way. He wracked and spasmed as the spell entered him. Then his lenses began to burn from within, bright yellow-green, though they were angled downward, and there was no moon for them to reflect. She pushed him away and they both fell to the ground.

A deafening burst of fire from the deck-guns of the Drakkul rattled the ground beneath her. Aether fire raked the inverted disc, colliding with its silver frame and forcing it a few feet higher into the air. She felt hands on her shoulders and slowly, painfully, she stood. Her ears were ringing, and she could not draw her eyes away from the daemon. It was the most awful thing she had ever seen.

Counter-sorceries of gold and green danced in the air above her. There was shouting. Brenk, too, began to rise.

The stricken Drakkul fired again, but this time the burning disc evaded the incoming fire with uncanny agility, whirling upward into the miasma from which it had come. Everything about it terrified her. The suddenness of its appearance, its cruelty, its disregard for natural law. That it had singled her out – she for whom steady ground was just a memory, whose life as she knew it had been whipped out from under her – made her angry, so angry.

Nine Point Seven.

The voice she heard was her own. It was Jhori’s, too. And, to her surprise, it was the voice of her grandmother.

Excessive firepower is permissible.

As the daemon began to vanish into the gloom, Teffi Ginstock raised her aetherflare pistol, and fired. A bright blue bolt sailed upward, where it impacted with the underside of the receding disc. There it detonated, haloing this J’Zsalo, this Speech-Shaper, in golden light, if only for a moment.

A moment was all that was needed.

A thunderous boom quaked the ruins of Azrilazi as one of the Gromthi-a-Grund’s cannon batteries fired a single shot.

Teffi sensed her father reaching for her, felt him fuss over her, but her eyes remained fixed upward. She watched the disc and its rider explode into bright flames before disintegrating into silver rain. A roar went up from the folks at her back, but all that emerged from her was a laugh. A wheezing, giddy laugh.

She looked down to where Brenk had fallen, after he’d saved her life. He was on his feet now. And he was laughing too.

Kha.

Kha.

Kha.

Wrath flowed like mountain chill from Grombrindal’s shoulders as he stepped free of the throng of mortals gathered around him. He interposed himself between Spotter-Sergeant Brenk and the rest. The light in the arkanaut’s eyes was piercing now, and had begun to shine through the grille in his mask, as well as the fastenings around his neck where his suit was sealed. He was burning from within, his body changing, bulging outward–

The suit burst with a horrendous tearing sound, and a tide of flame leaped free. Acid sorceries hissed as they lashed at the whitebeard, but flowed no further than his feet. Then, withdrawing, they rose above Brenk’s body, which staggered onward as a new form wrenched itself free from the bubbling ruin of his torso.

The flames took the form of two serpentine necks, each terminating in a baleful, birdlike head. It was the twinned visage of the daemon itself – as yet unreal, immaterial, but no less capable of burning a mortal life away.

Grombrindal held his axe low.

‘A pointless show of power, old bird,’ he said, his voice little more than a rumble. ‘Needless. Petty. To no meaningful end.’

Both heads craned around to regard the body from which they had emerged.

By this act is a soul claimed.

One needless, petty, meaningless soul.

There is nothing more precious, is there?

Fateweaver’s herald had started a fire in the minds of all who had beheld it, and now the greater daemon projected its will through that same conduit of agony. Its voice was a nail that scoured the meat of mortal minds.

So solid, whitebeard, dead-king. So singular.

All to protect those who seek shelter in your cold shadow…

Protect them from what, I wonder?

‘All that I can,’ Grombrindal said. ‘Always.’

Brenk staggered forward.

Yet you walk. This way, that way. Forward, back, forever, along the tangle of individual lives.

The spotter-sergeant’s movements were ungainly, almost childlike. A heavy-footed pantomime of duardin motion.

But you could move as I do. Descend, as I do.

Upon a city, a people, a world entire.

The City of the Sun burned for ninety-nine days, under my eyes…

The City of the Ancestors shall burn for nine hours, and nine hours only.

Then, it will fall. It shall be broken before it reaches the high peaks. It shall be broken along every axis that matters.

It shall split, and in splitting, be reborn.

‘How many times have you plucked at prophecy, and been denied?’ Grombrindal growled. ‘Where has your scrying led you, in all the ages we have lived?’

Here.

‘Aye. Here to invite your own unmaking, yet again.’

Ai, ai, ah. You mistake me, dead-king. This is no future I see, but the past.

If I must repeat the truth, I will.

This game ended long ago, and it ended as it always does.

With ruin.

Grombrindal sensed the daemon’s satisfaction. For all its power, it was a hungering creature, a being that fed on its own narrow purpose. Here, as its voice dissembled within the mortals in his company, it drank greedily, and in doing so, grew more powerful still.

‘Then it seems I must repeat myself, also,’ Grombrindal said. ‘I shall not be toyed with.’

Ah, ai, ai! But you will, you will!

The daemon’s voice gained a capering quality, and burned more painfully for it.

You will, because they are toyed with, always.

And you, realm-plodder, move as they do.

By the light of a false moon were prophets deceived, and a horde drawn to the walls of lofty Thryng – and you, inevitably, with them.

By the light of a false moon were prophets deceived, and a horde drawn to the walls of cursed Thorga – and you, inevitably, with them.

What is this, then, if not your fate, also?

And who am I, if not–

There was a flash of light, and a radiant blade flew forth from within the throng. Ardellain had regained her mind, it seemed, and set herself the task of silencing the daemonic projection. The blade pierced Brenk through the chest and sent him collapsing to the ground. There, god-wrought silver began to counteract the warping magics that afflicted him. The twinned heads of Kairos Fateweaver burned more brightly, for a moment, as the daemon fed on this vaunting act of mortal willpower. Its voice gained a mocking quality that mirrored the cruel pantomime it had made of Brenk’s body.

Ai, aiah, ah. I am struck down. Illuminator’s daughter! You have won a boon of me, a secret…

Have it then, for I am generous!

The final words the daemon spoke lost all of their mirth, and resonated with utmost sincerity.

There is no mortal so ill-fated that their fate cannot be reworked…

This is the Changer’s promise, too.

With a flash of flame, the illusion faded. In its wake, the body of Spotter-Sergeant Brenk lay on the broken ground. They saw then that he was as whole as he had ever been. No terrible mutation had overcome him, no irreversible change; these had all been illusions. Yet he was dead. Blood pooled beneath him, and flowed in thin rivers down from the place where Ardellain’s sword had entered his body.

She stepped forward calmly to retrieve her weapon. Grombrindal stepped forward with her, knelt, and laid his hand upon the spotter-sergeant’s mask.

The grief and anger he felt were intended to keep him here, he knew. That was the purpose of this purposeless cruelty. He climbed a short distance up a debris pile, and beheld the lot of them – and the dead Arcanites they had left in their wake. The aftermath of another battle won, yet somehow lost. He saw Justec of Aranthine watching him from the shadows, his eyes bright with madness and reverence in equal measure. He saw the doubt growing in the minds of the rest of them. In part the daemon’s doing, in part his own.

‘Beardlings,’ he began. ‘I’m afraid that this is the time and place of our parting.’ He saw several mouths snap open, and raised his hand to arrest half a dozen interjections. ‘There are places I must be, things I must do, and as much as it grieves me, I cannot do these things and remain part of your company.’

He set the hilt of his axe down upon the ground, and spoke solemnly.

‘The daemon would have you believe hope is a snare,’ he said. ‘Destiny a weapon that only it, and those who follow it, can wield. I trust a few of you to know better,’ he added. There was a glimmer in the grey depths of his eyes. ‘I won’t tell you what to do, beardlings. I will not dictate your course to you, nor your next choices. But allow an old dawi to give you a bit of real wisdom. Something granted to me by my own ancestors.’

He searched into their eyes in turn then, seeking to calm the fires that had been lit inside each of them.

‘Your mortality is something precious,’ he said. ‘It has power, and it is not to be forsaken lightly. If your time is used to the betterment of just one other mortal soul, then it was well used. For this much is true – there is no mortal so ill-fated that their fate cannot be reworked.’

At these words, a crawling figure emerged from the shadows and prostrated itself before him, trembling. Justec had removed his cloak, and now offered it back to him. Grombrindal bent down and kindly took this gift, and returned it to his shoulders.

‘This is… less true for gods, I’ve found,’ he said at last. ‘Even less so for daemons.’

The wind picked up ash and dust from the top of the debris pile on which he stood.

And with that, he was gone.

CHAPTER 7

BETTER PLACES TO BE

Margew Venki ventured once again through the hollow in the twin-headed edifice, pulling himself forward on his one good hand until he was free and in the open.

Well, not quite free.

After he spied the Arcanites, he’d hidden again. Then there were new dangers – loud, frightening new dangers. A ship had come down, he thought – it was a sound he knew a little too well – then there’d been violence, then sudden quiet. Not a drop of good fortune in any of it, he was sure. But on his previous excursion he’d spied something that might, at last, mean his luck was changing.

As he’d watched the Tzaangor pack move away, his eyes had been drawn back to the ruin of the building he thought might have been a dockmaster’s office. The free-standing post he’d seen had since fallen, and while searching for that lost landmark Margew found himself looking more closely at the debris itself, and there among the blasted brickwork he caught the edge of an iron hoop, jutting upward.

He clung to that image in the darkness because he’d started to believe that he knew what it meant. The handle didn’t look like it’d fallen; instead, it looked like everything else had fallen on top of it. That meant a trapdoor. Wasn’t uncommon for a building to have a cellar, but it was less common up here, in the sky. Yet some places did have cellars, and if this ruin were one of them, then perhaps Margew Venki had found a new set of choices for himself besides die in the dark or die in the open.

So he began to drag himself back out from under the Warrior and the Maker, fighting against pain and fatigue as he earned every inch of progress. He kicked himself along the ground, dragging forward with his one good arm, and then, at last, he got to his feet and dashed – head low, heart pounding with every step – towards that jutting iron hoop. He kicked away ash and gravel until the square outline of the trapdoor was visible, then leaned down, grasped for the handle, and pulled as hard as he could.

The hatch protested at first, but he insisted. He didn’t want to stay outside for long. He felt it budge, and this was enough to keep him pulling. Then it gave way, swinging open to reveal a patch of pure darkness, and an updraught of deep-cellar chill.

And hops. Old hops, an edge of salt…

Good fortune, at last.

After the whitebeard’s departure came a period of gathering, planning, and parting. Too many strong wills had been gathered in one place for it to be any other way. The crew of the Drakkul busied themselves with freeing the ironclad from the place where it had come down. Eventually, trepidatiously, Teffi Ginstock went to aid them, because she was an endrinrigger, and that was what endrinriggers did. If Sjarsdottir’s arkanauts knew who she was, they did not say.

The ship had caught the bulk of the impact on its starboard flank and lower hull. It was dented and scratched, but its endrins were intact, save for one, which had been ruptured by witchfire. It could be repaired quickly enough, however, and with simple tools. It was unlikely that the ironclad would be fit for a long-distance voyage any time soon, but long-distance voyages were beyond any of their expectations right now. Their activity was undercut by the steady roar of distant battle, and a periodic straining thump that echoed with increasing regularity through the pipework of the city itself.

Do what is right, here and now, and I will do the same.

Larn held to these words as he gathered his possessions, dusted himself off, and whetted his axe. Somewhere beyond this place, clawing their way towards the centre of the sky-port, were daemons. The daemon. That was where he must go, he knew. That was where his slaying path must lead him.

Rhyngrim of Sigyorn was impatient to leave. She spent a few moments in the company of her Hearthguard, speaking to an old warrior that Larn learned was called Maegard. He reminded Larn of his own uncles, and he wondered if any Kerriks remained in Urgyrnaz. Yet he could see that the runedaughter was too restless to spend much time with her own people. Their dead god had his full grip on her yet. And she was still steaming drunk.

He stood and walked over to where Ardellain waited, utterly still, searching outward, just as she did when she stood on the prow of the ship.

‘Found it?’ Larn asked.

‘No,’ she replied. ‘The daemon is not yet manifest. Yet it will be. It is… not winning this war, but it is not losing either. A more forceful intervention is likely.’

She paused then, on the edge of a deeper suspicion.

‘Know where it’ll be?’ Larn said.

‘No,’ she repeated. ‘But we should leave, even so.’

He nodded. Then he narrowed his eyes, regarded her posture, and gave word to a long-held suspicion.

‘You’re missing a weapon,’ he said. She blinked. ‘I’ve seen it. You’re fast, but you’re using speed to account for the lack of something. You’re used to having two blades.’

Nauré Ardellain was completely silent.

Larn flipped his axe over in his hand and held out its hilt to her. ‘Take it,’ he said. ‘It’s heavy, but balanced. I have another one.’

Ardellain raised her face to the sky.

‘No,’ she replied, after a moment. He thought he saw her sigh, but the motion was almost imperceptible. ‘That which I have lost cannot be replaced.’

He stared up at her, but her eyes were set a thousand fathoms away. He said nothing. He returned the axe to his hip and turned to see Sivarn waving at him urgently.

‘Don’t go alone,’ Larn said, then turned and crossed the uneven ground towards the Drakkul, where the wizard waited for him atop a mound of debris.

‘He came back without much fuss,’ Trell said. ‘But listen–’

They stood together near the sliding hatch that led to Justec’s compartment. From within came a rhythmic, rasping sound, punctuated every so often with the sound of claws on metal.

‘He’s singing.’

Larn listened for a moment. He could not say that he heard whatever it was that Trell did, but he’d never had much of an ear for the boy’s art.

‘No knowing what’s happening to him,’ Larn said. ‘Not in the middle of all this.’ He gestured around him, at the city, the war, the sorcery in the sky.

Trell nodded. ‘I don’t think he can stay here,’ he said, hesitantly. ‘He’s not safe anywhere, but–’

‘He’s a fighter,’ Larn agreed. ‘He has the knack of mage-slaying. Do more good out here.’

Sivarn looked into the duardin’s eyes. ‘We could lose him. After all this, we could lose him. No matter what was promised.’

Larn shrugged. ‘Could be that we’re all lost already, Trell,’ he said. ‘Not much to do but make a fight of it. Set the boy free. Might know where he’s going. Not sure Nauré does.’

‘What about me and Myr?’

Trell looked away, to where Myrddi stomped from one wounded figure to the next, peeling back punctured flight suits and testing the range of wrenched limbs. She responded to mortal wounds and sprains alike with the same brusque nod of her head.

Larn said nothing, but looked at him.

‘There’s work to be done here, I think,’ Sivarn said. ‘I… I don’t think we should come with you.’

Larn thought for a moment, then nodded. ‘You’re a decent healer,’ he said, by way of acknowledgement. ‘These folk need it. We don’t, not yet.’

He reached up and idly began to pluck at a strand of greenery where it pressed through the stump of his ruined shoulder.

‘Sorry about that,’ Sivarn said.

‘Ah, it’s fine,’ Larn replied.

Inside the Drakkul, a release lever was pulled, and the compartment where Justec cowered slid open.

Cold-wind flows–

The ghoul sprang out into the open, startling a huddle of survivors as he clutched his spear and scrambled away.

Beast! Foul-stalking predator–

They couldn’t hear the song, but he could. He sang it to himself as he drove hard through fields of lambent winnow-seed. He sang it to the seven phantoms who rode alongside him, to the lowlanders who scattered tokens in his wake, to the distant High Kings of the Mountain, whose armies were abroad now, gone to war in the name of the gods.

At age’s unjust end…

The creature darted away across the courtyard, as if guided by some inner sight of its own. Inner madness, Teffi reminded herself, as she watched it go from her vantage point high in the Drakkul’s rigging. This was unkind of her, she acknowledged. What was it that the whitebeard had said? He’d called the creature boy, and said he waged war against an invisible foe. He wasn’t alone in this. Teffi’s heart had scarcely slowed since the encounter with the daemon. Since the rise and fall of the Gromthi-a-Grund. Since she’d found herself face-to-face with Shima Sjarsdottir. All of it had left her deeply shaken. Fate-daemons were beyond her understanding, but she sensed that the eyes of a predator had found her and would not leave her alone.

The ghoul – Justec – paused at the edge of the courtyard, turned, and gestured with its spear towards the walls of the inner city. The motion was almost human. Then it turned, stooped, and sped away. She watched as Larn Grunslayer rushed away after it, followed by the aelf and the runedaughter. Below her, their companions watched them go, sparing no particular sentiment for the moment of their separation. Teffi returned her attention to the Drakkul, after that. It was their best hope of escape should things go as badly as it appeared they might. And the task at hand was her best hope of finding a moment of peace.

Later, they found a place to lay Brenk’s body to rest, and she stood with his arkanauts as they made a final log of his actions, and delicately removed the badge of commission from his chestplate. It was a miracle that of all those who had gathered outside the Twins-and-Tankard, his was the only life lost.

They’d had remarkable protection, Teffi supposed. They didn’t have it any more. Teffi’s eyes went to the horizon. Beyond this place, the battle for the city raged. She saw columns of smoke rising from stricken districts, aethershot streaking upward from the inner batteries. Her kinfolk were fighting for their lives. She and her companions were only a small part of the war for the sky-port, and they had been miraculously lucky. She felt a swell of guilt, and that particular deep sadness that comes with survival at another’s expense. It wasn’t the first time she’d felt it this evening. It was for the best that the whitebeard had left them, Teffi resolved.

Bring that luck to someone else, she thought.

She looked over to her father, who sat and shared rations with the other survivors. Then she followed his sight-line up to the looming bulk of the great battleship. Shima Sjarsdottir was still in there, somewhere. Her trained ears picked up the sound of the Gromthi-a-Grund’s massive endrins being shut down, one by one, rendered safe. After her spectacular, reckless display with the deck-gun, the renegade admiral had apparently committed herself to doing something sensible.

Gradually, gloom enclosed their fragile little encampment, except for the sporadic illumination provided by flashes of scarlet lightning within the clouds, and the detonation of distant artillery. Could they afford to light a fire? There were fires enough across the city. They might attract no further attention–

She heard movement, then, deeper in the ruins. They all did. Tumbling stone, and sounds of exertion. Those that could got to their feet. She saw Sivarn and Myrddi push ahead, in the direction of the danger. Teffi looked to the arkanauts at her side, and then to the crew aboard the Drakkul, all of the best fighters they still had. At last, she reached for the aetherflare pistol that Brenk had given her.

But the pistol had already done its work. The light she had sent into the sky – twice – had already been seen, it seemed. She saw Trell relax visibly as a dust-covered duardin emerged from the shadows. They wore a simple environment suit open to the waist, and their beard was matted with grime and blood. Those that followed after them were not much better off. But they were mortal folk, and they were in need.

So it was that the first refugees found them. So it was that Teffi’s share of responsibilities grew. These strangers had stories of their own, of course. They too had lived through a long, strange night, and found themselves on the wrong side of the inner-city walls. They would not be the last.

Sivarn took quickly to the needs of the newcomers. Despite his height, and his strange appearance, he had the knack of putting weary duardin at ease. Though none present had the necessary sensitivity to perceive it, the energies of the Jade Kingdoms flowed from him as he tended to those most badly wounded. He cultivated life in the bodies of those who might otherwise slip deathwards. He projected his will into the land at his feet, carving the potential for peace out of the war-wracked territory in which they found themselves.

It fell to Myrddi and the other duardin to make this potential into something real. Fortress-building was in their blood, despite their disparate origins. They worked together to drag fragments of stonework and bent girders into something resembling walls and barricades, big enough to hide behind. They blocked alleys and ingress points that might pose a danger to them, while ensuring their own avenues of escape – towards the Drakkul, which formed the centre of their little bastion, and towards the Gromthi-a-Grund, which they came to think of as a second line of defence. It felt good to build, to pass stone from one hand to another, even though the city might fall from the sky at any moment and render all their labours pointless. Together, however incrementally, they improved their chances of survival.

There were, for a time, no leaders among them to oversee their preparations; they were guided by collective common sense, and duardin decency. They relied on the strength of the berzerker Maegard, who struggled to hold his axe steady, given the injuries he had sustained, but could still haul a greater weight of scrap than any other. One of the newcomers, Gullen, was a guild architect by trade, and knew at a glance which parts of a domicile could be stripped away without causing the shell to collapse, and which under-vents it was safe to block and which must be avoided.

Eventually, however, a leader did discern to come among them. Shima Sjarsdottir descended the boarding ramp of the Gromthi-a-Grund at a leisurely pace, mask down, conspicuous in her rich admiral’s garb. She kept her distance at first, straight-backed and unreadable. Then she approached, as if to conduct an inspection of the efforts that they had undertaken in her absence.

Her son and granddaughter confronted her together, this time. Shima directed her attention at him first.

‘You were quite right about the Gromthi, Nytten,’ she said, matter-of-factly. ‘It’s in a dreadful way. But I’ve seen to it. It’ll need dedicated work to fly again, but it won’t explode, either. Be cautious if you find yourself tempted to fire the main gun. That blast shifted the bow by more than a scratch. Another might send the whole thing tipping over.’

Teffi was difficult to read, and in truth, still a stranger to her. But Nytten had not changed very much. Shima had always been more comfortable as admiral than kin, even in her Code-abiding days. Nytten was different, and it did not surprise her that he’d made his own clan in her absence. Yet there was an uncanny familiarity to the way he looked at her now – a defiant obstinacy, as if nothing between them had truly changed. And he spoke to her as he ever did, as if she were any other admiral.

‘Might not matter,’ he said. He held up his hand, and waited a few seconds.

Thump.

They’d grown used to that periodic sound, which resonated through their feet from somewhere deep beneath them, closer to the city’s heart.

‘Not enough pressure getting to the outer districts,’ Nytten continued. ‘That means the Master Endrinworks are under heavy strain.’

‘Good ear,’ Shima replied. She patted her pockets, checking for ammunition and rations. She stared away into the tangle of once-familiar streets, getting her bearings. She was home at last, and she hadn’t been dragged here in chains. It was a little anticlimactic, truth be told.

Thump.

Beneath her mask, she smiled to herself. There it was. The city didn’t need grasping tendrils to draw her back, now. It had her. All it needed to do was let her hear its failing heartbeat, and trust that her undying spark of reckless ego would do the rest.

‘I’d best be off, then, dearies,’ Shima said. ‘See to my ship, won’t you? You were always fond of it, Nytten.’

Then she turned, and began to stride away.

‘You’re leaving?’

There was disbelief in Teffi’s voice, which was lent a muffled, frantic tone by her mask. She snapped her visor up as she followed in her grandmother’s wake. The poor girl could not contain her frustration. Shima turned back, her own expression hidden, every inch the renegade admiral, every inch the pirate captain.

‘Aye, dearie, I am,’ she said. ‘It’s just as old Whitebeard says. We must each heed to that which makes us what we are, and that which lies ahead of us.’

Teffi flinched. From her posture, Shima could see every word and objection as it caught on the tip of her tongue.

Shima sighed. ‘I know, granddaughter. I know. Here’s a bit of consolation for you – everything you need to know about me, you’ve already heard. The stories are true, you know. The infamy, the dishonour, every word of it. All true. Worse, even, in parts.’

She chuckled to herself, drew her pistols, and began to walk away into the dark.

‘Goodbye, Teffi Ginstock,’ she said. ‘Best of luck.’

They moved fast, the four of them, heading inward towards the core of the city. Justec raced ahead, following an internal logic they were forced to trust. It finds foes, was all Larn had said to the runedaughter when her wrathful eye had settled upon their unusual guide. She sprinted alongside him, weapon drawn. Larn couldn’t be sure that she wouldn’t try to bury her war-pick in the boy, should they catch up with him. It’d be for the best if they found a more dangerous foe first.

As they reached the edge of the trade district, they emerged from a forest of fallen gantries and arrived at a place that was close enough to its neighbouring district to have been spared the wrath of the fleet. A few spherical aether-lamps cast waning yellow light across streets assembled from hammered steel panels, fringed with ornamental blocks of polished stone. Domed buildings rose in an uneven sprawl away from the open spaces where several roads converged, linked to one another with winding iron stairways, or else gated off and isolated according to some other need for privacy. Fyreslayers did not build holds like this, Larn acknowledged; though their cousins may have shared values when it came to the art of fortress-craft, this subdivision of a place into little pockets of ownership was not the way of Magmaholds. Humans built their cities like this, in his experience, but their walls and boundaries fell to a stiff breeze more often than not. It was impressive and daunting all at once, to see the indomitable spirit of duardin craft set in competition against itself: manses built side by side, in contest with their neighbours; workhalls and warehouses that stood as belligerent declarations of wealth and standing.

This wasn’t Larn’s preferred way of doing things. Despite long years in exile, he was drawn to company, and common cause – and to him, these things had always been bound together with an uncanny sense of encroaching doom. That feeling swelled in him now. It had been with him since their collision with the Gromthi-a-Grund. There was doom waiting for him here. Waiting, perhaps, for all of them. That sensation had been missing at all of the other places they’d sought the white-bearded stranger.

Ardellain felt it too, he was sure. The aelf was typically content to guide their exploits, to offer her blade and her uncanny foresight. Occasionally, however, he’d get a glimpse of the lofty, duty-bound person she had been, before she lost her faith in her gods. He wasn’t so different, though neither he nor the aelf were in any particular rush to acknowledge the comparison. Yet the person he had been – Larnik Vuul-Kerrik, runeson – had always been drawn to the safeguarding of kin. She – Nauré Ardellain, Bladelord Seneschal – concerned herself with the protection of the realms themselves, the maintenance of symbols and signs that only she and her kin perceived.

But they had found common cause in this. In him. In Justec of Aranthine. It mattered to him that the boy be given a chance to become something other than a monster. Given the opportunity to do the right thing – the brave thing – he’d always done it. In Larn’s view, that wasn’t the sort of thing that warranted punishment with a curse. Ardellain, as she explained it, saw in Justec further evidence of the weakness of the gods, the incompleteness of their work. To have the power to rewrite destiny, yet to leave the work undone – this, to her, was a flaw that must be confronted. An asymmetry, as she would put it.

They agreed on this: what had happened to Justec wasn’t fair. And if no one else would stand with him, or for him, then they would.

Ahead of them, they saw Justec’s shadow as he leaped down from the top of a boundary wall and scrambled into the shadows of a wide gap between two buildings. Here was an empty docking spar, large enough for a small sky-vessel. The boy ran along it, then leaped to the far side, forcing them to press in along a narrow walkway that circumvented the void. Beyond that, they stepped into open air and a rushing updrift of cold wind, rising from the mountains below them.

They had reached the gap that separated the trade district from its neighbour. It was spanned by an iron bridge as well as clusters of pipes, chains and cables clad in fraying leather. Justec lost no momentum, but jumped down onto the nearest pipe and scrambled to the other side. Ardellain reached the edge and leaped with uncanny grace, gliding weightless through the chill updraught and skidding to a halt at the foot of a wide stair that led up to the inner city.

It would not be so easy for the two duardin, each of whom would need to take the bridge. Larn kept his head low and charged in that direction. Despite years aboard the Drakkul, there were moments that drew out from him an instinctive distrust of the Kharadron way. This was one of them. The bridge was exposed, flanked on either side by absolute void. He’d rather fall into a magma vent than find himself tumbling through open sky.

As he reached the middle of the bridge, his sense of danger grew too intense to be attributed to simple vertigo. He heard blades in flight as a flock of disc-mounted Tzaangors hurtled out from the shadows between two looming buildings. These new assailants were armed with bows that sent barb-tipped arrows speeding forth. He smashed one projectile aside with the flat of his axe and dived out of the way of another. Behind him, an arrow sliced through Rhyngrim’s flank. She roared, drew a throwing axe one-handed, and sent it hurtling after the nearest Arcanite as they flew overhead. The Tzaangor weaved to avoid the blow, then spun to face her.

‘Move!’ Larn yelled. He tensed his legs and prepared to dash for the far side. But Rhyngrim was stubborn. Her hand went to another throwing axe, which she drew and raised to her eyeline, high and ready. With a disharmonic twang, the Tzaangor released its bowstring, and with a grunt of exertion, Rhyngrim let her axe fly free. Each struck the other. The Tzaangor flew backwards from its disc, Rhyngrim’s weapon protruding from its sternum. The runedaughter, for her part, ducked and caught the arrow across her shoulder plate. The force of the impact sent her reeling. She teetered dangerously on the edge of the bridge, then stamped down to steady herself before throwing herself forward towards the far side, and safety.

‘I fight where I like,’ she said drunkenly as she barged past him, sprinting to catch up with the others.

Even after her long absence, Shima Sjarsdottir knew Barak-Thryng. It helped that its Admiralty cleaved to the Code so closely that amendments to the sky-city took decades to consider and approve. Azrilazi had changed little, before the grots and the bombs had each taken their turn at flattening it. She’d flattened a fair section of it herself, she noted, with a small amount of satisfaction.

Her last few hours aboard the Gromthi had afforded her time to plan, to listen, to know exactly where those grasping tendrils of fate were determined to drag her. In truth, the sound of the rhythmic failure of the city’s Master Endrinworks had been all she needed to hear. It was the most dangerous sort of problem for a sky-port to have: critical but easy to ignore when there were bright, leering killers in the air, and enemies at the gates. It was a fault that could be sidelined in the moment, with a dozen other matters crossing the desks of the Admiralty Council. The Code mandated belligerence in the event of a threat to the city, and that meant siphoning guards and defences in one direction – towards the walls – and rigger-crews in another – towards those vital supporting systems. Even in her duty-bound youth, she’d railed at the vulnerabilities this exposed. But this was Barak-Thryng; one did not argue with the Code.

Yet if the Master Endrinworks failed, they’d all be fighting an uphill battle to keep Barak-Thryng aloft. That wasn’t the sort of battle you wanted to fight. The city didn’t want to fly, Shima understood. Cities wanted to be on the ground, or else somewhere high up in the mountains. Kharadron pride made it all too easy to forget that, and Kharadron process would be, as ever, the enemy of decisive action. So it fell, in the end, to her – to pick her moment, pick her problem, and intervene. On behalf of those she flew with, and all those she’d left behind.

She followed the spoke pattern of the ruined tradeways until she arrived at an intersection, somewhat central, where she pivoted on her heel and located a heavy iron door set between two bombed-out storage buildings. These buildings had withstood the bombs because their walls were part of the district’s superstructure, she recognised. That meant that the heavy bulkhead door set between them was an access point reserved for the use of the Endrincorps. It would lead to the under-furnaces, the bilges – all sorts of rotten places that she did not especially wish to go to. Yet it would also speed her to the heart of the city through the tunnels and accessways that threaded between each disparate district of the city and connected them at its centre. From there, she’d be able to make her way to the Master Endrinworks.

She hauled the bulkhead open. With her first descending footstep, her boot sank up to the ankle in oil and grot-muck. The stench threatened the fortitude of her suit’s filters. With a sigh, Shima lit the aether-lamps at her shoulders, drew her pistols, and began to descend.

Justec of Aranthine felt the ground beneath him rising, angling upward towards a summit of light and fire. There was a shimmer in the air and the mountainous landscape before him swam, dreamlike. Looming edifices cast long, angular shadows across his path, and rolling banks of white fog channelled him forward, and up. The old songs of his house helped him make some sense of this. There was a war being fought at the edge of the heavens, he understood. The High King of the Mountain had gone to fight it, because that is what High Kings did.

He is gone, came that other voice, unbidden. He was a king of winter only, a phantasm that melts away with the coming of spring. Summer calls to you, child. You are awaited.

No. No.

He could not remember when this argument within him had started, only that there was no escaping it – except, perhaps, in the feasting moment that followed a quest’s end. Otherwise, his heart and his blood were engaged in a ceaseless debate. The strength of their argument ebbed and flowed within him, but failed to progress past a certain point. This point: that his king was not his king, and his hall was not his hall. This notion was where he held the line and refused to allow the argument to develop any further. The old songs were clear on this point: House Aranthine paid homage to two gods, but had pledged their fealty only once. Unless…

Be not a thief of faith. Return.

No. No.

He kept his eyes set straight ahead, at the apex of that bright summit. His hearing was fine and sharp, his ear for foul sorcery even more so, and the air was alive with it. There were enemies close at hand. These were the foes that the High King had named, and as such they had earned the ire of Aranthine. Ahead, above him, foes waited in ambush, lurking in the shadow of rocky crags, concealing themselves in banks of cloud.

He called out a warning to the seven phantoms at his sides: Fethe, Hynda, Gyrfa, Jullon, Chorsel, Irianthe, Vejec. His knightly company, his siblings.

They’re gone, Justec. They were gone long ago; you never knew them.

He called out a warning to the three that followed behind him, instead: Larn, Nauré, and the third – a fierce stranger.

He called out to those he’d left behind, too, who he hoped could hear him: Myrddi, Sivarn, Shima. His knightly company, his friends.

For them, and for his High King, he charged, spear low, into the thick of the foe. For a moment, those white clouds cleared, and he imagined himself in the tangle of an impossible city, a place beyond his understanding, even in dreams.

For a moment, he imagined himself to be deeply, dreadfully cold, and deeply, dreadfully hungry.

Banishing these treacherous imaginings, he struck out with his spear, and pledged himself more deeply to the High King’s cause. He brought all the legendary martial acumen of his people to bear, heeding the wisdom of his forebears as if it was his own. He warmed himself with the strife of battle, and fed on nothing but the fear of those he drove before him.

Larn attempted to steer them only towards the battles they needed to fight, but need was ever a matter of debate, and none of them were particularly given to conversation. Justec least of all. The streets beyond Azrilazi rose sharply as they drew closer to the high walls of Barak-Thryng’s well-fortified central districts. Here, the City of the Ancestors began to earn its name. Finely engineered boulevards lined with statuary were flanked by towering steamworks of staggering height and complexity, whose distant peaks bristled with docking spars large enough to moor an ironclad. Closer to the ground, a series of stepped courtyards led away to shadowed fortress-manses, each of which might have housed a company of arkanauts. Their gates and doorways were barricaded, and no lanterns glowed within. As the tumult of battle deeper in the city grew louder, they encountered more and more evidence of the war being fought for the city: shell craters and buildings scorched by aethershot and witchfire, bodies of Kharadron and Arcanite alike left exposed in abandoned streets. Any straggling cultist they came across died, but Larn knew in his gut that this was not where the siege of Barak-Thryng would be broken.

Eventually, however, the runedaughter’s appetite for battle saw her collide with a skulking Arcanite rearguard where they gathered in the shadow of the first of the great gates that led into the inner walls. The skirmish that followed was brief, but bloody. Larn’s only answer to the runedaughter’s aggression was to match it with his own, to put aside the thinking part of himself and let the slayer do its work. They caught these cultists by surprise, despite Rhyngrim’s loud belligerence, and the fighting rapidly broke down into isolated encounters fought among the shadowed domiciles and high pathways of an abandoned part of the city.

A human in a grinning mask took a swipe at him with a curving sword, and Larn took the blow across his chest. He felt his skin split, but it wasn’t a deep cut. He growled and headbutted his assailant in the chest, then swung down to end him. Ardellain sped along a gantry above him, blade high, point forward. She ended a series of duels with lethal precision, one after another. In the shadows, Justec hunted. Larn listened for him, always, attempting to stay alert to the ghoul’s position. This was, in part, what it meant to care for the lad – but it was pragmatism, also. Larn Grunslayer had slain his share of flesh-eaters. If the boy’s mind finally broke completely, he refused to be caught unawares.

With a roar, Rhyngrim crashed through a makeshift barricade and drove a pack of Arcanites back into the wide causeway beyond, where more acolytes rushed to join them. Afforded a moment to regroup, they raised their shields and began to chant an incantation. Larn looked up at Ardellain, and she looked down at him. They sprinted forward, he on the ground, she above, blades high.

A resonant detonation burst against his eardrums, and half the acolytes’ formation vanished in a burst of gore and stonework. The survivors staggered away from the point where the shell had struck, stumbling directly into the path of a salvo of expertly aimed aethershot. Along the causeway, moving at pace, came a group of heavily armed Kharadron in Grundstok colours. These newcomers took in the sight of the Fyreslayers and the aelf, and waved them forward.

‘To the gates!’ their sergeant yelled, insistently, without pausing to address them directly.

Rhyngrim sprinted into formation alongside these newcomers, and Larn followed, his ears ringing. He thought he heard the sound of war-horns, somewhere deeper in the city. Chanting, too, and screams. Emerging at the end of the causeway, they found themselves at last at the foot of a huge, sealed gate. At its apex was a platform lined with arkanauts, who looked down at them, their weapons raised and ready – but not aimed at them.

Larn turned, and saw streams of sorcery and silver converging at a distance, fell light rising across a dozen bridges and flowing inwards towards them. The path that Justec had chosen had been a fortuitous one, after all. They’d outpaced the body of the foe’s forces, and reached the gates first. But if they’d bought themselves some time, it wasn’t very much. The enemy would be upon them soon, and the gates were sealed shut – as well they should be.

The Grundstok gunners set their feet upon solid ground, put their bodies between the inner city and the foe, and held their weapons ready. They knew that the gate had been sealed by the Code itself, and that it could no more be opened than the Code could be amended. In another sky-port, perhaps. But not in Barak-Thryng. They took a measure of pride in the doom they now accepted as an inevitability.

Above them, however, the arkanauts hastily cleared the gantry, waved away by one of their own. There was a low creak at Larn’s back, and a sudden hiss of steam.

And the gate began to open.

Rhyngrim, Larn and Ardellain did not wait for their new allies to understand the chance they’d been given. They raced into the widening gap, and as they did, a voice above them rang out clearly:

‘Inside, lads! Let walls be walls, and warriors be warriors. Get inside, and defend your city!’

It was a voice that Larn knew in his soul. He stopped in his tracks, and glanced up to where a lone figure stood at the edge of the high gantry. The Kharadron he saw there was stout, fully suited, and every inch the decorated arkanaut of Barak-Thryng. A captain, perhaps, by the look of his fine armour. His mask was down, however, his true features lost behind the angular ancestor-relief inscribed upon it.

It was that relief that drew Larn’s eye. This particular captain honoured his forebears with a mask of bright steel, not bronze or gold, as was more regularly Kharadron custom. His sculpted beard was wide, and fanned downward to cover a large portion of his chestplate.

And though the night was alive with fire and dark magic, the light that reflected from it was pure, gleaming white.

Many such tales were told that night in Barak-Thryng.

The city was a home to duardin, and the peril that descended on them cared not for their gods or their history, nor their boldness or their ingenuity. Chaos saw neither past nor future, when it came to their kind. It saw only a particularly stubborn form of fuel – the sort that refuses to burn unless subjected to extremes of heat and pressure. The enemy had seen the Khazalid Empire the same way. It had tasted what it was to break them, and gained an appetite for it.

Theirs was an animosity older than the Mortal Realms.

And so the enemy had gathered its cleverness, uncoiled labyrinthine power from the boundless Realm of Chaos, and distended its jaw. So many teeth, such gnashing will. Such heat, and pressure. Enough to overwhelm any soul that might stand against it.

Yet the wanderer’s purpose was not to stand; it was to wander. He was not bound to doing any one particular thing, saving any one particular life, averting any one particular crisis. The purpose of his wanderings was this: to remind the duardin of their own resilience, should their foe seek to make them forget. To say, the strength we had before has not left us. To remind them, also, that boldness and ingenuity are the means by which the future is secured. To say, if you need a tool and you lack it, then it falls to you to forge it. To show that change was not the enemy’s weapon to wield. Only weakness of will could make it so.

Change was stone. It dwelled in the dark, all mass and potential, awaiting the sculptor’s chisel.

Change was iron. It gained strength with each hammering, each new element introduced, each new alloy forged.

Change was fire. In the hands of the duardin, it was a brazier, burning bright. Hearth-warmer, fiend’s foe.

Change was the sky. It was as boundless as the Eight Realms. There was more of it than the boldest privateer could ever know.

The wanderer knew that the paths of stone, iron, fire and sky were pathways to change, and it was along these pathways, that night in Barak-Thryng, that he made himself known to his people.

To open doorways.

To dig tunnels.

To tell stories.

As the arkanaut captain Azdorik, atop the Gate of Five Thunders, he acted boldly, and saw Gunnery Sergeant Marvon’s squad to safety. Their rifles and mortar would subsequently be essential to the inner city’s defence; what was a crack in the gate if it meant that the wall held?

(Those others who saw him there said nothing of their suspicions, but pressed onward. It is sometimes the privilege of those to have crossed the wanderer’s path once to encounter him again, somewhere along the way. The customary thing to do, in these moments, is to smile, offer a nod, and continue to wherever it is that the mountain road wishes to lead you. The stranger will always have a smile for you in return.)

As the veteran mercenary Gunzharr, he rallied a fyrd of itinerant Vostargi to the defence of the cruxward batteries. The Fyreslayers might have otherwise been convinced to take the commission of a cowardly krontanker magistrate, who argued that the city was lost, and that a lost city could yield no ur-gold. Old Gunzharr reminded them that the debt they owed of Grimnir’s ghost was one of pride, as well as one of coin. When flame-spewing daemons of the Changer descended to silence the great guns of Barak-Thryng, they faced a foe who feared no fire.

As the longbeards Nilgromm, Tormr and Gromrhun, he ensured that the scattered Dispossessed who had made the perilous journey to Barak-Thryng understood that the city was theirs, too. To defend, as needed, but to see as a sanctuary, also. To bring to their Kharadron cousins the particular wisdom they could offer, in times of war, for they were a people who knew what it was to lose a home.

As Rigo, well…

There were many such tales told, that night in Barak-Thryng, and many duardin who would understand themselves to be in legendary company, in desperate times.

Even if this was not a feeling they could name.

And even if the wanderer did not cross their paths at all.

He arrived at last among the repair crews that tended to the city’s Master Endrinworks. Here, in a cavernous space beneath Barak-Thryng’s central district, hung a colossal set of inverted endrins. They descended from a gantry-lined ceiling like the cupolas of ancient temples, lit from within by furious conflagrations of aether-gold. As he pressed his way through the muster, garbed in an endrinrigger’s altitude suit and welding mask, he could taste the tension in the air. The fire in two of the six master endrins stuttered and flared dangerously – their fuel lines were shot, and yet power was being drawn from them still, channelled upwards to power the city’s defensive arrays. Yet that same power must also, by necessity, be channelled downwards, to ensure safe altitude. Here, and here most of all, was the tension between sky and city most keenly felt. Though the labourers gathered here were Kharadron born, a few of them might have felt, somewhere deep, a certain pull to dig a hole and live in it instead.

The Code was split on this particular matter. The master endrins were priceless, and therefore not to be re-engineered without significant consultation from the Admiralty, the Endrinrigger’s Guild, and three different Grundcorps with stakes in the matter. The safety of the city was paramount, of course. There was no profit in loss. But what did it mean to serve the city at this moment? Did it mean channelling power to its defenders, or holding it aloft, in the event that those who fought for it failed?

There were perhaps a hundred souls present, some busy with small acts of maintenance, others engaged in furious debate. He held his position in the crowd, and made ready to choose his moment to intervene, should it prove necessary to do so.

Yet in this instance, another took his place.

‘At attention, crews!’

The shout came from above them, at a point where a cavernous underway opened out into the roof of the vast chamber. A figure in a well-made arkanaut’s rig leaped down onto the highest gantry. She carried a pair of pistols, and was slick with grime and grot-blood. Her mask snapped up. Bright eyes looked down at them from a deep-lined face and commanded their attention. There was no doubting her authority, from the make of her suit, and the ornate detail upon her pauldrons and ancestor mask.

It was a rare enough thing to meet an admiral, let alone one who was willing to get her suit dirty. She reached out and gave the descending bulk of the nearest endrin a thump with the butt of one of her pistols.

‘Let’s keep this city in the sky, shall we, dearies?’ she called down to them.

He chuckled to himself. Beneath his welding mask, his whiskers bristled. None heard him, nor paid him any mind as he stepped away. They were too busy cheering, raising a clamour with their wrenches, hammers and torsion tools.

It had always been his pleasure to watch the duardin remember who they were.

CHAPTER 8

A MORTAL SPAN

At the bottom of the cellar steps, Margew Venki found a small aether-lantern set carefully aside. Ensuring that the trapdoor was shut, he ventured to light it, though he kept the flow of fuel to a meagre trickle. Even so, it was a Maker-made blessing to feel himself illuminated by something other than all-consuming fire.

His unspoken suspicion had been correct: the building above had been a tavern, and thus this was the most fortuitous sort of cellar he could have hoped to find. It was lined with casks – some empty, some full, others cracked and spoiled, each stamped with a mark of trade. Many of these marks were familiar to him. Yet before he sat and contented himself with sampling the kegs’ contents, putting aside all thought of the danger outside, it seemed appropriate to put the place in order, as best he could.

In a far corner of the cellar he found another set of stairs. These led down to a small larder, and there he sniffed a welcome supply of provisions – wedges of hard cheese and strips of salted meat, pickled fruit and vegetables. He permitted himself to sample a few things. The taste of good salt made his eyes water. In the corner of the larder he found a pair of wooden steps, no doubt here to help the tavern’s keeper reach high shelves. Margew thought they’d make for decent stools, and so he carried them back to a cleared space near the trapdoor, brushed them down, and set them on the floor.

In a dusty corner, he found a tankard, and used the cuff of his filthy pilot’s suit to sweep the spiders from it. Then, at last, he permitted himself to peruse the tavern’s stock.

Irontop Regular. No, not sure I’ll ever regain the taste for it. Emberkin Sixty-Five. Warm to the touch, but empty. Ah! Skellarbrau Seventy-Six!

There wasn’t much of that particular batch left. He rapped his knuckles on his chosen cask, and his heart swelled at the slop of its contents. Holding his tankard under his chin as best he was able, he began to untighten the cask’s stopper.

Knock, knock.

The sound stopped Margew’s heart. Above him, against the trapdoor…

Knock, knock, knock.

He froze, backing away slowly into the shadows.

Inch by inch, the trapdoor began to open, and a band of crimson light cut into Margew Venki’s sanctuary.

‘Ho there, innkeep!’ called a voice, deep and clear.

A figure began to descend the shallow steps – a traveller, in leathers and mail, clad in a cloak of decent make, one hand curling in the hairs of a vast, white beard. The stranger’s eyes found Margew Venki, there in the dark, and seemed to ignore the sorry sight of him – the tattered suit and mangled arm, the broken wheel to which he was bound.

‘Hope you don’t mind, innkeep,’ the stranger said, smiling broadly. ‘Front door’s gone, so I let myself in. Would you share a little repast with a weary traveller?’

They found no haven in the inner city. All of Barak-Thryng was at war, it seemed. The forces gathered here were larger, and the battles they fought all the more desperate as the enemy drew closer to the heart of the City of the Ancestors. A skybound foe could strike anywhere, as the Kharadron well knew, and as such the siege of Barak-Thryng was fought everywhere, all at once. The battle they left behind at the gates was as vital as any other: each victory won the sky-port’s defenders a moment of respite, just as each loss empowered their enemies, compounding the dire odds stacked against them. Mustering Grundcorps and scattered bands of mercenaries fought street by street, courtyard by courtyard, in the city beyond the gates, as Larn, Rhyngrim of Sigyorn and Nauré Ardellain themselves fought their way inward.

That damned, head-ringing mortar blast had shaken Larn’s senses. Then, the race to the gate, the noise, the uncanny sight of him again, standing proud in his new guise – all of it had conspired to distract him. Until then, Larn had known where Justec was. Now, he’d lost him. He muttered a curse. They stood in a landscape of bristling docking towers and looming guildhalls. Power surged and faded in the orbs of pale aether-lanterns, which at their brightest picked up the insectoid shapes of broken-down mechanical conveyances and the bending arc of stairways that led up and away to the cloud-scraping manses of the most prosperous Kharadron. This place was a maze. If anything, the siege helped him get his bearings. He’d have no sense of direction at all without it.

Do what is right, here and now, and I will do the same.

He steeled himself with this. He had to trust the whitebeard’s words – that all might yet come good, for himself and for the boy, if he kept following his instincts. There were moments, these last few months aboard the Drakkul, where that had not been so easy. In dabbling in prophecy, they’d been reminded that not all calamities were lucky enough to receive a counter-balancing miracle. Larn had long had a doom-sense of his own, and to an extent, he knew this already. Yet it had been difficult for some of the others to accept. When you knew what could happen in times of dire need, then it was hard to know who to blame when it didn’t.

Nobody at all, Shima Sjarsdottir had said. The old admiral was sparing with her wisdom, but on this subject, she had opinions. You weren’t there, either, to help any of those folk the glimmerings revealed to you. Anything he could have done, you could have done.

She really meant that last part, Larn sensed.

‘Where now?’ Rhyngrim said, likewise adrift in the City of the Ancestors. Her eyes were drawn to the distant crack of aethershot. Further along the way on which they stood, a company of arkanauts hunkered down behind the shell of a crashed hauler, and opened fire on a marauding band of Tzaangor warriors.

‘Could have our pick of little scraps all night,’ Larn replied.

Ardellain’s blade flashed, and she pointed up a flight of stairs that led in a different direction.

‘The realm bends and breaks. An incursion is starting,’ she said flatly. ‘This way. Something is coming.’

The City of the Ancestors was a fragile act of artifice, kept aloft by grand ambition and mortal pride. A lesser daemon might have fed upon a place like this for a long, long time.

Yet this was not what fate demanded.

Innumerable rivulets of destiny converged here. From its brooding place within the skin of reality, Kairos Fateweaver perceived these converging streams as but one tributary of the great river of time. Through one set of eyes, it gazed away down that tributary to its origin in the past; through the other, it glanced away to the far future. It did so with a predator’s patient eye. Fateweaver was a superlative predator – a favoured child of the god of the river, whose aspect was that of a twin-headed wading bird.

Fateweaver plunged its beaks into time’s river and drank deep. It could taste the distinct points of origin of a thousand mortal lives, many of which it had tasted before. Yet this rich brew was a mere trickle, a thirsting pauper’s last drop, compared to sacred and terrible Eternity – the greater ocean to which all would return.

Fateweaver felt individual destinies running down its twin gullets, each swarming with secrets. It searched through these for the choicest delicacies. These it would disgorge in tribute to its master, when its present doings were done.

Ah, ai, aiah, but the work is not yet done.

Fateweaver was not alone. A hated rival squatted upon the riverbank: a fisherman, ruddy-cheeked and white-bearded, who insisted upon dangling his bright little lures into the water. He fished for nothing of any real value, by Fateweaver’s reckoning, but that was no less reason to loathe him. His attitude was one of hapless contentment, of mindless satisfaction with small things.

The fisherman had crafted a simple rod and line that he might fish idly from the dry shore, as if the dredging of destiny were a mere pastime. This was an insult to the god of the river, whose domain encompassed the primal truths of time, destiny, and change. To do this – to continue to do this, season upon season, whether the river ran high or so low that it threatened to dry out completely – was a supreme act of arrogance, typical of those who aspired to godhood yet denied the Changer its due. It was an act that presumed there would always be a river to fish in, and a bank to fish from.

Fateweaver knew otherwise. It knew that Eternity had an ending. It knew that, though it was a riverbird by nature, its wings were powerful and would carry it to rivers beyond this one, in the course of trackless aeons. It had witnessed Eternity’s end before, and would do so again. If it could do that, if it could survive such a thing, then it could climb the bank and walk the land as surely as its hated rival did. It could choose to open its gullets wide, and swallow all of the fisherman’s meagre ambitions in a single, predatory swoop.

Aiah, ai. This is the choice that the Changer demands.

Thus this was the choice that Fateweaver made. It unfurled its wings in satisfaction as the ninth hour drew near, and reached out with a talon to pierce the skin of reality. The time had come to see to the final breaking of the sky-city, and all the promises borne aloft by it. Something growled in the deep-crimson depths of night, and all over the city, birds of every sort took to the air, cackling in the same, unnatural voice.

Kha-kha-kha-kha!

A pinprick of light appeared high above the City of the Ancestors – the first touch of starlight to reach Barak-Thryng since the Cursed Skies rolled in. First one star appeared, then two, then four. They danced apart, taking on for a fleeting moment the aspect of baleful eyes, then split for the horizon. Then, from the horizon to the heart of the city, they sliced a burning rent in the aether. Taloned hands reached forth to seize at one side of this scar in reality, and then the other. Wind rushed upward, and the city trembled as the greater daemon birthed itself into the sky. Then, at last, it began to descend. The sorcerous aperture from which it had emerged clung to the tips of its outstretched, radiant wings, forming a trailing path of witchfire in its wake. It was impossible not to feel small in the shadow of such a thing, no matter the stories one had been told of gods and monsters. Its kindred Lords of Change flocked to it as it fell, rising from where they conducted the siege of the sky-port to encircle Kairos Fateweaver as it alighted upon its chosen perch.

Just as its sigil bore the likeness of Maker and Warrior both, so was Barak-Thryng a city of parts and pieces. It could be subdivided in many ways according to the needs of trade, of war, of pioneering, and always of the Code. Its districts were bound together with many structural spars, built one atop another over the course of generations. Should one fail, there would always be another.

Yet those who built the city had elevated one bridging element above all the others, simply for the sake of doing so. This one they called the Span of the Ancestors. It was approximately at the centre of the sky-city; indeed it had been precisely so, once, the elders would grumble. It took the form of a massive, shallow staircase that rose from one district of the inner city before descending to meet its counterpart on the far side. High, vaulted arches had been built along its length. The gaps between them were open to the sky at their apex, and large enough to allow a frigate to pass through. Lower down, however, the spaces between the arches were filled with towering ancestor statues. Heroes of the past, rendered in a stubborn weight of skyborne stone.

It was a sacred place, to the extent that such a thing existed among the Kharadron, and it was to this quality that Fateweaver and its flock were drawn. The greater daemon’s descent melted the stonework beneath its talons and blasted back those defenders who raced to the Span’s defence. Fateweaver’s twinned heads shrieked in exultation, and it brought the barbed tip of the Staff of Tomorrow down to strike against the ground.

The flames it had carried with it from the Realm of Chaos broke free and spread in each direction, burning bodies and souls alike. Those touched were transfigured in an instant into capering spawn, and set about their former comrades with new limbs, new teeth, new babbling voices.

The power brought to bear by the daemon’s arrival caused half of the Span to burst upward, an echo – and a promise – of what it would mean for any part of the city to collide with the ground below. Fragments of stone rained down on the districts beyond. Then, Kairos Fateweaver took up position upon its broken bridge, stooped low…

And began to drink.

It drank the bridge’s past. It drank the meaning that the Span had held to generations of Kharadron – the bonds it represented, both physical and cultural, and the bond of duty it shared with every other bridge, strut, pipe and spar in the city. These things were material fact, but to a daemon, they were malleable ideas. It drank the bridge’s future, too – the future Fateweaver itself had created with this one sudden act of targeted violence.

In its gullets, it wove these strands together into a spell. It bound the fate of all bonds and bridges together, so that the destruction of one would be the destruction of all. When its weaving was concluded, it would speak the word, and they would, each of them, be unmade. Barak-Thryng would be revealed for what it was: not a city at all, but a collection of parts and promises. A stack of runes, tossed up in the air, there to hang suspended for but a moment.

Before tumbling down.

‘Something’s happened, Myr,’ Sivarn said. At the crash site, all heads shot up at once. Had there ever been birds in the city? Myrddi wondered. She’d not been here long enough to know. She’d seen no natural birds, anyhow. Heard nothing as simple nor good as birdsong for a long time. Not that there was anything good or simple about the birdsong she could hear now. It meant danger, no doubt. Her eyes went to Sivarn as he stood, and then the lot of them were on their feet, rising from behind the barricades they had built. The crew of the Drakkul looked up from where they laboured on the ironclad’s rigging.

All eyes went to the lights in the sky. At the green, pink and blue flames that danced there, before flowing inward to converge somewhere closer to the middle of the city. For a moment afterwards, there was utter silence, as if all expected some new catastrophe to follow – a ground-shaking explosion, a sudden lurch beneath their feet.

Myrddi’s imagination held all of these possibilities. Yet what actually followed was slower to dawn upon her senses, and more insidious. Throughout the city, a cry went up. The voices that raised it were human, bestial, chittering, disharmonic, and far closer than Myrddi would have liked. The song had begun far off, but now it resounded through the ruins that enclosed them on three sides. They’d never been safe here, they realised now. This pause in the fighting had only been a reprieve. She raised her mallet one-handed and reached up with the other to grip Sivarn’s wrist.

‘They’re feeling bold,’ she said. ‘But don’t fret, love. Folk often sing their own dirges, when things get dire.’

The whitebeard was gone. Their friends, the best warriors among them, were gone. Myrddi raised her weapon into the air. The folk around her had started to look to her for leadership, she realised, because she had the wherewithal not to show how scared she was. They looked to Sivarn, in turn, because he’d been kind to them. And they looked to the young endrinrigger, Teffi, because the night had lit a fire under her, and now she was always busy – rushing from this place to that, citing this artycle, this amendment. Taking charge, offering answers.

‘Arms and positions!’ Teffi Ginstock called out, as if on cue, high and clear above the hubbub. Arkanauts gathered around her at the foot of the ironclad’s boarding ramp – a few from the Drakkul, others in the colours of Barak-Thryng. Myrddi watched her as she pointed away with her pistol towards the widest of the nearby alleys, and fired. The flare swept away the shadows, revealing only an expanse of empty streets, at first…

Then a gleaming sea of masks and ornate armour, surging forward.

Myrddi drew a deep breath, and bellowed. ‘Shields forward! Stand!’

At her side, Sivarn closed his eyes.

In the shadow of the Drakkul, Teffi Ginstock raised her hand as the arkanauts at her side levelled their weapons. Then she brought it down.

‘Open fire!’

‘I won’t repeat myself, dearie,’ Shima said. ‘Blow the hatches.’

The endrinrigger standing before her was covered in grime and his suit was a mess of patchwork repairs, but he had enough Thryngish dignity in him to bluster at the admiral’s orders. What she commanded was nothing less than the abandonment of a significant share of well-forged sky-iron, precision-engineered and unprofitably difficult to replace. She stared him down with unflagging authority.

They were all fully suited now. Those crews who lacked proper environment gear had been sent away, back up through the access tunnels, to offer their aid elsewhere. The admiral’s first Code-bending order had given them no other choice. She’d had them crack the vents on the two failing master endrins, and now they gouted refined, volatile aether-gold freely into the cavernous chamber. This was the extra volatility they needed, she’d argued, convincingly, in order to manage the flow of power to the other four. But it was also poison, and so there was no surviving without well-fitted suits and masks.

She waved her hand through a glittering eddy of aether-gold. ‘This is fine stuff. It wants to go up. One stray spark and it’ll detonate as it is, mind you. Where’s all that energy going to go, then?’

‘Up,’ the endrinrigger replied. ‘Through the city.’

‘Correct!’ the admiral exclaimed. ‘Then what is our recourse, if we are to properly see to the profitable use of the fuel now in our possession?’

‘Open the hatches,’ he said. ‘So that it vents downward…’

‘And provides…?’

‘Lift, admiral.’

She slapped him on the shoulder, then turned back to the dials and gauges on the hanging console in front of her.

‘Anyone who can’t find an endrinsuit for themselves should make their way out now,’ she said, to nobody in particular. ‘Tether-lines don’t count. Flyers only.’

A series of shouts echoed her orders as they were passed down. All around the vast chamber, repair crews made for the gantries. One lever was pulled, then another, and then, with an almighty crash, the bolts holding the chamber floor in place began to loosen. Colossal hatches swung open beneath them and caught the wind with such violence that they were torn away at the hinges, sending huge sheets of metal tumbling down through the empty sky. Suddenly, their narrow gantries hung above a howling void.

There wasn’t a single endrinsuit among them, she knew. Nor one for her. This was an unlucky crew, to have landed such a duty on such a night, but Shima felt no need to add to their stock of misfortune. She simply took the steps necessary to ensure that the Master Endrinworks did not fail, and that the city did not fall. It just so happened that each step necessitated that more and more of her kin be sent away.

‘If you can’t fly, you leave,’ she bellowed. ‘Plenty of work to be done elsewhere.’

She heard their uncertainty and their acquiescence all at once. She was not technically incorrect, after all. Maintenance of a sky-vessel in free flight mandated the use of a flight harness of some kind, and while there were many definitions of free flight, a good rule of thumb was any time there are clouds beneath you.

The last of the repair crews abandoned their posts and began to climb away through the access tunnels. Caught in an updraught, refined aether-gold pooled above Shima’s head. It’d have somewhere to go, now, should it catch fire, and a decent skyfarer could always make profitable use of a bit of downward thrust. She walked the length of the gantry, to another set of controls. Checking to ensure that the last of the repair crews had left, she sealed the bulkheads behind them.

She hadn’t given them her name, and the majority couldn’t possibly have got a good look at her. Shima held to these promising thoughts as she returned to the business of saving the city.

The barricades they had built might have served to hide them, or grant a small advantage against a scouting party, but they could not hold against a full-scale assault. These Arcanites were hungry to offer up cruelties to their patron, and here they found a fresh stock of sacrifices. There were hundreds of them – far more than they could hope to stand against. Sivarn watched Myrddi hold fast as battle lines converged. She smashed one acolyte aside, then another. She screamed, jumped out of the way of a prowling Tzaangor, fell backwards, and rolled to her feet. Bright aethershot punched into the enemy line, but on they came, too committed to their madness to be dissuaded by something as mundane as death.

His own aetheric sensitivities were screaming. A flash of sorcery caught his eye, and he saw that the two acolytes that Myrddi had slain were melting. Their flesh ran together until it formed a pool of liquid silver, and then from that pool a Tzaangor stood, new-formed but garbed for war, just like its kindred. This first wave of human foes were little more than chattel, there to sap the strength of the duardin while sacrificing little of their own. As acolytes fell, Tzaangors rose, each unnatural birth a sickening subversion of the natural order.

For a moment, however, Sivarn held to hope. Myrddi’s very existence was proof of the Wuttenfolk’s resilience, and the brayherds were their ancient foe. This was a battle that her people had won before, and there, on the front line, she ceased to be his partner and became the warrior that her clan had raised her to be. He saw her, and he knew that the duardin did, too. His Myr, in her green traveller’s garb, with her wooden weapon, laying low a foe of sorcery and silver.

Suddenly, baleful light washed over the Arcanite host from behind. An exultant shriek went up, and a monster thundered forward – building-sized, lumbering, and heavily mutated, with a nest of serpentine tentacles where its head might once have been, and a lurid vortex of acid-green sorcery roiling atop its back.

Myrddi, blood-slick and breathless, held her weapon high and yelled out, ‘Stand!’

But there was no standing against a foe such as this. The beast was a living weapon, shaped by sorcery for no other purpose than the banishment of hope.

Fear gripped Sivarn Trell, but rage took root. He let desperation empower him in that moment, and began to search for power in the earth. But it wasn’t earth at his feet; it was quarried stone and metal. He was useless up here, he feared, and this was no time to be useless.

She held her ground fearlessly, his Myr. She took a step towards the monster, weapon low at her side. The first time he’d seen her swing that mallet, it’d been at him. The first time he’d seen her actually hit something with it, their foes had been nothing more fearsome than woods-bandits. They’d agreed to be thieves, together. How had they found themselves here?

By doing the right thing, he reminded himself. He did not regret that. But he did not want to watch anybody else die. He didn’t want to watch Myrddi die. And so Sivarn Trell, gardener, did something he was not supposed to do. He closed his eyes, and emerged from his woods-exile onto the path that had been offered to him when he studied at the Collegiate Arcane. He went looking for power, and the search sent him digging deep. Very deep.

He sensed life in the chests of all those gathered around him. They were a herd under attack. Bullish, but vulnerable. He could not draw from them without sapping their strength, and they needed every bit of it. Next, he extended his will into the grime that had seeped into the ground beneath his feet. Here was the touch of something foul, but natural. Some time ago – not long, by any reckoning – there had been grots here, and they’d brought their filth with them. All the way up from the Dyrwood, far below.

A spore or two was not a forest, but it was a start.

He opened himself to his greensight, and entered the dirt. The voice of the Dyrwood was dark and distant. It liked the beasts, the gloom, the blood that drained away into its roots. Its spirits were old and angry. His arms outstretched, Sivarn raced into that darkness, and life-magic began to spill from him, not as wind or rain but as thorns, sharp and searching.

He couldn’t see the wrath he unleashed upon the foe, but he could feel it. Each barb and splinter carried the primal wrath of the Dyrwood as it sought out the gaps in silver armour to pierce eyes and throats.

Through the Dyrwood, Sivarn reached for home. For Ghyran. The voice of the old wood was her voice, after all. Another dark facet of the vengeful Everqueen, his patron, his debt holder. His ears were full of the sound of battle, death, calamity. Gunfire, the clash of steel. But his mind heard her terms. The cost of enrollment in life’s war.

Your mortality is something precious, not to be forsaken lightly, Grombrindal had told him. Told all of them. Few understood the wisdom in the words more than Sivarn Trell. Yet the Everqueen did not ask him to give up all of his mortality. Only a part. The part that allowed him to perceive pathways other than hers.

This was the price of power, and he accepted it, though his stomach sank to do so.

He winced as his fingers became thorns. Her thorns. The sound of sorcery and strife ringing in his ears, he raised these thorns to his eyes, and pushed, and screamed.

At Trell’s feet, the ground bent and buckled. He parleyed with the spirits of the Dyrwood with the Everqueen’s authority and convinced them that this was a place of growing, of life, of bleeding and feeding. Quarried stone cracked. Twining roots and tendrils of dense vegetation caught him as he collapsed backwards, forming a throne. The spirits built much more than this. He needed more than this. At his back, a sapling was born from little more than the notion of a seed. It lived a hundred years in an instant, until it became a wide-trunked oak, gnarled, iron-barked, its shadow spreading over desperate duardin and Arcanite alike.

Sivarn’s will was in the ground, now, as well as in the air, and it searched out foes with questing roots and jabbing thorns. He fed the forest the flesh of Tzaangors and madmen, then sent his will surging inward, towards the unnatural monstrosity at the heart of the host. It loomed over the little spark of life he knew to be Myrddi. It lashed out at her, and the force of the blow disarmed her and sent her flying backwards. She landed softly, however, on the carpet of vines that he called forth to catch her.

And when her mallet touched the ground, it ceased to be her weapon, and became his.

Here was a splinter of far Ghyran, a precious piece of home. He called to the spirit of the tree from which it had been carved, and extended an offer of vengeance.

Myrddi’s weapon exploded into a thicket of strangling roots, which grasped at the monster’s underside, piercing its flesh and dragging it to the ground. Sivarn felt its bones begin to snap and closed his grip ever more tightly, until the baleful sorceries that animated it were extinguished completely and its spoiled meat fed the earth. The ground heaved and subsided where the beast had been, forming a low hill.

Sivarn’s will went to the high branches, then, and from there it extended further than it ever could have when he’d only been a man. Beyond his burgeoning newborn glade was an expanse of unnatural city, much of it dark, but some of it bright with life.

Part of him wanted to hate it, to rip it all asunder. Another part of him, however, saw the parts that mattered. He had a choice to make yet.

Mortal lives. More survivors. Some of them aren’t far. I don’t have to stop here.

This errant thought shook him back into an awareness of his mortal body. His wounded, blind, mortal body, snagged and tangled in the roots of the tree.

‘What have you done?’ Myrddi shouted, desperate, as she wrenched him free. ‘Stupid, stupid,’ she said, dragging him down to rest upon the soft earth that he had called forth for her.

He blinked blood from unseeing sockets. He realised then that he could no longer hear gunfire, or violence. He heard wind in the leaves, and weary footsteps on mossy ground, but no danger, no struggle.

‘Did–’ he began.

‘Yes, it worked,’ she said, furious with him, and heartbroken, but proud also. ‘I wish you could see it.’

‘I can,’ Sivarn replied. ‘It’s green.’

A few folk offered to help Myrddi tend to the wizard’s wounds. The circumstances of their survival left them stunned, but grateful. Others made their way cautiously around the forest that had bloomed at the heart of their shelter, checking for surviving Arcanites and other dangers. Teffi Ginstock, however, did as she was wont to do, when the ground once more refused to stay steady beneath her feet. She went looking for her father.

He’d been on the Drakkul, last she’d seen him, before the attack. Before the defence of their holdings had left her bruised and bloodied, and her ammunition stocks dangerously low. She’d sustained a slash across the arm, and a broken lens. She carried her helm in her hands as she mounted the boarding ramp, plucking shards of gemstone out of the socket with her thumb. She paused to shake the rest free, then blew through the gap. She’d have to find a replacement if she was going to do high-altitude work any time soon.

Whoever she’d been at the beginning of tonight’s shift, Teffi Ginstock was a different person now. She felt it. She walked the boards of her grandmother’s vessel as if they were her own – as if its arrival alone would not have been a life-changing happenstance. By focusing on the needs of the moment, she’d survived, and her mind had survived, too. It had gained roomy new compartments in which all of the night’s terrors could reside until she had time to deal with them. Where she could escape, when the predator’s eye threatened to find her again.

‘He’s belowdecks,’ the pilot said. Renke. Her name was Renke.

‘How close are we to being back in the air?’ Teffi replied.

‘Not far,’ Renke replied. ‘All this…’ She gestured at the vegetation that bloomed around the ship. ‘It complicates things a bit. I’ll get it seen to.’

‘Good,’ Teffi said, with a nod. ‘See that you do.’ It was only as she walked away that she realised that she had given the Drakkul’s pilot an order.

Teffi found her father in the admiral’s quarters, at the rear of the ship. They were not ostentatious – there was a cot, a rig for the storage and maintenance of Sjarsdottir’s suit, a few chests of trinkets, and a desk. It was at that desk that Nytten Ginstock sat, one hand in his beard, the other on a thin sheet of rune-stamped copper plate.

‘She left this behind, Teffi,’ he said matter-of-factly. ‘For us, I think. It’s more than I expected, in truth.’

She saw the impact of her long, strange ordeal mirrored in her father.

‘You don’t seem shocked,’ Teffi said.

‘Nor do you, my girl.’

‘I don’t know what to make of any of it,’ she replied. ‘Who’s to say that it’s even her?’

Nytten looked up, a faint smile on his face. ‘Oh, it’s her,’ he said. ‘At first, the surprise of it… This was not a thing I expected to live to see, in truth.’

‘Do you know why grandmother left?’ Teffi asked, as she began to move around the desk. She’d heard the story a few times, but never pried. There was too much sensitivity around the name Sjarsdottir to go prying. But who cared for such sensitivities now?

‘Aye,’ he replied. ‘She felt trapped by the Code. Always did. Asked me to go with her, too.’

‘She did?’

‘Oh, aye, girl. Twice.’

‘Then why didn’t you?’

‘I wanted to have my own life, Teffi. I didn’t want to have hers.’

‘It was that simple?’

He chuckled. ‘Oh, it’s never so simple. Present circumstances are proof enough of that.’

He spoke slowly and calmly, but she caught the edge of tension in his voice. Her father was ruminating over something, she could tell. He sighed, in the way he did when regret got the better of him, or when he was struggling to make a decision. Her eyes went to the copper plate beneath his fingers.

‘Can I read it?’ she asked.

‘I’d hoped you would,’ he replied, sliding it towards her.

My dear, the letter began, though these runes had since been scratched out.

If you are the one reading this, ‘Rigo’, then stop it. You know what it says. Leave this for those who need to hear it. And let them find it, gods damn you. No smug display. I am upholding my part of our little compact. Spectacularly, I might add. As was ever going to be the case.

My dears, the letter then continued.

I was a young woman when the glimmer-traders first came to the city. Serving on the Admiralty Council already, mind you. The risks of employing this new Ghurish magic were much debated. Of course they were. But I was unafraid. What’s another risk, to our kind? We stick spells in bottles, when it suits us. These scryings came pre-corked.

My latest crew might tell you that I refused to aid them in their folly – that I told them I no longer partook of the Excelsian’s vice. That’s true, to an extent. I helped in many, many other ways. However, I crushed no crystals, I perceived no futures that might aid them. This is because I have seen the future many, many times, dears. And it is always the same.

Here is what I see. I see a statue. Of me. White, polished stone. Beautiful craftsmanship. The image of a venerated ancestor. An exemplar of the Code. It stands somewhere in the city. It never changes. A humourless greybeard comes to clean it every once in a while. Gives it a testing tap, to check that the stone’s holding together.

I hate him. I hate it. I hate my statue. For many years, I refused to make my peace with it. I did whatever it took to put a dent in the severe, unsmiling face they’d given me. And yet, nothing!

I’ve earned my infamy, dears. All they say about me, all of it is true. By the gods, I set Ardellain upon the whitebeard – a legend of my own girlhood – and I hoped against hope that she’d put a dent in him. But she didn’t.

There’s nothing I can do, I fear. I’ve checked. I am bound, I think, in the end, to return home and do something so valiant that it makes my people forget the night-black stain on my name. I cannot imagine what it will be. Perhaps you already know.

I’m taking a risk writing this. Odds are one of you is going to commission a sculptor out of spite alone. But I would prefer you to have an answer, even if I damn myself with it. What’s one more stain?

It seems likely, now, that we are on the whitebeard’s trail. Ardellain believes so, and I have no reason to doubt her. I should have sensed that we were on the cusp of it the moment we crossed into Chamon. This is the downhill stretch. I have always been coming home, one way or another.

This is what HE told me, the night he freed me from my own brig.

He said, ‘I’m releasing you so that you can do that which you were always going to do.’

Awful! Awful!

Nytten, dear, I’m sorry. Gods watch over you, and your child.

If it wasn’t for that damned statue, I’d have come back much sooner.

S.

Teffi hesitated a moment, still holding the inscribed plate in her hands. Then she set it down. ‘Selfish,’ she said, at last. ‘Selfish. No reason at all to–’

‘I quite agree,’ her father replied, eyes downturned.

‘I hate the idea of that statue, even so,’ Teffi said, matter-of-factly.

‘Aye, my girl,’ he said, nodding. ‘As do I.’

They looked at one another then, the Ginstocks. Each confirmed a suspicion that the other privately held:

That they had a choice in the matter of their legacy.

That no predator could choose to make Teffi Ginstock its prey without her say-so.

And that no vessel of Barak-Thryng belonged in the hands of pirates.

Doom called to Larn Grunslayer, Fateweaver’s spell-making demanded a response from Ardellain’s blade, and the ultimate target of Rhyngrim’s belligerent path had revealed itself. Their destinations were the same, and there was nowhere for them to go save to the foot of the great stairway where the daemon made its roost.

They were not alone. They found themselves pressing forward through a host of duardin, assembled here by chance, luck and circumstance. Thousands of them. Several distinct fyrds of Fyreslayer mercenaries marched alongside Grundstok and arkanauts of multiple guilds and corporations, as well as those who served the city itself. Larn saw retinues of Dispossessed warriors, also, gathering in haste in the service of itinerant runesmiths and lorekeepers. After years on the run from the agents of a Warden King, it was strange to walk among such folk without fear. Perhaps he’d finally run far enough to evade the consequence of what he and his comrades had done in the depths of Karak Thorga.

His shoulder stung violently, and he winced. He reached for the old wound and felt fresh bark, tender to the touch. The pain slowed him enough to put him at risk of losing the others in the throng, and he gained speed in order to catch up.

There were many warriors here, and many leaders among them. Orders were barked over one another, in every direction. They all amounted to much the same thing.

Forward.

Defend the city.

Slay the daemon.

As one, the host of duardin began to run alongside him. Yet this felt to Larn Grunslayer like the reckless sort of running. Shields forward, axes high was not a strategy; it was a reaction. Ahead of them, at the height of the Span of the Ancestors, a trio of Lords of Change wove yawning portals into being, their talons outstretched. From these voids emerged a vast sea of horrors – true daemons, this time. Long-limbed pink and blue bodies formed a tumbling avalanche of claws and grinning teeth as they descended the step towards the gathering defenders of Barak-Thryng. There would be no swift victory here. Yet he gritted his teeth anyway, and picked up speed until he and Ardellain ran into battle together.

A wayward bolt of sorcery from the top of the Span caught an ancestor statue at the base, and sent it crashing down into their path. The entire stairway shook with a reverberating thrum. Their momentum arrested, they wiped dust from their eyes and gathered their bearings. The edifice had split when it fell, and now blocked the Span in three places.

And atop the central piece stood a white-bearded stranger.

He stood ahead of them, singular, and from his high vantage point, he appeared for a moment to fill the sight of every duardin that beheld him. As one, yet in their thousands, they saw him. They saw the trappings of the Ancestor Gods that hung from his shoulders, the rings of bronze, gold and gromril in his beard. They saw his rising shock of white hair, the broad, twin-headed axe. They saw mountain snow, and a prospector’s path – a blizzard, and through that blizzard…

Eight peaks, lost to time. They saw the ire that rocks the deep, and sends forth magma, gouting; they saw iron sharp enough to cut the sky.

He stood ahead of them, and drew his breath, and the force of this alone was enough to stop them in their tracks.

‘Hold! Here we hold, I say! Here is our line drawn, our mettle tested. Here, the wall shall be built!’

He gestured with the hilt of his battleaxe towards the statues at their flanks.

‘I task you with containing the evil that rises here. I task you with doing as our people have always done. Dig, friends. Dig, and build, and ensure that not a single mote of hellfire passes this place to touch the city beyond. What is wrought here, I charge you with ensuring that it stays here.

‘I see in you the echo of your forebears,’ he bellowed. ‘A sea of proud faces. Grim-set, up-turned, wondering. In your fine armour, your ingenious suits, in little but your scars. I see masked and maskless, bearded and beardless. I see you, my duardin. They see you, too.’

He stamped down, hard, onto the stone of the statue on which he stood.

‘You are flanked by your ancestors, beardlings,’ he cried. ‘So let them lay down their bodies to protect you. They have done it before. Perhaps in the future it will fall to you to do it. But tonight, now, I say, bring them down. Let them serve you, one last time.’

There was a note of disquiet at this, born of Code, tradition, or simple respect for good workmanship. At the whitebeard’s back, the twinned heads of the greater daemon curled apart, beaks wide, shrieking a reverie of Ruin. Down the steps, horrors came. Teeth, madness, flame.

Then, Rhyngrim of Sigyorn remembered the purpose of a pickaxe. She swung hard for the nearest chunk of stone, and shattered it into pieces that might serve as bricks, or projectiles. She raised her weapon in salute, and the whitebeard raised his in return. They roared, together, and then the cannons of the Grundcorps roared with them. Heavy shells flew over their heads to impact statues further up the span, sending them crashing down to stem the tide of foes. Each collapse sent forth a cloud of white dust, which gathered into an avalanche as it raced down the Span of the Ancestors towards them. It caught in their hair, their beards, the gaps in their armour. The dust settled upon each of them like war paint, blurring the lines between them and marking them out as warriors in the company of the white-bearded ancestor.

‘There is no mortal so ill-fated that their fate cannot be reworked!’ the stranger bellowed. ‘There is nothing of mortal make so broken that it cannot be remade! And in all the long ages of our kind, there has never been a god nor daemon so lofty that its ear cannot be bent by the songs of our ancestors. Let them hear you, young ones!’

He gave his war cry then, in a language long since forgotten.

‘KHAZUKAN! KAZAKIT-HA!’

The words thundered within them even so, and were returned in the form of a thousand war cries of their own.

Larn held his axe forth, and offered up the old wisdom of Kerrik lodge:

‘As death is here, so am I!’

A roiling tide of horror-flesh pressed in on the duardin line. Ardellain and Larn fought together, side by side in the front ranks. Grundstok artillery thundered at their backs, firing from raised positions sought hastily atop fallen statues. Well-aimed grudgesettlers from swooping frigates punched holes in Fateweaver’s massing forces, winning the defenders of Barak-Thryng moments in which to take stock, find their feet, regroup. Those who fought at their side changed as one moment of chaos gave way to another. The runedaughter was there at times, and at other times the melee swept her away, as fyrds of Fyreslayers intermingled like a river of gilded magma. There were hammer-toting longbeards in the crowd, too, and swooping Skywardens armed with hydraulic pikes.

Always ahead of them, atop the largest slab of fallen stone, was him. The whitebeard. Grombrindal. Alone perhaps out of all of those present, Nauré Ardellain had been to war in the company of gods before. And their servants. Whatever his true nature, that was the role he played now. And it was a role, she sensed, though he purported to have shed his guises. Daemons disintegrated before him in wide, sweeping arcs. He made himself the resistant core against which Chaos was forced to break. Yet always his body and his ire were directed towards the greater daemons at the centre of the Span – and the singular being who towered, awful and resplendent, above them.

She’d fought greater daemons before, too. Bloodthirsters and prowling Keepers of Secrets. Never alone, of course. That was a test she’d not been set. But she recognised the power in them. The particular way the aether frayed at their coming. They were the deepest hungers of the Dark Gods made manifest. Here, the Changer had seen fit to send forth a whole coven. Here, something truly ancient had chosen to set foot upon–

Chosen.

Of course.

The whitebeard’s guise was not for the benefit of the duardin at all. This was a performance with an audience of one. From the moment they had boarded the Gromthi-a-Grund, they’d been in the lair of a stalking predator who needed to see its prey twitch and struggle if it was to be convinced to reveal itself. Their enemy was a weaver upon the loom of fate who fancied its touch invisible, its schemes too labyrinthine to be perceived.

Now, Kairos Fateweaver stood incarnate upon the Span of the Ancestors, drawing power to itself, becoming more whole, more terribly real with each moment that passed.

Grombrindal wheeled about, belligerent, his whiskers wild, bright gromril catching the light, a symbol for his people to rally around.

Their eyes met. Hers darted to the greater daemon, and he looked to the sky.

Ardellain shut out her other senses, and listened. After a moment she caught the drone of a lone endrin, far above her. The sound was high-pitched, frail and sputtering, unlike the roar of more proximate vessels, or indeed the din of battle as it raged all around her. But it was there nonetheless, significant by its incongruity, growing louder by the moment. She looked up and saw a tiny speck descending from the daemon skies. Only a speck, yet becoming larger. A gunhauler, in Thryng colours, storm-beaten, overladen. Gemlights glimmered on its hull.

A navigation vessel, Ardellain recognised. A scout.

The runemark upon its side read Shale-Skipper.

Whirling white smoke poured from the Shale-Skipper as flares shot away in all directions. They glowed blue at first, then bright gold as they detonated in the clouds, where they caught the underside of descending shadows.

A whole fleet of descending shadows.

She looked down at Larn, preoccupied as he was with the business of death, and allowed the whitebeard’s gambit to reveal itself to him in its own time.

And she smiled.

The fire in Larn Grunslayer had never burned so fiercely. Not when he was Larnik Vuul-Kerrik. Not when he was Rat-Tail. Not when he’d lost his runes. Not when he’d lost his arm. Never before had he fought like this, carving his own legend from the bodies of an innumerable host. He split one horror down the middle, then twisted to carve the two that emerged in its aftermath, before banishing the grasping spirit of the thing with a battle-howl that came from somewhere deep in him. He was beheld by all around him, seen for what he was: a slayer – the slayer you wanted in a moment such as this.

And his reckless valour had its echo in the sky.

He lifted his head to see the Cursed Skies punched inwards by the coming of an armada of sky-vessels. All around him the Kharadron raised a deafening clamour, but their own voices could not overmatch the one that boomed from the largest of the onrushing ships.

‘THIS IS HIGH ADMIRAL KLARSDOTTR,’ the voice thundered, amplified by a pair of colossal resonators fixed to her ironclad’s underside. ‘STAND, BARAK-THRYNG. RELIEF IS AT HAND.’

Several vessels from Klarsdottr’s armada descended quicker than the rest. Dangerously quickly. They had the look of cargo-haulers. At the prow of each vessel stood a giant in burnished sigmarite. As soon as they were clear of the Cursed Skies, these shining figures held forth pennants that whipped upward in the rising air, gathering the tumult into an aetheric vortex.

And through that vortex, bypassing the Cursed Skies completely, they called the storm.

Lightning struck the bows of three of the vessels at once, and from there conjoined into a forking bolt. It searched downward, seeking the ground, but hit the Span instead, blasting a hole in the daemon horde with a flash of blinding azure light.

In the lightning’s wake, ahead of the duardin, a line of Stormcast Eternals split the Span of the Ancestors. Their faces were hidden beneath masks of sigmarite, but these were not the faces to which the eyes of the city’s defenders were drawn.

Embossed upon every pauldron and shield was a visage that had its mirror in the city’s own sigil. There they saw the Maker, Grungni, in his war aspect, made manifest at the heart of the City of the Ancestors.

Yet it wasn’t this that drew Larn’s attention in the moments after his vision cleared. Ahead of him, facing away, but clearly visible enough that he knew her by sight, was a warrior with a mace in one hand and a censer in the other. A warrior who, in dreams, he had seen fighting at the whitebeard’s side. A warrior whose death he had witnessed on the cliffside at the edge of Bladesmith’s Return.

Momentarily dazed, he searched for Grombrindal – and found him, still atop his rock, urging the duardin forward to close the gap with their new allies.

The old whitebeard spared him a glance, then, as Larn began to sprint forward.

And the slightest suggestion of a wink.

CHAPTER 9

TRANSMUTATION OF GOLD

‘Sounds to me like you’ve lived through a little age of ruin, beardling,’ the stranger said, taking a sip of Skellarbrau Seventy-Six before passing the tankard back. Margew had only been able to find the one drinking vessel, but he’d found two stools, and as such he was not ashamed of the hospitality he’d been able to offer. To stumble across food and drink in a place such as this had been fortune enough. To find company was a miracle.

As he took the tankard, he passed the stranger’s pipe back the other way. He started to feel hale again. His stomach had settled, and the only fire in him now was the warming touch of good beer. It hadn’t taken much prompting to get him to spill his story, mind. The canny old duardin had the truth from him with nary so much as a wink. Margew had told all of it: the grots, the poison, the Frorlenhand, the crash. Waking, fleeing, hiding, finding this place. Far from trying to hide the broken wheel, he’d shown it off, used it as a prop. It was proof of all he’d done this remarkable night. All he’d lost, too.

‘To those who didn’t make it,’ Margew said, raising the tankard. The stranger lifted his pipe in salute, held it aloft for a moment, then tapped it out, letting a little pile of ashes gather on the tiled floor between them.

‘Too many, beardling,’ he said, softly. ‘Ah, forever too many. Yet here you are.’ He jabbed out with the tip of his pipe, and the vast expanse of his beard rose and fell with the gesture. ‘Just one of you is enough. That’s the enduring miracle of it.’

He puffed contentedly for a moment, then slapped his hands down on his knees.

‘It’s been a pleasure to hear your tale, Margew Venki,’ he said, at last. ‘But I’m afraid I must be off. I’m glad you’re feeling better.’

He stood, then, and walked over towards the bottom of the steps.

‘Don’t fear to climb back out of here when you are ready,’ he said, then paused before adding, ‘You’re ready now, I’d say.’

The stranger took a step up towards the trapdoor as Margew watched him, rapt. Then, as his gloved hand reached out to touch the door’s underside, Margew stood.

‘Who are you, Whitebeard?’ he asked abruptly. ‘Who might I say found me here, of all places?’

The stranger smiled. ‘Whitebeard is enough,’ he said. ‘And you’ve not been found yet, Margew Venki,’ he added. ‘Not just yet.’

Margew took a step forward as the stranger threatened to vanish through the trapdoor.

‘Wait!’ he called.

Whitebeard paused, then half-turned to look back down at him. Margew held up the broken wheel, which was still bound to his maimed wrist by the tangle of his tether-line.

‘Would you…?’

The stranger’s beard rose in the suggestion of a smile. Then he reached down with both hands towards Margew’s wrist, gave a single, strong, expert pull, and the entire knot fell away.

‘Thank you,’ Margew said.

‘My pleasure, beardling,’ Whitebeard replied. ‘You only needed to ask.’

Then he climbed the rest of the steps, hauled himself up out through the trapdoor, and was gone.

Margew waited a long moment in awed silence. He tested his wrist and found it still painfully tender. He considered following the stranger, but the thought of exposure to the open air struck fear into him. It was, after all, safe down here. The same could not be said for wherever it was that Whitebeard had gone. Yet it was then that Whitebeard’s words came back to him:

Don’t fear to climb back out of here when you are ready.

You’re ready now, I’d say.

These words stirred a bit of resolve in him. If the stranger spoke the truth, then there was no better time to make his escape than now. Whitebeard could not have gone far. Perhaps these words had been an invitation. If the stranger knew the way to safety, then…

Margew darted up the steps without giving the matter much more thought than this, broken wheel in hand. He took two steps at a time, hasty in his hope, and pushed with his shoulder against the trapdoor, and there beheld…

Desolation.

Even more of the inn had collapsed in his time underground, half covering the trapdoor in dust and brittle debris. There was no evidence that it had ever been opened at all, and of Whitebeard, he saw no sign. Margew emerged until half his body was free of the cellar, then sudden sound stole the breath from him.

Talons. On metal.

Again.

His stomach plunged. Paralysed by indecision, he froze where he stood.

Margew watched in horror as a feathered shadow formed upon the piled debris ahead of him. A Tzaangor stalked backwards into the ruins, its beak raised, its eyes darting, curious. The monster clutched a hooked sword with one hand, and with the other it fidgeted with a wound in its side. It was bleeding. Dark stains marked its filigreed armour.

It had not seen him. Yet it was also much larger than he was, and much stronger.

You’re ready now.

It was one foe. One wounded foe. It wouldn’t stop him. Not after all he’d been through. Margew Venki shook himself free of the calamities piled atop him, mustered his strength, and rushed at the beastman. It hissed and began to turn to face him, but not before he was on its back, bearing it over with his weight. Its sword came around and caught in the spokes of the Frorlenhand’s wheel; Margew put all of his weight down through his one good hand and screamed defiance. Rage lent him strength and the beastman lost its balance, and the two of them fell to the ground. Margew heard a horrendous crack, and flinched, and when he opened his eyes, he saw the Tzaangor’s sword lying harmlessly in the dust. Beneath him, a broken wheel spoke had punched through the beastman’s neck, ending its life. Margew bellowed in rage and triumph, then sprang to his feet, wrenching the wheel free, reeling. He smelled and tasted blood.

There were footsteps in the gloom. Of course. He should’ve known there’d be more of them. Margew glanced down at the Arcanite’s weapon, but thought better of picking it up. He wasn’t going to die swinging his enemy’s sword. Wasn’t proper. He’d–

The figure that barrelled through the darkness towards him was no Arcanite. No Kharadron, either. But she was duardin. She held a heavy-looking shovel, and the stains upon it looked like Tzaangor blood. She took in everything about Margew Venki at a glance, and then she called back into the darkness.

‘Sivarn! Found the last of ’em, I think.’ Then she fixed him with an insistent look. ‘C’mon. Move.’

After a night of terrified solitude, Margew found himself in unexpected company for the second time. The duardin woman, Myrddi, ushered him away from his shelter, scarcely pausing to tell him her name, or ask his. She led him to a tall, unkempt-looking human – this Sivarn – who had gathered around him a small group of ash-caked, shocked and bloody survivors, each of whom had a story much like his own. Not in every detail, perhaps, but close enough.

It took Margew a few moments to realise that the man was blind, and needed Myrddi to lead him. Together, they made their way across the smouldering dockyard, evading dangerous abysses and the still-burning hulls of destroyed vessels – including the fire-blackened shell of the Frorlenhand. Margew said nothing of it this time.

Eventually, they climbed one of the surviving stairs up to the tradeways, and then ducked into the shadows of the alleys beyond. His new companions moved with surety from then on. This was terrain they appeared to know, and then, after one winding turn and then another, he saw why.

What Margew beheld in the middle of the Azrilazi tradeways stole his breath. It banished the spectre of his long ordeal and, for a moment, made him forget the pain he was in. He stared up at the proud hull of a crashed battleship, shrouded in vegetation. Near the base of its boarding ramp was a tree, tall and incongruous, and at the base of that tree, in turn, were many small fires. They were campfires, with duardin silhouettes huddled around each of them. Margew paused to sniff the air. His last visit to the Dyrwood had not ended well, and had somewhat dented the appeal of forests. Yet the only thing that reached his nostrils was the heartwarming smoke of a dozen open hearths.

‘Come on now,’ the human said, somehow noting Margew’s hesitation despite his blindness. ‘This way. We’ll all be leaving soon, I think. Take time to rest, while you can.’

‘Might be more gathered here than the Drakkul can carry, love,’ Myrddi said, taking in the sight of all the souls that she and Sivarn had safeguarded. Their time had been well used, as the white-bearded stranger had put it. Perhaps a little too well used: it was in neither of their natures to seek stewardship over so large a group.

‘I know,’ Sivarn replied. He seemed at home in the shade of his tree, despite all it had cost him. His head was tilted in the direction that Larn, Nauré and Justec had vanished, hours earlier. Towards the heart of the city, where a storm broke, an armada gathered, and battle raged, tumultuous in the distance.

‘They’re fighting for the city,’ he added. ‘All of them. Even Justec…’

‘Aye,’ she replied, patting his hand. She could sense that he was on the edge of something – another plan.

He looked down at her.

‘What’d you say to opening an inn?’ he asked suddenly. ‘Or a trading post. Something of that sort. In Ghyran, probably. I can see to the plants…’

‘All right,’ she replied.

Beneath their feet, Barak-Thryng thrummed with power, then quieted again. A high, howling wind rose above the furore of distant battle. Azure lightning clashed with scarlet. Flashes of fire danced in the sky as wings of gunhaulers pursued skyborne daemons through the clouds.

‘We should go and find them, shouldn’t we?’ Sivarn said. ‘Make sure…’

‘Aye,’ Myrddi repeated, sighing as she stood. ‘No sense walking there, though. And Sjarsdottir’s gone. We take the ship, I say.’

‘More folk here than we could have carried anyway,’ Sivarn replied, a little of the clever thief returning to his manner. ‘Not to mention the danger. They’re safe here, and others will find them, when the battle’s won.’

Myrddi smiled at him, and trusted that he could tell. Then she hefted her borrowed shovel and led him down from the tree to where the Drakkul waited.

The ironclad rested heavily on its hull, slightly a-tilt, but those who laboured over it had seen to it that it could take off, if needed. It had taken extra work to clear the vegetation that gathered at its base. Almost its full complement of crew had been sent scrambling around it with knives, axes and heavy cutters, ensuring that the aftermath of Sivarn’s sorceries wouldn’t snare it on the way out.

It was a short walk to the base of the ship’s ramp. There was no need to lie about their intentions, per se, but Myrddi didn’t fancy a debate. There were a few aboard she knew would go with them. She saw Onghas labouring over a particularly dense patch of vegetation, his mask raised. He would, for one. The whitebeard had made a pious duardin of him, and she had no doubt he’d jump at the chance to throw himself into the fray once again.

‘Hail,’ she said. ‘Look quick. We’re–’

There was a thunderous, discordant thump that knocked the air from Myrddi’s lungs, then a flash of light as power surged into the Drakkul’s endrins. The boarding ramp was dragged backwards with sudden force, then hauled upward. Myrddi, Sivarn and Onghas started away. There was yelling and scrambling as the dark-hulled ironclad rose into the air, leaving its crew behind. There, at the sky-vessel’s helm, Nytten Ginstock gave the wheel a testing turn. Then he nodded to his daughter. Teffi stood high on the bomber’s step, looking down at them all.

‘Artycle Six!’ she called out, stealing the ship. ‘Point Two. Rules of the high airs.’

‘Sorry!’

Upon a piece of broken masonry near the top of the Span, Grombrindal leaned on the hilt of his axe, stared down at the bond-breaking sorcery that swelled at Fateweaver’s feet, and gave a disapproving cluck.

‘Yet more power, I see,’ he said, ‘and all the more pointless for it.’

No power gathered here is a threat to me, dead-king.

The opposite is true. I savour this feast of destinies.

‘It’s a poor cellarman’s brew, I suspect,’ Grombrindal replied. ‘You’ve had your beak in the mix. Too many brewers makes for slop, I find. Unless they’re very close kindred, with the same nose for the craft.’

We couldn’t be closer.

‘I couldn’t disagree more, but that’s not the point. You’ve no taste.’

I have tasted eternities beyond your reckoning, godspawn.

‘Aye, but you’re never here for the important parts, are you?’

Kha. I will not be toyed with. You are in my snare.

‘And you’re in mine. That’s how this tends to go, old bird.’

Moments from now, the city falls.

‘I disagree.’

He sighed, and tapped his boot upon the rock, then patted about his pockets for a rune-tablet.

‘Tell you what,’ he said. ‘We’ll leave it up to chance, shall we? And whoever is proven right can tell the tale whichever way they choose.’

He tossed the rune-tablet into the air, then, and watched it spin. The moment hung, suspended. The next sound the daemon made was a screech of frustration.

‘Ah, chuf,’ the whitebeard said. ‘Rude of me, old bird. Chance is a thing of the present, isn’t it? Potential, too. All that power, contained in undecided things. You can’t see any of it, can you?’

In the moments before the coming of the storm, Justec had hesitated. As it had been before, so it was again. He had climbed the summit of light and fire, and now stood on the precipice of the High King’s war. Far below him, engaged in fierce struggle with an unrelenting foe, stood an army of duardin. He shivered, and hunger growled within him. He looked down upon them as the High King of the Mountain himself might have done – from the high gallery step, beholding the pride of the Khazalid Empire arranged at the foot of the Thorgiri Gate.

Far beyond, a sorcerous creature called on powers beyond his understanding. The old songs called it chimera.

This foe has not been named by dreaming Summercourt, said his blood. Forsake this place.

He was bleeding in several places, and his wounds offered their own wisdom.

There’ll be meat here in the aftermath. Naught but death here now.

He had raced ahead of his company, but he had not intended to lose them completely. The mountain was treacherous. Even as it offered him worthy foe after worthy foe – and the sense of purpose that comes with valorous combat – it refused to remain a mountain. He caught glimpses of a rising, rubble-strewn stair – not the grand gatehouse of Karak Thorga, but a construction alien to him. He saw fallen statues, and imagined himself lurking atop one that still stood.

Was this death-wisdom? he wondered. Was this why Justec hesitated, in the old songs, when the sibling-knights of Aranthine rode boldly ahead of them to confront the chimera in the ravine at Morwych? Why did he hesitate now?

The battle swam before him, a series of dreams overlapping. He set his spear down upon an outcrop and watched as it tipped from one side to the other like a set of scales, buffeted by cold wind and sorcery. The spear tipped one way, and there at the foot of the great karak he beheld the High King of the Mountain. His visage was deep-winter, and what he demanded of Justec was clear.

Beast! Foul-stalking predator

Befalls the pass at Morwych

Sorrow’s source – slayer-mark upon it!

So decrees the King of Thorga…

The spear tipped the other way, and suddenly Justec saw that rising stair, and there, at the forefront of the battle, exposed to the greatest danger, his knightly company. Larn and Nauré. His friends. They were racing towards the monster, striving to be first to reach it, as his siblings had long ago. Fear swelled in him.

They are going to die, his death-wisdom said.

In the old song, the chimera tore them to pieces, each of them, one after the other – then, at last, noble Vejec of Aranthine rode to their aid. She was closest to Justec in age and, like him, an icon-bearer. She rode ahead of him, and as she died the thunder broke, and the lightning took her…

Justec tensed atop his statue and made ready to descend. To be brave. To reach the monster before his friends did. To write another ending for ‘The Chimera of Morwych’.

But then the sky split in two. There was a roar, a rush of air, and a blinding flash of white and azure light. His spear tipped from its balancing place and threatened to fall, but he snatched it up by instinct and reeled away, momentarily blind.

When he looked once more upon the great stair, he beheld a host of golden warriors. And there, at the heart of that host, a vision – dreams overlapping:

A warrior in heaven-forged plate, swinging a heavy mace.

His sister, in her knightly garb, bearing the Thunderer’s totem.

This time, the lightning had not snatched Vejec of Aranthine away.

This time, it brought her back.

From cliffside to storm to anvil, from anvil to storm to war again. Jeskaine felt as if she had hardly breathed a full breath in this new body. Her purpose had been too urgent, too dire, for there to be any peace for her as her soul was painfully Reforged. Her first words had been Barak-Thryng. Her skin still felt like molten metal, and her soul was a fulminating, unsteady thing. It was reckless being here, she knew. She’d tended enough Stormcasts in her condition to know that too many deaths, too close together, could destabilise the spark of the divine in her. As a Relictor, she had a sense of what might await her after that. Ruination.

The voice that had told her not now, not yet, that insisted that she endure – well, that voice was quiet now. These might be her last moments of service, she knew. She resolved to use them well. She felt dangerous, though her new comrades saw her differently. Jeskaine was deemed a miracle, a blessing – last of her Stormkeep, a warrior without a brotherhood who had outlasted the Cursed Skies long enough to bring word of the Arcanite plot to Sigmaron. She had insisted on joining the relief effort, and how could they deny her, after all she had endured?

Her mace was new, but it served its purpose just as well as her old one. She smashed it into a horror’s mouth and let the storm within her do the rest, channelling a blast of fulmination through her weapon that disintegrated the daemon along with half a dozen of those who clawed forward behind it. Her armour was new, too. A design fresh-plucked from the mind of the Maker, finely wrought, called Thunderstrike. Here was the escalation that was promised: its purpose was to deliver Stormcast souls through the Cursed Skies. It had done so on the way down. Perhaps it would do so again on the way back up.

Of her old wargear, only her reliquary had survived. It was as stubborn as she was, though it remained inert. She held it forth for protection against the Changer’s sorceries, though in truth the better protection was offered by her mace, and by the shields and spears of those who advanced beside her.

If the chorus of life and death had been loud to her before, it was deafening now, amid the struggle for the city in the sky. Ahead of her, a pair of Lords of Change took flight. Each beat of their wings sent forth waves of sorcery that threatened to burn through the Stormcast line, forcing them to slow. Then the greater daemons soared away into the high airs, there to make war against Klarsdottr’s armada. Jeskaine kept her eyes forward, set on the task for which her new host had been assembled – nothing less than the banishment of Kairos Fateweaver.

The regiment at her side was composed of spear-wielding Vindictors that maintained a phalanx as they pressed the foe back. Gradually, they were reinforced by duardin – locals and mercenaries – mortal warriors, albeit of an uncommonly determined sort.

Far to her left, Lord-Celestant Tantrus bellowed a command and urged his flank forward. He had been hunting the Changer’s spawn since the dawn of the age, it was said, and each Reforging had made him more uncompromising, more eager to see the foe put down. He swung a long-handled warhammer in sweeping arcs, wading forward ahead of his comrades, dead set on a confrontation with the last of the Lords of Change that flanked Fateweaver. It singled him out and shrieked, and began to stride forth, carving a sigil in the air in green flame as the two ancient foes converged.

Such hasty valour might be the Lord-Celestant’s undoing, Jeskaine observed as she began to charge, nonetheless determined to be the first through the gap that Tantrus had left in his wake. What had repeat Reforging made of her? she wondered.

Altogether too given to melancholy, the voice inside her said. We’re winning.

This, at least, was true. They were gaining ground. She sensed hope rising among the mortals at her back.

Jeskaine crashed into a flaming, fang-mouthed daemon shoulder-first, and sent it collapsing to the stone. She dropped to a knee and brought her mace down, then snapped her head up to see a pair of horrors bearing down on her. Before she could stand, a one-armed duardin barrelled into them and hacked them apart with a runic axe. He turned as she stood, regarding her, and then she realised that she knew his face. It had been the last thing she had seen in her last life.

He seemed just as shaken to see her.

‘Here, now,’ he muttered. She got the impression that he was talking to himself. ‘It wasn’t then. It’s now.’

Larn had fought tirelessly to be first among the pack, seizing every advantage available to him, straining every step as he strove to reach the Stormcast line. For the first time he saw exertion on Nauré’s face, also. She made a cage of silver with her godwrought blade, projecting force with ceaseless, dextrous motion. The other duardin gave her the widest berth they could, but all of her attention, all her lethality, was set against their shared foe.

Larn was well aware that the purpose of these daemons was to slow them down. But there were few among them who could do anything other than take the Span of the Ancestors one step at a time. Even the God-King’s warriors were committed to the press, now.

He glanced behind him, but of Grombrindal, he could see no sign. The only thing he could rely on was doom-sense, trust, and instinct.

Do what is right, here and now, and I will do the same.

These words carried him to the side of the Stormcast warrior he had encountered on the edge of Bladesmith’s Return. She, too, was single-minded in her belligerence. Yet when he faced her, he could not find the words. He could not articulate what it meant to him that she was here. How could he? They were fighting for their lives.

So he yelled for Ardellain, and he set his mind to axe-work. She weaved through the press to reach him at the familiar Stormcast’s side. They were truly at the vanguard, now, the closest to the top of the Span of the Ancestors. Behind them, fighting intensified around a towering Lord of Change, separating their smaller cohort from the bulk of the duardin and Stormcast forces. Larn saw a flash of azure as a towering Stormcast was brought down, followed by a burst of flame as a familiar crest of red hair rose from the throng to fling itself at the beast’s neck.

‘It’s her,’ Larn said as Ardellain reached him, gesturing with his axe towards the Stormcast, who regarded him impassively as she strode onward to reach Fateweaver.

Ardellain simply nodded.

‘The pieces are in place,’ she said. He had no sense of what she meant by this, save that he’d learned what it looked like when the aelf was pleased with herself. Then Ardellain began to move, silver sword held forward, carving a narrow path towards the greater daemon. He gripped his axe and charged forward at her side.

It suited them to lead as a pair, in perilous moments such as this. And the Stormcast fell into step alongside them, as eager to set herself against Fateweaver as they were.

It could be no other way, Larn believed. His brow furrowed, and he felt power flow through his runic scars, then down his arm to the hilt of his axe. He felt power in his other shoulder, too. Sivarn’s power. Somewhere, the wizard lent him strength. This would be no simple slaying, but he had everything he needed. He would see it done.

As death was here, so was he.

It can be no other way.

Together they passed through a curtain of burning air. As he hacked at daemon-flesh, Fateweaver’s voice found him again. Simply to hear it was agony.

The pieces are in place.

It echoed his thoughts, and Ardellain’s words. It dissembled against his spirit. He looked to the aelf, and saw that rarest thing – uncertainty – register on her features.

Here, now. Be remade.

The daemon’s twin heads craned down to regard them, and then it thrust out with a claw, sending forth a wall of pink flame that coalesced into a wave of capering flesh and fangs as it cooled. When the fire reached him, its touch was unlike any pain or sorcery he had known. It was change. Change, pure and horrifying. Whatever Sivarn had done to try to protect him was burned out in an instant, replaced with a squirming sensation in the stump of his ruined shoulder that jolted fear – real fear – into Larn’s guts.

The image that etched itself into his mind was that of a Zharrgrim priest’s runic brand descending. Yet the sigil it bore was no Fyreslayer rune, but a serpentine flame – an eye.

He stumbled forward, swinging his axe wildly, and fell, scarcely half a dozen paces from the greater daemon. He writhed, roared defiance, and tried to stand. Nauré’s shadow fell over him, her silver sword blazing as she tried to carve counter-sorceries into the air. But then she fell too, as lightly as her shadow had. Their eyes met, down on the stonework, and he saw himself reflected in her. Witchfire burned in both of them.

Raise your braziers, runeson. Do as your wisdom demands. Signal the retreat.

He felt his arms burning. Both of his arms. A phantom pain.

Take your blades and leave, Bladelord. Heed to honour above all else. Abandon them.

Nauré grimaced, and tried to stand. When she could not, she reached out with her blade-hand, and extended her silver sword to Larn. Sorcery sparked against it, but did not catch. Where it touched him at the shoulder, the pain became more bearable for a moment.

Moments from now, the city falls, its promise broken.

Your own promises were broken long ago.

Here, now, be remade. The pieces are in place. It can be no other way.

There was a crash of sigmarite on stone, and the Stormcast staggered down onto her knees. She roared in pain and prayer, the first sound that Larn had heard her make. She had hardly made it two steps further than they had, for all the power the gods had invested in her.

Do what is right, here and now, and I will do the same, Grombrindal had told him. Where was he now? What was it that Larn had failed to do?

Larn heard another clash of metal, then. The sound of clattering bronze at great distance. A sound he knew. A clamour arising high in the eaves of the Span, then descending towards him.

The clash of spear on stone.

The return of a Knight of Aranthine.

They descended the steps of Karak Thorga together, the two of them, as they had done since the waning years of the Age of Myth.

He, Justec of Aranthine, honoured vassal, trusted friend.

He, High King of the Mountain, Whitebeard – not the King of Thorga precisely, but one who could speak for all duardin.

‘Vejec lives?’ Justec asked, wide-eyed.

‘Aye, lad,’ the High King replied, smiling. ‘I’m sorry to keep it from you. The Heldenhammer is secretive about such things.’

‘My other brothers and sisters?’

‘Gone, but honourably so. None so honourably as her, mind you. That’s rather the point.’

‘Vejec,’ Justec said, reciting the details of the song. ‘Twin-eldest. Bearer of the Thunderer’s totem. Borne by storm-winds, sworn to vengeance–’

‘As were you both, my boy,’ the High King said. ‘As were you both. You think you’re the only one to sing songs of Aranthine? My lad, yours is the most mangled rendition of “The Chimera of Morwych” I’ve ever heard.’

‘What do you mean? My renditions are acclaimed in dreaming Summercourt.’

The High King fixed him with a firm glance. ‘Speak to me not of the tastes of Summercourt. Heed this. When the Thunderer’s eye was drawn to the valour of Vejec of Aranthine, it was drawn to Justec also. Yet at the vital moment, hesitation held sway over him. Justec’s fate was altered, and he returned to his darkening hall, that drab outpost of Ushoran’s wretched court. This is nothing for you to be ashamed of, Justec the Thirty-First. But it is the origin of an extraordinary little fault, in the grand scheme of things. A little reserve of old power was set aside for Justec of Aranthine. Set aside, yet never used.’

Justec considered this for a moment, then gave his spear a twirl. ‘What do I do with it?’

‘Do as your wisdom tells you, Justec of Aranthine,’ the whitebeard said. ‘When your time of strife is at an end, do what you can to ensure that what follows is a time of boldness.’

Strife and boldness. Justec of Aranthine now understood these were the same. Curse and promise, too. Dream and reality. He left behind his concerns over the distinction between these things, and focused instead on the fallen forms of Larn and Nauré, and ahead of them, his sister, Vejec. He sang as he descended, spear held wide and ready. He embraced his nature as both icon-bearer and thief, as knight of death and knight of thunder. He embraced the contradiction within him and rose above it, full of all the power of undecided things.

Something faltered in the fatal spell being woven at the apex of the Span of the Ancestors. Fateweaver craned upwards, extended the Staff of Tomorrow, and sent forth a fresh wave of hellspawned horrors and fang-mouthed shriekers. At Jeskaine’s back, the fighting broke down into savage melees around jutting spars of crumbled stonework. Strafing cannon fire sent showers of white dust raining down on those who fought for their lives on the stairs beneath her. Yet above all this rose an unnatural howl from high above.

A lone ghoul fell a precipitous distance and landed spear-first ahead of Jeskaine’s position, vanishing with a snarl into a tangle of horrors. Then it ripped its way free and paused, looking back at her. It was wretched, wounded and blood-slick, and the only expression that could register on its features was a rictus grimace. Yet there was light in its eyes, and it regarded her directly.

‘Vessk. Shka. Oss-gek.’

The words were nonsense. Yet as she stood and began to approach the creature, mace held low, her own inner voice responded, as if it understood the creature’s words in a way that her waking mind did not. As if it was the ghoul’s voice.

Vejec. I am here. I am Justec.

Jeskaine took an urgent step forward towards the ghoul, but not before a many-limbed horror leaped towards it, talons outstretched. By instinct, she lashed out with her mace in a brutal defensive strike, as if this incongruous monster were under her protection. The ghoul hissed as claws ripped its flesh, then spun, brandished its spear, and stuck the horror through the roof of its mouth. As it did, a spray of black blood spattered across Jeskaine’s mask.

She tasted hot copper, then her breath went cold. Jeskaine’s vision wavered. Blinding pain shot across her temples. She was overtaken by what she might have believed to be stormsight, were she not also convinced that it was–

Madness. So this is the gift of too many lives.

Jeskaine blinked. Before her, she no longer saw one of Ushoran’s monsters. She saw a young man in armour. He wore scalloped plate that had been dyed a deep burgundy, fringed with gold, and he held his duelling spear high. Urgency was written across his face.

With me, Vejec, he called out to her. Together, as one! To vengeance, or the Amethyst Hall!

He gestured with his weapon towards the foe. Towards the dreadful chimera that had taken her life once, twice, countless times, and that now made prey of–

Her people, dying at the monster’s feet.

An aelf and a duardin, strangers.

Neither. Both.

The young knight charged away, and she began to race after him, and found her pace equal to his own. An unbidden flood of memories caused the storm inside her to gutter. She could not be Jeskaine and this Vejec both.

Yet she was.

And he was Justec. An echo, perhaps, albeit one so uncannily familiar that it was hard to believe that he was not her brother.

She’d died for him, long ago, and in dying, been taken by the storm. It was her beginning, long forgotten. It was her ending, the first of many. Yet it had apparently been neither of these things for him. She saw her brother, spear in hand, at her side. She saw a monster, pitted weapon gripped tight, pressing through the throng of daemons, heedless of the wounds inflicted upon it. She saw the echo of her people. She knew now that the voice that had accompanied her all these long lifetimes had been his. Something within her relic censer began to stir. Greater powers than the daemon had their eyes on her brother, now.

The pieces are in place.

Ahead of them, in the daemon’s burning shadow, waited a white-bearded stranger.

He stood aside as they passed, his expression stone-set.

It took no greater push than this to compel the knights of Aranthine to fulfil their final duty.

Doom-sense swelled in Larn’s gut as the spell was broken. He gathered his strength, ready to commit himself to the fight once and for all. He saw Justec – pale, half-naked, curse-wracked Justec – throw himself directly into the greater daemon’s path, drawing all of its attention for just a moment. Somehow, the boy had done what they could not and resisted Fateweaver’s sorceries. Now, he confronted the greater daemon at the Stormcast’s side. His spear of battered bronze hissed and recoiled where it impacted against Fateweaver’s skin, and sheer proximity to such manifest power caused Justec to begin to scream. Yet the sound that came from him was defiantly human, and the boy’s motions were practised, precise. Larn had seen Justec fight this way before – on the occasion of their first meeting, in the depths of the Aranthine Hall. Larn might not have escaped that place were it not for the boy’s curse-granted memories. Now, he watched him rise above the worst of that same affliction.

Justec spun, flourished his spear, and spat blood through blackened teeth. He stepped forward, ahead of the Stormcast, and interposed himself between her and the greater daemon. He demanded this danger for himself. Then he spoke. The words were faltering, but they were his.

‘Holy thunder. Guide my hand.’

The greater daemon’s twin heads craned to regard him in his entirety. Larn willed himself to stand. Justec’s gaunt musculature tensed, then he leaped.

Fateweaver lashed out with sudden, ferocious speed, battering Justec aside with the hilt of its staff. The blow cast Justec onto the ground, and then the staff was brought down hard, piercing him through the gut. Larn screamed, raised his axe, and threw himself forward. He watched with horror as the Stormcast was likewise smashed aside. She swung her mace wildly for one of Fateweaver’s heads before being crushed into the stonework beneath a massive talon.

Justec thrashed and clawed at the burning implement that tore the life from him; the Stormcast braced herself beneath the daemon’s unnatural weight and swung again and again with her mace, fighting for life even as her immortal strength failed. Larn’s rune-scars burned angrily and commanded him to find a way forward, deeper into danger – to do what was right, to die for the boy, if he had to.

He could hear the song of aelven steel in the air. Nauré was back on her feet. They began to run, together. To intercede, to avenge themselves against fate itself.

To save their friend.

Then a hand found his shoulder. It was firm and impossibly strong, and it stopped him in his tracks. It found him, and then it found the aelf, too.

‘No, lad,’ Grombrindal said, in words that were for Larn and Larn alone. Words he felt deep in his ribcage, within the fire that burned inside him.

‘You have done enough,’ the whitebeard continued, as battle raged in the sky above them and clear night revealed itself through gaps in the clouds. ‘More than enough.’

Larn’s breath caught in his chest, and he stared at Grombrindal, as unmoored in that moment as he had been years ago, as he stood at the edge of a bleak precipice on the outskirts of Karak Thorga.

‘I can help,’ he began.

‘Aye, lad, you could. You have. Look behind you.’

Larn looked. Behind him, stretching away, were the bodies of slain foes, scorch marks and severed daemon limbs – a trail of slayings that led all the way down the Span, as far as he could see. From there, they reached far into the past. He saw how they interwove with the path of Nauré Ardellain, leading all the way back into lives they had lived before this one. To the lives of Rat-Tail and Larnik Vuul-Kerrik.

‘You’ve done more than your share, drengi, though that thick skull of yours won’t let you see it. You’ll never know the weight of the lives you’ve saved with each swing of that axe. It is a sum that cannot be measured in gold.’

Larn looked at the whitebeard, and felt his feet settle upon solid ground.

‘There will always be doom ahead, beardling,’ Grombrindal said. ‘It’s more than any of us can face alone. There’s doom behind us, too,’ he added, smiling. ‘Never quite seems to stick, does it?’

Then he released his grip on Larn’s shoulder, and stepped away.

‘Let this burden pass to another, now, Larn Grunslayer. Seek no redemption. You have never needed it.’

Redemption, damnation.

The daemon’s voice reverberated in the aether. Its two mouths spoke in unison.

They are the same. A lie and a truth.

Grombrindal took a step towards Fateweaver, his greataxe held low at his side.

‘Not quite, old bird,’ he growled. ‘Just as this weapon I carry was once little more than a glimmer of deep-mountain ore, so does one contain the other. This is a truth at the heart of the duardin. This is what it means for a Maker to craft a promise.’

The whitebeard’s voice carried into the hearts of all who fought their way towards him. To Larn, and Ardellain; to the amassed throng of duardin, and their Stormcast allies. Rhyngrim of Sigyorn heard him, as she brought her war-pick down into the cranium of the last of Fateweaver’s Allscryers. Jeskaine and Justec heard him too, as they struggled upon the precipice of death.

‘My people are fate’s prospectors,’ he said, ‘and it is we who dig deepest in pursuit of that particular mineral. By the hands of the dawi is redemption forged. By our will is doom avenged. Through grudgement is the circle of redemption closed.’

As Grombrindal spoke, Stormcast warriors began to break through the swell of daemonic forces at his back. They closed on Fateweaver, each shield and pauldron embossed with the Maker’s scowling visage.

‘Have you forgotten that the Thunderer’s hammer was a gift from our forges? A miracle, that weapon. Capable of slaying and saving all in a single act,’ Grombrindal said. ‘The weapon they call Ghal Maraz is to me Skull-Splitter, old Smednir’s pride. Its existence speaks to a bond that I feel in my bones, daemon. Do you feel it, I wonder?’

The daemon sneered, the light in its eyes burning bright with malice.

Ghal Maraz has been lost before.

By my will, by my conceit, was the Heldenhammer’s weapon stolen away.

It will be lost again.

‘Aye, perhaps,’ Grombrindal said. ‘Perhaps.’

He lowered his shoulders and let the Rune-cloak of Valaya flow from him. Its inscriptions danced across its surface, red and gold, catching the light of daemon fire.

‘But where is Ghal Maraz now, old bird? Where is it now?’

Jeskaine knew her censer’s purpose now, or else she knew how to give it one. Inch by inch, she crawled towards her dying brother. His blood pooled over the flagstones and stained her gauntlets. Calling upon the soulcraft of her office, she reached out to his spirit and drew it forth. For a moment, he was freed from curse and warpflame. Proximity to the greater daemon began to burn her sight away, but still she could tell that her brother wanted to fight for her. His ghoulish form began to twist and thrash against the death that came for him.

‘With me, Justec,’ said Jeskaine, Knight-Relictor.

Together, said Vejec of Aranthine.

He snarled and struggled.

Be free, his sister replied.

Upon the anvil, conduct your own remaking.

Here, tonight, now.

As Fateweaver’s talons tore deep into her armour, Jeskaine raised the censer. Holding her icon high, she offered herself up to the lightning.

In High Sigmaron, beneath the vaults of Azyr, there is a throne.

Upon this throne, a god performs his eternal labour.

Upon this throne, long ago, was a promise made.

In a secluded part of Sigmaron, beneath the vaults of Azyr, there is a workshop.

In this workshop, a god performs his eternal labour.

In this workshop, long ago, was a promise made.

In this workshop, a hammer rises, and catches the storm.

In this workshop, a hammer falls, and strikes upon the anvil.

The hammer rises.

The hammer falls.

Twice.

The clouds above Barak-Thryng flashed blinding white, silhouetting High Admiral Klarsdottr’s armada. From within that brilliance came a colossal bolt of azure lightning. It carved the air into jagged serpentines as it descended, coruscating across the hulls of ironclads and gunhaulers as it sped towards the Span of the Ancestors.

From there, it split in two. The first bolt was the sort that slays. It struck Jeskaine’s reliquary, and from there its power exploded outward to wrack the body of the greater daemon. It burned through her, also, and through her brother, with force that no mortal form could hope to withstand.

The second bolt was the sort that saves. It was power of a sort scarcely witnessed. It dated from the waning years of an age of myth, this bolt, and it had been held in tension for a long, long time. This bolt, too, struck Jeskaine’s reliquary. There, it touched the soul of Justec of Aranthine, as it had always been destined to do.

By this bolt was the fault in fate’s mechanism found.

By this bolt was a promise fulfilled.

Jeskaine felt her own soul torn from her, as her armour detonated and she went to face what might be her final Reforging. At the last moment she watched Justec’s body burn away, as he went to face his first.

A thunderous boom resonated from the Span of the Ancestors, and the flash of lightning that followed was visible across the city. Only the Stormcasts knew what it truly meant to witness the conjoined labours of the Thunderer and the Maker. Yet this was the sort of power that etches itself into the souls of those who behold it. For a moment, those on the surface of the sky-city found themselves in the midst of a bright, clear day. Shadows were banished from its dockyards, tradeways and high walls. Packs of scrambling daemons and bands of prowling Tzaangors found themselves suddenly exposed, caught out in the open where the searching lenses of Grundcorps artillerists could find them all the more easily.

On the edge of the Azrilazi dockyards, Myrddi Wutten saw the lightning come, and she knew what it meant, too. Her folk still remembered the night when thunder swept the fens. It had been the breaking of the people that they were, but it was also the beginning of the people they became. The Wuttenfolk. She reached for Sivarn’s hand. All round them gathered their unexpected charges – wounded and war-wracked duardin huddled before small fires, safe in the glade that Sivarn’s sympathy had called into being. There in the shadow of the Gromthi-a-Grund, all heads were turned towards the sky.

‘I think it’s over, love,’ Myrddi said.

In the depths of the city, in the vaulted chambers of the Master Endrinworks, surging power bolted through overloaded conduits and sparked against the colossal domes of Barak-Thryng’s great endrins. Down below them, Shima Sjarsdottir, her mask raised for the sake of efficiency, strained to regulate the energy now infusing the city’s systems. Too much power was as dire a problem as too little, with this much aether-gold in the air. A stray spark could–

No time for speculation, dearie, she told herself. All the pieces are in place. Balance it out!

So that is what she did, for it was among the many things within her capabilities to do. She found the balance. She caught wayward urges within the system as it fought to become volatile. She quashed rebellion within the machine. There was a Code for this, too, and she heeded it, to the letter.

The bulkheads she had sealed in the wake of the departing endrinriggers bulged inward and broke, and a tide of horrors was unleashed to undo this righteous thing that she had, in the end, committed herself to doing. Among them came capering daemons, pink and pallid blue. Spiders also, and grots that had lost their minds in the depths of the city. They formed a tide of madness that forced its way along narrow, straining gantries to reach her, to ensure that she failed.

Below her, according to the orders that she herself had given, was nothing but empty sky. There was nowhere left for Shima Sjarsdottir to run. She began to hum an old lullaby, and set her mind to the task at hand.

Here was the beginning of a business concluded. The craftsman in him knew that this labour to which he had committed himself was a few cuts from being done. A few strong, righteous cuts. At his back gathered his disciplined battle line. Behind them stood his high walls. In his hands he held a weight of good gromril.

Grombrindal swept out with his battleaxe, and took one of the greater daemon’s legs away at the knee. The creature shrieked and began to topple sideways, sparks of unmaking flowing from its vast, burning wings. He willingly stepped beneath its falling shadow, swung his blade, and took one of Fateweaver’s heads. He stepped up to crush the skull beneath his boot, his nostrils wrinkling at the acrid foulness that rose from it.

Fateweaver’s other head craned slowly to regard him. With one talon, the daemon supported itself. With the other, it reached for him.

Doom, damnation.

‘Is that all you see, old bird?’ Grombrindal asked. ‘Is that all you’re left with, when you’re only capable of looking backwards? Doesn’t seem like enough, does it.’

He turned on his heel, then, raised his axe for a third and final time, and brought it down upon the fallen hilt of the Staff of Tomorrow, splitting Fateweaver’s implement.

‘I prove you insufficient for the purpose for which you were formed, daemon,’ Grombrindal said. ‘I cast you out. We’ll see if your master sees fit to remake you, broken playing piece that you are.’

The unravelling of Kairos Fateweaver had begun, and where the daemon’s body began to decohere, little tears in reality revealed themselves. Then they began to grow, drawing the high airs with them. Swift little eddies at first, then surging gales. Grombrindal held his position, resolute and immovable, his cape whipping around his ankles.

Through those widening portals, Nauré Ardellain glimpsed domains untold – worlds of power and change, a glittering labyrinth stretching to eternity. She raised her radiant silver sword and steadied herself. The force of the greater daemon’s destruction was enough to force the Stormcasts at her sides to brace and begin their own withdrawal. Yet the power in the aether was growing fast. Perhaps beyond even their strength.

With the tip of her sword she began to trace a glyph into the racing air, contending with the vast swell of change-sorcery that had been conjured into being here. The speed required to instantiate the sigil was faster than thought, and fickle energies in the air refused her every attempt. It was more than she could do alone, she recognised.

At her side, Larn struggled against the pull of the aetheric abysses that opened before them both. Yet his eyes were on her, even so, through the matted tangle of his dark hair. His arm went up. In it, outstretched, he offered her his runic axe.

She met his eyes and took it. It was heavier than her own sword, but finely made, according to a certain definition of fine. There was power in its minerals, and it settled in her hand after a few moments. The light of Hysh was interwoven with the fire within Larn’s weapon, and then it became an implement she could use.

Nauré Ardellain raised both weapons to the air, and split the aether along two lines at once.

Lightcaller.

Daemon’s bane.

She found the boundary between eternity and the realm in which her mortal life was lived. She chose her side.

And she made a single, clean cut.

The storm winds abated abruptly, but not for Rhyngrim of Sigyorn, who had committed herself to the charge as soon as she’d shaken herself free of momentary lightning-blindness. The daemons at her feet were done for already; there were bigger daemons to see to, and she’d be damned if she let the old whitebeard do all the slaying. So she’d started sprinting, because that was what she’d been doing all night, and there was still a bit of good ale in her belly, and more than enough fight left in her. Those howling daemon-wrought winds had been a help, if anything. They’d hastened her towards the foe.

The daemon was coming apart, vanishing into the air through bright-burning holes. Yet one of its heads still protruded, and its eyes were still bright with fury. That was reason enough to give it a seeing to.

Thus did Rhyngrim of Sigyorn hurtle past the shields of the Stormcasts, screaming, wreathed in flames, war-pick raised high. Thus did she race ahead of the aelf and the exile. She leaped, and sheer momentum carried her up into the air – high enough to bring her chisel down deep into the daemon’s remaining cranium. Fast enough to send her tumbling through the gap in reality left in its wake.

Through that gap she saw an eternity of foes in need of slaying. There, she could truly fight forever. But before she could, a strong hand caught her.

The portal sealed, and she found herself suddenly still, on her feet, on the ground.

‘Easy now,’ said the white-bearded stranger. He clasped a hand to her shoulder, tempering the fire that rose from her. ‘No more of that today, young one. It’s done.’

She stared at him, wild-eyed, then staggered back, and beheld the host arrayed behind her, trailing away down the Span.

The Thunderer’s gilded warriors, a sum of gold beyond her measure, arrayed resplendent. Her kindred of distant fyrds, their burning weapons rising and falling as the last of the foe were brought to heel. Her skybound cousins, masks low, lenses bright, rallied here at the heart of their hold. Ordinary folk of the lowlands, travellers, warriors and Warden Kings, gathered by circumstance. Bound by purpose. Bound by victory.

She raised her war-pick to the sky, the whitebeard at her side.

She roared, and they joined her.

Far below, through the expansive voids in the floor of the Master Endrinworks, Shima Sjarsdottir beheld only clouds and darkness. The jutting promise of cold mountain peaks.

All around her, a surging horde, desperate now to enact one final, pointless act of cruelty, as the schemes that had birthed them came undone.

Above her hung the under-workings of the city, well balanced and thrumming.

Above that, perhaps, somewhere in a distant district, waited a good cut of stone, waiting to become her statue. She took it all in, one last time – the city, the foe, the mountains, the clouds. Then, within those clouds, she saw a dark silhouette. An ironclad hull, angled upward in a perilous ascent, its hastily repaired prow aimed squarely at the gantry upon which Shima stood.

In that darkness, she saw hope. At the ironclad’s helm, she saw her own reflection. It was then that the thought came to her:

Might not be my statue after all.

Shima flicked back the chamber on one of her pistols and brushed her thumb over the ancestor-relief on the other. She smiled, and took aim at the cables that held her straining gantry aloft.

She fired twice, as the deck of the Drakkul raced up to meet her.

The gantry fell. Sparks flew. Aether-gold caught, and began to ignite.

And she jumped.

EPILOGUE

A STRANGER’S GIFT

These long moments, in the aftermath of a battle well won, were his favourite. The siege had been lifted, and at his back the people of the city began the process of recovery. The enemy had succeeded in circumventing the outer towers, and smoke still rose from one of the trade quarters, where several starwater mills had been put to flame. But the ghouls had reached no further than that. It had been his honour to be part of the breaking of the horde.

Now, he stood atop the tallest of the watchtowers of Lethis and let his gaze settle on the great lake at his feet. It appeared to have fathomless depth. Its waters were midnight black at its heart, except where small barques and fishing vessels disturbed the surface. Towards the far banks it brightened to sea-green, then silver. Beyond those banks rose the mountains, stretching away to eternity. There was something in this place – this particular view – that resonated within him. The lake was a mirror, though he little understood the phantasmal shapes that it reflected back at him, for his soul held no memories that could be stirred, even by the standards of his kind. Nonetheless, he felt a certain kinship with those drifting, illusory shapes.

Removing his helm, he filled his lungs with the richness of the land, lake and air, and let his shoulders settle. He wouldn’t mind if his duty kept him here for a while. This was the sort of place where one could make a life.

Which was not the sort of thing one expected to find in the Realm of Death.

His battalion had stepped into the lightning in far Azyr and emerged, belligerent and battle-ready, in the heart of the horde. His eyes followed the course of the road that wound from the city towards the mountains, and there at their base, he found the place where the thunder had struck. The craters were visible from here, as were the pyres that the cityfolk had built for the pallid monsters he and his comrades had slain.

For him, the battle had been all boldness and bravado. Knight-Questor Kestriel was hot-headed, a martial champion from the earliest days of her first forging, and preferred the press and strife of close combat to the discipline of a defensive line. He was proud to serve as her banner bearer, for his own sensibilities were not so different.

It was one thing to fell the foe with a greatsword, after all, and quite another to do the Heldenhammer’s work with the sharp end of a banner pole. He’d slain a fair tally in the battle just fought. He smiled at the memory. That banner – since cleaned – was held upright now, as duty demanded. But he’d placed his own sword to one side. The city was safe, after all. He’d played his part in making it so, and played it well.

What madness had compelled the flesh-eaters down from the mountains? he wondered. They had the numbers to make a nuisance of themselves, and could have perhaps been the doom of a smaller settlement. But Lethis was a free city, with a Stormkeep at its heart and heroes willing to sally to its defence. What could they possibly have hoped to achieve?

Madness had no meaning, he supposed. The battle had been won; the ghouls were dead. That was what mattered.

He stared into the lake for another long moment, then turned his gaze to the curtain wall that separated his tower from the one opposite, where his comrade Zenrien stood. There, above the gatehouse, Kestriel kept her own vigil. The scarlet crest atop her helm made her impossible to mistake. She was utterly still for a time, statuesque. Then she turned, and he saw that two figures were approaching her from further along the wall.

By their appearance they were no stonemasons or members of the Blackshore Guard, so there was no clear reason that they should be upon the walls. One was tall, cloaked, and carried a long bundle – from their bearing, an aelf. The other was shorter, heavily muscled, and from his bare skin – visible at a distance – a Fyreslayer. This piqued his curiosity; the folk of Lethis had no love of mercenaries, particularly the scions of Grimnir. Not after the Siege of Sorrow.

How do I know that? he wondered. He’d never had much time to learn the history of the places that he and the rest of Kestriel’s fellowship had saved in their questing journeys across the realms.

It could be a detail from one of Zenrien’s stories, maybe. He was full of them.

He watched the strangers approach until they reached Kestriel. It was bold of them to approach the Knight-Questor directly, but they appeared to do so without trepidation. They spoke to her for a few moments, and then, to his surprise, Kestriel turned and pointed towards the place where he stood. With a nod, the aelf glided past Kestriel and moved at speed towards the base of his watchtower, and the duardin followed close behind.

He took a step back from the top of the stairs and, uncharacteristically uncertain, stood facing the place where the strangers would emerge. He held his helmet at his side and for a moment considered putting it on, but he did not want to be caught blind, so thought better of it. He ensured that his sword was within arm’s reach, even so, and corrected the banner’s aspect so that it was held perfectly upright.

The Knight-Questor’s own inspections did not inspire such agitation in him as this. Perhaps it was simply that his reverie had been interrupted. He’d rather face an ambush than an unexpected diplomatic engagement. Aye, that was possibly it.

Moments later, a figure emerged at the top of the stairs – unmistakably aelven, and a Realm-lord of Hysh, by the way the light took to her. She made space for her companion to emerge behind her, and as she did so, she began to unfold the long leather bundle that she carried.

The duardin was unlike any Fyreslayer he had seen. His dark beard was beginning to grey, and he wore his hair long. Ornate scars described patterns all across his skin, except at the greenish stump that was all that remained of his right shoulder.

Their eyes met, and he could make no sense of the emotion that swelled in the stranger’s face. Despite the danger evident from the Fyreslayer’s physique and the weapons he carried, the duardin’s eyes were soft. They glowed with the deep red of a low hearth. The duardin blinked.

But it was the aelf who spoke.

‘My name is Nauré Ardellain,’ she said. She let the bundle in her hands fall away and drew a battered bronze spear, of mortal make. ‘Do you know who this belongs to?’

She held the weapon out to him, and by instinct, he reached for it.

Something stirred in him as he regarded the spear – the same something that had called out to him from beneath the surface of the lake. The weapon was bent, burned and blunted, and its fittings were rusted. It did not fit his hand.

Yet it was his. It was the first of the stranger’s gifts that day, borne forward across the turning of the age.

He opened his mouth, but no words escaped him. His chest tightened. The duardin seemed to register his distress, and stepped forward. But the aelf was unrelenting. She stared at him, and then, to his surprise – and seemingly to the Fyreslayer’s surprise also – she began to sing.

Her voice was high and clear.

‘One of shadow, two of light

One of craft – his brother, might

Two of beasts, body-bound

One of death, barrow-found

One of life, in greening lands

Holy Thunder, guide their hands.’

The spear was the first of the stranger’s gifts that day, borne forward across the turning of the age.

The second gift was the song.

The third was a name.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Chris Thursten is a writer and video game developer based in Bristol, UK. His work for Black Library includes the Age of Sigmar novel Darkoath as well as the short stories ‘Cauldron of Blood’, ‘The Long Run’ and ‘Pain Engine’.

An extract from Godeater’s Son.

Sometimes, when I look out over my world, I want it to end.

This time, the shadow of a sailing mountain drew my cold eyes to the burning flats. In its shade a woman staggered, her patent screams drifting up the way mirages do.

My spite warred with my pity. My soul groaned from the weight of my false indifference. Because I couldn’t not care. This was a priestess of Sigmar. Her Azyrite shrieks betrayed her, as did her ragged raiment and the worthless relics she carried.

The human in me wanted to help. Everything else screamed not to. Whatever the Azyrites claimed, they’d made beggars of us all. And I had not come here to save anybody. My conscience commanded me only to my sister’s word.

My eyes traced the priestess’ discarded baggage. Along that dotted thread, three figures gave chase. They were microscopic in the distance, yet lean and strong, accustomed to Aqshy’s heat. I saw it in their lanky swagger. I felt it in the glimmer of their sand-iron.

They were warborn of the Ushara, one of the Beltoll tribes. Centuries ago the Beltollers had submitted to Cardand and Bharat: the empires of my mothers and fathers, ruled by the great Yrdun houses and clans. That was a time of balance. Of restraint.

But this was the Age of Sigmar, and the old balance was gone. The Azyrites had destroyed the old order for the sake of their own. We were their prey, now. We were each other’s.

So I didn’t move. Let the priestess revel in the fires her people had kindled. Her tiny figure, swathed in bright clothes, stumbled. If her pursuers didn’t claim her, exhaustion would. If not that, then thirst.

If I didn’t help her, she would die.

And Varry would be disappointed.

My jaw hardened. I gulped a lungful of hot air. All I’d ever wanted was to make Varry happy. I’d seen her joy in guarded moments, in the dead of night. Twinkling in her smile, fading like cinderflies. But her joy was so rare. She took care of me, and I knew the toll those efforts extracted.

Always tired, Varry. Always bleak and forlorn. If I helped the priestess, I might see Varry smile. Something in that pleased me. Something covetous, something earnest. Most of all, something true.

Were this priestess sitting in my place, on the lee of this ridge – and were I in her place, in the shadow of leering mountains – she would not have helped me. Azyrites took everything and gave nothing in return. They’d never helped us. Not when we were rag-thin and roaming, nor when we built our home on the broken hill, digging our well into the rock until our hands bled.

But the Azyrites had never had what I had. Varry was all I lived for, the only mortal in blazing creation I would have died for.

Killing a handful of warborn for her would be nothing, nothing at all.

Dust billowed in the Ushara’s tracks. The nomads’ coal-black flesh gleamed beneath their Idoneth-dyed shawls, which whipped in the wind. The Ushara resembled serpent-dancers in Cardand’s night markets. Those dancers would gyrate like spinning tops, then plunge and roll to their feet. The warborn’s movements were similar, economic but showy. But when they fought they would be savage and merciless.

The priestess scrambled through the brimstone sands. She huffed prayers for protection to her god who didn’t care, who didn’t listen. She clutched a handful of precious jewel boxes in quill-thin fingers and ebony hands.

‘Please,’ she rasped. Her plea went unheeded, gobbled by the sounds of her scrabbling.

As I watched, I sneered. The priestess was a mewling child in the manicured flesh of a woman whose life had known only privilege. I loathed her – but it was not for her I had come.

Rising, I drew my javelin. Yolk-yellow sands dusted from my arms in sheets as I quit my concealment.

The warborn halted. ‘Yrdunko!’ one barked.

I whipped my arm forward. The javelin flew. My throwing thong slapped my wrist as the lead-weighted shaft speared the closest nomad’s eye. He snapped down headlong, blood misting the space where he had stood, then blossoming into a pool around him.

I drew my long dirks, both Hammerhal-forged. They were gifts from Jujjar, an old friend. Before this I had only appreciated their utility in cutting cord or slitting the throats of rustled cattle. Never in battle.

Immediately the nomads were upon me. The two remaining war-born expended as little energy as possible, exposing themselves not at all, cautious the way predators are. I fended off probing strikes. The Ushara’s serpentine fighting style was lethal, not a display I’d ever hoped to witness at blade’s length. At least, not without a rank of Yrdun Ashstalkers beside me.

Those days were gone. But before our Freeguild Ashstalkers had been disbanded, we had trained against warborn mercenaries. I knew this foe. The Ushara fought high and far, lofty in body and spirit, so I stayed low and tight.

They circled, thrusting their sand-iron, their falchions clanging off my dirks. If they attacked from both sides, they’d finish this. I had to stay calm, maintain control.

Then tremors ran beneath my feet. My eyes flickered down. A lavamander tunnelled through earthfire beneath the sands, sacred and massive and precious. Just what I hunted for – just when I wanted it least.

The second nomad barked and struck. Impulse had mastered her sense. She spent herself in a wild flurry, and when the time was right, I lashed out and swept my feet. She toppled; I finished her with a perfunctory thrust.

Sweat ran down my tarred brow. I had to focus on the third warborn, but fighting as a lavamander migrated only made this harder. Its moving mass shivered up my bones. The beasts were as quickly lost as they were found. To have followed this one’s movement now would mean losing sight of my foe. Even for a moment, distraction meant death.

Control. All I needed was control.

He thrashed forward. I parried a frenzy of blows from his sand-iron falchion, until a dirk slipped my grip. Survival in the Ashwilds required endurance, agility, tenacity. This foe possessed all three, in greater abundance than I. But rage ran in his veins like a curse. Fury had robbed him of reason. His breathing warbled as he panted hoarse oaths for the lives I had stolen. He had not mastered Aqshy’s heat; it had mastered him.

He was off balance, out of control. I could best him like that.

I feinted, then disarmed him. He gritted his teeth and shoved through my guard, tackling me.

Our blades thumped to the sand. His lithe fingers locked around my throat. With iron strength, his eyes cobalt fire, he squeezed the life from me.

I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t prise his stone hands from my neck. The world went red, then silver at the edges. I groped through hot sand until my fingers grazed a dirk’s edge. I seized the blade. Pain sang in my hand as its edge sliced through my palm and fingers. I jolted the dirk into the warborn’s arm, then twisted until sinews crunched.

He screamed, spraying me with spittle, drenching us both in blood. He crumbled and nursed his mangled arm.

I shuddered at the sight of his suffering. I would have closed my eyes if I dared. I finished him kindly, quickly. Not with pride, nor vim – just a breed of patience and remorse.

I sputtered, clearing the beetle in my throat, the throbbing in my head. Sand moistened by blood had infiltrated my wraps. This gory clay abraded my flesh and painted me rust. The stench of death hung in the air.

The mountains passing overhead reminded me where I was, and I scanned for more opponents. No Beltollers remained – only I and the mewling priestess, her eyes willow-green. Her thirst-gnarled lips hung awry, like the fixed rictus of my father’s death mask, a grimace that could frighten the dead.

The priestess hissed, half-mad. ‘Boy! Where did you come from?’

I raised a bleeding finger to my lips, then tucked my dirks into my sash. I padded after the tremors I had sensed. Here and there I paused to listen, holding my breath. Aqshy’s heat ebbed into my heels, running up my bones. My blood was hot; I fought to make it cool.

Then, beneath a shifting blur of heat, fissures split the earth. An animal’s coal-rough muzzle pushed up from beneath the ash-stricken sand. The lavamander.

I went prone as the black behemoth emerged. Ranks of thick legs carried its char-scabbed trunk from the ground, shedding crumbs of earthfire like slag. The blind creature sniffed the air, and I dared not breathe. The cracks in its tough hide glowed orange with the heat of its blood, which boiled mine.

A male, a juvenile. He bleated, then groaned. His call was all bass and glottalisation, like a knotted cord pulled through my head. He dragged his outsize mass onwards, seeking out a fresh vein of magma. The lavamander nosed into the hard earth and burrowed the way dogs play in sand.

I hugged the ground, still not breathing. When the earthen crush had ceased, I lifted my head. He was gone.

Varry had once told me our father uttered special words for lavamanders. Invocations to Sigmar, the god he worshipped, in Yrdo, the tongue of our people. In the past I thought that seemed right and well. But all things seem right to children.

I tugged a scrap of fire-resistant hide from my carrying sash and clambered into the cooling crater the lavamander had left behind. Magnure resembled crackling embers, smouldering and snapping with forever heat. Even through the enchanted hide it seared my hands and roused my heart. I kept the ice in me cold, counting my breaths, fighting the scalding heat with everything I had.

I wrapped the magnure, sashed it, then emerged from the crater.

‘What was that?’ the priestess croaked.

I regarded her. A priestess of Sigmar, yes, but not one of those priests. No shaven scalp, no scar-stitched face. No platemail or hammer or storm-swell voice, holy books chained to her war-heart breast. I glanced along the trail of treasures she had dropped during her flight. The warborn must have thought her a gift from the gods; perhaps she thought as much herself. To have carried so much so far, she must have been strong. But I couldn’t understand why she’d bothered.

‘You come from Capilaria,’ I said, in the Azyrite tongue. ‘From that damn city, Hammerhal.’

She furrowed her brow. ‘Yes, yes. That damn city. My damn city, damn you!’

I stared.

‘Are you alone?’ she asked. ‘I don’t care if you are, but please say you aren’t. You’re from Candip? You must be. Where are your spears? Your vassals? Or… your liege?’

My eyes wrinkled. ‘What’s a liege?’

She huffed. ‘What’s a liege… Well, yes. At least I’m alive. There’s always that.’

I followed her gaze into the wastes, where ash danced over blistered sands.

‘We brought something,’ she murmured absently. ‘Izmenili of Chamon. Precious gems. Gems… shiny rocks.’ She made shapes with her hands, as if to qualify the shininess of rocks. ‘You’ll need to go back for them with whomever’s accompanied you. It’s too dangerous to go alone. Beastkin overtook us at dusk. They killed my party, tore them apart.’ She shuddered. ‘They’ll be back. Won’t they? Or… perhaps you can go alone?’

I planted my foot on an Ushara’s skull. Brains squelched as I yanked my javelin free. ‘They’ll be back. Eventide. Just wait.’ I wiped the javelin clean, checked its shaft for cracks. ‘How’d you survive?’

She exhaled. ‘I don’t know. Hiding beneath the wagons. I ran when I could, but they chased. Damned things they are, but they’re vicious. I ran and ran through the night. Somewhy, they gave me up at dawn. Then, those…’ She glanced at the corpses around us. ‘Them. They came.’

‘Ushara. Warborn.’

‘Yes. Them.’ She peered at the jewel boxes in her arms, as if all her suffering were nothing compared to their value. She held at least a dozen. More were tied into her clothes.

Then she sighed. ‘I shall wait here, beneath the metaliths’ shade. The flying mountain, metaliths are flying mountains. Bring water when you can. You know these lands? Look at you, of course you do. You’ll have no problem, you and whomever you’ve brought. Yes? So. What’re you waiting for? Go on.’

I peered at the ridgeline. Part of me had hoped Varry would see all this. I had saved this woman for my sister, not for charity. The priestess was not some motherless infant I would elevate to adulthood and teach my ways. She was a grown woman, strong enough to carry many things, then drop them. Thanks to me, she was still alive. She required nothing else.

The priestess grimaced. I thought she saw me for the first time, then. The flesh of my face like a nightmare’s, painted in sun-daub tar mixed from stolen scrivener’s ink and crushed charcoal. My matted, unbound hair. The heat shawl and wrappings I had drenched in blood to save her life, already crusty and scabbed.

Or…

Did she see a man? A mortal like her, with mortal wants and mortal needs? I had dreams, once. As she must have had – as all children had. Once my eyes were delinquent with wishes. As a child, I had possessed hope and faith.

But I don’t think she saw any of that.

‘You’re not going to help,’ she said.

I pointed to the wasteland horizon. ‘The beasts are Smoulderhooves. They move when Hysh sinks below the hills and the sky’s fires dim.’ Then I pointed to the ridge. More drifting mountains – more metaliths – peppered the sky beyond. ‘Smoulderhooves are scarce beyond these bluffs. That way lies the Burning Valley, Cardand. And within it, Candip.’ I hawked, spat. ‘Your city.’

She grew flustered. ‘I need help, not waypoints. I need your help. I need the other Izmenili.’

I palmed sand over my hand until my cuts clotted, then brushed the dried filth off. ‘I did help.’

‘The warborn? That was duty, not help. We’re both children of Sigmar. Kindred.’

I chuckled. ‘You’re no kin of mine.’

She narrowed her eyes. ‘What’s wrong with you? Why this indecency?’

Enough was enough. My head pounded, my blood blazed, and the magnure’s heat burned in my veins like a hillfire. I sipped from my waterskin and departed.

Her feet crunched into the sand behind me. ‘You ingrate. You animal! You’re an ashfoot, aren’t you? A Paler, an Yrdun native. I’ve heard of you Yrdun. Miscreants and reprobates, charging extra for those who speak Sigmar’s tongue! After all we did for you! After everything we gave you!’

Ashfoot. My shoulders tensed, but I walked on. Perhaps I need not share the events of this day with Varry.

‘We raised aqueducts in Candip!’ the priestess said. ‘We walled your city, our armies patrol its reaches! We contain foes who would ravage your lands, you know that? Ra-vage! You’d be gheists but for us. You’d be thralls to the Dark Gods! This is how you repay us?’

I stopped and turned. ‘Repay who?’

‘Us! The God-King!’

My finger jolted out at her. ‘You did nothing when the beasts came for my family. Nothing when me and my sister were alone, except hire us to fight your wars. I’m not thankful for nothing. I don’t repay nothing.’

‘Civilising the Reclaimed is not nothing!’

I marched onwards. ‘Hail Sigmar.’

Blissful quiet followed, broken only by the rustle of wind. Then, a sizzling reached my ears. The air suddenly stank of brimstone and baking pottery.

I glowered and turned. The priestess made the old signs with her fragile fingers, trying to cast some spell. Cuneiform runes perforated the air, disturbing to behold for long.

‘Put your hands down.’ When she didn’t, I drew a dirk and lurched out. ‘I said, put them down.’

The priestess blanched, her skin going the shade of dusk. Her fingers danced faster. But she tugged the wrong threads of magic, and her sleeves ignited. The rune’s cinders caught aflame. Her eyes widened.

I ducked just as the spell exploded. Heat washed across me. Then I straightened and stormed over, swatting away the embers of magic. I seized the coughing priestess by her ragged raiment collar – she stank of sickly perfume. I hurled her down, then pushed my blade to her neck to silence her puling.

Breathless with terror and forceless indignation, she spoke. ‘What are you doing?’

I twitched, my knuckles digging into her soft neck. Soft, from a soft life of creams and silk and touching soft things. To a creature so soft, I must be jagged and ungiving.

Then the thought struck me. She thought I was the bad one.

For a moment, I wondered what she might have thought if we had met in Candip and not here. In the crevasse-city her people had stolen from mine, sitting on one of her priesthood’s heavy palanquins as it was borne upon the stooped shoulders of my impoverished kindred. Men like Jujjar, or women like Varry. Varry believed the Azyrites deserved reverence for the salvation they brought to Bodshe. Salvation.

I would not kill this priestess. Not even for summoning spells against me – not even in these Ashwilds where nobody would learn of her death. True, Varry would never have forgiven such a crime. Even in her absence, I craved to please her. I yearned to be the brother she loved.

But that wasn’t the heart of it. The Azyrites had already taken so much. I would give them nothing more. Not another moment – not another breath.

My eyes dropped to the hammer-faced medallion hanging from the woman’s neck. I cut its cord, tucking it away. Then I released her. ‘Seek the Burning Valley and Candip. There many will tumble for the chance to help you. Send them to kill me if you wish.’ I rose. ‘They’ll get lost.’

Tears formed in the corners of the priestess’ eyes. ‘Please. I can’t go alone. I just need help.’

But I was already gone. Her whispers became screams, then threats, then promises of reward. Perhaps her words would have swayed Varry, but Varry was blind to the truth of the realm. The gods did not love us. And just as well, for I loved nothing but Varry.

As the creaking hulks of passing mountains joined the priestess’ distant noise, I clambered up shingly slopes, each step careless. Errant thoughts washed through my mind.

Then someone emerged from behind the nearest tor.

I tensed as I recognised Varry. She wore a shawl like mine, and the same tar on my brow painted hers. Tufts of sand-caked hair protruded from beneath her cowl. She had come to find me, right where I’d promised to be.

The corners of my lips rose into a smile. Varry always looked tired. Beneath her spring-water smile and starlight eyes lay a forlorn strength, the prerequisite for our existence. She was the only person who had ever loved me. But she had come much sooner than I expected.

I froze, as if stillness could conceal the distant priestess or mute her petulance, but Varry was observant. She glimpsed the blood on my clothes and frowned.

‘Held, what have you done?’

Click here to buy Godeater’s Son.

Other great stories from Warhammer Age of Sigmar

GROMBRINDAL: CHRONICLES OF THE WANDERER

David Guymer

• DREKKI FLYNT •

THE ARKANAUT’S OATH

THE GHOSTS OF BARAK-MINOZ

Guy Haley

• GOTREK GURNISSON •

REALMSLAYER: LEGEND OF THE DOOMSEEKER

David Guymer

GHOULSLAYER

GITSLAYER

SOULSLAYER

Darius Hinks

BLIGHTSLAYER

Richard Strachan

SKAVENTIDE

Gary Kloster

• CADO EZECHIAR •

THE HOLLOW KING

THE DEAD KINGDOM

John French

• VEN DENST •

HALLOWED GROUND

TEMPLE OF SILENCE

Richard Strachan

LIONESS OF THE PARCH

Evan Dicken

THE LAST VOLARI

Gary Kloster

CALLIS & TOLL

David Annandale

BLACKTALON

Liane Merciel

YNDRASTA: THE CELESTIAL SPEAR

Noah Van Nguyen

THE BLACK LIBRARY

NEWSLETTER

Sign up today for regular updates on the latest Black Library news and releases

SIGN UP NOW

ENJOYED THE STORY?

RECREATE IT IN MINIATURE!

Get started at AgeofSigmar.com

A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION

‘Rat Tail’ first published in White Dwarf #485 in 2023.
‘High Airs’ first published in White Dwarf #486 in 2023.
‘Durkar’s Wake’ first published in White Dwarf #487 in 2023.
‘King Osgek’s Prize’ first published in White Dwarf #488 in 2023.
‘No God’s Land’ first published in White Dwarf #489 in 2023.
‘Bitter Oaths’ first published digitally in White Dwarf #490 in 2023.
This eBook edition published in 2025 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

Represented by: Games Workshop Limited – Irish branch, Unit 3, Lower Liffey Street, Dublin 1, D01 K199, Ireland.

Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.
Cover illustration by Christian Byrne.

Grombrindal: Ancestor’s Burden © Copyright Games Workshop Limited 2025. Grombrindal: Ancestor’s Burden, GW, Games Workshop, Black Library, Warhammer, Warhammer Age of Sigmar, Stormcast Eternals, and all associated logos, illustrations, images, names, creatures, races, vehicles, locations, weapons, characters, and the distinctive likenesses thereof, are either ® or TM, and/or © Games Workshop Limited, variably registered around the world.
All Rights Reserved.

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN: 978-1-80407-842-6

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

See Black Library on the internet at
blacklibrary.com

Find out more about Games Workshop’s world of Warhammer and the Warhammer 40,000 universe at
warhammer.com

For all the friends I’ve made through this hobby. For Jay and the crew at Warhammer Bath. For the Rollmodelers. For Matt, Will, and Dave.
And for Sean McCafferty, who has always known when to show up out of nowhere with a kind word, a bit of wisdom, and a pint.

eBook license

This license is made between:

Games Workshop Limited t/a Black Library, Willow Road, Lenton, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, United Kingdom (“Black Library”); and

the purchaser of a Black Library e-book product (“You/you/Your/your”)

(jointly, “the parties”)

These are the terms and conditions that apply when you purchase a Black Library e-book (“e-book”). The parties agree that in consideration of the fee paid by you, Black Library grants you a license to use the e-book on the following terms:

* 1. Black Library grants to you a personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable, royalty-free license to use the e-book in the following ways:

o 1.1 to store the e-book on any number of electronic devices and/or storage media (including, by way of example only, personal computers, e-book readers, mobile phones, portable hard drives, USB flash drives, CDs or DVDs) which are personally owned by you;

o 1.2 to access the e-book using an appropriate electronic device and/or through any appropriate storage media.

* 2. For the avoidance of doubt, you are ONLY licensed to use the e-book as described in paragraph 1 above. You may NOT use or store the e-book in any other way. If you do, Black Library shall be entitled to terminate this license.

* 3. Further to the general restriction at paragraph 2, Black Library shall be entitled to terminate this license in the event that you use or store the e-book (or any part of it) in any way not expressly licensed. This includes (but is by no means limited to) the following circumstances:

o 3.1 you provide the e-book to any company, individual or other legal person who does not possess a license to use or store it;

o 3.2 you make the e-book available on bit-torrent sites, or are otherwise complicit in ‘seeding’ or sharing the e-book with any company, individual or other legal person who does not possess a license to use or store it;

o 3.3 you print and distribute hard copies of the e-book to any company, individual or other legal person who does not possess a license to use or store it;

o 3.4 you attempt to reverse engineer, bypass, alter, amend, remove or otherwise make any change to any copy protection technology which may be applied to the e-book.

* 4. By purchasing an e-book, you agree for the purposes of the Consumer Protection (Distance Selling) Regulations 2000 that Black Library may commence the service (of provision of the e-book to you) prior to your ordinary cancellation period coming to an end, and that by purchasing an e-book, your cancellation rights shall end immediately upon receipt of the e-book.

* 5. You acknowledge that all copyright, trademark and other intellectual property rights in the e-book are, shall remain, the sole property of Black Library.

* 6. On termination of this license, howsoever effected, you shall immediately and permanently delete all copies of the e-book from your computers and storage media, and shall destroy all hard copies of the e-book which you have derived from the e-book.

* 7. Black Library shall be entitled to amend these terms and conditions from time to time by written notice to you.

* 8. These terms and conditions shall be governed by English law, and shall be subject only to the jurisdiction of the Courts in England and Wales.

* 9. If any part of this license is illegal, or becomes illegal as a result of any change in the law, then that part shall be deleted, and replaced with wording that is as close to the original meaning as possible without being illegal.

* 10. Any failure by Black Library to exercise its rights under this license for whatever reason shall not be in any way deemed to be a waiver of its rights, and in particular, Black Library reserves the right at all times to terminate this license in the event that you breach clause 2 or clause 3.