Skaventide, page 37
Amon walked out to her and crouched down, staring at her. For a long time she seemed not to notice him, but finally her remaining eye shifted, finding him.
‘Knight-Questor,’ she said, her voice a harsh whisper, as if she’d ruined her throat with screams.
‘Memorian,’ he said. ‘What happened here?’
She blinked, the eyelashes over her missing eye clotted with blood. ‘I – we–’ Sevora stopped, going silent for a long time before she found her voice again. ‘Everyone’s dead. Gone. Brevin and Corus, and Skein, and the skaven he brought with him. All gone. But they did it. Your hunt did it. Skein tried to stop us, but Corus killed him, and Brevin touched the Heart and brought the fire.’
‘And you?’ he asked quietly.
‘Me?’ she said. ‘I…’ A shudder went through her, and her eye shut. ‘What could I do? I just hid.’
Now it was Amon’s turn to stare in silence back at her. There was a lie buried in those terse, whispered words, along with a story long and terrible. It had been a wind that had rushed out from the wall, furious and fiery and dreadful, laden with molten quartz. He had felt its power, its heat, as he stood on the edge of the Halt, getting ready to leap. It had been a wind like the one she had summoned to save him.
But whatever the true story was, it was Sevora’s to keep. Whatever had happened in this strange spherical room was her memory to keep, forever if she wished. Amon was certain this last Memorian had earned that.
‘Come on,’ he said, reaching out a hand to her. ‘I will carry you to the top of the Halt, and you can see what their sacrifice has bought us.’
Sevora wanted to walk, but in the end the stairs were too much, and Amon had folded her onto one arm, carrying her like a child up to the top of the Halt.
He set her down when they reached the top, though, and walked beside her as she limped her way to the edge of the wall, carefully holding her dislocated arm. She could see General Kant talking to one of those tall, inhuman beings with the bows, and one of the silver-armoured Stormcast Eternals she had seen in her vision mounted on the back of the great beasts. The three of them crouched on the wall some distance from them, their scales glinting in the growing light of the coming dawn. They were huge, terrifying, but nothing like the creatures of the skaven. They had a terrible beauty to them, and Sevora felt a surge of exhilaration mix with her fear of them. Looking at them was like watching a great storm approach, wild and beautiful.
‘Draconith,’ Amon said, catching the direction of her gaze. ‘Fell and noble creatures of Azyr. Hammerhal Aqsha answered, if not in full force, and sent what few of them remain, along with the Auralan Sentinels.’ When she frowned at the name, he pointed to the creature talking with Kant. ‘Aelves. A reconnaissance in force, apparently. The children of the Horned Rat have risen from every hole and crevice across the realms to assault us. That is why they did not respond sooner, and why they sent so few. It is good they sent what they could, but in the end it would not have been enough.’
‘If not for Corus. And Brevin,’ she breathed. It wasn’t a lie. Not really. Brevin had forged her connection to the Heart, something she would have never been able to do. And Corus…
She had to stop for a moment to swipe away a tear on one of her ash-coated sleeves, wondering why they hadn’t stopped falling. She had wailed alone in the dark for what felt like forever, until her voice had broken, and when the Golden Lions and Amon had found her she thought she might finally be done, her tears all used up. But still they came, spilling from both the eye that was left to her and the empty socket beside it.
When she pulled back her hand, she could see that Kant had stopped talking to the aelf and was staring at her, her lined face weary but determined. The general nodded to her, a kind of salute between survivors, and Sevora had to turn away before she started weeping again.
At the parapet she stared out at Warrun Vale and the destruction she and the Heart had wrought.
The ground out to where the forest had once stood was scoured to nothing but blackened dirt. No bodies, no bones, nothing: just a wasteland of ash and pale eddies of smoke. Beyond that, there was a line of charred madness and death.
The corrupted trees had been broken and tumbled and lay in great blackened piles. Mixed with them were the bodies, mostly just blackened bones, though scraps of half-melted armour and weapons were scattered with them. There had to be thousands of them, twisted in with the blasted forest, and the stench of burned flesh and fur drifted on the morning breeze. There was another smell too, a sharp smell that came from the lumps of quartz that still glowed among the dead, the last chunks of the Halt’s facing that were slowly cooling.
Gone. Sevora looked down the wall below her, and it was nothing but dark basalt, a great sweeping face of harsh stone. An imposing bastion, a wall so high and thick it looked like a piece of the peaks that surrounded it. But it was different now, changed. The Heart of the Halt was gone, burned away by Sevora’s anger and fear and ignorance, and now this was just a pile of stone, doomed to slowly crumble away into sand and ruins, like the ancient city that had once stood behind it.
‘Dead,’ she said, her whisper harsh. ‘The Halt. I–’ Killed it, she was about to say, but she cut that off. ‘It’s dead. Its power is lost.’
‘But the Halt still holds,’ Amon said. He considered her, then looked away, towards what lay beyond the tumbled ruins of the downed trees and dead skaven. ‘What was done had to be done, or the skaven would have overwhelmed us. And then Clawlord Reekbite would have marched his army right into the Great Parch.’
Sevora looked with him, out at what was left of the skaven army. So many had died in the night, so many had been incinerated at her hand. Enough to pay for her brother, for Morgen and grey-winged Jocanan, and all the other broken but powerful Reclusians and their mortal Memorians? No. There was no amount of blood and ash that could settle that cost. But she had killed enough to make her sick. So many thousand dead, but as the dawn spread up the Warrun Vale she could see them gathered there still, a great swarm like a sea of filth converging between the high cliffs of the pass.
‘Reekbite was dealt a heavy blow last night,’ Amon said. He had his glass out, and was sweeping it over the still-massive army. ‘But that firestorm didn’t catch him. He survived, and he somehow kept his forces from turning and running. He’s organising them for a siege now. We won the first battle, but the war for the Halt is just beginning.’
‘Why?’ Sevora said, staring past the ash and the dead at the great swarm of skaven massing in the Vale. More. Always more. ‘What’s so important about this place?’
In answer, Amon handed her his spyglass. Sized for a Stormcast, the instrument was huge and heavy in her hands, but he helped her hold it up to her eye, to stare out at the land past the Vale, the realm that lay beyond the Adamantine Chain.
It was a wasteland.
The land was flat plains of white, like a vast desert of bone dust. Rivers cut through those pale plains, veins of something black that looked more like oil than water, feeding patches of hideous growth. They were thickets and forests of plants – twisted, horrible things like she had seen beginning to grow around Gallogast. Things stirred beneath their branches, monstrous shapes that she moved the glass away from before they could be fully revealed.
The glass swept across that awful, ugly apocalypse until Sevora’s view was cut off by a storm, a wall of black rain falling from greasy grey clouds that were split by bolts of emerald-green lightning. It was like the smoke but worse, a perversion of the heavens, pouring down upon a perversion of the earth. And just before it swept across her view, blotting it out, Sevora caught sight of something else. Something awful, that Amon’s glass brought far too close, far too clearly, despite it being so far away.
It was the outlines of a never-ending urban wasteland, towers that curved like claws or ended in jagged stumps like broken fangs, vast lumpy pyramids and bulbous domes like blisters, endless blocks of half-ruined buildings webbed together by broken buttress, rope and chain. And all across it, the tiny moving specks of skaven, the whole vast sprawl seething with them.
When the storm swept in and blocked it, the ugly black blot of that hideous rain was almost a mercy. Sevora pulled her eye away, and let Amon take his glass back.
‘I have crossed these mountains before,’ Amon said, folding the instrument up and tucking it away. ‘The lands beyond were a wild, dangerous place, but they were nothing like that hellscape. And that city, the one you can just catch the edge of, that did not exist. The skaven… they did something. I had heard tell once that they had a realm of their own, hidden somewhere in the dark spaces between the stars. It seems they found a way to bring it here, to Aqshy. That poison smoke was born from its arrival, but that wasteland, that city, is not going to go away like the smoke did.’ He frowned at the skaven army pulling itself together down the Warrun Vale. ‘As I said, our reinforcements brought word of fighting everywhere. But it is thickest all along the Adamantine Chain. I think these mountains now form a wall between those blighted skaven lands and the Great Parch. And the widest road across these mountains is here, blocked only by the Halt. The skaven never meant to stay trapped over there. They want to run riot across all the realms, and Clawlord Reekbite seeks to be the first to shatter our civilisations, to slaughter and enslave us, and to claim all that he can for himself and the Great Horned Rat.’
‘And so this fight will never end,’ Sevora said. ‘No matter what we sacrifice.’ As she spoke, her eyes were drawn to a dark shadow limping slowly down the wall towards them. It was Peace, one foreleg stiff with splints and bandages, his once piercing eyes dull with a pain that Sevora guessed had little to do with his injured leg. She reached out a hand, and the gryph-crow came close, letting her touch the shimmering black feathers of his head. ‘Was it worth it then?’ she whispered. ‘Brevin. The Ruination Chamber. The Heart. Corus. My–’ She cut off, pain sweeping through her.
‘Your eye?’ Amon asked, and she shook her head.
‘No. My magic.’ She could feel that searing scar in her, as if her soul had been cauterised. ‘When the Heart burned itself out, it took my power with it. I feel broken inside. Dead. And it’s not just my eye, not just my grief. I am broken, more than ever, and I will never be the same. Such a little thing, really, compared to everything else, but was even that worth it, if all that we bought was a little time?’
‘A little time,’ Amon said. ‘And a great deal of hope.’
‘Hope when hope is dying,’ she whispered, and beside her Peace whispered back, his strange voice as cracked as hers.
‘Hope.’
‘The fight is far from over, here,’ Amon said. From the Vale far below, something bellowed, a monstrous scream of rage that split the air even at this distance. He shook his head, dark hair brushing the battered, blood-splashed shoulders of his violet armour. ‘And its outcome is far from certain. But your part here may be done. You will return to Rookenval to await Corus’ return. You should know that it might be some time before he does, and… there is always the chance he will not survive his Reforging. This time.’
Sevora looked down at the death and destruction, and the army of monsters beyond that would wreak that much and more on the whole world.
‘I know. And even if he does, he may be so broken by it that he might not recognise me. If he even comes back in my lifetime.’ She hesitated, tears building again in her eye. ‘But I made a choice when he was dying, and I lied to him at the last, and I don’t know if that was right. If I saved him with that lie, or if I damned him even more.’
Amon looked away from her, at the dark stone beneath their feet. ‘Sometimes hope is a lie,’ he said.
‘Sometimes it is,’ Sevora said softly, her words tangled with the wind that ran over the Halt and down into the ruins of Warrun Vale. ‘And sometimes it’s a lie spoken with the fervency of a prayer.’
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Gary Kloster is a writer, a stay-at-home father, a librarian and a martial artist – sometimes all in the same day, seldom all at the same time. His work for Black Library includes the Warhammer 40,000 novel Lazarus: Enmity’s Edge, the Age of Sigmar novel The Last Volari, the Necromunda novella Spark of Revolution, and a number of short stories. He lives among the corn in the American Midwest.
An extract from War for the Mortal Realms.
Vandus, they called him.
It was a name of omen, one that carried the favour of the Golden City. He would be the first, they said. None would set foot in the Mortal Realms ahead of him, though the bringers of vengeance would be close behind. For a long time he had not understood what they meant, for they had had to school him as a child, teaching him to remember what he had once known by instinct.
Now, with the passing of aeons, he understood. The empty years were coming to a close, and the designs of the God-King were at last reaching ripeness. He was the instrument, just one of the limitless host, but the brightest star amid the constellations of salvaged glory.
For so long now, it had just been Azyr, and all else was lost in the fog of time.
But there had been other worlds. Now, very soon, there would be so again.
They were gazing up at him – ten thousand, arrayed in gold and cobalt and ranked in the shining orders of battle. The walls around them soared like cliffs, each one gilt, reflective and marked with the sigils of the Reforged.
Vandus stood under a dome of sapphire. A long flight of marble stairs led down to the hall’s crystal floor. Above them all, engraved in purest sigmarite, was the sign of the Twin-Tailed Comet, radiant amid its coronet of silver.
This thing had never been done. In a thousand years of toil and counsel, in all the ancient wars that the God-King had conducted across realms now lost, it had never been done. Even the wisdom of gods was not infinite, and so all the long ages of labour might yet come to naught.
He lifted his hand, turning the sigmarite gauntlet before him, marvelling at the manner in which the armour encased his flesh. Every piece of it was perfect, pored over by the artificers before being released for the service of the Eternals. He clenched the golden fingers into a fist and held it high above him.
Below him, far below, his Stormhost, the Hammers of Sigmar, raised a massed roar. As one, they clenched their own right hands.
Hammerhand!
Vandus revelled in the gesture of fealty. The vaults shook from their voices, each one greater and deeper than that of a mortal man. They looked magnificent. They looked invincible.
‘This night!’ Vandus cried, and his words swelled and filled the gulf before him. ‘This night, we open gates long closed.’
The host fell silent, rapt, knowing these would be the last words they heard before the void took them.
‘This night, we smite the savage,’ Vandus said. ‘This night, we smite the daemon. We cross the infinite. We dare to return to the realms of our birthright.’
Ten thousand golden helms looked up at him. Ten thousand fists gripped the shafts of warhammers. The Liberators, the greater part of the mighty host, stood proudly, arrayed in glistening phalanxes of gold. All of them had once been mortal, just as he had been, though now they bore the aspect of fiery angels, their mortality transmuted into majesty.
‘The design of eternity brought you here,’ Vandus said, sweeping his gaze across the sea of expectant faces. ‘Fate gave you your gifts, and the Forge has augmented them a hundredfold. You are the foremost servants of the God-King now. You are his blades, you are his shields, you are his vengeance.’
Amid the Liberators stood the Retributors, even more imposing than their comrades, carrying huge two-handed lightning hammers across their immense breastplates. They were the solid heart of the army, the champions about which the Legion was ordered. Slivers of pale lightning sparked from their heavy plate, residue of a fearsome, overspilling power within.
‘You are the finest, the strongest, the purest,’ Vandus told them. ‘In pain were you made, but in glory will you live. No purpose have you now but to bring terror to the enemy, to lay waste to his lands and to shatter his fortresses.’
On either flank stood the Prosecutors, the most severely elegant of all the warriors there assembled. Their armour was sheathed in a sheer carapace of swan-white wings, each blade of which dazzled in its purity. Their spirits were the most extreme, the wildest and the proudest. If they were a little less steadfast than their brothers, they compensated with the exuberance of flight, and in their gauntlets they kindled the raw essence of the comet itself.
‘We are sent now into the heart of nightmares,’ said Vandus. ‘For ages uncounted this canker has festered across the face of the universe, extinguishing hope from lands that were once claimed by our people. The war will be long. There will be suffering and there will be anguish, for we are set against the very legions of hell.’
Besides Vandus stood the great celestial dracoth, Calanax, his armoured hide glinting from the golden light of the hall. Wisps of hot smoke curled from his nostrils and his long talons raked across the crystal floor. Vandus had been the first to tame such a beast, though now others of his breed were in the service of the Stormhost. The dracoth was the descendant of far older mythic creatures, and retained a shard of their immortal power.
‘But they know us not. They believe all contests to be over, and that nothing remains but plunder and petty cruelties. In secrecy have we been created, and our coming shall be to them as the ending of worlds. With our victory, the torment will cease. The slaughter will cease. We will cleanse these worlds with fire, and consign the usurpers back to the pits that spewed them forth.’
As he spoke, Vandus felt the gaze of his fellow captains on him. Anactos Skyhelm was there, lean and proud, master of the winged host. Lord-Relictor Ionus, the one they called the Cryptborn, remained in the margins, though his dry presence could be sensed, watching, deliberating. If the lightning-bridge was secured, those two would be at the forefront, marshalling the vanguard to take the great prize – the Gate of Azyr, locked for near-eternity and only unbarred by the release of magics from both sides of the barrier.
