Sabrodt’s tirade stirred some of the disjointed fragments buried within Arnhault’s memory. He saw again the scene as it had unfolded long ago. He recalled the reasons he had spared Sabrodt the first time he had tried to seize the throne. ‘It was not for your sake I did not send you to the headsman. Your wife and my nephews pleaded for your life. They begged me to spare you and I was too selfish to risk earning their scorn, to see hate for me in their eyes.’
‘You were weak,’ Sabrodt scoffed. ‘Too weak to rule.’
‘You were the weak one,’ Arnhault countered. ‘Always letting others take the risks. You could not even do your own fighting. You had to let the hordes of Chaos do that for you. A conqueror? A usurper? You are nothing but a scavenger, afraid to fight for what you want.’
Sabrodt’s laugh was a steely growl that echoed through the tomb. ‘You will not goad me into leaving the Dragonseat, however much you try to shame me. I will sit here and be content to watch you die.’
The ghastly executioner rushed Arnhault. The Stormcast lifted his staff to block the descending axe. In a blur of eerie speed, the ghost’s weapon swept past his defence and crashed against his shoulder. There was an icy shock as the spectral blade struck him. His arm dropped, numbed down to his wrist. It was all he could do to retain his grip upon the staff. In another fit of uncanny speed the ghostly headsman pulled away and brought his double-axe up to deliver another blow.
Before the stroke could fall, a golden shape charged out from the darkness. Penthius swept his soulshield between the executioner’s descending axe and Arnhault. The weapon cracked against the enchanted barrier, the impact throwing the headsman back. Penthius retaliated with a crushing swing of his maul that disrupted the shadowy essence of the murderous wraith. The undead creature flickered backwards, ectoplasm dripping from its tattered shape.
‘Next time I wish you would listen when I call you,’ Penthius quipped.
Arnhault slapped his hand against his numbed shoulder, letting arcane heat drive down against the graveyard chill. ‘Next time I will,’ he promised.
Sabrodt pointed his bony fist at the two Stormcasts. A blackened blade manifested in his grip, conjured from the cairn where it had physically reposed. ‘Destroy them,’ he roared at his undead court. ‘Your king commands it!’
The wraiths responded to the Shrouded King’s decree, flying at the Stormcasts in a ghostly swarm. Penthius brought his maul flashing through the first few creatures, shattering their phantasmal shapes. His conquests were too few to stem the tide. The chain-wrapped nighthaunts forced him to raise his shield and try to hold them back with its magic.
‘Sigmar’s will,’ Arnhault intoned as he drew the vial from his belt and cast it at the undead swarm. As the vial struck the wraiths, it shattered, unleashing the energies of the mammoth’s spirit. The crackling power raged through the ghosts, whipping across their aethereal shapes to scatter them about the hall in wispy tatters.
The executioner alone from Sabrodt’s court defied the tempest Arnhault unleashed upon them. The creature came charging for the aether-mage, its axe raised to cut him down. This time Penthius was too far away to intercede.
There was no need for the Sequitor-Prime to do so. Arnhault responded to the threat by whipping his staff across the wraith’s arm. The glowing head seared through the spectral limb like a flash of lightning. The executioner reared back, the severed arm disintegrating in a flurry of ebon motes. He retained his grip upon the axe, but the weapon had too much solidity to be easily wielded single-handed. Before the wraith could compensate, Arnhault’s magic again scorched the cloaked figure. This time the staff raked upwards, flaring through his chest and up through his skull. Bisected from rib to cranium, the executioner struggled for an instant to retain such substance as he possessed, then exploded in a spray of blackened fragments.
Sabrodt shook his sword at the Stormcasts. ‘You have won nothing! I conjured my retainers from their graves once – I will do so again!’
Penthius hefted his maul and would have rushed the throne, but Arnhault warned him back. It would need a different strategy to unseat the Usurper.
Arnhault glowered at the Shrouded King. ‘You have won nothing,’ he accused. ‘Look at this kingdom you have claimed. A dead place filled with dead things. Echoes and shadows, that is all you hold! Is this the kingdom you coveted, brother? Or is this just a mockery of that dream?’
A howl of anguish wracked the Shrouded King. ‘Do not presume to speak to me of dreams, slave of Sigmar! What do you remember of your dreams, Volkhard? You mention my wife and sons, but what of your own? Do you remember them?’ The skull-face leered at Arnhault. ‘Do you even recall their names, or has Sigmar taken even that from you?’
Arnhault felt Sabrodt’s words cutting into him, opening all the uncertainties. The haze of his own past refused to be swept away. But when he looked at Sabrodt, he thought he understood why. ‘You remember everything, brother. You remember what happened long ago. You remember what you did and what was done to you. You remember what you wanted.’
Sabrodt leaned back upon the Dragonseat. ‘And you wish to know the secret of why I remember these things when you do not?’
The wraith’s words gave Arnhault pause. Try as he might, he could not recall Volkhard’s own family. That memory had been lost, pounded from him upon the Anvil of the Apotheosis. How much had been lost there? And what would he be willing to pay to get it back?
‘Yes, monster, I would know that secret,’ Arnhault confessed.
The Shrouded King glared down at him. ‘Hate, brother. That is the key! That is the force that is stronger than death and the grave!’
‘Hate makes you remember everything,’ Arnhault conceded. ‘All except one thing – who you were. Where is the man who was Sabrodt? I see only his shadow.’ He slapped his hand against his armoured chest. ‘I have forgotten much, but I have not forgotten who I am. I remain the defender of the innocent, the champion of the good. I remain true to my purpose. All you do is clutch at a past that is gone and bitterly tell yourself it is enough.’
‘It is more than you have, Volkhard. More than you will ever have. You curse my dominion because you are too weak to claim it for yourself.’
Arnhault shook his head. ‘Is that what you want, Sabrodt? You want me to be jealous of this charnel house you call a palace and this graveyard you call a kingdom? They are nothing, brother. Empty. A fitting dominion for a weak traitor.
‘We were twins,’ he reminded Sabrodt. ‘It did not matter which of us was born first. We were both taught the same things, instructed in the same ways. We were both watched and judged. Either of us might have become priest-king of Kharza. They chose me not because I was first… but because I was better.’
Sabrodt leapt down from the Dragonseat, his frenzied wail thundering through the crypt. A blur of hate and shadow, the Shrouded King lunged at Arnhault.
The instant Sabrodt was away from the throne, Arnhault raised his staff and sent a crackling spear of lightning stabbing into the wraith. The Shrouded King was transfixed upon the magical beam, but even impalement was not enough to dull his ancient hate. Sabrodt forced himself down the shocking lance, his ectoplasm steaming away as the aetheric power seared his undead essence. His jaws opened in a scream of fury, as he slashed his infernal sword into Arnhault’s armoured shoulder.
Against another blow, the sigmarite mail might have lessened the impact, but the blade Sabrodt bore was imbued with a fragment of the merciless ire of Nagash himself. To the spectral weapon’s innate power was added the rage of the creature that bore it, the centuries of brooding hate that had given the Shrouded King his kingdom. The blade tore through the armoured pauldron, down into the flesh beneath, through muscle and bone to cut a phantom path through the heart within. Ghostly as a cobweb, the wound did not bleed, flesh did not part, bone did not snap. The only evidence of the cut was the blemished mark on Arnhault’s armo
ur and the spectral cold that shivered through his soul.
Sabrodt leaned close to Arnhault, his skull briefly assuming once more the features he had worn in life. ‘You were never better than me,’ he snarled. ‘You will never be better than me.’
‘Sigmar found me worthy,’ Arnhault told the fading phantom. ‘Nagash simply found you… useful.’ He watched as Sabrodt’s essence collapsed into a black mist that sank down into the cursed earth of his tomb.
‘Penthius!’ Arnhault called to the Sequitor-Prime. ‘Attend me!’ The Knight-Incantor stumbled and fell, the uncanny wound visited on him by Sabrodt rapidly taxing his strength.
‘I am here, my lord,’ Penthius assured Arnhault. He took hold of the aether-mage’s arm and lifted him up from the floor.
Arnhault looked into his brother’s eyes. ‘Quickly,’ he said. ‘The wraith’s cut is a mortal one. I can feel my life being drained. Only my magic sustains me now.’
‘What can I do?’ Penthius had a desperate quality to his voice.
‘Get me outside,’ Arnhault commanded. ‘I must die, but I will not die in this place. Not where he has fallen. Get me outside, where I can feel the presence of the God-King looking down on me.’
The battle had ended by the time Penthius emerged from the barrow mound helping the stricken Arnhault out from the tomb. The stains of blood and ectoplasm were the only evidence of the conflict. The forms of the fallen had vanished soon after being struck down, drawn back into the cursed earth or else borne aloft to the Celestial Realm. Only the victors remained to meet the two Stormcasts.
Less than forty warriors remained of the Gilded Sphere. The rest of Arnhault’s retinue had fallen to the nighthaunts. Castigator-Prime Nerio was not among the vanquished. Penthius felt relieved to see the impulsive warrior come marching towards him. Nerio hesitated when he saw the condition Arnhault was in.
‘The Shrouded King,’ Penthius explained. ‘Arnhault vanquished it, but not before the wraith cut him with its sword.’
Nerio wrapped his arm around the Knight-Incantor’s other side and helped Penthius bear him away from the tomb. ‘We knew something had happened when the nighthaunts lost interest in the battle. One moment they were all around us, the next they began to sink back into the ground.’
‘That must have been when Arnhault defeated their master,’ Penthius said. He glanced down at the insensible aether-mage. The Knight-Incantor was scarcely breathing now, his body carrying with it a clammy chill.
‘Is there anything we can do?’ Nerio asked, taking stock of Arnhault’s state. Other Stormcasts joined them now, taking hold of the dying Knight-Incantor and helping carry him.
‘Only what he asked of me,’ Penthius said. He nodded towards the lonely green plot. ‘We will lay him down there, where King Volkhard fell.’
Nerio gave Penthius a questioning look. ‘Volkhard? Is he not the one who wrote the history of Kharza that Arnhault was always studying?’
Penthius did not answer. He was not sure what he could answer. From what he had overheard, Volkhard and Arnhault were one and the same, but until Sabrodt had named him such, Arnhault did not remember being the last priest-king of Kharza. Yet for Volkhard to have written the history resting in the Gilded Sphere’s archives, he must have known much more when first he was reforged as a Stormcast.
As they laid Arnhault down on the grass, Penthius considered something else the Knight-Incantor had said. Something about remembering who he was rather than what he was. Perhaps, in some way, Arnhault had allowed those memories to be consumed by his reforging while retaining other ones – memories that would serve his duty to Sigmar, the rites and rituals he had learned as an aether-mage.
Penthius and the other Stormcasts backed away as a brilliant blue light engulfed Arnhault. The light shot upwards, vanishing in the grey sky. It left behind it only an empty patch of grass.
Penthius closed his eyes and thought about what was happening even now in Sigmaron. Arnhault was being reforged, made ready to fight again. What would he remember of this strange homecoming, of this encounter with his treacherous brother? Would the name Volkhard mean anything to him, or would that too be lost?
‘Nerio,’ Penthius said, turning back towards the barrow mound and pointing his maul at the dark entrance. ‘Before we march from this place, I want that tomb sealed. And we will raise a marker here for King Volkhard.
‘So that any who chance to pass this way again may remember.’
SOUL WARS
by Josh Reynolds
In the shadowy lands of Shyish, Nagash, God of Death, calls forth his soulless legions to reassert his dominion. Will Sigmar’s brooding Anvils of the Heldenhammer be enough to stop the onslaught?
Find this title, and many others, on blacklibrary.com
A Dirge of
Dust and Steel
Josh Reynolds
Eerie shrieks pierced the gloom.
They reverberated through the broken field of toppled pillars and dust-shrouded statuary, riding the night wind. To Sathphren Swiftblade’s ears, there was both damnable pleasure and promise in those cries. The Lord-Aquilor repressed a shudder and bent forwards in his saddle. ‘Faster, Gwyllth,’ he murmured into his mount’s ear. ‘We’re almost there.’
The long-limbed, avian-headed gryph-charger squalled in reply, and increased her speed, despite the weight of the fully armoured Stormcast Eternal she carried on her broad back. Sathphren glanced back, checking on his warriors. Half a dozen armoured Vanguard-Palladors rode hard to either side of him. Like the Lord-Aquilor, they wore the silver-and-azure war-plate of the Hallowed Knights Stormhost, and rode atop lean, leonine gryph-chargers. The beasts were galloping flat out, the magic that flowed through their muscular frames enabling them to easily outpace their pursuers.
As one, they bounded over the fallen statue of some long-forgotten warden king. The square, bearded face glared sightlessly at the silver-armoured riders and their steeds as they raced on across the broken ground. The duardin had once ruled this unforgiving land. Before the coming of Chaos, the Oasis of Gazul had provided shelter for traders and pilgrims alike. Now, it was a daemon-haunted ruin, shrouded in shadows and dust.
Out of the corner of his eye, Sathphren caught a glimpse of a pack of lithe, inhuman shapes as they raced along parallel to the Hallowed Knights. The creatures, at once serpentine and avian, leapt and scrambled over fallen pillars and broken walls, moving with a speed that defied comprehension. They were urged on by their cackling riders – slim, hideously sensual daemonettes, the Handmaidens of Slaanesh.
The daemonettes resembled women, with thick manes of snaky locks and pitiless, androgynous faces. Chitinous claws snapped wildly at the air, as the creatures gesticulated obscenely. The Hounds of Pleasure were on the hunt, and Sathphren and his warriors were their quarry. ‘Looks like they’ve caught up with us at last, eh, Feysha?’ Sathphren called out.
‘Took them long enough,’ Feysha, his second in command, replied. The Pallador-Prime peered back over her shoulder. ‘Though I’ve not seen such a pack of beasts since the Bitterbark. Every daemon in this desert must be on our tail.’
‘Good. The more of them the better.’ Sathphren glanced back, following her gaze. Behind them, daemons raced across the dust dunes with quicksilver grace. Brutal beast-kin loped in their wake, braying to the Wraith Moon above. There were mortals among them as well – strange figures those, clad in everything from silks to furs, bearing weapons and musical instruments in their tattooed hands. Some rode atop daemonic steeds, while others capered through the dust. Golden standards, decorated with looted tapestries, mirrors and flayed hides, bobbed above the monstrous cavalcade.
It was not an army. A horde, at best. A moveable feast of frenzied indulgence. A celebration of blood and pain. And at its head, crouched atop a massive chariot made from bone and gold and pulled by a darting, hissing herd of daemon-steeds, was the host – the crea
ture known as Amin’Hrith, the Soulflayer.
The Keeper of Secrets was a monster among monsters. It towered over the tallest of its followers, even squatting as it did on its nightmarish conveyance. Its elongated torso bore a quartet of long, milk-pale arms. One of these ended in a vicious, snapping claw, while the hands of the others rested upon the bejewelled hilts of the various blades sheathed about its person, beneath the cloak of skins it wore. Its head was that of a bull, with great, curving horns capped with gold, and a ring of silver in its wide, flat nose. A mane of thick spines draped across the back of its neck, and its pale form was covered in the marks of ritual scarification, as well as various gemstones clinging to its chest like barnacles.
Sathphren’s gaze was drawn to the largest of these – a massive ruby, set between the daemon’s uppermost pectorals. Something flashed within the facets of the gem, and he turned away, frowning. ‘Into the oasis – go!’
Lone pillars and broken statues gave way to more substantial ruins – stone watercourses and shattered aqueducts cast elongated shadows in the moonlight. And beyond them, the high, narrow summit of Gazul-Baraz. The ruins spread out around the immense tower of limestone, spilling forth from the caverns beneath it, following the ancient watercourses. There were greater ruins by far within those caverns, stretching into the deep darkness. This was but the uppermost level of that vast fiefdom. One the Soulflayer had destroyed, and now claimed as its own.
‘Swiftblade – beware!’
Feysha’s shout was all the warning he needed. He ducked low, folding himself over Gwyllth’s neck. A crustacean-like claw snapped closed where his head had been, as a daemon-steed drove itself into Gwyllth’s side. The gryph-charger stumbled and spun, shrieking in rage. Sathphren hauled back on the reins, and snatched his boltstorm pistol from its holster. He levelled the weapon at the daemonette rider and loosed a bolt. The bolt struck it in the eye and sent it tumbling from the saddle. Its serpentine steed staggered, off balance, and Gwyllth smashed it from its feet, tearing open its elongated neck.
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