by Andy Clark
When Sigmar had raised Neave up and Reforged her as the first of the Knights-Zephyros, he had given his huntress many talents. Speed was perhaps the foremost. Neave rocked back slightly, tensing muscles and tendons as sparks of stormlight danced along her limbs. Then she launched herself forward with enough force to crack the stone slabs on which she had crouched.
She sped through the slaughter as a barely perceptible blur. Arrows fell around her, but she wove through them as easily as if they hung still in mid-air. A band of cultists began to turn as they sensed her approach, but they might as well have been trying to move underwater. Neave feinted right as she neared them and swept an axe in a beheading stroke before pivoting on her heel and pirouetting through their midst like a dancer. Her whirlwind axes lashed out again and again. In the space of no more than a second, she lopped the heads from two more foes, disembowelled a third and sent another sailing backwards with a thunderous kick to the chest.
Blood and tumbling bodies rained down in Neave’s wake. She barely even slowed, arcing around a hard-pressed circle of duardin fighting back to back and hacking down several of their assailants as she passed.
Xerkanos’ wagon was straight ahead and Neave slowed her pace. She would not simply charge in headlong, for the sorcerer was too dangerous a foe. Instead, she slid into the cover of another wagon, this one overturned within the blockhouse’s dancing shadow. Firelight, blood, screams, oaths and the clash of weapons blew around her in a sensory hurricane. Neave filtered it all instinctively, registered without conscious thought the dangers nearby and their relevance to her mission.
Snipers armed with bows crowded the blockhouse roof, raining arrows down upon anything that moved. They were shooting indiscriminately, Neave thought with surprise as she saw several shafts pierce a spear-wielding guardsman even as others slew the duardin he had been duelling. Hardly the discipline and discernment she expected from the worshippers of Tzeentch.
A band of faux guardsmen were pressing in from her rear, but still a good thirty yards behind and mired in battle with a band of recovering duardin. Not so much of a threat, she thought, even as another part of her mind noted the jagged tattoos and elaborate piercings that festooned the guardsmen’s exposed flesh. A number had thrown off segments of armour, she saw, had cast aside their cloaks and even flung away weapons in order to claw and strangle with bare hands. The perfumed reek was back, stronger, wafting from the attackers’ bodies.
Two more bands of guards were pincering in from either side, and these truly were a risk to her mission, for they were closing upon Xerkanos’ wagon. Only their drive to stop and murder each defenceless duardin they encountered had prevented them from reaching the sorcerer already.
Neave gathered herself to spring, but in that moment she felt a surge of sorcerous energies from ahead. The bars on one side of the cage-wagon glowed bright as the light of noontide. Then they simply shattered into glowing dust that skirled away on the breeze.
Xerkanos appeared in the gap, his chains discarded. He looked strong, alert, his movements sharp as a blade and his compound gaze drinking in the scene. Neave cursed herself for not factoring external attackers into her plan; slaying the sorcerer while he lay trussed in chains would have been far easier.
Still, she had to admit that the primal huntress in her nature relished a fair fight over butchering her quarry while he lay helpless. It had to be quick, though, before he linked up with the cultists who had come to–
That thought was cut off mid-flow as the lead guardsmen spied Xerkanos. They howled with murderous glee and raised their spears before breaking into a charge.
Xelkyn Xerkanos gave a buzzing snarl and raised gnarled talons. Streamers of magic gathered around his fingertips and stabbed out at the charging guards. One by one the warriors were flash-transmuted into shimmering crystal statues that tumbled to the stone floor to shatter under their own momentum.
Blood gushed from the shattered bodies to form a slick around their glinting remains.
Arrows rained down on Xerkanos and he gave another gesture, his anger clear to Neave in the jerky impatience of his movements. The shafts transformed into flights of stinging daggerflies in mid-air, before turning back and swarming up towards those who had loosed them.
Clearly, these were not Xerkanos’ followers, thought Neave. But if so, who were they and why did they want him dead? ‘Blacktalon!’ It took Neave a second to realise that Xerkanos was calling for her by name. ‘Blacktalon, I know you’re there, probably poised to take my head from my shoulders. I swear by almighty Tzeentch and upon the true name I shall never speak, that would be a mistake.’
Another rain of arrows fell, and Xerkanos ducked back into his prison-turned-shelter. Several shafts thunked into the wood of the wagon Neave crouched behind.
‘Blacktalon, I know the extent of your perceptive powers,’ called Xerkanos. ‘You will know if I am lying, won’t you? You can tell in that infuriating way of yours. Well hear me true. If these imposters acquire my blood, you’ll be dealing with a far greater horror than anything I can wreak.’
Blades rang behind Neave. She shot a glance back and saw Halgrimmsson, flanked by two of his shield-bearers. The duardin fought furiously against a mass of stabbing, shrieking cultists. For an instant, her eyes locked with the thane’s, and in that moment his expression was as unreadable as carved granite.
More guardsmen were closing in from around the square, dodging around the dug-in bands of duardin in their haste to reach Xerkanos’ cage. And to her great frustration, Neave heard no lie in the sorcerer’s voice.
‘Slay me now, huntress, and you’ll give them precisely what they want,’ he shouted, and this time Neave heard real alarm in Xerkanos’ tone. Arrows stuck, quivering, in the roof of his cage, and fresh waves of guardsmen pressed in from both sides.
‘Sigmar guide me in this,’ murmured Neave. ‘And if I’m wrong, strike me down for my foolishness.’
Neave vaulted the toppled wagon and launched herself into a sprint. She ploughed into the nearest mass of guardsmen, spinning, whirling and hacking with lightning speed. It was as she lopped off one cultist’s arm that she saw the tattoo upon the flesh of his shoulder, exposed as her axe-blade tore through his tunic.
It was an orb wrought in lurid purple inks and sprouting a shaft topped with opposed sickle-moon curves. The mark of Slaanesh.
Suddenly the perfumed stink, the deafening scream and the wild abandon with which the guardsmen attacked all made sense. But what did the worshippers of Slaanesh want with Xelkyn Xerkanos?
Neave despatched the last of her attackers, then dived aside as arrows whistled down upon her. She slid under the wreck of another wagon from whose rent flanks duardin provisions spilled. Ale from broken casks dripped amidst the juices of freshly butchered meat, giving the unpleasant impression that the wagon had been disembowelled.
‘Sigmar’s mighty throne, Xerkanos, does everyone in the Realms want you dead?’ shouted Neave. She was rewarded by a harsh buzz that might have been a laugh.
‘None so much as you, Blacktalon, and you’ll all be disappointed.’
‘Oh, I’ll hack you to bloody flinders, sorcerer,’ she shouted back. ‘Only tell me why I shouldn’t take your life right now.’
From across the square there rose a crescendo of baying howls. Neave shot a glance that way and saw a tide of deformed beings converging from streets that led deeper into the town. They were mutant horrors whose bulging flesh and deformed limbs were bound into hooked black leather that tore at their skin as they moved. Oversized eyes like black pearls, sucking sensory pits that took up entire faces, lamprey mouths and curled talons showed Neave at a glance why these foul abominations had not been part of the initial ambush. They could hardly have concealed such deformities.
Now, though, someone had unleashed the mutants to finish off their wounded prey, and as she watched the gibbering tide of twisted flesh hurtl
e towards her, she had little doubt they were up to the task.
‘Whatever you have to say, Xerkanos, say it swiftly,’ she shouted.
‘I had a cult cell in this town,’ he replied, his buzzing voice carrying over the maelstrom of shrieks and howls. ‘The idiot stuntlings would give me passage across the plains safe from your blades, then my cult would spirit me away once we got here.’
‘You said had, not have,’ said Neave.
‘Quite, I–’ Xerkanos broke off as a trio of spearmen charged the hole in his wagon’s bars. He spat twisted syllables and the three guardsmen’s screams turned to wet gurgles as their bodies burst open like flower petals. ‘I think it is safe to say my operatives are slain,’ he continued. ‘If I am not mistaken, these are Slaaneshi cultists of the Sixth Torment.’
‘None of this answers my questions,’ shouted Neave.
‘They want my blood,’ spat Xerkanos. ‘All my blood.’
‘And I shouldn’t let them have what they want?’ asked Neave.
‘Not unless you want them to work a ritual of surpassing power with it,’ replied Xerkanos. ‘A ritual of supreme divination that will light their path to their lost god. They’ve bled eight of my brothers already, and I am the last and greatest Tzeentchian sorcerer they need.’
‘Slaanesh is dead, the aelven gods slew him,’ said Neave. ‘His followers are deluded, his daemons by-products of their madness.’
‘Oh, Blacktalon, how little you know,’ spat Xerkanos, and again Neave experienced the grim sensation that the sorcerer spoke the truth. Her mind whirled. She could hear the tide of mutants getting closer, the desperate curses and the clashing of blades that marked the islands of duardin resistance being overrun one by one. Closer, the guardsmen were winding themselves up for another push towards Xerkanos’ wagon while arrows still rained sporadically down from on high.
And beyond the walls, nothing but darkness and certain death.
She would fight them off, she thought. Hit them as hard as she could, try to rally the duardin long enough to push the cultists back. If she could get the gates open, then she could drag Xerkanos screaming into the dark and as far from the town as possible before the ashen people came. With luck, there wouldn’t be enough left of the sorcerer for the Slaanesh worshippers to work their ritual on once those ghoulish creatures had had their way.
Even as she thought this, Neave felt another surge of sorcerous power.
‘Xerkanos, what in Sigmar’s name are you–’
Xerkanos’ cage-wagon exploded in a ferocious ball of green-and-yellow flame. Bits of wreckage cartwheeled in all directions and Neave ducked instinctively as a blazing axel ricocheted off her cover. The approaching guardsmen took the full brunt of the blast. Those not reduced to blazing cinders fell back screaming as the fires of change sent their bodies into uncontrolled spasms of mutation.
Neave felt her mark moving amidst the coiling smoke. She was out from under the wagon and running before Xerkanos could take ten paces, yet as she accelerated towards him, she saw he was running straight at a group of approaching guards. Neave cursed as she realised what Xerkanos was doing; she couldn’t risk the cultists bringing him down. She would have to slay them before they did.
She hurled one of her axes and it whipped end over end past Xerkanos’ shoulder to thud into the chest of the lead guardsman. The Tzeentchian sorcerer gave a buzzing cackle and dodged left, away from a wild spear thrust. That was the only blow the Slaanesh worshippers tried before Neave hit them like a thunderbolt.
‘Dark Prince guide us!’ shrieked one cultist just before she tore his throat out with an axe swing. He crumpled with a gasp that might have been agony or bliss. Another opened his jaws wide and spat out a coiling length of black, prehensile tongue that whipped around Neave’s throat. He tried to drag her in with it, towards his man-trap maw of fangs. Contemptuous, Neave grabbed a fistful of tongue and yanked. The cultist’s face smashed into her helm with a bony crunch and he fell back in a spray of blood.
The distraction had cost Neave precious seconds. She saw Xerkanos dashing into an alleyway between two high stone buildings, his ragged robes flying behind him like the multicoloured wings of some weird insect. Neave broke into a run and crossed the gap in moments. She rounded the corner in time to see the trailing ends of Xerkanos’ robes vanishing around another bend. The alleys had no lamps to light them, but Neave’s eyesight was so keen that she could see perfectly well. She didn’t even slow as she dashed down the rubbish-strewn alley, allowing herself to rebound hard from the wall with a clang of armour on stone so as to round the next corner all the quicker. Ahead, the alley emptied back out onto a lamplit street that swarmed with Slaaneshi mutants. Xerkanos ploughed straight into their midst, blasting assailants aside with tongues of kaleidoscopic fire.
‘Sigmar’s bloody throne,’ spat Neave as she saw that the sorcerer would be overrun in moments. She ran hard, spinning her axes in her fists before launching herself into a leap. She came down amidst the mutants like the God-King’s own fury, and lightning exploded outwards from her point of impact. Revolting beings were hurled through the air, their bodies convulsing and burning as her heavenly energies tore through them. Neave’s axes lashed out in swift arcs, hacking through deformed flesh and sending horned heads tumbling from lumpen shoulders. A crab-like claw snapped closed on her arm, hard enough to dent the Sigmarite. In return, she punched its owner in the neck, caving its throat in and sending it to the floor as it choked its last.
Neave cleared a circle around herself in time to see Xerkanos vanishing down another alleyway, his buzzing laughter floating back over his shoulder.
‘What are you doing, Xerkanos?’ she yelled, slamming her shoulder into a rearing mutant and driving it aside. ‘Where in the Realms do you think you’re running to?’
Xerkanos had said that his cult would spirit him away, thought Neave. What trickery did he have in mind?
She span in a circle, beheading a goat-man hybrid and driving a rib-shattering kick into the chest of a flabby thing with too many eyes. She leapt over the toppling beastman and broke into a flat-out sprint. Neave hurtled down this new alleyway fast enough to raise a wake of swirling dust and litter, executed a one-footed spring off the wall at the far end and burst into a square flanked with glowing lanterns and dominated by a dried-out fountain.
A Sigmarite temple took up one entire edge of the square. She saw Xerkanos dashing up its steps. He glanced back, and she saw firelight reflected in his glittering eyes. She could have hurled her axes right then, hit him in the face and the chest, struck him dead in an instant. She saw the knowledge of it on his face and, infuriatingly, the smug assurance that she would not risk it. Neave could hear the howls of cultists and mutants close behind and knew that, if it was Xerkanos’ blood they wanted, she could not stop them from overrunning her and taking it if he died here.
‘I’m going to drag you out of this town by the throat and feed you to the ashen people,’ she snarled.
‘There are more futures in which you don’t than in which you do,’ he shouted back, before smashing the ornate temple doors from their hinges with a blast of balefire.
Neave raced up the steps and lunged, grabbing at Xerkanos as he vanished into the cool dark of the temple’s interior. She felt her hands close around one of his chitinous limbs, sensed his alarm and pain as her grip closed like a vice.
Then came the mind-shredding scream again, more ferocious and intense even than before. Neave snarled in pain, losing her grip on Xerkanos as she was bludgeoned to the floor by the sonic sledgehammer.
Xerkanos, too, gave a buzzing shriek that was all but lost in the onslaught. Neave staggered, thumping against a column as her head threatened to blow apart under the appalling pressure of the sound. She looked deeper into the temple and saw its source, squatting atop a mound of carrion.
The bodies were piled in an untidy heap, ten feet high.
The few that were still clothed wore multicoloured robes that marked them out as acolytes of Xelkyn Xerkanos. All showed appalling degrees of mutilation, as though they had suffered long before they died. Their corpses dripped foul fluids.
Crouched on top of the mound of dead was a mutant several times larger than the rest. Its gender was impossible to determine, its body a rippling mass of over-muscled limbs and rolls of tattooed flab. It had six arms and two legs, and it leant forward on its many knuckles like some strange simian as it screamed. Its jaws stretched impossibly wide, permanently distorted out of shape by finely worked golden separators whose many filigreed tubes were acting as sonic amplifiers. Bulging flesh-sacs in the thing’s throat puffed in and out like bellows, sucking and pumping in sequence to maintain its endless scream, and an array of disturbingly normal human eyes clustered in the veined flesh of its forehead beneath its lank golden hair.
The scream stopped. Neave let out an involuntary gasp of relief. Then the thing spoke, and she almost wished she was deafened again. Its voice was horribly human, albeit distorted. It was also horribly sane, androgynous and musical.
‘The sorcerer’s blood is ours, huntress,’ said the mutant. ‘I am Achylla of the Sixth Torment, and I claim him in the name of the Dark Prince.’
Neave pushed herself upright and firmed her grip on her axes. Her blood surged hot and angry at the sight of yet another vile champion of the Dark Gods.
‘Xelkyn Xerkanos has been condemned to death by the God-King Sigmar and I am his appointed executioner,’ she said. ‘He is not yours to claim.’
In her peripheral vision, Neave noted that Xerkanos was edging closer to the corpse pile upon which Achylla squatted. He was half crawling, half crouching, muttering some kind of obfuscatory charm. Achylla swung its head towards him and gave a vicious screech. Xerkanos wailed in pain and collapsed, limbs shaking uncontrollably.