by Dan Abnett
Lhunara, in the lead, bore down on a cluster of crossbowmen, trying to load their weapons for one last volley. Too late, they realised their mistake. Their leader let out a wild scream and grabbed for his sword as Lhunara’s lance struck him full in the chest. Eighteen inches of hardened steel punched through cloth and light mail as though it were paper, splitting the druchii’s sternum and ribs with a brittle crunch. The lance tip and the first two feet of a blood-soaked pennon burst from the man’s back and struck another crouching ambusher in the side of the head. The druchii’s skull burst like a melon, showering his fellows with a spray of blood, bone and brain matter.
The weight of the two bodies dragged the lance downwards and Lhunara let the weapon fall, drawing her two curved highborn swords as Render bit another shrieking crossbowman in two.
Malus caught sight of another small knot of crossbowmen slipping behind the cover of a large boulder, heading in the direction of the city walls. Gripping his sword tightly, he guided the cold one right at the cottage-sized stone. At the last moment he crouched low in the saddle, dragged back on the reins and shouted “Up, Spite, up!”
The nauglir gathered its powerful hindquarters and jumped, landing for a heart-stopping moment atop the boulder before leaping down the other side. Malus caught a momentary glimpse of a cluster of pale, terrified faces staring up at him and picked one as his target, rising in the stirrups and holding his curved sword high.
Spite landed on two of the men with an earth-shaking crash, and Malus brought his sword down in the same motion, striking the druchii full in the face and splitting the man from crown to groin. Hot, sticky blood sprayed across the highborn’s face and the stink of spilled entrails filled the air. Spite slipped and slid over a slick mush of mud, flesh and pulped intestines. A severed head bounced like a ball across the icy ground, leaving splotches of bright crimson in its wake.
A thrown spear hit Malus full in the chest, striking sparks as it glanced from his heavy breastplate. Two surviving ambushers were running flat out for the city walls and Spite needed no prompting to charge after them. The cold one covered the distance in three bounding strides, clamping his jaws on one of the men and shaking his scaled head like a huge terrier. The druchii literally flew apart, arms and legs cartwheeling off in every direction. The man’s lower torso hit the city wall with a gelid slap before sliding to the earth.
The second druchii veered sharply to the right, howling in wide-eyed terror. Without thinking, Malus vaulted from the saddle and sprinted after him, a lusty howl on his blood-spattered lips. They ran for nearly twenty yards across the rocky field before the druchii turned at bay.
Malus saw the man suddenly whirl, and without thinking, swept his sword in front of him, knocking the thrown dagger aside even before his mind had fully registered it. He lunged in, quick as an adder, but the man met Malus’ sword with his own. Silvered steel rasped and rang as Malus blocked a low cut aimed for his thigh and then answered with a backhanded slash that nearly opened the druchii’s throat. Malus pressed his advantage, hammering at his opponent’s guard with heavy blows aimed at shoulder, neck and head. Suddenly the man ducked and lunged forward, his sword aimed for the highborn’s throat. Malus twisted sideways at the last second and felt the flat of the cold blade slide along the surface of his neck.
The druchii looked down and screamed, registering the length of cold steel jutting from his thigh. Bright red arterial blood spouted from the wound in time with his beating heart.
Malus pulled his sword free and the druchii crumpled to the earth. With a snarl he drew back his blade for the killing blow — and a mighty impact sent him tumbling through the air. His trajectory was cut short by a large rock, and for a moment the world went black.
When he could see and breathe again, Malus saw Spite chewing the wounded druchii to bits. The nauglir’s eyes rolled wildly in their armoured sockets and the warbeast shook its heavy head as though wracked with pain. Suddenly the cold one threw back its head and let out a wild roar, revealing rows of crimson-stained teeth as long as daggers. The nauglir spun in a circle, snapping at the air, then its nostrils flared and it charged off towards the road, bellowing in rage.
Malus felt his body go cold. He staggered to his feet. Something was wrong. Terribly wrong. He staggered around the rock he’d struck and looked toward the road.
The cold ones had gone wild.
The huge beasts were lost in a frenzy of bloodlust, bucking and snapping at the scent hanging in the air. Every one of the dozen cold ones had thrown off their riders and turned their jaws on every living thing they could find. The knights themselves were safe -they coated their skin with the poisonous slime of the nauglir so the fierce beasts would think them pack mates — but every other man and woman within reach was fair game.
The spearmen had tried to make a stand against the berserk animals, but their shield wall shattered like glass under the impact of the raging beasts. Dozens of mercenaries were crushed or torn apart, their armour useless against the nauglirs’ powerful teeth and claws. The broken hafts of spears jutted from their heaving flanks, but the beasts were oblivious to pain or injury.
Then the cold ones fell in amongst the coffled slaves and the orgy of slaughter truly began.
“No!” Malus screamed as the roadway turned into a churning abattoir in the space of a dozen heartbeats. The slaves’ cries mingled into a single, shattering wail of terror as the cold ones tore them to pieces, biting through bone and manacle with equal ease.
The highborn raced towards the carnage, dimly registering his retainers doing the same. His eye caught the black fletchings of the crossbow bolts jutting from Spite’s shoulder. Poison, he thought. Something to drive the nauglir wild. The ambush had never been meant to make off with the slaves, but to eliminate them.
Malus ducked the lashing tail of a nauglir and darted to Spite’s blood-streaked side. The cold one had its snout buried in the torso of a dead slave. With a quick leap, the highborn grabbed the hafts of both crossbow bolts and pulled them free with a wet pop. Spite shuddered and turned on Malus, and for a thrilling moment the highborn feared that the slime no longer protected him. Then the huge creature bolted for the field to the left of the road and began to pace in circles, sniffing at the air. After a moment he settled onto his haunches, flanks heaving, his energy spent. The highborn raised the bolts in one blood-stained hand and shouted angrily, “The bolts have poisoned the cold ones! Pull them out, quickly!”
Around him the other knights began attending to their mounts, pulling at the bolts sticking from their hides. Malus staggered into the field after Spite, stopping when he reached the nauglir’s side before turning to face the devastation behind him.
For a hundred yards, the roadway was a red mass of churned meat. Bits of pale bone or glittering chain shone in the misty rain. The armoured forms of dead spearmen littered the ground, their bodies twisted into unnatural shapes. The cries of wounded men filled the air.
Two years of scheming three months of hard raiding and a prince’s ransom in flesh swept away in just a few minutes. Someone had ruined him in a single stroke, and it had been expertly done.
The rattle of armour and weapons carried across the field from the direction of the city gate. A contingent of the city guard made their way towards him, spears ready Lord Vorhan walked his horse alongside the troops, his expression inscrutable. He reined in and studied the scene a mere ten yards away.
“A terrible turn of fate, dread lord,” he said darkly, shaking his head at the carnage. He looked at Malus. “Perhaps your luck will turn next season.”
The highborn considered the harbour lord. “Perhaps,” he said evenly, then plucked the crossbow from his saddle and shot Lord Vorhan in the face.
Chapter Three
GAZING INTO DARKNESS
Light from beyond the living world seeped through the great crystal skylight of the audience chamber, bathing the inner court with a boreal display of shifting, unsettled light. High upon a circular d
ais in the centre of the vaulted room, the drachau of Hag Graef, merciless fist of the Witch King, loomed like a nightmare before his subjects.
He wore the ancient, sorcerous armour of his station, an intricate harness of blackened ithilmar plates, sharpened, fluted edges and cunningly-forged hooks. Fiery light and bitter steam seethed from the seams in the armour and the eyes of the daemon-mask carved into his ornate helm, and when the drachau moved, the joints of the armour cried like the souls of the damned. Three freshly-severed heads hung from trophy hooks at the drachau’s waist, and the heavy, curved sword in his left hand steamed with clotted gore. His right hand was enclosed in an armoured gauntlet tipped with barbed talons and carved with thousands of tiny, glowing sigils. In that clawed, vicelike grip a highborn noble writhed in his own blood and filth, his eyes gleaming with fear and pain between the drachau’s armoured fingers.
The noble saw only darkness, agonising and absolute, but he uttered not a single sound. The pale faces of the court shone like ghosts in the chamber’s unsteady light, bearing witness to the highborn’s brush with ancient night and waiting for their own turn to come.
This was the culmination of the Hanil Khar, the presentation of tribute and the renewal of the oath of fealty to the drachau, and through him, in turn, the Witch King. The inner court was packed with the true highborn of the city — prominent nobles rich in gold, slaves or battle honours, with hoary lineages and titles. The families clustered in discrete groups, maintaining a wary distance from rivals and even allies -assassination attempts were a matter of course during public gatherings, especially on such ceremonial days. Every family member was further insulated by a circle of favoured retainers, leaving each high-ranking druchii lost in his own solitary thoughts.
Malus watched the highborn suffer on the steps before the dais and wished that he were the one wearing the dreadful gauntlet. The need to lash out, to slice into skin and muscle and spill sweet blood was so intense it set his teeth on edge. He could feel the eyes of his former allies upon him, those nobles who’d invested in his scheme and risked the wrath of his siblings — to say nothing of his dreaded father.
They were watching him like wolves, waiting in the shadows for the right moment to sink their teeth into his throat. And they could do it. They knew exactly how weak he was.
He’d broken with ancient tradition, going outside his own family for the funds and alliances to embark on his late-season raid. Worst of all, he’d returned empty-handed. Now there was a large debt to be paid, and his father could easily disavow any obligation in the matter. The Vaulkhar hadn’t yet, but only because the druchii lords hadn’t yet pressed the issue. Of course, they would when they sensed the time was right. He had little support to draw on; the survivors of the mercenary spearmen had left his service as soon as they’d reached the Hag, and Malus had been forced to pay them in full or risk a blood feud he could ill afford. That left him no more than a score of retainers and twice that many household servants.
He’d only brought three retainers with him to court: Lhunara, Dolthaic and Arleth Vann. The retainers stood in a tight semicircle behind him with their hands on their swords. It was a token guard at best, but against the massed strength of his debtors his entire complement of warriors wouldn’t have been enough. Better to keep them guessing at his display of bravado than confirm their suspicions with a phalanx of bodyguards.
The children of the Vaulkhar were arrayed in order of age and ostensible power, though gauging the relative strengths of a highborn family was a murky business in the best of times. There was a conspicuous gap between the tall, armoured figure of Lurhan Fellblade and his second-oldest child, Isilvar.
Bruglir the Reaver, eldest son of the great warlord, was still at sea with his raiding fleet, filling his holds with plunder and the choicest slaves from Ulthuan and the Old World. He would not return until the first of the spring thaw, spending most of the year at sea. It was a feat that only a handful of corsair lords could accomplish, and his favour with the Vaulkhar was such that Lurhan made it plain that none of his siblings was fit to take Bruglir’s place, regardless of circumstance. It also had the effect of focusing the resentment of Lurhan’s other children, chiefly on Bruglir, a fact that had not escaped Malus.
There were no fat druchii — like their debased cousins, the elves of Ulthuan, the peoples of Naggaroth were typically lithe and muscular, hard and swift as whipcord. Isilvar was fleshy. His skin had the greenish pallor of the libertine, pouchy and swollen from too many years of potent spirits and mind-altering powders. He wore his black hair braided with dozens of tiny hooks and barbs, and his long, drooping moustache hung like two thin tusks past the line of his pointed chin. His long-fingered hands, with their sharpened, black-lacquered nails, were constantly in motion; even when folded before him, the fingers riffled and danced like the white legs of a cave spider. Isilvar had made no raids past his own hakseer-cruise; indeed, he often disdained to carry a sword in public, relying on a large contingent of lavishly-appointed retainers for protection.
At some point in the past he and his elder brother had reached an agreement of sorts — Bruglir reaped a harvest of flesh and coin from the spineless kingdoms beyond Naggaroth, and Isilvar oversaw its investment at the Hag and elsewhere across the Land of Chill. This kept Bruglir at sea spilling blood and gave Isilvar all the gold and slaves to sate his prodigious appetites.
At the heart of this strange arrangement were Isilvar’s relentless cravings, or so the rumours went — his apartments in the Vaulkhar’s tower were said to be a charnel house, rivalling the Temple of Khaine elsewhere in the city. So long as he could bathe in the blood of the tormented each and every day, he was loyal to his brother the provider. Isilvar was surrounded by a score of heavily armed and armoured druchii, each of them resplendent in plate armour lacquered in shades of ruby and emerald. They formed a horseshoe-shaped formation around him, taking care not to deny their lord an unobstructed view of the excruciations occurring on the dais. Isilvar watched the agonies of the highborn with rapt attention, his eyes fever-bright. His long hands, spotted with drops of old blood, spasmed greedily at each of the supplicant’s convulsions.
If Isilvar wore his hunger like a rich, stained robe, Lurhan’s third child wore a mask of cold, perfect marble, revealing nothing of her inner thoughts. It was said that Lurhan’s long-dead wife had been a creature of stunning, lethal beauty — stories recounted duels fought over a single, passing caress offered at court, or rivals torn apart by eager young nobles who lived and died at her whim.
Her daughter Yasmir was said to be her living image. Tall and effortlessly poised, lithe and muscular as one of Khaine’s blood-draped brides, Lurhan’s eldest daughter wore a gown of indigo-coloured silk beneath a drape of delicate, yellowed finger bones bound together with fine silver wire. Her thick, lustrous black hair was pulled back from the perfect oval of her face. She had large, violet eyes, the mark of an ancient bloodline stretching back to drowned Nagarythe; they added an exotic air to her otherwise classical features.
A pair of long, bone-handled daggers hung from a narrow girdle of nauglir hide, and it was well-known that she could use them as well, or better, than any man with a sword. She was closely guarded by a dozen retainers, each one a rich and powerful son of one of the city’s highborn families.
Yasmir was a living, breathing treasure to them — a wealth of power, influence and beauty, seemingly ripe for the taking. Malus knew better. They were her baubles, to be toyed with and expended to suit her needs. And for the few months he was at the Hag, Yasmir and Bruglir were inseparable, taking up residence in his spartan quarters in the Vaulkhar’s tower. So long as she held her brother’s undivided attention, no other man would dare press a challenge of marriage for her.
Other druchii tended to fade into the background when in the presence of Yasmir’s glimmering beauty, but none more so than her younger sister. Nagaira was more the child of her brooding father: her skin was duskier, her frame smaller and her figure
fuller and less athletic. She had Lurhan’s black eyes and strong nose, and her thin lips were often compressed in a fine, determined line.
Unlike her sister, Nagaira preferred robes of indigo and deep red over a lightweight kheitan worked with the cold one sigil of the Vaulkhar’s house. She wore her black hair in a thick braid that hung only to her waist; it was streaked with strands of glistening grey and white, the telltale sign of one who trafficked in dark lore. Rumours of her secret pursuits had circulated through the court for many years, but if she were troubled by the hint of scandal she took no steps to mitigate it. Like her siblings, she was well-attended, though her retainers were less a show of strength or vanity than a nod towards function and propriety.
The ten druchii that surrounded her were a motley crew, a mix of priests, rogues and mercenary swords, but she chose her tools well and knew how to use them when she put her mind to it.
But if Nagaira was the shadow to Yasmir’s cold radiance, Lurhan’s youngest true child was a patch of deepest night. Urial stood straight and tall, nearly of a height with his father, but the heavy black robes masked the withered right arm and bent leg that had marred him from birth. The druchii had no place in their houses for cripples; the malformed were slain at birth or the males given as a sacrifice to the Temple of Khaine.
The infant Urial had been cast into the Lord of Murder’s cauldron, and if the stories were true, the ancient brass split with a thunderclap that knocked the priestesses senseless. It was not unheard of for a sacrifice to survive the seething cauldron; such children were seen as marked by the Lord of Murder and taken in by the Temple to be trained in the arts of assassination. But Urial’s body was too deformed to make him a holy warrior. He had been raised in the temple as an acolyte, though what he learned there was a mystery oft-speculated.