by Dan Abnett
The skull quivered in Malus’ grasp. Though he couldn’t see the relic, he could sense that it was beginning to glow with a light of its own as the shaman called the ghost of the sorcerer forth.
The relic grew warm in his hands. There was a buzzing in the air, like an angry swarm of bees. Was it a physical sound, or a vibration trembling along his bones? Suddenly mere was a jolt that shook his entire body, then another. A burning, tingling energy seemed against his belly and tried to push its way inside him. The shaman was forcing the spirit of Ehrenlish into his body. It was similar to the sensation he’d felt in the Wighthallows, only slower and more purposeful, like a dagger sinking inch by inch into his flesh. He gritted his teeth in rage and mustered his will against this unwanted invasion, but he was powerless to stop the inexorable violation of his body.
Dark power seeped slowly into his abdomen, staining his guts with the taint of psychic corruption. His stomach rebelled at the cold, gelid touch, but his body could not expel it no matter how hard he tried. Malus shrieked in impotent rage, and the shade of Ehrenlish crept like a spider along his bones.
The spirit soaked into him on a tide of madness and hate. Visions filled the highborn’s mind — visions of otherworldly planes that clawed at his sanity and froze his soul. His heart writhed with worms and his veins filled with corruption. The sorcerer leaked inexorably into his skull, twisting and writhing like a serpent and probing into the dark recesses where all his secrets lay.
Then Hadar shouted a command, and Ehrenlish recoiled as though struck by a physical blow. Words clawed their way through Malus’ mouth, savage, hateful curses for the animal that dared to command a champion of the Ruinous Powers. Malus raged and wailed in the remote corners of his mind as the battle between sorcerers was joined. Kul Hadar bent his will against Ehrenlish, and every blow reverberated through the highborn’s body in waves of brilliant pain.
The struggle stretched for an eternity, with neither side yielding to the other. Ehrenlish roared his defiance with Malus’ mouth, and the skies above roiled and thundered in response. The shade spat streams of curses that curdled the air, but each time Hadar lashed back, Malus could sense the fear in Ehrenlish’s spirit.
He’d sensed that terror before, back in the Wighthallows, when the skull had fallen into his grasp, though at the time he hadn’t know what the savage jolt had really meant. For all the shade’s power, it also feared the darkness that waited beyond the confines of its magical prison. Ehrenlish had been an ancient and terrible force long before he had gathered his cabal to bind the power within the temple to his will. He had made many dark and fearsome pacts with things far more ancient and terrible than he, and they still waited for the reckoning that was their due. If Hadar pressed too hard, Ehrenlish would give anything to stave off his dissolution.
Malus wondered if his body would give out before the sorcerer’s will finally broke.
Hadar lashed at Ehrenlish with blasphemous words of power, and the shade responded in kind. Malus felt his throat tearing beneath the force of the fearsome curses. Heat shimmered in the air over the standing stones, and Malus could see the strain evident on the beastman’s face. But years of obsession lent Hadar a fevered will that seemed to match Ehrenlish blow for blow, and the highborn could sense the sorcerer beginning to weaken.
His fingers and toes were beginning to burn. Malus could feel the heat flowing from his extremities as his body tried to cope with the awesome energies coursing through it. He was being consumed like a candle, burnt from both ends, as the two sorcerers raged on, oblivious to his fate.
Malus heard screams in the air. Screams? At first he thought it was his own maddened thoughts deceiving him, but after a moment, he realised that Hadar’s voice had faltered, and the cries of pain warred with Ehrenlish’s shouted blasphemies.
A shadow fell across the standing stones — no, not across it, but into it, rushing up amid the priests from the lower slope. Hadar reared back, shouting in rage, and then one of Urial’s riders stepped into the ritual circle, reaching for the skull in Malus’ hand.
The world shook and the sky split with a cataclysmic crash of thunder, and Ehrenlish shrieked as the pent-up energies of the ritual exploded in a storm of ravening green fire.
* * *
In pain there is life. In darkness, endless strength.
The old catechism echoed from some dark part of Malus’ mind. He lay in blackness. His body felt shattered like a pot in a kiln, smoking fragments scattered beyond his reach. And yet, in the darkness, a mote of the highborn’s will still lingered. And slowly, bit by bit, gathering strength and speed, Malus knit himself back together.
When his vision returned, Malus found himself lying on his side, fetched up against one of the standing stones. The skull of Ehrenlish lay nearby, the bone blackened and the silver wire partly melted from a blast of intense heat. Many of the stones had been blown apart, jagged shards scything like knives through the bodies of the priests, who lay burned and ravaged all around the circle. Surprisingly, Kul Hadar still stood, his massive form wreathed in smoke. He was stunned and reeling from the blast, but his sorceries had somehow protected him from the worst of its force.
Malus couldn’t think of a single reason why he’d survived, but at the moment he had far more pressing things on his mind.
It had been a desperate gamble, brandishing Nagaira’s talisman. The moment it was broken he suspected Urial’s hunters would be able to sense the location of the skull and then race to claim it. Malus’ faith in his half-brother’s single-minded hate had been borne out once again. Urial had made his minions well.
Malus had got the violent diversion he wanted. Now he just had to escape it in one piece.
The rider who’d single-mindedly breached the circle had somehow survived — the pale, ravaged figure was pulling its shattered body across the slate tiles towards Malus on the burnt stumps of its forearms. Its clothing and much of its skin had burned away in the blast, but the eyeless, blackened skull was focused on Malus with unerring, murderous intent.
Malus tried to stand, his limbs weak and pitifully uncoordinated. His feet writhed weakly on the steaming tiles as the revenant crept closer. Malus could hear the seared flesh of the rider’s arms sizzling on the hot slate. With a savage cry the highborn pushed his armoured body across the stone, burning his own bare hands in the process, and snatched up the blackened skull as he forced himself out of the ritual circle. The more he moved, the more strength returned to his body; after crawling only a few feet across the bare earth, he found that he could stagger painfully to his feet.
Surprisingly, he found that the wounds on his hip and arm didn’t pain him nearly as much as they had before. He suspected it was Ehrenlish’s doing — the shade’s fear of dissolution was so great it might have reflexively repaired the worst of his injuries to ensure his continued survival during the forced possession.
There was a battle raging in the grove. As Malus’ senses returned he realised that the beastman herd had reacted violently to the arrival of the riders and their invasion of the sacred grove. Yaghan and his champions had pursued the riders into the cleft and now their great weapons and fearsome stamina posed a real challenge for the revenants. The riders had been stunned by the magical blast, and now the beastmen had them surrounded.
Dark horses reared and lashed out with bloody hooves, and their dismounted riders wove a deadly web of steel with spear and sword, but for each beast-man that fell, a rider took a grievous wound in return. Already two horses thrashed impotently on the ground, their legs sheared away, and one of the riders had fallen once and for all when his head was severed from his neck.
Malus watched a rider surrounded by beastmen plunge his sword through one of the huge warriors, but the mortally wounded beastman only rocked back on its heels and gripped the rider’s skull in its massive hands. The beastman squeezed, and blood began to spurt sluggishly between its fingers as it slowly crushed the revenant’s skull.
The highborn hear
d a furious bellow and a savage peal of thunder to his right, and glanced over to see Kul Hadar savaging the crippled rider in the circle with bolts of searing green fire. Arcs of seething energy cut into the revenant like blazing knives, carving the figure into a dozen smoking pieces and scoring red-hot lines into the slate beneath. The berserk fury of the beastmen at the invasion of their grove had eclipsed all pretence of reason, handing Malus an opportunity that he knew would not last for long. The problem was the path down the cleft was packed with a mob of furious beastmen and sorcerous riders.
Malus closed his eyes and took a deep breath, summoning what little strength he had left. His hand fumbled for the sword at his hip. Drawing the blade, he hurled himself forward, running headlong down the slope. He raced past the oblivious beastmen and plunged full-tilt into the midst of the bloodthirsty trees that lined one side of the twisting path.
The hungry wood exploded into sinuous motion as he hurtled between the trees. He leapt every root that reared up in his path. Once he lost his footing and threw himself into a long, bouncing tumble, eventually leaping back onto his feet. As long as he kept moving, part of his mind desperately reasoned, the vines could not move fast enough to get a grip on him. At one point he burst from the trees and across a curving part of the path, running between a crowd of surprised beastmen before disappearing into the trees on the other side.
Thorns lashed at his face and hands, their poison burning across his skin, but to one who’d coated himself in poison for most of his adult life, the force of the toxin had little effect so long as it wasn’t concentrated around his throat. His wild plunge seemed to last for hours, but only minutes passed before Malus burst from the hungry forest at the base of the cleft.
The highborn shoved his way through the crowd of beastmen gathered below the path and ran on down the slope, casting about wildly for his warriors. “Warriors of the Hag!” he cried, his voice sounding high and wild. “Mount up!”
Malus heard Spite’s familiar bellow at the very bottom of the slope. In moments he had reached his warband, every one armed and mounted. Their faces went white with shock as they saw the ravaged, lurching form of their lord. Without a word, the highborn threw himself into the saddle.
“My lord!” Lhunara cried. “What happened? We saw the riders — they swept past us as though we didn’t exist and charged up the slope with the whole herd baying at their tail.” Her face went pale when she saw the look on Malus’ face. “What did Hadar do to you?”
Malus leaned drunkenly in his saddle. His body began to tremble, then quake, and he bent double over Spite’s neck. The retainers watched him with deep concern as racking gasps welled up from deep inside his chest.
Then the highborn threw back his head and laughed with the mad glee of the damned. “Hadar has given me the key to the gate!” the highborn cried. “The great fool! He’d have been wiser to have cut my throat than give me such a glimpse into Ehrenlish’s soul!” He dropped the skull in his saddlebag and grabbed up his reins. “Quickly now! We must ride for the valley while we can. Once Urial’s riders are finished, Kul Hadar will come at us with everything he has!”
Just then a great, angry shout echoed down from the mountain cleft, and Malus knew at once that his diversion was finished as Hadar realised that the highborn had escaped. “Forward!” Malus cried hungrily, and put his spurs to Spite’s flank. With a wild cry the warband leapt after their lord, thinking him mad but also sensing that their long hunt was nearly at an end.
Malus expected to find a well-worn path leading from the camp through the forest to the road of skulls that wound up the valley. As it happened he was mistaken, and it was an error that nearly cost him his life The warband skirted the edge of the camp, riding along the tree-line looking for a path. After nearly half a mile the slope of the mountain bulged outwards, creating a high ridge too steep for the nauglir to climb, and the forest at that point was extremely thick with brambles and close-set trees.
With a curse, Malus turned the warband around and raced back the way they’d come, looking for less dense woodland to work through. On the way back he saw the beastmen coming on at a run — the entire herd, some three hundred strong, led by Yaghan and the surviving champions. They were all howling for blood, incensed at the defilement of their sacred grove. Malus hauled on the reins and cut left, driving Spite into the first relatively passable stretch of woodland he saw.
Even then, it was slow and difficult going. Spite bucked and plunged through the undergrowth, and Malus bent low over the cold one’s neck, pressing his face against the scales of the nauglir’s back. The rest of the warband followed in his wake, plunging blindly ahead without a clue as to where they were going. After a time Malus began curving the cold one’s path back to the left, resuming a general course back towards the valley.
By this time, however, the woods were full of howls and hunting cries as the herd plunged headlong into the forest to cut the druchii off from their intended goal. The shouts seemed to echo all around the beleaguered warband, and Malus watched along either of Spite’s flanks, fearing they might be surrounded at any moment.
Fortunately, the thick woods had a similar effect even on the woods-wise beastmen — in their rage they plunged into the thick undergrowth and quickly became scattered, hunting beneath the trees singly or in small packs. More than once Malus and Spite burst through the tangled foliage into the midst of a group of beastmen; those caught in the nauglir’s path were crushed beneath the cold one’s feet or smashed from their feet by the beast’s head or shoulders. Any the cold one missed felt the edge of the highborn’s sword, leaving a trail of bloody bodies and stunned survivors in its wake.
Malus came upon the skull road without warning. One moment Spite was thrashing through brambles and brush and the next he was hurtling past a tall marble obelisk that passed within inches of the highborn’s left leg. The transition from dense growth to a broad, open avenue was disorienting, even for Spite, who briefly checked his headlong pace to gain his bearings.
The road leading up the valley had been quarried from pale stone. Each smooth surface had the carved relief of a skull on it. Some were animal skulls, others elf, and still others were miniatures of mythical beasts such as dragons, manticores and chimera.
There were thousands of them stretching in an unmarred white trail through a tunnel of dark greens and greys. No living thing grew up in the thin spaces between the stones — in fact, the lowest overhanging branches were all of a uniform height, creating a tunnel-like effect through the forest. It was as if the sorcery that laid down the stones consumed any living thing that lingered too close to its surface.
Although thousands of years old, the stones looked as if they’d been laid only the day before. Every half mile an obelisk of black marble reared up on either side of the road, carved with the faces of daemons and inscribed with columns of nines that drew the eye and tormented the soul.
Once in the open, the warband thundered down the road, the forest around them erupting with howls and cries as the hunters reacted to the distinct sound of heavy footfalls on the paving stones. Malus kept the knights riding as fast as the nauglir would carry them, plunging ever deeper into the mountain valley.
The sounds of pursuit dwindled behind them. The riders raced their mounts for a mile, then two. Malus was beginning to believe the worst was behind them when he rode Spite around a bend in the road and there, just ahead, stood a score of armoured beast-men arrayed in loose order before an arch of irregular, veined marble. Beyond that stone portal the air seethed with madness and destruction, the death of worlds given tangible form. They had reached the Gate of Infinity at last.
Less than a hundred yards separated the druchii from the beastman contingent. Whether they had been dispatched hours ago as a precaution by Kul Hadar, or they had been part of the pursuit and had simply made for the one place they knew the warband would head for, Malus could not tell. They waited resolutely with their backs to the silent, otherworldly storm, and Malus
saw at once that the deadly barrier presented a hazard to the onrushing knights. He raised his hand, ordering the warriors to slow to a walk.
If they charged full-tilt at the beastmen and met with little resistance, there was a real risk that the running nauglir would careen headlong into the storm before they could check themselves. Malus didn’t like to think what would happen to anyone unfortunate enough to cross that unearthly barrier. “Crossbows!” he ordered.
Still at a walk, the riders readied their weapons. “Fire at will!” Malus said, and shot one of the beastmen in the front rank. The four retainers fired a volley, and another four beastmen fell. By the time the druchii had reloaded the two sides were less than fifty yards apart, and the beastman leading the contingent had grasped the plight it and his warriors were in. Rather than stand by and be shot at, the pack leader let out a howl and the beastmen charged down the road at the druchii.
“One more volley!” Malus cried, and the five crossbows fired as one. Three more beastmen fell, and then the druchii drew their swords and kicked their mounts into a trot. When they were less than twenty yards from their foes, the knights spurred their mounts into a run, and moments later the two sides crashed together.
These beastmen might not have been among Yaghan’s chosen warriors, but they still knew a thing or two about dealing with cavalry. The last of Dalvar’s retainers was dashed to the ground as two beastmen buried their axes in his nauglir’s chest. Before the warrior could gain his feet another beastman stepped up and crushed his skull with a two-handed warhammer.
The warriors facing Malus tried to sidestep Spite’s snapping jaws and slash at the cold one’s face. One beastman misjudged and had his head crushed like an egg in the cold one’s jaws. The other swung his broadsword two-handed and opened a long, ragged gash in the cold one’s neck. Ichor sprayed across the beastman’s chest and face, momentarily blinding it. Malus leaned over in the saddle and thrust his sword through the warrior’s throat.