by Nick Kyme
‘The sea aelves who bore me the first time I undertook this journey appeared sane enough, and they did not look scared of the fire.’
With a muttered curse, Zhargan pulled a volley pistol from its holster and pointed it right at Issakian’s head.
‘Oh, now you’re warming up.’
Issakian merely looked back, his face as impassive as the one carved into the mask he wore.
Zhargan snorted, and lowered the weapon.
‘How many ships refused your offer before you came to mine, eh? I’m guessing more than one.’
‘On this occasion? All of them,’ Issakian replied. ‘You alone agreed to take my charter.’
‘Lucky bloody me.’
Zhargan jabbed a gauntleted finger, gesturing to beyond the frigate’s prow. ‘I know why I’m sailing towards that. Greed. I like aether-gold. I want more of it. Being rich is worth a little fear. But you…’ He nodded, and Issakian thought the duardin might have hawked up a gobbet of spit had he not being fully helmed. ‘Why are you doing it?’
‘I seek a creature. I have sought it for a long time. Years, I think. The purple crow, the Summoner.’
‘All this to kill a witch?’
‘It is prophesised. I dreamt of it. I still dream of it.’
A pennant tied to the airship’s uppermost vane snapped noisily, drawing Issakian’s eye. It reminded him of a white mane, gently rippling in the breeze.
‘Breath of Grungni,’ hissed Zhargan, ‘you are insane.’
Issakian looked southwards to the maelstrom.
‘No, I’m not. Not yet.’
The sea churned around the maelstrom. It turned, spilling inwards, caught in a slowly narrowing gyre that fed down to dark oblivion at its nadir. Smoke plumed from this wound in the sea, like air rushing from a pierced lung, and hung over it in a black pall.
‘“The heart of fire”,’ uttered Issakian, bringing the revenant’s words to mind. It had become harder to remember them since that first time, and he sometimes wondered what else he had sacrificed to keep them. ‘“Seek out the heart of fire, where the ocean sinks and the air is black as sackcloth.” It has to be here.’
‘We will find out soon enough,’ said Zhargan, as the air began to burn. He called down to Endal. ‘Endrinmaster, signal the crew. We enter the maelstrom.’
Endal nodded, perhaps reluctant, but gave a curt salute. His heavy armour clanged loudly as he leapt onto the main deck. He swung a massive steam hammer onto his shoulder.
‘All hands to stations,’ he cried, and the crew set to their orders. ‘Roll out the heavy guns, and stoke up the aether-vaults. Make ready those belaying valves.’
‘Do you know what they call this place? What it is?’ said Zhargan to Issakian, but did not wait for an answer. ‘Helmaw. It is a realmgate, but I have no idea where it leads. Do you, Stormcast?’
Issakian didn’t answer. As the Drekka-Duraz flew into the black smoke he raised his lantern. Light spilled forth from the open shutter, reflecting off fiery embers in the darkness.
‘There is debris in the cloud,’ cried Fulson, straining to be heard over the swirling fury of the maelstrom.
Carving through walls of smoke, pitching and yawing amidst the savage updraughts, the frigate fought through the burning air until it hovered, unsteadily, right over the heart of Helmaw.
Issakian drew his sword as his mind revisited familiar horrors. ‘That is not debris.’
Embers became eyes. The darkness came alive and the daemons descended. Ragged wings beat the air in slow, ponderous sweeps. Distended mouths opened, revealing shiny pin-like teeth. Flayed flesh rippled with heat.
The bark and fizz of aether-rifles tore the air, warring with the infernal shrieking of the damned.
Zhargan looked down into the maelstrom, drawing his cutter and volley pistol. He turned to Issakian, his eyes hidden behind the cold blue of his lenses, and roared.
‘For glory… For plunder… Dive!’
The Drekka-Duraz dropped violently, cutting through veils of smoke. Gobbets of lava sizzled against the hull, spat from the churning walls of the maelstrom.
Down plunged the ship, and Issakian had to brace himself just to stay on his feet. He lashed his lantern to the main dirigible stanchion, the ‘endrin mast’ Zhargan had called it.
Hot cinder raked his armour, carried on burning wind, scorching the sigmarite.
It was nothing compared to the winged furies emerging from the fire itself. Like scraps of smoke given form and with blazing coals for eyes, they swept upon the ship’s crew, as voracious as a plague.
Issakian watched as a rifleman disappeared into the darkness, carried up and away, screaming and fighting. The stink of burning brimstone weighed upon the air, as heavy as a curse. Every taken breath was searing agony.
Something arrowed out of the darkness, shrieking as it came for him. Issakian cut its left pinion and it spiralled madly before clattering into the deck. A pistol shot put the daemon down for good, shattering its skull and reducing it to smeared essence.
Zhargan caught Issakian’s gaze and nodded.
Issakian reciprocated, and then the captain turned, about to extol his crew to even greater efforts, just as a flock of furies took him. One moment Zhargan had been there, fighting hard, bellowing orders; the next, only his cutter remained, dropped as he was carried off. It had landed blade down, embedded in the deck like a grave marker.
Discipline began to waver, but the ship plunged all the same, shuddering and creaking as unnatural forces sought to tear it apart. The roar of fire grew deafening, the heat so intense Issakian could barely breathe. He sank to his knees, dimly aware of the shrieking overhead and the hull cracking below.
And then… nothing.
Darkness.
Shadow.
Aldrineth trod carefully, trying to gauge the strength of the bridge. One misplaced step and the chasmal depths below would embrace her. She saw spirits writhing in the shadows below, incorporeal and angry. She subconsciously touched the talisman around her neck, glad of its presence. Her boots scraped against one of the slats underfoot.
‘It is bone… The bridge is made of bone,’ she said to the others, but didn’t look back.
Don’t ever look back, not in this place, not in Shyish.
A harsh, abrading sand swept down off the hills ahead. It cast Aldrineth’s black attire and scalemail armour in an amethyst patina. There were voices in the sand, of the lost. Aldrineth shut them out.
‘Everything in this benighted realm is bone, sister,’ said Rhethor, tugging his dark cloak more tightly around his shoulders. He kept his sword drawn, but close to his body.
‘Do you smell that?’ asked Valdred, scowling. He had an arrow notched to his shadewood bow, and watched the shadows with a wary disquiet.
‘It’s the dead,’ offered Issakian, a few paces behind the rangers. He had been looking at his left hand but regarded the aelves now. ‘Beyond the bridge, and just past those hills, is the Endless Pyre. That’s where the dead go to burn. They never stop burning.’
Burning… The ship aflame. The duardin screaming in terror… A descent into shadow and the prize awaiting him…
‘A cheery thought,’ muttered Rhethor.
‘I thought we were guiding you, Stormcast,’ said Valdred, his eyes and his bow on Aldrineth as she slowly traversed the bone bridge.
‘I have been this far before,’ said Issakian. ‘But no further – the dead linger in those hills, too.’
‘They are not hills,’ said Rhethor.
‘No,’ Issakian agreed. ‘They are not.’
‘We’ll have to go around,’ said Valdred, sighing with relief as Aldrineth reached the other side of the bridge alive and with soul intact. She urged the others on, just as the sand around the hills began to stir…
Valdred cried out a warning, but Aldr
ineth was already turning and drawing an arrow from her quiver. She loosed three times in close succession as a monster of bone and scraps of decaying hide hauled itself forth. Immense, it dwarfed the aelf as it bore down on her. Aldrineth’s arrows tore through one of its wings. Its leathery skin sheared like wet parchment, but it gave no cry of pain or discomfort.
Rhethor threw open his cloak and hurried for the bridge as Valdred took aim.
‘Save your arrows,’ Issakian told him.
Valdred looked askance at him, face angry.
‘And do nothing!’ he snapped. ‘Your blood may be ice, Stormcast, but those are my kin.’
‘Save your arrows for them.’ Issakian gestured to a horde of lesser creatures pulling their rancid bodies from the burial mounds. They were pallid, grey and hungry, and cold earth clung to their rangy frames. Aldrineth was trying to fight them off and face the terrorgheist.
Valdred snarled. ‘Flesh-eaters.’
Issakian went after Rhethor, his sword trailing starlight.
Rhethor made it halfway across the bridge before the dead took him. The spirits simply reached up, their angry and despairing voices joining the aelf’s as a host of spectral fingers coiled around him. First the ankles as he hacked and slashed ineffectually at the phantoms, then the legs and abdomen, followed by the torso and arms. Rhethor had begun screaming, shrill and childlike, but the spirits smothered his face and carried him off the bridge into the shadows below.
The screaming persisted as Issakian gained the bridge; his raised lantern – now separated from its staff and clutched in his gauntleted fist – kept the spirits at bay.
The dead on the other side were another matter.
The ghouls recoiled from the light, hissing their pain through withered mouths stuffed with spiny teeth. The skeletal terrorgheist seemed less perturbed by it and lashed out at Issakian with a bony claw.
He leapt aside, narrowly avoiding being impaled but dropping his lantern. The light went out, and at once the ghouls swarmed.
He swept his blade out, cutting dry flesh, severing a hand from a wrist, opening up an emaciated chest. The ghouls snarled.
Aldrineth lay dead, her corpse cradled beneath the terrorgheist’s claw, as though the creature were a hunter jealously guarding its kill. She had been crushed, her armour split apart, her bow snapped in half and trapped under her body. He felt a momentary ache, something only half-forgotten, but that quickly faded.
Issakian heard a cry of anguish, and knew then that Valdred had seen what he had seen.
Arrows whipped through the air. At least the aelf had the presence of mind to aim for the ghouls. He shot one through the neck, another through the eye. Dark, old blood splashed the burial mound.
It did not deter them. Hunger had become a greater motivator than the threat of death.
Issakian cut another of the creatures down as the terrorgheist beat its huge but ragged wings and took to the sky. He looked up as a monstrous shadow fell across him.
‘The tower, inverted, spearing down into the underworld,’ he murmured, trying to commit the image to memory. It had been etched onto a stone tablet, lying at the bottom of the Helmaw like sunken treasure. Not a realmgate, as such, but a near inaccessible vault. A crew of duardin privateers had given their lives so he could obtain this knowledge. He had to keep it. For when he returned…
The terrorgheist bore down on him, claws outstretched to shred him sigmarite from bone.
Issakian raised his sword.
Then lightning struck.
A bolt of pure Azyrite, hurled from Sigmaron itself, sheared the monster in half. It fell out of the sky in a hail of bones, as if whatever darkness had held it together had come unstitched.
Further lightning strikes hit the chasm, hammering the spirits harboured there and chasing them into the deepest dark.
And in the storm’s wake… Warriors clad in ivory sigmarite, their spaulders as blue as summer rain.
The Knights Excelsior. It felt like several lifetimes since Issakian had seen them. They set about the flesh-eaters swiftly, cutting them down with hammer and blade. Azyrite arrows crackled and spat cascades of sparks. The horde fled, what few of their kind remained, and from out of this righteous slaughter there came a general riding a fierce gryph-charger, its flanks grey and white, with green feathers around its forelimbs. She carried a spear, though tied it at once to the beast’s saddle when she saw Issakian, and leapt off her mount.
A hand-axe and boltstorm pistol slapped gently against her armoured thighs as she approached him.
‘Palladors!’ she cried. ‘Make sure those creatures are gone for good.’
A host of more lightly armed cavalry on gryph-chargers went immediately to do her bidding. Lord-Aquilor, they called her, but as she took off her helmet and allowed her long white hair to cascade onto her shoulders, Issakian realised he knew her by a different name. He had to reach for it in his mind, like catching a snowflake before it melted in his hand. It took a few moments.
‘Agrevaine…’
He knew her, but chasms of memory kept them apart.
The briefest shadow of sadness passed over her face, before she mastered it. Agrevaine rested her hand on the pommel of her axe.
‘Issakian, I did not expect to see you here.’
‘I seek the Summoner.’
Agrevaine tried to hide her surprise.
‘Still?’
‘It has been a long road, and the storm,’ he uttered, ‘has been… taxing.’
Agrevaine looked as though she was about to say something, but caught her breath. She touched his armoured cheek and whispered, ‘Are you still flesh under that mask, Issakian?’
Issakian did not respond. He remembered the tablet.
‘The tower, inverted, spearing down into the underworld.’
Agrevaine let her hand fall.
‘Is that what you seek?’
‘It is his lair. The creature I have followed through death, through the storm.’
Agrevaine nodded then clenched her teeth. She looked as if she was in pain, though Issakian could discern no injury.
‘We are bound for the Blackstone Gate,’ she said, ‘and from there to a city called Glymmsforge. A muster is gathering. Rumours say that war unbound is coming to Shyish. We shall play a part.’ She paused, as if trying to see through the mask Issakian wore. He could not remember the last time he had removed it. Perhaps he never had, but he found her gaze curious all the same. ‘Come with us,’ she said. ‘I shall have need of a Lord-Veritant. You would be very welcome in our ranks, Issakian.’
‘Abandon my mission?’
‘Before it takes everything you once were, yes. Abandon the mission.’
Issakian was incredulous. ‘I cannot. I have come too far to give up. I have sacrificed…’
‘Obsession drives you now, not duty. Please… Come with us.’ Agrevaine reached out for him, but Issakian stepped back.
‘The tower, inverted, spearing down into the underworld… I will find it, and I will kill the thing that makes its lair within.’
The Palladors had returned, both beasts and their riders eager for the hunt.
‘I cannot stay,’ said Agrevaine. She donned her helmet.
‘Nor I,’ Issakian replied.
‘We will be at Blackstone Gate for three days, awaiting Lord Ironshield and his men…’ She let the implication of that statement linger.
‘That sounds like wisdom,’ said Issakian.
She paused, as if discerning some greater meaning from the words, and whispered.
‘My blood, the thunder…’
Issakian looked back blankly, unsure how to respond.
Her eyes hardened behind her mask. He heard her fist clench.
‘Farewell, Issakian Swordborne,’ she said at length, something in her voice making her sound hollow. Then
she turned and deftly leapt onto her mount.
Issakian watched her go, leading off the Palladors at a fearsome pace. In moments they were gone, lost in the distance behind an amethyst sand cloud.
Valdred had taken him the rest of the way. The dead did not bother them. They were in hiding after the storm, but would return soon enough.
Issakian stood facing the tower, its crooked roof stabbing upwards like a dagger thrust, and balanced impossibly on a raised shelf of amethyst sand. A narrow causeway of violet-tinged stone led to an outer door framed by a skull-studded arch.
As Issakian took his first step on the causeway, he heard Valdred slip away. The aelf had done his part. Let him mourn for the dead.
Spectral fog wreathed the tower, thickest at its roof. Incorporeal faces swam in this miasma, reaching up at Issakian from beneath the causeway but almost afraid to touch him.
He felt the storm within, like lightning in his veins instead of blood. His thoughts turned to his prey and a long hunt at last drawing to its end.
Crossing the causeway, Issakian stepped through the arch and let darkness take him.
He saw well enough, but found the halls of the tower lonely and cold. His footsteps echoed. They almost sounded like the voices of the lost. A presence lingered here. Issakian felt it. Slowly, he closed in on it, the instinct that all Veritants have coming to the fore.
‘I seek that which is hidden, the daemon and the sorcerer…’ he murmured. ‘I shine the light where darkness clings deepest.’
He raised the lantern, though it made his hand ache. Its pearlescent light described the edge of a circular dais. Smooth steps led down to a massive chamber, hewn from the same violet-tinged stone as the causeway. The dais lay in the centre, the lines of the chamber’s three walls converging and connecting at this point.
A figure knelt inside the dais with her back to Issakian, scribing on the floor with a piece of purple chalk that had coloured her fingers in the same dust.
The girl. Issakian dimly remembered her and the zoetrope, turning and turning as it revealed its shadow play to him.
‘You are no child…’ he began, and drew his sword.