Finally, the axe came out. The gash it had inflicted on the wood was pitifully shallow.
Felling a tree was clearly harder than it looked.
‘Is that all?’ I said
Fage lowered his axe, his pride stung. ‘It’d take a score of men, paired up and working in shifts, to bring something like this down.’
I crack my knuckles. ‘Step aside.’ I walked towards the wounded tree, letting the haft of my halberd slip through my grip until I held it near the butt. The long curve of its axe-like blade glinted in the last of the sun.
This time I definitely heard something.
A groan, as if ancient timbers were being drawn into a stressed and unpalatable new position. The foliage rustled briefly, then moved, a wave of restless leaves heading slowly in our direction. Fage hurried back to the line of Vanguards who calmly raised their weapons to the trees.
The front rank of trees gave way, and I took an involuntary step back.
I saw then why I had such difficulty identifying the spoor we had discovered in the High Gorwood, why there had been only a single print, and how it had been made in such unlikely ground.
The creature towered over us all. It was huge, lignified, armoured in thick plates of reddish bark and encrusted with orange lichens. Buzzing clouds of insects emerged from bore holes in its bark and swarmed around its aggressively branched crown. Its eyes were myopic pools of amber, buried within toughened whorls. They seemed to have difficulty focusing on something as small and active as me, and the monster peered down with short-sighted loathing.
I have never been to Ghyran.
I am familiar enough with the warlike forest spirits that inhabit the Jade Kingdoms to bluff it, if challenged, for they exist too in the wilder places of Azyr. They are different, of course, as the Everqueen and the God-King are different: reclusive, patient, less prone to spring rages and content, by and large, to sleep through the cycles of the heavens.
This was a Ghurite Treelord.
It was a beast.
I lowered my halberd, lifting my open hand to show I meant it no harm.
‘You came to me in my dream. Tell me, how may Hamilcar Bear-Eater hel–’
The treelord snatched me up without breaking stride, blasting the wind from my lungs and tossing my halberd to the ground. Broudiccan shouted something that I could not hear for the wind whistling in my ears, presumably ‘loose!’ for soon thereafter the air burned to the rapid fire of hurricane crossbows. The smell of wood smoke reached me, but the treelord took another lurching step and smacked a Vanguard-Hunter into the bole of a tree with a swipe of its hand. The Stormcast dissolved into a bolt of lightning that hammered the dead warrior back to the heavens. The tree smouldered in its wake and the beast gave a rumble of steady outrage, its grip on me tightening until sigmarite creaked and ribs bowed.
My vision burst into colours, stars blistering the foreground of what was otherwise a blur of bloody bark and hissing swarms. The treelord’s hand had swallowed my lower body up to the waist. Its grip pushed my warding lantern up against my breastplate, but its gnarly index finger was clamped over the shutter and I could not open it.
Bracing my hands against the treelord’s finger, I tried to force it far enough down to free the lantern.
I am a beast of a man, a giant even amongst my fellow Stormcast. I am the Champion of Cartha, the Eater of Bears. I slew the Ironjaw war chief, the Great Red, in an unarmed combat that lasted a day and a night. My strength is a thing of fireside tales and legend, yet I could not for the life of me move that finger.
I was not even wholly convinced that it noticed the attempt at all.
Lightning-flecked quarrels and boltstorm fire thundered and cracked. Somewhere in that awkward streak of greenish ground and amber sky, I saw Crow tearing bark from the treelord’s shins, trying to climb. The treelord ignored him utterly. Another streak of lightning bolted skywards.
I am not afraid to die.
I have done it before and I will doubtless have to do so again, but if my warriors were to be spared the torment of the soul forges that day, I was going to have to fell the treelord myself.
The constant spinning motion of the treelord waving me about in its fist was starting to have an unpleasant effect even on my constitution. I gritted my teeth against the rising bile, then spat with inch-perfect precision in the monster’s lidless eye.
I felt the anger run through the treelord’s gnarled bulk as it turned its age-dulled eyes from my warriors to me.
I would have gasped in pain, but the monster’s grip was crushing my diaphragm and all I could do was mouth silent profanities as it drew me in. I could feel my bones being ground, my feet, legs and stomach being compacted like a nut in a vice. Something metal clattered hollowly on hard wood. I almost cried in elation as I looked down to see that the treelord’s tightening grip had forced my warding lantern wholly out of its clutches.
Frankly, I had no idea if the restorative power of Sigmar would harm or hinder the Ghurite, but it was all I had. My fingers felt as if they were clad in sponge rather than sigmarite. My arms had become bendy and gained a joint, but somehow I got my hands over the lantern’s mechanism and drew the shutter.
The light of Sigendil and every bright star over Azyrheim emptied from my lantern and into the treelord’s half-blind eye.
It gave a slow but emphatic roar of pain.
I had hoped that it would drop me, but, of course, it had to hurl me with every chip and whorl of its awesome strength as if I had just burst into flames.
I crashed through a tangle of leechwood pines, their branches willowing over my heavy armour and savaging my face. By some sweet irony, the treelord had thrown me too hard for the branches to get a purchase on me, only slowing me down as I battered my way through and thumped heavily to the ground.
Groaning, astonished that my legs could still stand my weight, I stumbled up and around, and swayed to face the treelord.
Its legs had been stripped of bark. One was on fire. Its body sprouted quarrels like virile new growths and the eye I had burned was leaking a milky white sap. It gave a tortured groan and collapsed.
It dropped straight down, falling onto what I will call its knees, though they did not bend so much as bow, then split like hollow bones. Its shoulders sagged, and then it was still, the creak of settling wood overlain with the grating disquiet of the insects that had called it home. My relief was such that the sight of Fage swatting at a furious swarm of fat-bellied wasps with the flat of his hatchet almost made me chuckle.
The sudden shudder of tearing bark knocked my good humour flat, throwing me straight back into the final moments of my dream the previous night.
Acting on a premonition, I flung up a hand as the treelord’s great trunk tore up the middle and a searing beam of amber flashed across us.
It faded quickly, leaving only a tingling warmth upon my skin, and I lowered my hand to see the bark that had clad the belly of the treelord had given way to reveal a cocoon of some kind within the dripping sap. Held in a foetal curl within its protective juices was a sylvaneth unlike any I had seen before. Her bark was brittle, and where new growth showed, it was yellow and unhealthy. The entire inside of the tree smelled rotten.
The tree spirit looked up at me like a blind crone on her death bed.
I went to her.
‘It was you,’ I said, gruff, but gentle. ‘It was you that sought to reach me in my dream.’ The sylvaneth turned to the sound of my voice without any suggestion of recognition or, indeed, sanity. ‘Why did you attack us? Or the woodsman’s people?’
‘I am dying,’ she rasped, her voice like wind through reeds.
I understood. The Jade lines ran strong here, strong enough to support these great trees. ‘You fled here to heal.’
‘Ghur’thu heard my call,’ she said, presumably referring to the treelord I had unfortunatel
y just slain. It must have killed Fage’s woodsmen and driven off the native tree worshippers too, which must have come as a nasty shock to their beliefs.
‘It does not look as though you are healing,’ I said.
‘He stole my life.’
I shot a questioning glance at Fage, who shrugged. ‘Not yet, he hasn’t.’
‘He stole my life.’
Her use of the word ‘stole’ struck me as awkward, and I was almost certain that I was misinterpreting her meaning somehow. There was no time to interrogate her further than that, however. She was dying.
‘You will be next,’ she hissed.
That gave me pause. A vision of myself held in a cage of warp lightning and screaming filled my thoughts, and I cursed the Lord-Veritant of the Knights Merciless who put it there.
‘What… makes you say that?’
‘Because he told me.’
‘He?’
She opened the mottled bark of her mouth to answer as a feeble shudder passed through her body. She relaxed into the soft wall of her cocoon with a sigh, and said no more.
For a time, no one sullied the grove with words.
I lowered my eyes and placed my hand upon her body. I felt a light tingling through the metal of my gauntlets. I did not know what had been done to her.
But I would find out.
OBSIDIAN
David Annandale
It would not be the first wedding in Nulahmia to be preceded by a murder, Karya Treveign thought. She stood beside Evered Halorecht in the nave of the Grand Chapel of Night’s Hunger, looking back towards the main entrance. The two were alone in this cavernous space. But there was room within for thousands. Here, Nulahmian society would congregate to make obeisance to Nagash, and to the consuming, predatory need that was the cost of existence after death.
The Grand Chapel was constructed around the fossilised ribcage of an ancient leviathan slain by Nagash at the dawn of the Age of Myth. The chapel walls therefore curved outwards, then back in, and formed the building’s dome. Monolithic slabs of obsidian filled the spaces between the ribs. Adjacent to the dome stood the high tower, carved from the monster’s legs, and from the tower’s roof a single claw jutted, a spire raking at the sky. The trace of the predator’s hunger.
From the centre of the dome hung two fangs, each more than fifty feet long. Between them was a latticework of smaller bones holding hundreds of tallow candles, encased in glass stained with red and fragments of blue and green. The flames filled the ribcage with this softly blended, crimson hue. In the glow, the blackness of the petrified bones was rendered even more profound.
If Karya was honest with herself, she would have to admit that it would not be the first wedding precipitated by a murder, either. And being honest was, for Karya, a matter of principle. Honesty in Nulahmia was a precious metal, rarer than gold. Even so, she had been forced to engage in some degree of subterfuge when it came to her relationship with Evered. She had had to do more than omit to reveal the truth of their love to her father. On three separate occasions, Karya had lied about where she had been. The memory of each of those instances was a festering wound upon her heart, an injury that struck all the deeper because her father, Lord Vorst Treveign, had believed her. And he believed her because he trusted, absolutely, in her honesty.
You are, he had once told her, that which I have never had the strength to be. The path you have chosen is a hard one. It runs against the grain of everything our queen has forged. I fear for you. But you give me hope, and for that I will be eternally grateful and proud. Your mother would be, too.
‘Do you think she’ll agree?’ Evered whispered, pulling Karya from memories and guilt.
‘We can but hope,’ said Karya. She looked at him and entwined her fingers with his.
‘Hope,’ Evered repeated. He smiled. ‘I can do that. You have taught me how. You have shown me that there is such a thing, and that it is strong.’
Their sibilant echoes seemed too loud for their hushed voices, and so they gently kissed, each wrapping themselves in the other’s protective silence.
Hope. The one Karya held now was that the Mortarch of Blood would agree to her and Evered’s request. There was no guarantee, though, that they would even have the chance to speak with her, let alone receive her blessing. There were many reasons why Neferata would refuse to permit the union of the Houses of Treveign and Halorecht. Karya was not naïve. Trying to follow strict principles of honesty had forced upon her a hard awareness of political realities. No, this was not the first wedding preceded by murder, nor the first precipitated by murder. But this murder leading to this union would, she knew, be the talk of Nulahmia, and perhaps all of Neferatia, if the dread queen allowed it to come to pass.
Karya and Evered had come here to force the issue.
In one of the circular crypts that clung like petrified tumours to the sides of the main chamber lay the body of Therul, high counsellor to House Treveign. When Karya had heard that Neferata planned to pay her respects to the assassinated vampire lord, she had determined to face the Mortarch and know her fate. No one knew when Neferata intended to come to the Grand Chapel, so Karya had performed her own visitation to the corpse, shortly after her father’s, and then, joined by Evered, she had waited.
They had been here, in the centre of the nave, motionless and expectant, for five hours. No one else had passed through. Karya felt trapped, pinned by a dagger of expectation to a limbo as huge and unforgiving as the structure of bone and obsidian that enclosed her.
‘Will she believe in us?’ Evered wondered aloud.
‘Yes,’ Karya said. ‘I am sure she will. She will understand.’ If, that is, Karya could prove she understood the political realities, was not blind to them, and knew how to overcome them.
The huge iron doors of the entrance opened. The deep, reverberating groan of their hinges climbed the walls of the Grand Chapel, becoming the echo of the great beast’s death rattle. Neferata advanced down the aisle, accompanied by the Lady Mereneth. The Mortarch and her high courtier wore long, black dresses. Neferata’s was accented by threads of silver that picked up the dim light of the candelabra, flashing in and out of sight with the movements of the dress like a glint of steel or, as Karya chose to interpret it, the return of light that always waited within darkness. Mereneth’s robes were trimmed in a deep crimson that counterpointed and emphasised the brilliance and deep shadow of her mistress’ garb.
Queen and noble regarded Karya and Evered as they approached. Mereneth’s gaze was cold, flat, unreadable. Neferata bore a smile as slight as it was powerful. Her eyes were narrowed in amusement. Karya’s determination wavered. The closer Neferata came, the more Karya felt herself shrink before the aura of majesty that surrounded the queen. Neferata’s presence filled the Grand Chapel until it seemed as though the monolithic building struggled to contain her. She was more ancient than the fossil, and more powerful than the beast had ever been in life. Karya was beneath the notice of so great a being, though she had dared to call attention to herself by standing in the path of the queen.
She realised that she would be fortunate not to be turned to ash. To ask for more would be foolishly presumptuous. Yet she gathered her failing courage to do just that. Beside her, Evered was rigid with barely suppressed trembling.
At a slight nod from Neferata, Mereneth turned from the couple and swept past, heading off towards the crypt where Therul lay. Neferata stopped before Karya and Evered. Her smile grew almost imperceptibly broader. Her lips were the red of arterial blood, her face the white of perfect, glacial death.
‘Treveign and Halorecht, side by side,’ said Neferata. ‘I doubt I will see a greater wonder today. Explain it to me. What is the nature of this wonder?’
Karya had no doubt that Neferata already knew the answer to her question. She had felt the queen’s gaze scour her being of all secrets. Yet she was called upon to speak
, and so she did, honestly, and proud.
‘We are pledged to one another,’ Karya said. ‘We seek your blessing for this union.’
Neferata laughed. Her mirth was as silvery as bells, filling Karya’s heart with love and the urgent need to please her ruler. The laughter’s echo resounded with the iron slam of a coffin lid, and Karya quailed in fear.
‘And thus it comes to pass,’ said Neferata. ‘After centuries of enmity, the two great houses are joined through the love of their heirs. How very star-crossed of you. How worthy of verse you both are. Tell me more. Delight me further. Why now? How can it be, Karya Treveign, that the murder of your father’s right hand leads not to greater bloodshed but to reconciliation?’
‘It is because the death of Counsellor Therul could make things worse that we must act now, my queen,’ said Evered.
Neferata regarded Evered for a brief moment, then turned her attention back to Karya. ‘Did Therul approve of this union?’
‘He did not know about it,’ Karya said, glancing at Evered. ‘He would certainly have advised my father against it. Without his opposition, I believe that my father will be easier to convince. Should we have your blessing, I know he would be.’
Neferata laughed again. ‘An easy prediction,’ she said. ‘Its truth is too certain to have any worth as flattery. What interest would I have in granting this blessing?’
Karya had not been trying to flatter. Everything she said was the truth as she saw it.
‘Acting as one, Treveign and Halorecht could serve your majesty with tremendous strength and loyalty. Our every act would be an expression of gratitude. This I swear.’
‘And what can you offer as guarantee of your word? Your father rules House Treveign and your betrothed is just as powerless – or has Nagra Halorecht relinquished control to her son and I am ignorant of it?’
Karya bowed her head, as did Evered beside her.
There was silence for a long moment. Then, for a third time, Neferata laughed. ‘Your answers only increase the wonder of this union,’ she said. ‘You delight me, and so you shall have my blessing. Have you given any thought to where you will celebrate your union?’
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