Neave surveyed the fallen fort a second time, forcing herself to start again, dispassionate, taking in every detail. The shores of the lake lay just yards away, and she realised from the angle at which the cogfort lay, and the tracks still visible around its shattered bulk, that it had been backing towards the water when it fell. The lake’s muddy banks were churned into an oil-streaked stew where one of the cogfort’s legs must have taken a swiping step and slipped over the mud. It looked as though they were trying to back into the lake itself.
A desperate plan.
Neave spotted one of the missing cogwork legs, lying some distance away. She took note of the deep gouges in the leg, the snapped cables and twisted stubs of metal. It had been ripped clean off.
The fort’s upper towers had broken across the rocky slopes of the volcano itself, several landing perilously close to rents that split its dark skin, glowing with hellish light and belching thick clouds of smoke. The heat from the rents had melted the wrecked superstructure and burned several human corpses that had been flung from the highest spires.
Tarion leaned close to Neave and murmured in her ear. ‘We should give chase, before the mark gets away again. I could not bear the weight of further deaths upon my conscience. Have you a sense of its location?’
Neave closed her eyes and reached out. She ignored the crackle of flames and the groan of stressed metal, the stench of sulphur and brimstone that billowed from the bubbling lake and from the slopes above. Lightning exploded above them with a volley of dry cracks. Thunder bellowed. Neave barely heard them, focusing her attention upon the mark.
‘Not everyone on that cogfort can have died in the crash,’ she whispered to Tarion. ‘The mark has been thorough, again. It left no man nor duardin alive. Even if it is large and powerful enough to massacre settlements and drag down a cogfort, that must have taken it some time. It can’t have gone… far…’
Neave’s eyes snapped open. Every fibre of her being burned with an adrenal surge of warning. She looked again at the muddy shore of the lake, where the cogfort’s rear limb had taken a single, swiping step. Where it had reduced the ground to a mangled mess in which no tracks would show.
Where the shallows boiled like a cauldron.
‘It’s still here,’ she hissed.
The surface of the lake exploded as something vast erupted from its depths.
The thing was as much forged brass and black iron as it was wet muscle, taut sinew and exposed bone spars. It was massive, taller at the shoulder than a Dreadfort wall and built so heavily that it was as though a fortress had mutated and come to predatory life. Neave caught sight of blazing furnace eyes and razor-sharp brass teeth in its hound-like head, a massive collar of spiked brass that encircled its neck, talons the size of battering rams and an armoured body into whose flanks were cut deep rents. Furious fiery light shone from those rib-like gaps, and as the abomination burst from the sizzling waters, black fumes belched out of them as though from the stacks of an Ironweld factory.
Despite its immense size and heavy metallic body, the beast moved blisteringly fast. It covered the ground to the Stormcasts before they had so much as drawn breath and swept a massive foreclaw through their ranks.
Neave leapt straight up, backflipping over the brass claw as it swept below her like some baroque siege engine. Tarion shot past her, taking to the air like a streak of lightning. The Palladors were less fortunate, two of their number failing to wyndshift away in time. Blood sprayed. Torn flesh rained down as the monster’s talon obliterated its victims, sending the sundered corpses of two gryph-chargers bouncing and rolling to a stop amidst the wreckage of the fort.
Two bolts of lightning arced skyward, Stormcast souls rushing back to the heavens to be Reforged.
Neave landed with catlike grace and found herself immediately on the defensive. No time to mourn the fallen, but time enough to let their deaths stoke her anger, adrenaline and speed. She leapt back from another hurtling claw swipe, then rolled aside as the monster’s jaws clanged shut where she had lain a split second before. Neave managed to lash out with her whirlwind axes as she rolled back to her feet; sparks rained down as they clanged from the abomination’s metal skull to no appreciable effect.
‘It’s some form of accursed daemon engine,’ barked Tarion.
‘It’s immense,’ cried Neave, weaving aside again as the monster slammed a claw into the ground with enough force to crack the bedrock. ‘Like a Khornate Flesh Hound grew to the size of a living castle! How did such a thing come to be?’ Sulphurous waters were still boiling away from its slick muscle-and-metal body, creating a choking cloud of steam that mingled with the black smoke churning from the thing’s insides.
A volley of crackling bolts whipped in from the side, peppering the armour around one of the daemon hound’s eyes and causing it to recoil with a growl like a furnace door being thrown open. Neave didn’t waste time thanking Kalparius and his remaining Pallador – she just took the momentary opening and accelerated away from the beast.
Crackling arrows streaked down as Tarion drew and loosed, drew and loosed far faster than any mortal warrior could have. The lightning-wreathed shafts impacted along the beast’s spine in blasts of white light. Neave cursed as she realised that, again, the attacks had done as good as nothing. Her eyes danced across its mountainous form as it moved, seeking weaknesses and vulnerabilities. Its armour plates looked utterly impervious to anything short of sustained cannon fire, and clearly even that hadn’t availed the cogfort. Perhaps the wet muscle and sinew that entwined its limbs, she thought.
Then the engine opened its jaws wide with a terrible shriek of hinging metal. Phosphorous flame leapt within its gullet.
‘Arlor, get clear,’ yelled Neave, in the instant before a spear of white-hot flame roared up from the daemon hound’s throat. Tarion had seen the threat coming, yet the engine moved with the speed of an onrushing avalanche. He barely managed to weave aside, crying out in pain as searing flames licked up the right side of his body. Neave saw the Knight-Venator’s armour catch light, and his crystal wing-veins crack in the intense heat. What kind of hellish fires could catch in forged sigmarite? thought Neave with growing horror. Surely this gigantic abomination must have been loosed from Khorne’s own daemonic forges, to possess such hideous gifts.
Tarion spiralled away, smoke boiling from his scorched form, and Krien gave a desolate cry.
‘Foerunner, attract the abomination’s attention,’ shouted Neave. ‘I’m going to try for its living flesh.’
Kalparius shot Neave a salute and spurred his gryph-charger, gesturing for his remaining warrior to follow his lead. The two Palladors rode hard, straight at the daemon hound, and lightning cracked overhead as they unleashed another salvo of boltstorm shots. Crackling blasts burst across the monster’s face and it gave a howl of fury before loosing another pyrotechnic blast from its maw. The Palladors wyndshifted out of the path of the searing beam, and it bored a blazing rent in the flank of the fallen cogfort.
Blacktalon seized upon the hound’s moment of distraction. She ran up a sloping armour plate that had broken away from the cogfort’s superstructure and leapt, axes raised high, sailing through the air and slamming down on the monster’s back. Neave buried both axes into a huge clump of flensed muscle that bunched and corded along the hound’s brass spine. Molten ichor sprayed, spattering her armour and faceplate and hissing as it warped the sigmarite.
Neave had an instant to be grateful she was wearing her helm, before the daemon hound bucked underneath her. She had half hoped its fury might make it insensible to her presence. Instead, the beast twisted and snarled, shaking its massive body left and right and almost dislodging her. Worse, Neave could feel furnace heat rapidly building, radiating up from the monster’s metal skin and through the soles of her armoured feet.
She couldn’t run with burned feet, she thought, and she couldn’t fight if she couldn’t run.
This close, she could hear the daemon engine’s mechanical innards thundering away like some pandemoniac factory. She was surrounded by black smoke that choked her lungs and fouled her vision. She realised that, for all her speed and huntress’ instincts, she didn’t even know where to begin to try to bring down a monster so vast and strange.
Knowing she couldn’t remain still any longer, Neave ripped her axes free and began to run along the creature’s back towards the nape of its neck. She recalled seeing a great mass of muscle and sinew bunched between its shoulder blades. Perhaps, if she broke enough of those connections, she could behead the beast? For a second, she questioned what would happen if she couldn’t, but then crushed the notion down. Panic lay that way, and the realisation that if this thing slew them all, it would have free rein to continue its slaughter.
How many more lives would be lost if they failed here? How much more death would be laid upon their shoulders?
Neave made it ten paces before the daemon hound bucked again, footfalls pounding the bedrock as it turned a maddened half-circle trying to dislodge her. Neave’s balance and agility were superb, and she rode out the violent motion, hacking her axes into every visible fleshy substructure as she passed. Boiling ichor spurted in her wake, but the wounds seemed only to increase her mark’s fury.
The hillock of wet muscle rose ahead of Neave and she saw a webwork of capillary-strung tendons stretched like hawser cables between it and the brazen collar that encircled the beast’s neck. Pivoting on the balls of her feet to avoid being thrown loose again, Neave spun and swung her axes in a vicious arc. Their blades met the nearest tendon and rebounded as though they had struck a castle wall. Neave felt a moment’s horror. She had never seen anything resist her blades so completely.
The daemon hound chose that moment to wrench itself sideways, slamming bodily against the crumpled cogfort. Already off balance from the unexpected deflection of her axes, Neave was thrown from her feet and felt a sickening lurch in the pit of her stomach as she plunged over the hound’s shoulder and down to hit the ground at its feet.
Neave managed to control her fall, but only barely. She landed on one shoulder and rolled, hissing at the jarring pain that shot through her arm and down her back. She turned the roll into a rising start and began to run, but the hound slammed a claw down and managed to clip Neave’s leg. There came a tearing of metal, a crunch of bone and a vicious stab of agony, and Neave crashed down on her face. Fury and despair warred within her at the thought that she was about to be slain, that this abomination was about to best her and be freed to continue its slaughter. She was about to fail Sigmar for the first time, and the thought appalled her.
Neave rolled onto her back in time to see Kalparius and his surviving Pallador riding hard at the hound, shooting as they went.
They were trying to buy her time, Neave knew. But the blow to the head had stunned her momentarily, and with her shattered leg, she simply couldn’t move fast enough.
Tons of metal and roaring fire rushed overhead as the beast lunged, bounding right over Neave to swat the remaining Pallador through the air. His body hit the waters of the lake and sank like a stone, before his soul flashed up from the surface in a geyser of steam.
Kalparius was, if anything, less fortunate still. He hauled his gryph-charger into a hard turn, trying to weave between the hound’s legs to reach Neave. Impossibly fast, the hound’s muzzle darted down and its jaws clanged shut, taking Foerunner’s head from his shoulders with shocking precision. A second bite a moment later sliced the Pallador’s steed clean in half, the gryph-charger shrieking its last even as Kalparius’ soul shot heavenwards.
‘We’ve failed,’ breathed Neave through a haze of pain. ‘We’ve failed. Damn this monster.’
The thought was utterly unacceptable and, spurred by a fresh burst of rage and determination, Neave hauled herself into a crouch. She looked up at the underbelly of the beast, seeing more ironwork, bone, muscle and brass. Circular metal hatches were built into the creature’s torso, all but obscured by black smoke and bound shut with brass chains. They had unholy runic sigils etched into them, Chaos designs that stung Neave’s eyes worse than the smoke.
Were the hatches there to allow access? They couldn’t be. Not if they were chained from the outside. They must be hatches behind which something was bound, then.
She had no more time for thought, as the daemon hound circled with pounding footfalls and prepared to attack her again. Neave forced herself to stand, pain screaming through the broken bones in her right leg, and held her axes down and out to either side, blades glinting. The monster’s face drew level with her own, furnace eyes burning, hot breath gusting around her. Neave stared back, unflinching. She felt disgust and defiance as she locked eyes with the immense beast, and sudden scorn. It was so powerful, so unbelievably mighty, yet it did naught but destroy like a mindless beast. If this was all that the Dark Gods had to offer, they might well wreak a trail of destruction across the realms, but no amount of unholy strength would prevent Sigmar’s armies from winning this war in the end.
‘You can kill me now,’ she said. ‘But I will come for you again and again, and in the end it is you who will fall.’
She’d died before.
She knew its wrench.
She prepared herself for the wash of pain.
A storm of arrows whistled down and peppered the monster’s muzzle. Explosions of lightning drove its head aside, before a shrieking crimson comet shot down and raked glowing talons across the beast’s left eye.
The daemon hound reared back with a roar so loud that Neave could feel her ears bleeding. Beyond the beast, perched upon a wrecked spar of cogfort battlement, she saw Tarion beckoning her. He pointed at the shadowy rent in the fort’s flank below his position.
Neave summoned as much speed as she could on her mangled leg. Every footfall was blinding pain, but she kept moving, and as the hound came after her Tarion drove it back with another volley of shots to the face. Krien spiralled past, causing the maddened daemon hound to lash out with a massive claw. The star-eagle spiralled up and away, giving a mocking shriek as he shot towards the storm clouds above.
Neave lunged up a metal slope, footfalls clanging, and threw herself into the darkened interior of the fort. She heard a rush of metal and a thunderous impact behind her and was spilled from her feet as the fortress shook. Looking back, Neave saw one blazing eye staring at her through the rent in the fort’s flank, then it was replaced by the hound’s yawning jaws.
‘Oh no, no, no, no…’ gasped Neave as she dragged herself along the wall of the tilted corridor and fell desperately through a buckled doorway that yawned surreally in the ‘floor’. Neave slid out of control down a ruptured deck and crunched into the heap of wreckage that had piled up against the chamber’s far wall. She cried out in pain as the bones in her leg ground together.
Then came fire, filling the doorway with white-hot light. Neave felt the heat from the blast, even thirty feet down, and saw the metal of the door frame glow and begin to drip molten gobbets.
Then the fire was gone.
There came another thunderous clang, then another. A metallic snarl carried through the fort’s hull, and the structure shook around Neave as it suffered another thunderous blow.
‘For once, I am the cornered prey,’ she murmured. Neave heard the tortured shriek of metal, then another blow shook the chamber. Junked furniture and discarded weapons shifted beneath her.
‘Neave!’ She heard Tarion’s voice, distant, echoing through the cogfort. His cry was answered by a muffled howl from outside and another ripping sound.
Concentrating on the echoes of Tarion’s voice, Neave hauled herself across the drift of wreckage and through another door that had burst open in the chamber’s sloping wall. She found herself in a shrine to Sigmar, with a high ceiling and an altar that had fallen and smashed against a pane of stained glass. Spars of rock jutte
d up through the shattered window, and bits of broken glass twinkled, their representation of Sigmar fractured into a hundred pieces.
‘Neave, where are you?’ She heard Tarion again, closer, his voice tight with controlled panic. She began to scale the pews that had been bolted to the metal floor. Neave found bodies amongst the pews, broken and dangling where they had knelt in prayer before the end. A couple of soldiers, what looked like an alchemist of some sort, and a figure she was relatively sure was the fort’s cook.
Neave climbed on and, grabbing both sides of the doorframe in what was now the ceiling, she hauled herself up into another skewed corridor. There were more bodies here, Freeguild soldiers lying with their necks broken and bodies mangled by the fall. Fire had swept along it, and Neave saw that it had issued from the fort’s secondary engine room – a metal plate was bolted to the wall, its blackened lettering still just visible in the half-light that fell through small rents in the hull. A duardin lay beneath it, his Ironweld garb a blackened and bloody mess.
The fort shook again, and a howl of rage echoed from outside. Something heavy thumped down at the other end of the corridor, and Neave spun, axes raised.
‘Tarion,’ she said quietly, her voice tinged with relief. The Knight-Venator hastened to meet her, his cracked wings tucked close. She could see from the way he moved that he was in significant pain. His armour was fused and melted down one side.
‘Your leg,’ he said.
‘Broken,’ she replied. ‘Nothing I cannot ignore until the job’s done. You look worse.’
‘I am not dead yet,’ said Tarion, and to Neave’s surprise he shot her a lopsided grin. She felt herself respond in kind.
‘We soon will be if we cannot come up with a way to defeat this beast,’ said Neave, keeping her voice pitched low. There came another rending clang from somewhere close, shaking the corridor and causing oil to spatter down through rents in the wall.
‘Its hide seems proof against our weapons,’ said Tarion. ‘Direct assault isn’t going to work, not with two of us. It’d take an army to bring that thing down.’
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