With a self-deprecating shrug, Aethnir indicated the slimy marmot-like creatures strung up from his fyrd’s magmapikes. The animals burrowed into the soil all over this country where the lake was shallow. They tasted even more like dung than dung, but they needed neither cooking nor skinning, and when left to hang could release three or four times their dry weight in lukewarm water.
‘I’d rather eat the magmapike,’ Killim grumbled.
‘You could always try going hungry,’ Aethnir returned. ‘It would be better for the pike.’
‘I should’ve gone with Huffnar and Rokkar. Founded a new lodge and forgotten this damned quest. I’ll wager they’re not eating this hot drez right now.’
‘I’d wager you’re right,’ said Aethnir levelly.
Dunnegar snorted, earning himself a sharply quizzical look from his old mentor. ‘You really think they managed to start a new lodge anywhere here?’
‘Better off,’ Killim grumbled after a moment.
Dunnegar turned to the young karl. ‘Do you know how far we are from Fyrepeak?’
Aethnir simply shrugged.
‘Of course he doesn’t know,’ Killim snapped, swiping up his own chronicle and waving it like an admonition to an entire damnable world. ‘It’s been thirty-three hundred days. We should’ve seen the Plain of Dust, but we haven’t. We should have had at least a hint of Taurak Skullcleaver or the last of his lieutenants, but we haven’t. We should be entering the Red Mountains, but we bloody well aren’t.’ He looked around, drunk with sarcasm. ‘We’re not, are we?’
Aethnir squinted at the red haze on the horizon. ‘They look a bit l–’
‘They’re not the Red drenging Mountains,’ Killim screamed, slamming his book shut, then taking it two-handed and launching it into the air.
It sploshed into the lake, ignited an instant later, and sank under with a hiss.
Panting, Killim turned slowly pale. ‘Oh, drez.’
‘It’s alright,’ said Aethnir. ‘I don’t think it was helping anyway.’
‘This is your fault.’
‘My fault?’
‘Aye. You. Burying ur-gold I could have used. Feeding me these… things.’
Ignoring them, determinedly so for the circularity of their arguments made him dizzy, Dunnegar rose to his feet and leaned forward. He was peering to the horizon, and that latent red shimmer. For a moment it had seemed to crackle as if with storms. He listened, counting under his breath, and on the count of nine came the rumour of thunder.
He couldn’t say why, but the storm made him think of war.
‘The Red Mountains are there,’ he said, sure of it. ‘And we go on.’
‘The four thousand and first day saw the end of one quest and the beginning of another. The journey had proven long and costly and perhaps we should have abandoned it before we did, though there can be few who were there that day who took issue with the outcome. An oath is an oath, but gold is gold…’
The Sepuzkul Chronicle (formally the Angfyrd Odyssey)
‘I am wrath!’ Dunnegar roared, throwing his elbow through a warrior’s pointed jaw. Blood exploded from the reaver’s mouth. There was no time to attend him further. The enemy were packed in so close that there was no air to breathe that had not already been breathed out or bled into. The froth from their mouths was in his beard, their blood was in his eyes, and he killed more men with his fingernails and his teeth than he could with his axe.
The mountains – whether the Red Mountains or no – were rust red, fangs of rock to rip open the jugular of passing worlds and drink the fire of their blood. The trail that wound through them was rugged and uneven, climbing by sudden rises and twisting often, but not nearly difficult enough that thirty of the hardest duardin ever to leave the Realm of Chamon could hold back the horde for much longer.
Thirty. Against a thousand thousand.
Few they were, but that it was they who had made it this far and not others was testament to their bloody-minded tenacity to kill rather than be killed.
The last of the two lodges’ hearthguard held the old cart, containing the tools of runemaking and the last few ingots of precious ur-gold, as though it were a fortress. Globs of molten magma screamed from their pikes, blasting smoking trenches deep into the enemy ranks. Solldun the runesmiter chanted from his smoky bastion, straddling a pair of fyresteel chests packed over the axle, and bade the rock to split and boiling geysers to fire the Bloodbound to their dooms. What he admittedly lacked in the rune-maker’s craft, he joyfully accounted for in the arts of war.
The final fyrd of vulkite berzerkers was the wall around them. Leading them in a song of gold and glory, Killim left his years behind him to fight with equal fervour. He and Aethnir battled back to back, the latter a ghost-pale blur behind his twinned fyresteel axes.
‘I am vengeance!’
By foot and shoulder, Dunnegar cleared space enough to swing his axe. It clanged against a blood warrior carrying a mace and a shield stretched with human skin. Too close. The rune-scratched bloodsteel took its hit, and then the warrior thumped him back with the flattened face of his shield. Dunnegar shook off the stunning blow, but not before a bloodreaver daubed in black and red flame tattoos grabbed the haft of his axe and tried to pull it from him.
Dunnegar punched the man in the face. Once, twice. The man’s lip split, his jawbone caved. The third hit twisted his head so sharply that his neck snapped.
Dunnegar shrugged off the mobbing bloodreavers with a howl.
‘I am Grimnir! I am already dead!’
And in that moment, power that did not belong in mortal veins rushing through his mind, Dunnegar was Grimnir again.
The heat of the mountain, the dust on his hands. He could feel the meat of Vulcatrix’s mammoth neck coming apart beneath his axe. And claws. Claws piercing, claws in his chest and in his jaw and spearing his thighs. The god-lizard was dying, and in its savage throes those claws came apart. He felt it. Gods of old, he felt it!
Weeping golden tears, he hurled himself headlong into the grind, striking out with such furious pain that it no longer mattered that there was no room to swing. Everything that got near him died.
‘Tame yourself, grim brother,’ bellowed Nosda-Grimnir from atop his terrible ash-grey magmadroth. ‘Back into line, lest the souls you condemn cry your name into the Underworld and bring the gaze of Nagash upon your shade.’
The Sepuzkul runefather was fending off an ape-like monster of blood and sinew at the extreme range of his grandaxe. Black spikes split its muscular torso without any thought to symmetry or pattern, branded icons of control sweating against slick red skin. Fists like boulders beat aside armoured Goresworn and blood marauders alike in its efforts to get close. The magmadroth sent spumes of flame battering against it, re-opening partially healed lash scars and, in concert with his master’s axe, only just managing to hold the rabid bloodspawn at bay.
‘If we die then we die fulfilling oaths!’ Killim screamed, throat raw, mouth red. ‘To the last! All of us on to the bloody death.’
‘A bloody death!’ Aethnir echoed, raising his axes high.
The Fyreslayers sung it, shouted it loud, beat the words into Bloodbound shields. Some even laughed it, for what was death but the penultimate step on Grimnir’s road?
‘A bloody death!’
The shock of a horn blasted back in answer. The note was as deep as the earth, as powerful as thunder, and on hearing it a fire seemed to die in the eyes of the Bloodbound. Dunnegar felt it too, the fight being drawn from him through the uncanny goose bumping of his flesh, though not to the obvious extent of the Khornates. They stared at each other as if through a dream, and in a listless scrape of greaves and boots on the armour of dead men, they stumbled back.
The Fyreslayers let them go. Expedience perhaps, or exhaustion. Or maybe the pacifying power of that horn had affected them more profoundly than
they realised. The armies stared at each other across ground thick with dead. A silence well befitting a graveyard fell across them. Duardin shuffled warily.
‘What is this?’ Dunnegar hissed.
‘We’ll find out soon enough,’ said Killim.
And soon enough, they did.
Simpering and shuffling under the crack of whips, the ranks slowly parted to form a corridor. A pair of towering slaughterpriests walked down it with lengthened strides, escort and honour guard to the monster between them.
It might have been a horse once, but its mouth had since become a beak and its spine curved like one of the daemon hounds of Khorne. Fired burned where a mane should have grown and eyes with just enough intelligence to weep rolled in sockets all over its many-jointed limbs. And mounted on that fell beast rode the real monster.
He was a colossus of armour plate, clanking roughly from side to side with the violence of his mount’s ungainly stride. His armour was a fluted puzzle of grooves and channels through which blood sluggishly trickled. His helm had a Y-shaped opening that revealed a black face with eyes like burning coals, and a pair of flat, angular horns.
The priests of blood parted and there, straight backed and with arms crossed like statues before a realmgate to the Realm of Chaos, they stood.
The Lord of Khorne lowered his horn, made from a length of curving, hollowed bone, and regarded the Fyreslayers one by one.
‘I am Kar Thraxis,’ he said, the deep timbre of his words inflaming the blood of all who heard with a need to do violence. ‘I am the Ravager, the Devourer in Flame. I would meet your mightiest.’
Killim, Aethnir and Nosda-Grimnir shared glances.
Without waiting for them to decide, Dunnegar strode into the clearing and readied his greataxe.
Kar Thraxis nodded, apparently satisfied by what he saw. ‘I hear you slew the Griever.’
‘Not I,’ Dunnegar grunted, ‘but I was there.’
‘Good. You cannot imagine how long I have waited to see him dead.’
Dunnegar gave an impatient growl. ‘Are we going to fight then?’
‘One day. Perhaps.’
With a snap of his armoured wrist, a gang of inhumanly muscular men with dull, beast-of-burden looks, trudged between the watching priests. They dragged heavy chests behind them, pulling them by chains that were fed through the steel rings hammered into their bruised flesh. At a motion from Kar Thraxis, one of the slaughterpriests stepped forward to kick the lock from one. The giant bent low and threw it open.
The Fyreslayers murmured in stunned appreciation.
Dunnegar’s eyes widened as he took in the glittering hoard. As if he could simply absorb it all.
‘There is ur-gold here,’ said Solldun, crouching, eyes fire bright.
‘You’re sure?’ Dunnegar mumbled.
Many Fyreslayers had some sense for the presence of ur-gold, but only a runemaster had the gift to pick ur-gold from gold.
Solldun simply nodded.
‘You like my gold?’ said Kar Thraxis, a smile opening his face like a fissure in deep earth. ‘I had heard.’
‘We like some of your gold,’ Dunnegar said cagily, but bartering now seemed pointless. The Lord of Khorne had seen the hunger in them all, the starvation. He lowered his axe in surrender, dimly conscious of his brothers and cousins doing the same. ‘What do you want for it?’
Kar Thraxis gestured behind him. There, the storm that the Fyreslayers had been following like a guiding star blackened the mountain sky. ‘The war storm is here, led by a being the Stormcasts call Celestant-Prime.’
‘You want me to kill this Stormcast for you?’ Dunnegar wrenched his gaze from the gold and turned to face the Lord of Khorne. He felt no fear of this monster. He stuck out his jaw, puffed out his chest. ‘Because I can do that.’
Chuckling, Kar Thraxis dismounted and knelt to be eye-to-eye with the Fyreslayer. ‘His death by another’s hand wins me nothing.’
‘Taurak Skullcleaver,’ Dunnegar grunted in understanding.
‘The gods demand unity in the face of the storm. His death by my hand will also win me nothing. Will you do it?’
Dunnegar’s gold-flecked eyes met the Khornate’s hate-filled glare and held it. The runefather was dead, his lodge destroyed and swallowed by another. Ancient as such civilized trappings could appear, they were temporary. Grimnir’s life and death taught that. Only power was eternal.
Only gold.
He hawked up a gob of saliva and spat it on his palm, extending it to the Lord of Khorne as it sizzled.
‘I will. And I can.’
I
Daemons were dancing over the Voidfire Plain. The flamers of Tzeentch spun and whirled, their columnar shapes rocking back and forth. Their serpentine limbs outstretched, they bathed the grasses of the Voidfire in their unholy flames, twisting the land, catching it up in their lunatic dance. Wherever he looked, Vrindum saw the daemons. They kept their distance from the Fyreslayers, too scattered and too few to mount a challenge to the great host. They remained writhing silhouettes close to the horizons. The grimwrath berzerker’s grip on Darkbane, his fyrestorm greataxe, was tight with frustrated anger. He longed to cut down the taunting abominations.
Just ahead of Vrindom, Bramnor, youngest of the runesons, rose in the throne on his magmadroth. ‘Face us!’ he shouted at the daemons. ‘You are craven beasts!’ His roar was powerful. The long, roped braid of his beard shook with the force of his shout.
The flamers danced on. They had no need to close with duardin. Mindless, they were caught in the ecstasy of the song, the song that was greater than the daemons, the song that blew with the wind over all the regions and vastness of the Evercry. The song that had called to Beregthor-Grimnir, auric runefather of the Drunbhor lodge. The song Beregthor had answered, leading his warriors down from the mountains, away from the magmahold in Sibilatus, exhorting them to cross the wailing plain.
A choir of a billion voices joined the wind in singing the melody of the dance. The song was simple, repetitive, insistent. It had three notes. Low, high, low. Short, long, short. The beats soft, strong, soft. The voices came from the grasses of the plains. They were tall, waist-high on Vrindum, and flexible, hollow, fleshy, corrupted. Along each shaft, a multitude of toothed mouths chanted. The reeds swayed with the song, bending with and against the wind. When by chance a cluster of reeds leaned together, they burst into eldritch flame. Across the endless stretch of the plain, blossoms of fire shot up into the hard light of the sun. They spread like oil upon water, then went out with the suddenness of candleflame. Fire without cause, out of nowhere, appearing and vanishing.
A tangle of reeds blew against Vrindum’s arm. They grasped at him, mouths gnawing with hunger. He yanked back, uprooting and tearing them. Green ichor spattered. A step later, a cluster formed and spat their fire over him. He growled at the burn. A thousand searing claws crawled over his flesh, seeking to swallow him in metamorphosis. He shrugged away their touch and swung Darkbane like a scythe, cutting a swathe through the reeds. The fire went out.
All along the Drunbhor lines, Fyreslayers fought the ravenous, singing, burning grass. So it had been for days beyond counting.
A flare of violet flame swept over Bramnor. His magmadroth spat its own fire over the grass, killing it with the purging acid. Bramnor snarled as he passed through the daemonic burn. ‘This is not war. I’ve had enough of this cursed land.’
Frethnir, the eldest runeson, said, ‘There is change ahead.’ He pointed.
Vrindum squinted. There was darkness in the distance. A mass of tall forms, much higher than the grasses.
‘Is that a forest?’ The middle brother, Drethor, shaded his eyes.
‘It is not,’ Vrindum said. The shapes, vague as they were this far away, did not belong to trees. He cut through more grasses as they reached for him. Their mouths issued discordant cries, but t
hey fell without burning.
‘Runefather,’ Frethnir called, ‘is that the promise of honest battle we see?’ His tone was jocular, but Vrindum heard an undercurrent of concern. It had been present when Frethnir spoke to his father ever since the departure from Sibilatus, and had become clearer and more urgent during the endless crossing of the Voidfire.
There was no answer from Beregthor.
Instead, there was a cry from further back in the lines. An upheaval of flamer-corrupted grasses wrapped around both legs of a hearthguard berzerker. Blood streamed down his limbs and he fell into a conflagration. He cursed to the last as his flesh burned and his body changed, bones thrusting clacking tongues through muscle, eyes sprouting in his beard, wings unfolding on his back. ‘Brothers!’ he called at the end, and his voice was the only thing that was still duardin about him. His comrades answered his need, and ended his suffering, preserving his honour. Then, in rage, they set about slashing the cursed plain with even greater vigour. In the distance, the flamers danced and paid them no heed.
Another death. They were becoming more frequent. The movements of the land were hypnotic. Mistakes were easier and easier to make with every passing day.
Frethnir had turned around in his throne when he heard the shout. Now he met Vrindum’s gaze. Frethnir’s face was expressive in its pain. His features were thinner and longer than those of his brothers. Even his beard seemed more angular. A great scar ran from Frethnir’s forehead to his chin, earned when he had single-handedly slain two maggoths. Sigils of ur-gold ran along the mark, a sign of Frethnir’s honour and strength. At this moment, though, it seemed to be the division in his spirit. Loyalty and love fought with doubt.
Doubt. Frethnir had spoken it aloud. Bramnor, recoiling from the vast sky over the Voidfire, had been complaining since they reached the plain. Drethor, quieter than the other two runesons, had fallen into a silence he now rarely broke as the days had turned into weeks and supplies had run low. He fought on through the cursed grasses with a stoicism more grim than patient. Frethnir, though, had expressed concern about the quest at the start. He had argued with Beregthor, then accepted the runefather’s decision as final. After so long in the Voidfire, though, the doubts had returned, and grown more serious. They were clearly eating at Frethnir. The lack of answer from Beregthor did not help.
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