by C. L. Werner
While the rest of the black ark fought for their lives, the Star Spire remained inactive. Malus would have an answer for such treachery.
‘We have to get to Eldire,’ Malus told Silar.
The retainer scowled as the first of the zombies reached the bridge and stirred into hideous animation. He managed to cut the chain binding one of them before it became fully active, but then was forced to retreat as the rest slashed at him with their weapons. ‘I fear that won’t be easy, my lord.’
Snarling, Malus sent the head of a drowned pirate hurtling from the bridge. ‘Then we make it easy,’ he vowed, pressing home his attack and breaking the umbilical feeding energy into the headless body.
A great shadow fell across Malus as he engaged another of the corpse-puppets. The drachau had only a second to dive aside before the gigantic paw of the giant came smashing down. The corpse he’d been fighting was obliterated by that huge hand. The whole bridge shook from the impact, chips of stone cascading down into the street below. The tendril-like fingers of the hand snaked about, squirming and oozing in every direction. Malus felt his gorge rise at the boneless, sinuous way the digits moved. Each was tipped not with a nail or claw, but a rounded leech-like mouth. He could see shreds of meat and armour caught in some of those mouths.
‘You’ll not feast on me!’ Malus roared as one of the tendrils slithered towards him. The warpsword slashed across the finger, all but severing it. Wide as a man’s body, the thing squirmed back, writhing and undulating. Other fingers came slithering around the bridge, some crawling up from beneath the span, to investigate the injury. Six gigantic tendrils turned upon Malus, their mouths uttering obscene ululations as they whipped out at him.
The warpsword severed one of the fingers, sending its wriggling hideousness into the crowd of terrified slaves below. Then the drachau was forced to retreat before the nest of abominable tentacles. It was all he could do to fend off the slobbering mouths and with each breath, the terror that Tz’arkan would immobilise him again grew.
Tremendous roars rang out from the end of the bridge. Malus was able to look past the nest of tentacles threatening him to see two enormous reptiles lumbering out onto the bridge. A company of beastmasters were goading them forwards with long spears and torches. Bigger than small whales, the reptiles stomped forwards on great clawed legs, their long bladed tails lashing angrily behind them. Bodies armoured in thick layers of scale, they ploughed through the corpse-puppets, snapping at them with their fanged maws. Each of the beasts boasted half a dozen heads, each one resting on a long, serpentine neck. There was no fear in their dull yellow eyes as they charged towards the titan’s hand, only the limitless savagery of the most fearsome creatures ever bred by the beastmasters of Clar Karond: the war hydras.
Malus knew these beasts. He’d purchased them himself to augment the armies of Hag Graef, paying a small fortune to secure the biggest, most ferocious hydras ever to emerge from Clar Karond. He was still bitter over such squandered wealth. Only a few months after Griselfang and Snarclaw had been delivered to Hag Graef, the barbarian invasions and daemonic incursions had started. Clar Karond became a city under siege, desperate to sell anything and everything at any price just to bring more warriors to her defence.
Now, however, the colossal war hydras were showing their value. As they lumbered towards the titan’s hand, Snarclaw reared its six heads. When it thrust them forwards once more, gouts of flame exploded from each maw, searing across the putrid meat before them. Griselfang roared, pushing past the other reptile in order to worry at the steaming flesh of the huge hand.
The tendrils that had a moment before been menacing Malus whipped back around, striking instead at Griselfang. The hydra bit back at the ropy fingers. Malus saw the hydra pull one of the wormy tentacles loose, as though uprooting a tree. The tendrils responded by wrapping around one of the reptile’s necks and squeezing it mercilessly. Eventually the crushing pressure choked all life from the head. The tendrils withdrew, letting it flop lifelessly at the hydra’s side. But even as life ebbed from the head, hideous new life coursed through Griselfang’s frame. The dead neck and head burst, splashing gore across the bridge. Where the mangled flesh had been, two smaller heads now writhed, each snapping at the charred hand with vengeful ferocity.
Before the combined might of the two war hydras, the gigantic hand withdrew, retreating upwards. Bolts from repeater crossbows stabbed into the grotesque extremity, loosed by hundreds of Hag Graef’s soldiers and the black ark’s warriors. Nearer at hand, Malus saw a long spear hurled up at the hand to embed itself in the thing’s palm. He locked eyes with the caster of that spear. The timely arrival of his war hydras was explained: Vincirix Quickdeath, making certain nothing dire could befall her lover and benefactor. The drachau started to walk towards her…
…Vincirix, Silar, the war hydras, the bridge itself vanished before Malus’s eyes. One instant they were there, the next they were gone. Replacing them was a cold, dark room. Celestial shapes shone overhead, picked out in diamond and pearl with lines of platinum running between them to form the signs of the Cytharai and the Cadai. A great pattern glowed upon the floor beneath his feet, crushed rubies forming the lines of the Pantheonic Mandala. Upon the symbol designating each god and goddess, a disembodied heart lay in a pool of blood, the organs pulsing with impossible life. Only at the centre of the mandala, where the emblem of Khaine was depicted in bloodstone, was there no heart. Instead, a young elf boy stood, his body swaying in the grip of some hypnotic cadence.
Malus looked away from the esoteric scene, gazing instead at the people gathered around the edge of the mandala: Lady Eldire and the cabal of sorceresses she had gathered together. Somehow, he had been transported inside the Star Spire!
Eldire and the others stood in a wide circle, their hands linked. Crackling ribbons of aethyric energy played between them, provoking frost to form against their skin. Several of the sorceresses shuddered and shivered from something far more intense than the cold; two of them looked as though they had been shrivelled into mere husks, kept standing only by the hands of the druchii at either side of them.
There was only one gap in the circle. As Malus took stock of his surroundings, he saw Drusala waiting for him. Her expression was grave as she confronted the drachau. ‘Your army will never reach Ulthuan if you do not protect this circle,’ she warned him. ‘The sea daemon will drown the Eternal Malediction. Our only hope for survival is to give it other prey.’
Malus looked over at his mother, but if Eldire was even aware of his presence, she gave no sign. ‘How?’ he demanded, returning his attention to Drusala. ‘How will you save my army?’
Drusala indicated the young elf standing at the core of the mandala. ‘A final offering to fuel the invocation,’ she said. ‘That is all you need to know. You must protect us until the ritual is finished.’
‘Protect you from who? That giant?’ Malus scoffed.
At a gesture from the sorceress, a door swung open at the end of the room, letting in a thin sliver of daylight. ‘Stop the ones coming up the stair. If they reach this place, we are all finished.’ She smiled, but it was a bitter, joyless look. ‘My own precautions are not enough. Lady Eldire saw that much in her divinations.’
Drusala did not linger to explain more, but quickly returned to the circle, seizing the hands of the witches at either side of the gap. Malus wasn’t sure if it was his imagination, but a shadowy knife seemed to appear beside the hypnotised youth.
Sorcery! He didn’t understand how such things worked and even less did he understand the strange price demanded by magic. It was enough that such forces could be harnessed and put to use. If whatever Eldire and Drusala were conjuring could save them from the titan, he would play his part to bring such magic about.
Grimly, Malus stalked through the door. Somehow he wasn’t surprised when it slid shut behind him. He was standing on a landing high upon the Star Spire. Below hi
m, he could see the whole of the black ark. From this vantage, he could appreciate the gargantuan size of the giant and the havoc it was inflicting upon the Eternal Malediction. An entire tower had been ripped free, thrown into the sea by the raging behemoth. The same sorcery that supported the black ark kept the tower afloat, broken as it was. Strange sea scavengers darted about the shattered tower, picking bodies from the rubble.
Closer at hand, Malus could see the giant’s head. Several clusters of eye-stalks stared back at him. There was no mistaking the abomination’s hungry interest as it redoubled its efforts to batter a path through bridges now swarming with bowmen and war machines. He could feel Tz’arkan stir deep inside him, but the daemon at least had sense enough not to speak and goad the giant to greater effort.
Malus forced himself to tear his eyes from the behemoth to the stair leading down into Fleetmaster Hadrith’s tower. At the edge of the stair, he saw a lone warrior standing guard. The elf had a sinister, eerie air about him, his black armour looking as though it had been hacked from a slab of malachite. His helm was tall, moulded to look like a mass of writhing serpents. He reminded Malus of a medusa, though even those terrible creatures would have had more vibrancy about them than this stony sentinel.
Beyond the guard, Malus saw a troop of corsairs rushing up the stair. At their head was Fleetmaster Hadrith, his sea-dragon cloak and cephalopod-styled armour distinct among that of his retinue. As they saw him, a cry of utter hate welled up from the corsairs. From their tone, Malus could guess that all of them had lost family to make room for Hag Graef’s army.
‘The fleetmaster looks upset,’ Malus told the guard. He expected some kind of response, but all he got was the same stony silence. He hoped that the elf was better at fighting than he was at conversation.
The corsairs halted as they neared the top of the stair. Hadrith stepped forwards, pointing angrily at Malus. ‘Stand aside, Darkblade. My business is with that scheming witch Drusala and your mother.’
‘If you haven’t noticed, there’s a giant daemon ripping apart your black ark,’ Malus said. ‘I think you have bigger problems.’
Hadrith waved his sword at the drachau. ‘They took my son, Darkblade. What does the black ark mean if I lose my legacy to keep it? Stand aside, and I will spare you.’
Malus shook his head. ‘You seem to forget who is in command here.’
An animalistic snarl rasped through the vent in Hadrith’s helm. ‘Kill them!’ The corsairs charged forwards at the fleetmaster’s command.
What followed was a whirl of blades and bloodshed. Malus caught his first foe just as the warrior was thrusting his halberd at the drachau. The warpsword slashed through the haft of the weapon and the elbow of the arm behind it. The crippled elf shrieked as blood jetted from the stump of his arm. Malus shouted his own war-cry and kicked the mangled corsair down the stair, tripping up the pirate behind him and leaving the elf easy prey for a butchering sweep of the warpsword.
Beside him, the silent guard played his own deadly swordsmanship. Elves crippled by his blade fell screaming from the stair, hurtling to their destruction hundreds of feet below. The guard never uttered a sound, plying his gruesome art with the merciless precision of a machine. Even when a corsair’s axe managed to slash his thigh, the guard didn’t cry out but simply returned the hurt with a backhanded slash that opened his attacker’s throat.
Fighting from the high ground, Malus and the guard held the corsairs at disadvantage. Hadrith’s concern for his legacy had provoked the fleetmaster to act rashly, to ignore the development of a more cunning strategy. He’d depended too much on numbers and force of arms, perhaps upon charms and talismans to ward away sorcery. He hadn’t planned on warriors of such quality defending the spire.
Suddenly, the entire ark shook, a great tremor rolling through it, the quaking sending more corsairs hurtling from the stair. A bright flash in the sky blinded Malus, causing him to stumble back. Almost at once, Hadrith was flying at him, the fleetmaster’s sword upraised. Malus caught Hadrith on the warpsword’s point, the enchanted blade ripping through his breastplate and the ribcage behind it.
Spitting blood, Hadrith thrust himself along the impaling blade, trying to bring his own sword slashing across Malus’s neck. ‘They… killed…’
Malus didn’t let the fleetmaster finish. With a twist of his sword, he cut the noble in two, the severed halves rolling obscenely down the gore-slick stair. The few corsairs left standing turned and fled as they saw their leader cut down.
‘I’ll set Vincirix and her knights to finding them,’ Malus said as he watched the corsairs flee. ‘They won’t be able to hide for long.’ Again, his words brought no reaction from the silent guard. The sinister warrior simply turned and marched back to his place at the head of the stairs. Malus felt a chill crawl across his flesh. Even the corpse-puppets had been more lively than his late comrade-in-arms.
Thinking of the giant sea daemon, Malus cast his eyes downwards. He was shocked to find no trace of the abomination. The destruction it had wrought was all too visible, but the thing itself was gone. Vanished as completely as if the sky had swallowed it up. He could see equally shocked elves in the windows of the towers and on the bridges. He followed the pointing hands of several druchii. Far across the waves, another black ark floated upon the sea. That vessel was now listing to port, caught in the vicious embrace of the sea daemon.
Icy fingers played down Malus’s spine as he considered the wrongness of what he was seeing, the uncanny magnitude of the magic his mother and the others had invoked. The shudder and the flash, that had been the mark of Lady Eldire’s great spell. Hadrith had known that, recognised it as the sign that his son had been rendered up as the final sacrifice.
‘The daemon has been given new prey.’ Malus looked up to see Drusala standing at the head of the stairs, one arm draped teasingly across the blood-soaked shoulder of the silent guard. She smiled coyly. ‘That is the Relentless Retribution. The ritual we cast allowed us to switch places with her in much the same way that I was able to transport you from the foot of the spire to the top. Only on a much grander scale. Six of the circle were drained completely by the spell.’
‘My mother?’ Malus asked.
Drusala drew back one of her raven locks, tucking it behind her ear. ‘She was not one of the six. The experience has wearied her, but she will recover.’ As though irritated by the question, she pointed again to the black ark. The giant was starting to pull it under, dragging it down into the depths. ‘I believe Lady Khyra was on that vessel. We determined that she was behind the attempt on your life. I thought you would be happy to know she won’t be able to do it again.’
‘Then I will be able to focus on other threats,’ Malus said, just the most subtle edge of menace underlying his words.
‘Just be certain who is enemy and who is ally,’ Drusala advised him. Stroking the shoulder of the guard, she beckoned the warrior to follow her back inside the spire. ‘Come, Absaloth. The danger is past.’
Malus watched them disappear into the Star Spire, then turned to watch as the sea daemon finished sinking the Relentless Retribution. The deaths of thousands didn’t move him; he’d seen massacres on a such scale before. It was the thought that such a fate could so easily have been his that made Malus sombre.
Be careful of that witch.
‘I intend to,’ Malus growled at the daemon inside his head, annoyed by Tz’arkan’s renewed intrusion. Especially to state something he already knew.
She is more dangerous than you think, Darkblade. She can see me.
She knows I’m inside you.
SEVEN
The ragged coastline of Ulthuan stretched away along the eastern horizon, shores so abrupt they might have been hewn by one of Addaioth’s crooked swords. Here and there a crag of crumbling rock thrust itself up from the pounding waves, rotten fingers of stone that might once have been hills or mountains. At the
height of the Great Sundering, when the treacherous followers of the false king Caledor sought to vanquish the faithful subjects of Malekith, the most powerful magic known to elves wrought destruction upon the realms of Nagarythe and Tiranoc.
Tidal waves a thousand feet high swept over the lands, drowning thousands, fouling the once lush countryside, obliterating the gleaming cities and soaring towers. Much of Tiranoc was sheared from the rest of Ulthuan, sent sliding into the sea. Beneath the waves, the streets of drowned cities could yet be seen, fish swimming through the weed-wrapped columns of palaces and temples.
Greatest of these sunken ruins was Tor Anroc, a place yet haunted by the ghosts of those who perished in the cataclysm. Even druchii invasion fleets gave Tor Anroc a wide berth, many of the corsairs claiming that sailing over any part of the drowned city would cause the sea god Mathlann to forsake their fleets.
As he studied the coast, Malus felt only contempt for the religious superstition of the corsairs. Mathlann had done nothing to help them against the great sea daemon that had tried to sink the Eternal Malediction. For the Lord of the Deeps, Mathlann had been noticeably reluctant to draw the creature back into the depths. If not for the sorcery of Eldire and Drusala, their voyage would have ended in disaster long before they came within spitting distance of Tor Anroc and the curse of its ghosts.
The real threat posed by Tor Anroc lay in that part of the city which the asur had rebuilt, a naval fortress that guarded the approaches to the western shore and whose artillery loosed pots of alchemical fire so fierce even the sea couldn’t extinguish the flames. Flotillas of small, sleek galleys were anchored in the fortified harbour, ready to set sail at a moment’s notice to harry any invader. The mages of Tiranoc were even known to conjure mighty merwyrms from the waters that had swallowed their old lands, and the great sea serpents were easily capable of crushing a ship in their coils, a menace to any raider not embarked on a helldrake or black ark.