War storm, p.17
War Storm, page 17
‘No! No!’ screamed Ephryx in anguish. The warriors on the walls had been overwhelmed, and the lackeys of Sigmar were coming through the part of the wall transformed by the mutalith. They were pouring into the courtyard, destroying his life’s work without a thought for his efforts.
A billow of rain-filled air battered him in the face as Lord Maerac alighted on the parapet.
‘See, sorcerer! This is true Chaos! Not your pedantic constructions. The fortress is lost! Your own pet has let them in!’ Maerac was laughing, a hard mix of despair, anger, and glee.
‘Coward!’ screamed Ephryx. ‘I will not abandon my work!’
He turned upon the men on the walls and the metal plaza outside, sending gales of billowing fire into the ranks of his foes, transmuting Stormcast Eternals into all manner of hideous forms. A volley of bolts arced towards him. He waved a hand and they fizzed into nothingness even as his other throttled the Judicators that had fired them.
‘It is lost!’ repeated Maerac. ‘Flee.’
A terrible howl drew Ephryx’s attention to the courtyard. The mutalith slumped to the floor. Its vanquisher turned and raised his hammer at the mage in defiant challenge.
Ephryx fixed Maerac with a doleful stare.
‘What are you doing?’ demanded Maerac. ‘No, Ephryx!’ he said warningly. ‘Do not call upon such powers!’
The sorcerer raised his hands, all the while glaring at the lord defiantly. Cursing, Maerac urged his mount into the storm-wracked sky.
Ephryx chanted an arcane phrase three times. Attackers were approaching from the other side of the breached wall. A jagged bolt of lightning slammed into the fort’s central tower. The artefact within heard and responded, a secret signal only Ephryx could detect. The calling of the hammer to its master set his teeth hurting, but he would not stop and chanted the phrase over and over again.
Reality screamed. Ephryx channelled as much power as he dared, his soul chilling as he handled the dark energy.
The last syllables left his lips, and he nearly choked upon them. Angrily he drew upon the reservoirs of energy trapped in his fortress, enraged that they must be expended.
A circle of blackness expanded from the sorcerer, slaying every thing that it touched. Chaos warrior and Stormcast Eternal collapsed as the fortress discharged curling arcs of night-purple doom. The skulls clawed at the lives of the Stormcasts killed, but there were so many slain that the castle could not consume them all, and their essences raced home. The earth rebelled at this black work, shuddering in pain. His tower swayed, its walls cracking and revealing the golden light of the artefact within, but it was not enough to hold back the darkness Ephryx had unleashed. For a split second the sorcerer stared into the realms of death. Something ancient and dark gazed back at him with contempt.
The light returned. Ephryx sank to knees, dizzy. All around him were the dead. The Stormcast Eternals had disappeared, carried off by their lord. The ground was carpeted by the bodies of his men and Maerac’s followers.
A dry chuckle sounded behind him. Wearily, Ephryx raised his head.
‘Master,’ he said.
‘A clever gambit, mortal,’ said Kairos.
‘It was idiotic,’ said the second head, arching close to the sorcerer. It tilted to one side, its eye filling Ephryx’s vision.
‘A good play,’ disagreed the other. ‘Why would I want a dull follower?’
‘Perhaps I would,’ argued the second head.
The heads spoke together, the menace in Kairos’s words unmistakeable. ‘Now you have had your turn. Let us bring this to a close together.’
‘Yes, together,’ said one head.
‘That is what we always intended, no?’ asked the other.
‘Y-y-yes!’ said Ephryx. ‘Of course my lord! Why, I only intended to… There was no time… I had to act quickly, I…’
Kairos leaned heavily on his staff. ‘Tut tut tut,’ said the first head.
‘Do shut up, Ephryx,’ said the second.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Reforged
Memories bubbled and slipped from Thostos, a fleeting impression of darkness and snatching hands tearing at his spirit. He was moving fast and lost in the light. The pain was so great it overcame the universe. An ocean of agony, deeper than time. He could not recall his name. He remembered… Where? A land of giant beasts, a castle in a country considered civilised. A kind father, a good life.
He remembered its end. Blood and death and pain for those he loved.
He smelled the ruin of it, thick and cloying, and he gasped. No air came into his lungs, only energy, raw and crackling. He had no lungs. Something convulsed. There was no body. Was it his soul?
Caeran. Was that his name?
Something twitched in the stormlight, a zygote that split and divided rapidly.
A woman’s face. His mother? An aunt? He did not recognise them, but the sight of them brought the need for vengeance.
A man’s face, crowned with a circle of red gold. Dead. Consumed. He raged at the thought, and the need for revenge gripped him more tightly. In the wash of light, delicate bones rapidly thickened, became a hand bare of flesh, a hand that clenched. He felt muscles grow, the strands of their fibres wrapping around one another. More bones erupted from the stuff of magic, caging organs that inflated wetly. A skull crept over a newly sprouted brain.
The pain worsened.
There was another castle, where he had another name. A land of metal. A horned man.
So much pain! He thrashed, trailing streamers of raw nerves that sparked excruciatingly.
The process quickened, but in truth the duration could have been months or seconds. Thostos had no frame of reference for time, only the pain. All he knew was that the sequence of growth increased in pace. Skin, hair, teeth, nails. Or something like them, something that had their semblance, but that lacked their solidity.
Agony seized his skull as a new face grew over it, twin pits of pain where fresh eyes budded.
He could not bear it.
Time ceased. He was elsewhere. A castle of stone, hung with dreadful fruits. A castle of metal, bursting under the strain of stolen magic.
A castle that hid a great prize…
‘Thostos!’
His God-King called to him.
‘Thostos!’
His king.
‘Thostos Bladestorm!’
Thostos, was that his name? Yes. The name given to him by the God-King, the lord of light. Sigmar’s gift, a new name for a new life. Had there been another?
A man, a woman. A burning castle. Vengeance. Memories of that time slipped away, became blurred, and were lost to him forever.
He was Thostos. Thostos Bladestorm of the Celestial Vindicators. There was no other, not any longer. Guilt persisted, a leftover of another world, cool and unyielding as a diamond, that was all he had left.
Never again would he fail.
Another light replaced the first, softer, soul-cleansing. It rinsed him through and through, and he let out a sharp breath as the last vestiges of his pain slipped from him.
‘Stand, Thostos Bladestorm!’ Words of gentle thunder. The memory of the pain was wiped away.
The light dimmed, resolving itself into the shape of a great man, a god. Sigmar Heldenhammer, seated in the throne of Azyr. Thostos knew his face better than he knew his own. Tall and regal, majesty manifest, a man clad in the light of godhood. Thostos blinked. He held up his hand in wonder to eyes that smarted in their newness. His hand, armoured in its celestial turquoise, whole and unharmed.
‘We shall kneel no more,’ said Sigmar. He gestured, encouraging Thostos to rise.
The Lord-Celestant of the Bladestorms stood on legs that felt insubstantial, as if his armour were all that gave them shape. There was strength there; he did not shake or fall, but it did not feel like it was his. It was loaned to him from elsewhere. Or stolen.
‘Your Reforging is complete,’ said Sigmar.
Thostos recognised where he was: in the throne room of Sigmar, a hall suited to the God-King’s majesty. Others stood behind Thostos, lesser beings than Sigmar though great in their way, the Lord-Celestants of a dozen stormhosts.
How had he come to be there? He had no memory of entering this room, or of kneeling. He remembered… he remembered metal…
‘Now tell me of Chamon,’ prompted the God-King.
There was an eagerness to Sigmar. He was triumphant. What did he expect Thostos to say? What had he done?
Thostos swallowed. His throat felt different. His limbs buzzed with magic. What had happened to him?
‘There was…’ he began. His words sounded hollow in his ears. ‘There was a fortress of magic. We breached its walls, only to die in a burst of unlight that was fought by a greater light.’
Sigmar leaned forward. ‘Speak to me of this greater light.’
There was more, there was… death. Dark lands, a covetous presence thwarted. He had died. There was a chill in his heart that had not been there before. He had lost something. He remembered clawing, skeletal hands and shuddered.
‘Golden,’ said Thostos. He had to force the word out, like it was a part of himself that had to be chipped painfully free. ‘Not the bastard energy of Chaos. Violent, but pure.’
Sigmar tensed. The air of triumph intensified. He nodded, and though he looked at Thostos he saw into another time and place. ‘I remember it well,’ he said eventually.
He turned abruptly. ‘Lord Vandus!’
One of the others stepped forward. Thostos knew him. His memories of this place he retained, faded but clear, like tapestries whose colours have bled away with age. Hammerhand. Vandus Hammerhand. That was him, a fellow Lord-Celestant, and, and a… friend?
The Hammerhand stepped up to Thostos’s side.
‘Prepare thy warriors,’ commanded Sigmar. ‘That light is mine.’ He sank back into his throne and gripped the metal gryphons that made up each arm of his seat. ‘We have found Ghal Maraz.’
Thostos had done that. He remembered, as Sigmar spoke on.
Sigmar finished. The crowd of warriors roared. Some chanted his name. But he could not think.
He had found Sigmar’s greatest weapon, but in doing so he had lost himself.
PROLOGUE
The storm arrives
Virulent green mist rose from the damp soil of the Ghyrtract Fen, choking the air and all but blinding those who toiled within its reach. Lord Grelch, master of the Ghyrtribe, scooped an errant tendril of mist towards his disease-ravaged face with bloated paws, inhaling it. It burned pleasingly as it seeped into his lungs and blistered mouth. He gave a sigh of deep satisfaction.
‘Tastes like death,’ he murmured, to no one in particular.
Grelch sat midway up a slabbed pile of stone steps, which climbed upwards to the edge of a steep cliff. The steps ended at an arch shrouded in clinging vines, its capstones cracked and shot through with roots thicker around than his thigh. He shifted the long-hafted plague-axe lying across his lap and turned to eye the archway suspiciously. He had fought long and hard to lay claim to this patch of forest and the archway, but even now he wasn’t entirely sure why. Stories clustered fast and thick about those stones like flies.
The Grandfather’s eye was upon this place though – his great hand had stirred the nearby Rotwater Swamp, casting a dense and foetid fog across the fen, and this part of it in particular. The sky was as black as the boils on his backside, and the once-green leaves of the now-withered trees were covered in sticky, dripping moisture that was not dew. Fertile soil had been reduced to damp sludge by the tread of his warriors, and the waters of the rivers had grown stagnant and pleasingly foul. The men of the Ghyrtribe had long ago given themselves over to the tender mercies of Grandfather Nurgle, and they carried his blessings with them wherever they went. They warped the land about them into more pleasing shapes, reminiscent of the Grandfather’s garden.
Smacking his lips, he gazed down from his perch and watched as his slaves wriggled through the muck and mist, dragging heavy stones towards the points their overseers indicated with lash and blade. The stones were covered in carvings dedicated to the glory of Grandfather Nurgle. Each one was a prayer given physical form, and together they would form a silent chorus calling to the Grandfather in his garden, calling him and his children to the Greenglades. Grelch sighed in satisfaction. From where he sat, the slaves looked like maggots wriggling in spoiled meat.
‘Speaking of which,’ Grelch grunted, inspecting the mottled flesh of his forearm. The cut he’d received a few days earlier had sprouted squirming white shapes, which nibbled enthusiastically at his rotten flesh. He smiled indulgently.
‘Eat hearty, little ones. Soon you’ll be proper flies, and no mistake,’ he crooned as he playfully stirred the maggots with a finger. The wound ached, but it was a small price to pay. Grandfather Nurgle never gave a man more blessings than he could bear, sure as sure, and Grelch was happy to serve in even this smallest of ways. He sat back, feeling cheerful. Yes, he was happy to serve. And why not? After all, it was an honour to be here.
The ragged banners of the blessed and flyblown jutted from every horizon, even as noisome fogs and vast clouds of insects swarmed across the land. The drone of a billion flies accompanied the efforts of Grandfather’s own – the Glottkin, Torglug the Despised, Gutrot Spume, and the mangy Beastlord Gluhak, amongst others – as they strove to bring the bilious blessings of the garden to Ghyran. That wasn’t even taking into account the scuttling servants of the Horned Rat, where they crouched in the Rotwater Blight.
And Grelch as well, most powerful of those born here, in these filthy climes, Grelch thought.
Let the others, like that nitwit Kraderblob or brutes like Torglug and Gutrot Spume, scramble about in the filthy Greenglades, hunting the witch Alarielle and getting themselves ambushed by Nurgle alone knew what. Grandfather had sent three captains to find her, for without her there could be no lasting victory for Nurgle.
He flexed his wounded arm, and remembered the talon-like branch, whipping forward faster than his rheumy eyes could follow to lay open his flesh to the pitted bone. It hadn’t hurt; his sense of pain had been one of his first offerings to the Grandfather. He remembered too the fierce green hatred burning in the eyes of the monstrous bark-creature as it had smashed him back on his heels, before he’d driven the rusty edge of his axe into its creaking maw. They’d used what was left of it and its fellows for kindling the witchfires that now burned about Ghyrtract Fen, providing an eerie light for the slaves to work by.
Let’s see Spume do that, the kraken-bellied oaf, Grelch thought.
A baleful drone suddenly echoed through the trees, causing the foetid air to quiver like a frightened animal. Grelch’s eyes popped open and he turned, all thoughts of gardens forgotten. It was the Dirgehorn, originally hewn from the skull of the great plague-beast Brondtos by Beastlord Gluhak, the Crusted Blade – a feat it never stopped barking about. The Dirgehorn had been hollowed out and consecrated to Grandfather, and now sat atop Profane Tor. Its whining call, sluggish and flat, could be heard even in the Grandfather’s garden.
Someone somewhere in the vast woodlands that stretched from the Shimmertarn to Ghyrtract Fen had found some sign of the radiant queen, Alarielle. Like hounds on the scent, the other disparate warbands, searching for places such as this archway, would follow the winding echo of the Dirgehorn to wherever it led.
At the same moment, the sky darkened, grey turning to black. The snap of whips slowed and fell silent as slaves and slavers alike found their eyes drawn upwards to the roiling clouds. Grelch felt his stomach lurch, and not in the usual pleasing fashion. A moment later, the air was split by a sound greater even than the Dirgehorn – a crack of thunder which reverberated through the trees, and even his bones, deafening him.
He slapped his hands to his ears, teeth gritted against the pain of it. Instinctively he cast his gaze up and saw the black sky rupture, torn apart by fangs of crackling azure light. Bolts of twin-tailed lightning struck the ground again and again, splitting the air and searing the fog away. The ground bucked and heaved, and his warriors and slaves were tossed about like sparks from an anvil as the hammer struck. Trees burst into flame and sluggish rivulets of mud were burned dry. The air tasted of iron and clean winds, and Grelch gagged at the stink of it.
As the smoke cleared, he saw rank upon rank of armoured warriors standing where each sky-borne bolt had struck. Crackling chains of lightning crawled across their masks and the heads of the great warhammers they carried. It danced along the rims of their shields and illuminated the awful sigils which marked their armour.
He felt as if something fearful had come, fiercer even than the bark-beasts, and he shoved himself to his feet, snatching up his helm from where it sat on the steps beside him. His heart thudded in his chest as he began to descend. Few dared defy the Ghyrtribe since he’d earned Grandfather’s favour, and fewer still had ever mustered the courage to attack them head on. Whoever they were, they would be good sport, if nothing else.
‘And they’re all ours, my warriors,’ he roared. ‘To battle!’
His warriors roared in reply and hurled themselves towards the interlopers, scattering untrampled slaves aside. His chosen warriors, his sons and cousins and brothers, putrid blightkings all, led the way towards the centre of the invaders’ battle line. Grelch’s heart swelled as the battle was joined. This was the way it was supposed to be. The newcomers had numbers on their side, but his warriors were swollen with the strength of Nurgle.
