GALLOGAST
The warpstone light turned Brevin’s blood black, and it ran like a liquid shadow down the chains fixed around the Lord-Ordinator’s neck. He hung in the crude, splintered frame and watched it flow link by link with his eye and wondered if he would ever bleed to death.
It was a grim thing to wish for, but Brevin was being gutted spiritually by the skaven’s magic and he couldn’t stop it, couldn’t fight it. There was nothing but defeat, nothing but this vast emptiness inside him that made his righteous anger a distant thing, one tiny red star in a vast sky of black shot with green…
‘No.’ Skein’s whisper hissed through the chamber. ‘No.’
Brevin blinked, yanked from the terrible spiral of his thoughts by the sound. There was something in the Grey Seer’s denial. Anger, hate. Fear. Yes, fear. Skein crouched quivering before the warpstone, his claws twitching in the air as if to grab something, to rend and destroy it.
‘Light. Light that lies. The dull dark ones have brought more. More cursed light!’
To one side, Lisstis stirred, the eyeless assassin shifting his head as if he were hunting for the source of his master’s anger. On the far side of the chamber, Varus looked up from his pile of rags in one of the niches. His round ears were laid back, flat to his spotted skull, and he hissed a tiny ‘Yes?’
‘No,’ Skein growled. ‘Kill. Kill the light and break the wall. Kill!’ The Grey Seer’s voice rose to almost a shout, and from the shadows the other assassins appeared, moving silently into the room.
Hissing ‘shhhh’ as Skein ignored them, raging.
‘Shadows take, dark devour! Devour the light! Varus!’
The spotted skaven slunk from his filthy pile, creeping towards Skein hesitantly. Skein hissed, and at the sound, Lisstis lunged over and grabbed the smaller skaven, dragging him to his yellow-robed master.
‘We must add strength. Strength in shadows.’ Skein laid his hands on the variegated copper triangle in the air between the stone and Brevin, and Lisstis shoved Varus forward until he was on the other side. But Varus hesitated, snarling in fear, until Lisstis set the bladed tip of his chain whip against the corner of the spotted skaven’s eye. With a sound that was part snarl, part whine, Varus reached up and took the triangle in his claws too.
Brevin could feel their magic in him, curled into his soul the way the smoke had gone into his lungs. But the fear in the Grey Seer’s voice had started to rekindle his rage. To give him some tiny portion of hope. Something was happening. Something that Skein feared.
And Brevin wanted to see the skaven afraid. He wanted that very, very much.
The other eyeless skaven leaned in close, lips drawing back from yellow teeth as they tasted the air. Clan Sisseris crouched, sensing some threat to their master that their chain whips couldn’t touch. Brevin watched with them, and then he felt something like fire. A thin thread of it, whispering through the hollow in his soul until it touched that spark of anger. And then it exploded.
Light filled him. Heat filled him. Fire. It poured into him and filled the hole that Skein’s magic had corroded through his soul. Filled it, and then it flowed away, gone. The hole was still there, but its edges were cauterised, not healed but scarred over, and in the centre of the space floated that spark of anger. It was divine rage, but it was something else too. It was his connection to the Heart, returned. The emberstone heat of that magic, glowing in him again. It hurt. Gods, it hurt, worse than ever. They had harmed the Halt again, but the wall still stood. Something had stopped his shadow, stopped their magic.
He heard Skein’s hiss, heard Varus yowl like a kicked animal. The light inside Brevin had faded, but now there was light in front of him, something other than the ugly green glow of the warpstone. The copper triangle that hung in the air had lost the green sheen that stretched across its middle, and now the copper sides were glowing with heat. Brevin could smell the stench of searing flesh, Varus and Skein’s hands burning as they gripped the hot metal, shuddering and hissing but unable to let go. Brevin’s lips stretched, and he bared a vicious smile as he watched them suffer.
Then Lisstis pulled Skein away, breaking the Grey Seer’s grip and tearing him from the triangle. The skaven leader snapped at his rescuer, ripping open the eyeless assassin’s arm, but Lisstis simply let him go and bowed. Skein shuddered, holding his hands in front of him. Then he snarled, and Lisstis turned and slapped Varus away from the glowing triangle with his tail. The smaller skaven rolled across the floor, coming to a stop in a crumpled heap. His claw hands were seared things covered in blisters that wept yellow fluid onto the floor below him, and he curled around them, saying ‘yes, yes,’ his thin voice a whisper of agony.
Not enough. It wasn’t nearly enough, but the pain of his tormentors gave Brevin strength. The triangle’s glow brightened until it was incandescent, heat rolling off it, and then the centre of each side melted through. With a series of clangs the corners fell, hitting the basalt floor around a puddle of steaming molten copper that gleamed like blood in the green light.
Brevin tore his eyes from the broken pieces of the hateful instrument to look over his shoulder. His shadow was there, dull and dark, but there was no gleam of poisonous green within it. It was just a shadow. On the floor at its feet, the flawed warpstone pendant lay, the copper necklace it was attached to discoloured from heat.
‘Something beat you,’ Brevin said, his voice harsh from disuse. ‘They beat you. Dissolved your magic and cleansed my shadow.’
Skein was licking his burned hands, his long tongue running over the blisters. But he stopped when Brevin spoke. His hands twitched as if they would scoop his thumb claws from his sleeve, but instead he shuddered in pain.
‘Your warlord is coming, and you failed,’ Brevin said. ‘The Halt still stands, and I hope Reekbite skins your eyeless hide from you before he dies.’ It was a goad, deliberate and enjoyable. Brevin still couldn’t break the chains that held him, but he dreamed of catching the Grey Seer in the lightning bolt that would fall to claim his body if the skaven killed him. But Skein just hissed and Brevin’s guards came for him, each taking a chain and jerking him away into the dark.
They came for him again the next night.
He’d spent the day in his dark cell, listening, waiting. The ruins were always quiet, Clan Sisseris keeping to its silence, but there were rhythms Brevin had grown used to, the distant sounds of things that might have been sparring, feeding, moving. They were different that day. There was more noise, more movement. As if the Sisseris were preparing for something. The arrival of Reekbite? Or something else?
Stormcast Eternals? They were the only ones with the power, the purpose, to foil Skein’s magic. Could they have come here, to smash Skein and his forces? To bring him home?
That hope filled Brevin and troubled him. Despite everything, he had the tattered remnants of his pride. Skein had lured him out here and then used him to attack the very thing he had been trying to defend. It was brutally humiliating, contemplating how thoroughly he’d been beaten. But mixed with that humiliation was a burning anger, which let him push aside his despair, let him embrace his pain instead of being crushed by it.
When the guards came for him that night, he walked easily to the candelarium with them, filled with the strength of that anger, coiled and waiting for its chance to explode.
Skein’s clawed hands were wrapped in yellow bandages, but the hooks were back on his thumbs, gleaming in the green light as he stalked in a silent circle around the chunk of warpstone. Around his neck he wore the warpstone pendant, its yellow flaw like a slitted pupil. The puddles of molten copper had solidified on the floor, but the corner pieces of the triangle had moved. They were laid out on the floor on one side of the chamber, where Varus Hish and one of the assassins of Clan Sisseris crouched over them. The eyeless skaven was connecting them together again, using lengths of copper wire and human bones. Varus watched the other skaven with eyes filmed with pain, his ruined hands held out in front of him. They’d not been wrapped, and they seeped an ugly yellow-brown fluid from the burns that covered them. That fluid pattered across the floor when Varus reached out, hissing, correcting the way the Sisseris had been winding the wire. The other skaven hissed back, but changed the way it was joining wire to bone to copper rod, and Varus muttered, ‘Yes.’
‘Your magic is not mine,’ the Lord-Ordinator rasped, his voice barely above a whisper. ‘The only thing I know about it is that it is poisonous and corrupt. But whatever you’re trying…’ His one eye shifted from Varus to Skein, who had stopped his pacing and turned towards Brevin, the yellow threads over his empty eye sockets gleaming like worms burrowing in the Grey Seer’s flesh. ‘It looks like desperation.’
‘Shhh,’ the Sisseris hissed, but Skein moved closer, the hooks on his thumbs shining.
‘It burns,’ the Grey Seer said. ‘Burns in you. The Heart.’
‘The Heart burns and the Halt stands,’ Brevin said. ‘You couldn’t use me to tear down the Halt’s magic. You failed, and now the army that’s coming will find itself trapped.’ He smiled, not knowing if Skein could sense it and not really caring. ‘They’ll die there. I don’t care how many you have, it’s not enough. Your bodies will pile against the base of the Halt in drifts. You failed, Skein. The Stormcasts stopped you.’
‘Storm-cursed,’ Skein whispered. He stood out of reach, but Brevin could still catch the burnt-flesh stink and the stench of whatever awful medicine soaked the bandages that covered the skaven’s hands. ‘They brought light. Light lies.’
‘Light burns,’ Brevin said, and Skein lunged forward, the curved razors on his thumbs rising. Brevin was coiled, waiting, and his anger made him move like a whip cracking. He caught the Grey Seer by the throat and started to clench his fist, even as the curved claws sank into his arm. They tore through skin and muscle, but they were too small to go deep enough to stop him from crushing out the skaven’s life.
Then another blade struck him.
The thin dagger-point end of Lisstis’ chain whip slammed into his elbow, sinking into the hollow between upper and lower arm. Brevin ignored the pain of it, keeping his grip, straining to crush the Grey Seer’s windpipe. But Lisstis snapped the chain, and the blade in his arm tore at him. Brevin’s fingers spasmed open, the muscles severed, and–
And pain washed through him, exploding from his chest. Pain that made him stagger and choke on the collar around his neck, made him let go of Skein.
‘Light.’
Brevin shook his head, the pain easing, like a beast relaxing its jaws around him. He was on his knees, the guards holding his chains tight. Lisstis clung to his back, and he could feel the point of a blade pressed against the corner of his remaining eye.
‘Light,’ Skein repeated, his grating whisper harsher now. ‘It lies. You think it freed you? Still mine. Mine, storm-cursed. Will use you to fulfil my bargain. Wall will fall.’
Across the room, the assassin working with Varus Hish stood. In his hands he held a new triangle. It was much smaller, made of the three corners of the original joined now by raw red copper wiring and lengths of bone. At each corner of the triangle was a spike of sharp iron. It was crude and ugly, but it glinted ominously in the light of the warpstone. Varus was staring at his burned hands, lips pulled back from his teeth, but when the assassin stood he raised his head and looked to Skein.
‘Yes,’ the smaller skaven said, voice filled with pain and resentment.
‘You want my shadow?’ Brevin said, his deep voice a threat as he watched the skaven assassin approach with the spiked triangle. ‘Let me stand. I’ll–’
A sound echoed through the dark tunnels, a thin whistle that made every Sisseris skaven snap their head around to stare at the empty door.
‘Storm-cursed. Cursed men,’ hissed Skein. ‘Slow them. Stop them. Loose the childe swarm. Bring the darkness. Now!’
The Sisseris poured from the room, dark bodies slipping past each other like a flood of black water out the door into the tunnel beyond. Then there were only the guards holding Brevin’s chains, Lisstis, still clinging to his back with the blade of his chain whip pressed against the corner of his eye, Varus, and the Grey Seer.
‘They’re coming for you,’ Brevin said. ‘And they’re going to hang your hide from the Halt.’
‘Coming for you,’ Skein hissed. ‘You, wall keeper. To bring you back into light.’ The assassin that had been holding the crude construct Varus made had gone with the others, leaving the copper and bone thing on the stone floor at Skein’s feet, and the Grey Seer picked it up, running his hands over the spikes projecting from its corners. ‘Light is coming to save you. Light is a lie.’ Skein’s ears folded back and he raised his head. He crouched before Brevin, his yellow robes pooling across the stone, like a predator gathering itself to spring, and the flawed green warpstone around his neck gleamed. ‘Lies. I will show you.’
Then Lisstis drove the point of his blade behind Brevin’s remaining eye.
Another shock of pain, but worse was the world vanishing around him. Brevin thrashed, jerking on the chains that held him. He could feel one of them give, the guards holding it losing their grip and stumbling forward. Brevin kicked, and his foot cracked ribs. Then the pain in his chest grew again, burning through him. Too much for his anger, it left him trapped in agony until it finally receded and he was lying on his back on the floor, furry bodies pinning his arms and legs, a barbed chain wrapped around his neck. Holding him down.
‘Storm-cursed. Listen,’ Skein hissed somewhere above him. ‘Listen to the dark. It holds all the truth. It holds everything.’
‘Listen to me, unclean thing,’ Brevin snarled. ‘The chosen of Sigmar will tear open your eyelids and pour fire into your skull, and that’s all the truth you need.’
‘Shhh,’ Skein said, and the Grey Seer was close, his stinking breath hot on Brevin’s skin.
Brevin moved, trying to slam his head up into the skaven, but the barbs on the chain around his neck dug in and held him back. Then he felt two more points against the front of his neck, above the chain and near his voice box.
‘Damn you,’ he growled, the best last words he could think of, and then the points sank in.
Razor sharp, they went deep, curved hooks sliding around his vocal cords. Then Skein jerked his thumbs back, and the cords slit and popped, flying apart in Brevin’s throat. He choked, feeling blood splatter into his windpipe, and wondered if he would die, drowning in his own blood. But Skein had the skill of a surgeon with his blades. He took Brevin’s voice, but not his life, and Brevin felt despair clawing through his rage again.
Then a scrap of sound found him in his darkness. A shout thinned by distance and stone, but it made it into his head, and his soul.
‘For Sigmar! Forward! Bring hope, when hope is dying!’
Hope, when hope is dying. They’d sent the Ruination Chamber. The last hope. The strongest, and the cursed.
‘Death comes. Dark comes. You hear. Hear and feel hope.’ Skein had pulled back. There was a sound, a clink and clatter of metal on bone. The Grey Seer had the triangle Varus had made. ‘You want light, and lies. Lies, hope. Hope, lies. All the same. I will show you. I will make you know.’
Brevin felt the skaven holding him tighten their grip, and then a trio of blades slammed into his chest. They punched into the flesh around his heart, grating off his ribs. A feeling hit him, the hollow, weak feeling that had swept through him when Skein and Varus had taken his shadow, but it didn’t take away the fire in his chest, the pain. It mixed with them instead, became a sickening, spinning sensation. It felt like he was being broken, every bone shattered as he was folded in towards his centre, towards the hole that had replaced his heart, and he was being twisted inside out and pulled through it.
It was all pain and vertigo, and then the darkness before him split open with poisonous green light.
Eyes. Vast eyes staring down at him, filled with hate. And then there was Skein’s voice, cutting through it all.
‘The dark, storm-cursed. Listen. Listen. It will teach you truth. It will teach you despair.’