She was a witch-aelf of Khailebron, a Daughter of Khaine, and she slid through the night like steel through velvet – silent, lethal and true. The great fortress city of Greywater Fastness was intermittently dark and subdued, though never entirely, for even this late there was business to be done and perimeters to be walked. The great forge complexes run by the wealthiest duardin families operated day and night, and now they lit up the heavy smoke hanging over the city, casting a sulphurous yellow glow over rooftops and along streets.

The air was acrid, heavy with soot and hot metal, rent by the deep-throated scream-hisses of quenching steel. Yet despite the Greycaps’ vigilance and the hellish glow from the forges, no one saw the aelf pass, for she was Trisethni the Unseen, and the title was no mere posturing.

Lord Rygo’s mansion sat high upon the central hill of the city, where the breezes did much to carry the worst of the smoke away. Here were situated the most expensive properties in the Fastness, exclusively occupied by merchant lords, nobles, and members of the Council of the Forge or the Grand Conclave.

Trisethni’s disdain did not show on her cold, beautiful features, though it burned hot within her. These people worshipped glory and wealth, comfort and reputation, when they should worship the gods who kept them safe from the Forces of Chaos; the gods who blessed them with the resources and knowledge needed to manufacture their weapons and black powder. Instead, they were enamoured of their own skill, blinded by greed and arrogance and the bright flash of gold coins.

Footsteps sounded up ahead and the aelf stilled in a shadow as black as spilt ink. Her silver-blonde hair was muted with charcoal, her boots, trousers and tunic in shades of grey and deep blue. She splayed a gloved hand across her face to break up its outline lest forge-light or moonlight should glint upon her. The sentries marched past, silent and alert – but neither silent enough nor alert enough to spot her. Trisethni watched them go, and then slipped back onto the road and increased her pace. She didn’t have long.

The aelf didn’t like Greywater Fastness, hating its stink and endless hammering, the black skies and black walls and black rain that fell. But her soul and devotion were to Khaine, to Morathi his First Daughter and the High Oracle, and to her coven. She would endure the contempt of Greywater Fastness’ other, lesser, races with the outward inscrutability common to both her species and her religion.

The Khailebron sect of the Daughters of Khaine did not have a home temple, preferring to wander the Mortal Realms in response to the tides of war and fortune or the dictates received from Morathi herself. For the duration of this dictate, the Draichi Ganeth sect was hosting them in their temple here in this smoking, desolate, dead place of rock and metal.

She headed towards Rygo’s confection of a mansion for the second time that night. The first had been with her sisters, clad in armour beneath their cloaks to perform their ritual blade-dances at the coming-of-age celebration of Rygo’s son. Trisethni did not know why the boy was to be so honoured with their presence, but it was not her place to question the commands of Hag Queen Belleth. The war-coven had attended and they had performed, their every movement composed of death and grace and worship, moving in step, matchless in their abilities – and they had been insulted. Rather, Trisethni’s sister Itara had been insulted when some stinking-drunk human had told her she lacked the grace to blade-dance with the others. Itara had, rightly and instantly, slaughtered the scum for his sacrilege.

Just the memory of it set Trisethni’s rage to burning anew, hotter and brighter than the largest duardin forge, for an insult to one member of the coven was an insult to all, and by the time they had departed the panic-stricken mansion and reached the temple, they were clamouring for permission to return and wreak holy vengeance.

The insult would not have been borne by any of the aelven races, let alone those who had pledged their lives to Khaine, god of battle and Lord of Murder. Belleth had listened to their complaints and shared their outrage. While she did not at this time want outright war with the humans of Greywater Fastness, she had sent Trisethni to be the silent blade of justice, streaking through the night to carve retribution from the bodies of the perpetrators.

Trisethni ground her teeth together at the blind arrogance the surviving human guests had displayed in the aftermath of Itara’s righteous slaying. Once the initial screaming and running had faded, after the Greycaps arrived at a run and looked at their opponents and wisely did nothing but form a non-threatening line between the Daughters and the humans, some of the guests had spoken eagerly from that supposed safety. Their mouths uttered false solicitations, their hands and eyes told the lie that they did not share the dead man’s opinions of Itara – or indeed all the witch-aelves who had done them the honour of performing – and all the while they stank of unearned superiority and pitying derision.

You are beneath us. You are savage. You are animals, their smiles and hearts proclaimed, and not an aelf there did not see past the lies to that inescapable truth.

As she sped through the night, it pleased Trisethni that she would prove them right in one of their beliefs. The Daughters of Khaine were savage, because life was savage in the endless struggle against Chaos. And before the dawn fought the forge-light for possession of the sky, Rygo and his whelp would know just how savage existence could be. The humans would need to invent a new word for what she would do to them.

Trisethni’s saliva was coppery with the need for blood. I am the blade of my sisters’ just vengeance. My retaliation on their behalf shall not be swift, though it shall be brutal. It shall last for hours. And all humans will be reminded that the Daughters of Khaine are true servants of justice, and of blood.

The aelf ran the last mile over the rooftops of the houses ascending the soft curves of the hill, springing from gable to eave to ornamental tree until she reached the crest and the largest, grandest buildings, each set back behind its own protective wall. Trisethni had memorised the layout of Rygo’s gardens – a wonder in the stone, smoke and metal of Greywater Fastness and its bleak, uninhabitable surrounds – and the approaches to the main house, as well as the three large rooms she and the rest of the blade-dancers had been permitted to enter. Permitted. As if they were a troupe of common mummers. But she was deep into the concentration required for her mission now, and the thought – the outrage – skated over its surface without leaving a mark.

There were house guards patrolling the base of the wall and none of the trees were within jumping distance – she’d have to cross open ground to reach the little orchard. Trisethni waited until the pair of guards had vanished into the gloom and then leapt from the top of the wall, covering ten feet and rolling once to take the impact out of her landing, and sprinted into the shadows. Her keen ears told her she remained unnoticed.

From there it was two hundred paces to the house, eighty of them within the trees. Once she was on the lawns and among the flower beds, there would be little cover, but it didn’t matter. Though the humans found it more comforting to think of them only as blade-dancers or pit-fighters – little more than brutal savages who fought for the Forces of Order – the truth was that the Khailebron were the spies, saboteurs and assassins of the Daughters of Khaine. Concealment and subterfuge, the blackened blade in the night or the slip of poison into a cup, were their tools in trade. A hundred feet of open garden was no obstacle to Trisethni the Unseen.

Grinning at the ease of outwitting the dull-sighted human guards, the aelf sped light-footed across the grass, using the low shrubs as cover, and flung a grappling hook from thirty feet out. The hook, ­muffled in black cloth, flew long and high and true, wrapping around a second-floor balcony balustrade with a muted clatter. Trisethni didn’t wait to see if anyone was alerted by the noise; she swarmed up the rope and over the balcony, drawing it up after her, and lay pressed against the smooth, cool stone until she was sure she was undetected. Two more guards patrolled by below her and she caught a glimpse of their grey hats – Rygo was spooked and had supplemented his private guard with others. Just how she liked it.

Trisethni packed the hook back into the small bag she carried across her back and pulled out a stiff loop of wire and a blackened, narrow blade. She worked the blade in between the window frame and the lock, pushing to create a small gap, then fed the wire through and felt around until it hooked the latch. A twist and a quick upward jerk with the loop, and it slipped free. She stepped into the house as soft as liquid shadow.

Humans were so trusting. Give them high walls and enough weapons and night-blind guards and they considered themselves impervious to retribution. Trisethni’s lesson would be for more than just Rygo and his mewling pup; it would be for them all. The whole of the Fastness. The whole of Ghyran. The Daughters of Khaine fought for Order and for Light, and there wasn’t a human whose opinion meant anything to them. This house’s fate would ensure no one ever forgot that again.

The mansion was sprawling and opulent, as befitted a member of the Grand Conclave. Wealth oozed from the walls, displays so ostentatious they became tasteless. So rich they looked cheap. The heavy carpeting silenced Trisethni’s footfalls, but would also deaden those of any guards; she proceeded cautiously but fast, gliding along the corridor. It was lined with rooms, many with the door closed and the distinctive sounds of breathing emanating from within.

Rygo’s party guests inhabited these rooms, guests who had stood by and let Itara be abused. If there’d been more time, she would have chased them down one at a time or in groups, spilling blood for Khaine, but tonight it was Rygo as host and his son as guest of honour who deserved the full measure of her fury. The rest would benefit from mercy they had no right to expect.

Trisethni pulled a mask from her bag and tied it tightly over her nose and mouth, then took a paper packet from a pouch. One by one, she opened the doors and ghosted into the rooms, using a long feather to waft the powder coating the paper over the slumbering occupants before stealing back out and shutting the doors. No one in this house would wake at Rygo’s screams. No one in this house would ever wake again.

In the name of almighty Khaine, in honour of his prowess and his subtle arm, I dedicate these deaths. May he look on me with favour, though these endings draw no blood in his name.

That is still to come, she added to herself with a toothy smile as she removed the mask. Anticipation stroked its fingers across her scalp and began to whisper in her veins as she padded up the stairs to the third floor, where the private suites were located.

She left the tainted mask, the feather and the empty paper on a small table in an alcove, arranged beside a large, gold-painted vase. The mask’s silk was painted with the Khailebron sigil, but Trisethni placed it face down so it couldn’t be seen without being handled. She smiled again, wondering who would turn it over when the house’s fate was discovered – and if they would live long enough to identify the Cult of Khaine as the bringers of justice to this house.

There would be sentries stationed throughout the lower levels of the house to guard against intrusion. Trisethni didn’t know how many, but she knew they’d come at the first sounds of fighting or the first screams. Another slow smile stole across her face.

Crouching at the top of the stairs, the corridor sweeping away to her left and right, she scanned the darkness. Rygo and his son, Rygel – how original – would have the entire third floor to themselves; Rygo’s wife had died two years before. Each man had a guard stationed outside their door and the soft tramp of feet indicated at least one more walking another, unseen corridor or room. Guards downstairs she’d expected – it was why she’d entered the mansion through the second floor. For Rygo to have or need guards on the private floor spoke of paranoia in excess of what she’d expect even for a lord.

He knows the insult given to my sister. He is expecting me, perhaps.

Reaching into her bag, the aelf retrieved a different packet. She didn’t need a mask this time. The tiny black spheres shifted against the paper and Trisethni tipped them into her hands. Rising fluidly, she called out: ‘What? Who are you?’

The guards’ attention snapped towards her. ‘What?’ one responded in dumb incomprehension. ‘Who are you?’

‘How dare you enter the lord’s house uninvited,’ Trisethni growled. Confused but obeying their training, the guards trotted towards her from either end of the corridor, pulling short swords as they came. As soon as they were in reach, she threw the spheres. Warmed by her body heat through the gloves, the sudden cooling as they sped through the air caused them to pop, releasing the gas inside.

Trisethni back-flipped down the stairs to the landing, well below the reach of the coiling fumes. Coughing, spluttering and then the snarling of rage drifted down to her, and after a count of ten she sauntered back up. The guards lunged at her and the aelf held up her hands. ‘You will do as I command,’ she said softly, and they halted. She gestured at their uniforms. ‘Kill all those dressed as you are dressed, and those wearing grey hats who patrol the grounds, but quietly, that you might take them all. Let none come up to the third floor. Go.’

They passed her in a silent rush, teeth bared and eyes black with compulsion. Dressed as you are dressed. When the last of the non-compelled guards were dead, they’d turn on each other, unable to stop the need to kill. Waving her arms to dissipate any last traces of the gas, Trisethni took the left-hand corridor first. Time to see who slept where – and who got to watch the other die.

It was the boy’s room. Rygel. Newly come of age. An adult now, but one who would never get any older. He didn’t look like an adult as he sprawled drooling among the silks and quilts of his bed, though; he looked young. He looked innocent. Almighty Khaine would be pleased to receive his life in offering.

The assassin backed softly out of the room and left the door ajar, then hurried along the corridor to Rygo’s suite. She could just make out the sounds of combat from the ground level, too quiet for human ears. Would the Greycaps in the gardens be aware and, if so, would they come to the guards’ aid or summon help first? It was an idle query; Trisethni would slaughter any who tried to stop her. She slid in through the door and leapt, lithe as a cat, onto Rygo’s immense bed. The thump of her landing was enough to stir him; the press of the sciansá at his throat enough to bring him to full, icy-cold wakefulness. Trisethni crouched over him like the avenging spirit of murder she was.

‘Let’s visit Rygel,’ she breathed.

‘Who – who are you?’ Rygo stuttered. ‘Guard!’

They waited for twenty heartbeats, Trisethni’s smile growing in time with Rygo’s blanching. ‘Oh dear,’ she lamented. ‘No help.’ She slid off the bed, keeping the blade against his throat, and wrapped her hand around his arm, dragging him to his feet. Rygo winced at the force of her grip and then gasped as moonlight crossed her face.

‘Aelf,’ he hissed. ‘What is the meaning of this?’

‘I think you know, but I’ll tell you both in Rygel’s room. I dislike having to repeat myself,’ she said, hauling him towards the door. The man dug in his heels and resisted, so Trisethni spun behind him with a blade-dancer’s grace and her sciansá nicked at his flesh, drawing a crimson bead of blood. ‘Walk. Walk or I take your fingers one by one.’

He balked again, just for a second, and then all the fight went out of him in a rush. ‘Whoever’s paying you to do this, whatever their price, I’ll double it,’ he babbled as she marched him along the corridor towards Rygel’s room. She said nothing. ‘Triple. I’ll triple it, I swear. In Sigmar’s name, I swear it.’

He seemed suddenly to realise where they were going, because he slowed and then fought them to a halt. Trisethni let him, let the fear build. ‘Ten times,’ he said, his voice hoarse. ‘Ten times whatever you’re being paid if you let me and my boy go.’

She shoved him in the back, got him moving again, her lips peeled back at his proximity to her. His body heat passed through her clothes; his fear-sweat clogged her nostrils.

‘Everything I have,’ he moaned.

‘Open the door.’

‘Please.’

Trisethni sighed, spun him so his back was to the door, pressed his hand against the stone of the wall and severed his little finger with the wicked, razor edge of her blade. Rygo sucked in a breath to scream and she slapped her hand over his mouth, turned the door handle and shoved him backwards into the room. Only then did she let go and the shriek she’d muffled found its way out.

Trisethni locked the door and pocketed the key. When she turned back, Rygel was sitting up in bed, yelling in shock at the sudden commotion. Humans. Always so loud, so emotional.

Rygel fumbled with the lamp on his table and turned up the flame. Rygo had his maimed hand clamped in the other and held in front of his face. He was grey and still screaming as he stared at the space where his finger should be; maybe he’d never stop. Trisethni relished the screams of her foes, but this one was simply embarrassing himself. She brandished the sciansá; Rygo sucked in one last deep breath and then closed his mouth. Sweat poured into his eyes and his chin wobbled as he fought to master the pain.

‘I am Trisethni of the Khailebron war-coven. We did you and your whelp the greatest honour of your miserable lives earlier this night by performing our blade-dance for you. The response of one of your guests was to insult my sister.’ Trisethni’s voice lowered into a growl and her fingers flexed on the hilt of her sciansá. Outrage and fury built anew in her breast. ‘You have no honour, and you sought to strip the same from us to, what, make your own inadequacies seem less? Believe me, in that you failed. You will pay for the insult, and all in this stinking prison of a city will know the Daughters’ honour is intact and untainted.’

‘I didn’t… the insult has been paid for,’ Rygo squeaked, trembling all over. ‘The man is already dead!’

‘The man is, yes. But who encouraged him in his folly? Who was the corpse’s friend?’ She didn’t bother making it easy for him, knowing the moment of realisation would be sweet. For her, at least.

Rygo frowned amid his sweating and bleating and bleeding, but then horrified recognition dawned and, slowly, he twisted towards the bed. Rygel was standing by its side now.

‘You fool,’ his father breathed. ‘Tell me you didn’t. Tell me you’re not so stupid.’ He was almost begging.

Rygel’s warm brown skin drained to grey. ‘I… it…’ he stuttered, but no more.

Trisethni felt a blush of satisfaction and another rush of justified anger. There was no battle-joy to sink into with this assignment, but that was simply another sacrifice the witch-aelves of Khailebron made for their god. Alone of the Daughters of Khaine, when it was necessary they forewent the wild blessings of bloodlust that united them with their lord. To be the subtle arm and poisoned cup instead of the frenzied, joyous killer was their pride and their curse both.

Rygo turned back and seized both her forearms in a grip strong with desperation. Trisethni raised an eyebrow.

‘He’s a boy, just a boy, a stupid, snivelling wretch. He didn’t know what he was doing. A foolish prank, honoured Daughter. We will pay reparations to you, your sisters. Many reparations. A donation to the cause of the Daughters of Khaine, however much you ask. My son will make a public apology–’

Trisethni twisted her arm free and whipped up her sciansá; the point scored through his cheek and eyebrow, a thin red line that an instant later began to gush with blood. Rygo screamed and fell back, both hands clutching the new wound. Rygel screamed too, and seized up the lamp and threw it at the aelf.

Trisethni leapt towards the bed. The lamp smashed against the door and spilt burning oil in a pool across the wood and the rugs. Hissing in fury, she batted the boy aside and ripped the silk hanging down from the wall. She threw the material over the flames and stamped them out, her rage hotter than the burning oil. The last thing she needed was the house to burn down – no one would find her message if the occupants were nothing but charred corpses. By the time she turned back, Rygel had fled, leaving his father coughing and bleeding on the floor. Human loyalty left much to be desired.

Trisethni slammed the hilt of her blade into the side of Rygo’s knee – he wouldn’t be running anywhere now – and set out in pursuit of the boy. The suite was a warren of rooms, at least a dozen, but no human had ever outrun an aelf and this one wasn’t to be the first. She caught him by a window and slammed his face into the wall next to it. He crumpled, and Trisethni bound his hands with cord from her pack, and dragged him back into the main bedroom.

Rygo was hammering on the scorched door and calling for his guards, his injured leg stretched out before him.

‘Stop that,’ the aelf said. ‘They’re dead or dying – no one’s coming for you. You’ve done this to yourselves. Arrogance has blinded you to any consequences that don’t involve increasing your wealth. Weapons and gold are your god and guiding light. Neither will save you.’

The lord’s voice faltered when he saw Rygel, blood streaming from a broken nose, dazed in Trisethni’s arms. ‘Please, not my boy,’ he whispered. ‘I beg you, in the name of Khaine, not my boy.’

Trisethni became very still. ‘In the name of Khaine?’ she asked, and her voice was death. ‘How dare you swear on my god’s name when it was my people – his people – you so insulted? How dare you sully his divinity with your mouth? What know you of Khaine or the sufferings we endure to restore him, what know you of our battles and struggles against the forces of darkness and death? My god decrees his Daughters are sacrosanct – now you use his name to turn me from my righteous vengeance? Will you debase your final moments of life with more dishonour, more arrogance and manipulation, or will you find your courage and accept your fate for what it is – both justice for your crimes and a warning to others like you?’

‘I will, I will, but not Rygel. He’s a boy. Just a boy.’ Tears mingled with the blood on his face and he held out two hands and nine fingers in supplication.

Trisethni scoffed. ‘We danced at his coming of age celebration this very night. We came here to honour your son and you repaid us with insult. He repaid us with insult. You say, and your custom says, that he is now a man. He will suffer a man’s fate.’

‘I have wealth,’ Rygo tried again, forcing himself up the wall, balancing on one leg. He hopped towards them and the aelf tightened her grip on Rygel’s arm. They stank of desperation and this blind repetition of bribery only increased her disdain. They could not conceive of an existence dedicated to a higher purpose, or that wealth was not the ultimate goal for every living creature.

‘I have already said I don’t want your stinking human riches,’ she snarled, and put the edge of her sciansá against Rygel’s neck.

Rygo stopped, wobbling, pain creasing his bloody face. ‘I have other things, other valuables not treasures,’ he babbled. ‘I have a book! A secret book, a book that your priestesses will want. I guarantee it.’

The assassin laughed, the sound sharp as a knife with mockery. ‘Is there no end to your lies and bribes? Is there no beginning to your honour? How such a one as you rose to power is beyond me. There is no doubt it is the Daughters of Khaine who stand between humanity and Chaos.’

‘He does have a book. A book of information,’ Rygel ventured. Trisethni shook him into silence. She was growing tired of the delay. This wasn’t noble, joyful combat to praise her god; it was the messy necessity of slaughtering diseased livestock.

‘This book will change everything you think you know about your religion,’ Rygo said, and the claim was so bold and delivered with such fervour that it gave Trisethni pause.

‘Is it about almighty Khaine?’ she asked, reluctance and suspicion clouding her tone. It was most likely just another delaying tactic; Rygo probably hoped his guards were on their way. But if not, if she passed up this opportunity to discover information vital to their cause… If it did exist, the tome might give an insight into the possible locations of the shards of her destroyed god. With such an artefact they could restore him to life and power and together, in his name, crush the Forces of Chaos forever.

‘Khaine? No,’ Rygo said, patting the door. ‘It’s in my room – we must go and get it.’

‘Tell me what the book is or the boy dies screaming,’ Trisethni snarled and Rygo’s momentary bravado shrivelled in the heat of her anger.

‘It contains secrets, many secrets, that Morathi wishes to keep hidden,’ he said quickly and it was as if he’d thrown a bucket of ice water over her. The aelf’s natural grace deserted her for an instant and the sciansá cut Rygel’s neck as her hand jerked. The boy, who’d been standing so still he barely breathed, screeched and tried to squirm away. She held him tighter.

‘I swear! I swear,’ his father shouted. ‘Don’t hurt him, I swear it’s true. A book of secrets about Morathi herself. Let him stay here – let him live – and I’ll give it to you.’

Trisethni had her orders, but Hag Queen Belleth couldn’t have known about this. Would her instructions have been different if she had? The assassin made her decision.

‘No, he comes with us. And if you’re lying, I will make you watch while I peel off your son’s skin. Now – let’s go.’

‘A book, a book,’ he repeated, the only words he seemed able to say in the extremity of his terror.

Trisethni unlocked the door and followed, dragging Rygel, who was silent but for a high-pitched wheeze with every inhalation. He walked as if half turned to stone, legs stiff and gait jerky. She shoved him along. If the uninfected guards had killed the two she’d compelled, they’d sweep the house for more threats soon enough. ‘Hurry,’ she hissed and didn’t need to expand on the threat. Whimpering, one hand on the wall for balance, the lord limped on.

His suite, if anything, was even more luxurious than his son’s. The trio shuffled past the bed and into a study: walls lined with bookcases, a huge desk in the centre beneath a wide window. A lamp stood on the desk and Rygo fumbled with it until light flooded the room.

‘The book,’ Trisethni demanded, keen not to waste any more time. She listened back to the suite’s entrance and beyond to the stairs. So far it was still clear. Every room on the second floor would need to be checked and the dead and dying guests any surviving guards found would need dealing with. It should slow them some more.

Rygo unlocked a desk drawer, removed a second key from it, staggered to a bookshelf and pulled out a dozen books, letting them fall. Behind them was a little door set into the wall – a hiding-place.

The governor unlocked it and Trisethni tensed – there might be a weapon in there. This was Greywater Fastness, after all. She would not underestimate its many innovations on the subject of weaponry and swift death. She tightened her grip on Rygel and pulled him in front of her as a shield, a blade in each hand now, the steel framing his throat. The governor reached into the hole and dragged out armfuls of papers; these, too, he let fall. His confidential documents scattered like snow around his bare feet. He reached in again and dragged out a large book bound in what looked like troggoth-hide leather. Clutching it to his chest, he shuffled around to face them.

‘It is yours in return for our lives,’ he tried.

‘Where did you get it?’ the aelf asked, ignoring his bargaining.

‘Before settling here I was – I am – a merchant. Spent years travelling Ghyran. Even took the Realmgate to Azyrheim a couple of times. Over the years I collected much – wealth, treasure, artefacts. This,’ he rubbed his non-maimed hand over the cover lovingly, ‘this I… made.’

Trisethni blinked. ‘Made?’

‘Sometimes I was paid in information, not coin. Or old objects – scrolls, books, tablets and statues. A few pieces from the World-that-Was itself even, invaluable objects that held many secrets. Some of those secrets related to Morathi, some to other figures. I collated each into a book – this is the Book of Morathi.’

Rygo paused and a calculating look stole briefly across his sweating features. ‘When you and your blade-dancers came to perform tonight, it was but a cover. Your high priestess Belleth came here too, in secret, to inspect this book. It’s why I wasn’t downstairs to curb my idiot son’s indiscretions. The chaos after your sister killed my guest alerted us. Belleth had been reading the book – she told me to keep it safe and that she would soon need me to arrange for its transport. Then she left and returned to the temple ahead of you. Or so I presume.’

Trisethni’s grip on her blades tightened. ‘No,’ she said softly and then shoved Rygel out of her path. ‘No. Belleth would never trust such an object to a human. She would have taken it herself, guarded it and made her way to Hagg Nar with it. You lie.’

Rygo’s eyes widened. ‘I assure you I do not, Daughter of Khaine. Belleth herself came here and told me to keep hold of it until she was ready for it to be sent away. She did not want it falling into the wrong hands.’

And now Belleth has sent me to kill them. Rygel had not denied her accusation back when she’d first burst into his bedroom with his father screaming and bleeding at her side; the insult had indeed been given and Itara had reacted appropriately. But that didn’t explain all. It didn’t explain anywhere near enough.

Rygo, of course, knows the contents of the book. Who knows how many others he may have shared it with, and yet Belleth would have the book remain with him. Rygel too confirmed its existence; how much of what it contains does he know? Knowledge like that cannot be allowed to rest in the hands of a human. It is direst folly.

She went suddenly cold. What if Rygo had turned to the Dark Gods? What if he was a traitor, allied to those who would see the destruction of the Daughters of Khaine? If this book was meant for an agent of Chaos…

No. If Belleth suspected that, she would have told me to retrieve the book or at the least to destroy it. None of this makes sense. She didn’t tell me to collect a book; she didn’t even mention one. But how is she going to get it back once I’ve done my work here and the mansion becomes overrun with Greycaps?

Trisethni’s mind was a whirl of confusion and indecision. Neither emotion was familiar to her; both were unwelcome. She couldn’t think of a situation in which leaving the book in Rygo’s possession – and not only that, but dead Rygo’s possession – was a good idea.

But then, I am not hag queen. Belleth knows what she is about; she is privy to more knowledge than I. There will be a reason she acts as she does. Have faith.

The assassin had done Belleth’s will for decades, ever since her birth-mother had deemed her old enough to begin her training, first in obedience and the lore of the Khailebron, later in weapons and finally in those other, quieter methods of destruction. Belleth had raised her, taught her, confided in her and trained her. It was Belleth who named her the Unseen; Belleth who guided Trisethni’s career within the Khailebron. Her loyalty, her love, would allow no suspicion and no disobedience.

She sheathed one sciansá and held out her hand. ‘Give me the book.’

‘Our lives?’ Rygo asked. ‘Our lives for this knowledge?’

Trisethni sighed, pulled Rygel against her with her free hand and slit his throat with a swift, hard jerk of her blade. Blood gouted like water from a burst pipe and the boy gurgled, trying to scream. His bound hands scrabbled at his neck, but there was no stemming the flow of life. He collapsed as Rygo gave a hoarse, despairing cry and launched himself at them both. He threw the book. Trisethni plucked it from the air – it was heavier than she expected – and then Rygo was past her, running for the exit without a single thought for his twitching, dying offspring.

Humans.

There was no glory in this hunt – Trisethni’s mind was too unsettled – but she chased him down the corridor towards the staircase, running up the wall to fall on him from above and spear him through the top of his shoulder with her blade. Her body weight punched it deep inside, cleaving his lung, stomach, intestines.

‘For the blood to speak it must first flow. Ten cuts are better than one, save the deft slash that opens the artery. For almighty Khaine, my blade drinks deep.’ The words of the Red Invocation spilt from her lips as Rygo crumpled beneath her.

He was still alive when Trisethni carved the Khailebron sigil into his forehead and the palm of each hand for all to see. ‘Those who find you will understand. They will know the Daughters of Khaine preserve their honour. And they will know you threatened it. No one will mourn such fools as you,’ she promised him. The governor didn’t seem to care. He died as she stood and retraced her steps, to mark Rygel the same, though she would have preferred to do it while the boy still lived. Still, appearances were important.

When it was done, Trisethni stood in the study and looked at the book in her hands. Then, very carefully and without opening it, she replaced it in its hiding place, piled the papers back on top, locked it, and hid the little door behind books again. Her hag queen had given her orders; her hag queen had her reasons for not telling Trisethni to recover the book, or even of its existence.

She put the key back in the drawer and left the suite, drifted like smoke down the stairs to the second floor, and slid back out through the window. She didn’t need the grappling hook this time; she dangled by her hands and then let go, landing with a soft thump she turned into a tumble to absorb the impact.

As she crossed the gardens without challenge – all the guards had been pulled inside by the sounds of fighting – her awareness of the book’s existence tugged at her. Resolutely, the aelf put it from her mind and sped back into the night.

‘My queen, the task is complete and our sisters’ honour is restored.’

Trisethni stood before the hag queen in the inner sanctum of the temple deep in Greywater Fastness. Belleth was tall and wrapped in shadow, her face distant and closed. Behind her loomed the iron cauldron in which the Daughters bathed to rejuvenate their bodies after battle. The cauldron that went to war with them, dragged on a great chariot to aid the hag queens in their magics. Before that cauldron, no devotee of Khaine could lie. But why would they want to?

‘Rygo and his whelp are dead?’ Belleth asked softly.

‘They are, and every guest in the mansion with them. The Khailebron sigil is carved into their flesh, and if any of the guards survived the night, they will have only carnage to speak of. It was good justice.’

Belleth was silent a long while and Trisethni stood within it, feeling the sanctity of the temple soothe her troubled thoughts like balm on a wound. ‘The house is intact?’

A tiny frown marred Trisethni’s smooth brow. ‘It is, my queen. You gave me no orders to burn it. Should I have?’

‘No. It is fitting it remains untouched but for the bloodshed within.’

Belleth fell silent again, and now not even the ancient beauty of the temple could still the maelstrom of confusion in Trisethni’s head.

‘You have done well. And Rygo… did he say anything before he died?’

‘Yes, my queen.’ Trisethni’s palms began to sweat; this didn’t feel right. ‘He told me of your meeting with him while we were blade-dancing. He told me of the book’s existence and how he had written it himself. He tried to use it to barter for his life and his son’s. Promised the Daughters anything and everything if he could but live.’

Belleth took three long strides forward and seized Trisethni’s chin, forcing her to look up into her eyes. The hag queen’s were dark with nameless emotion. ‘And did you? Make any such bargain? Did you read the book?’

‘N-no, my queen!’ the aelf managed, bunching her fists to keep from reaching for Belleth in turn and twist herself free. Anxiety flared in her, fed by her sudden anger. Her body tensed with the urge to fall into a fighting crouch, to snarl her challenge and feel the comfortable worn leather hilts of her blades in her calloused palms. She did none of these things, for this was Belleth and the question was simple.

‘Of course not,’ she added when the hag queen did not seem convinced. ‘I put it back from where he’d taken it and left.’

‘Why?’ Belleth hissed and now danger flickered along Trisethni’s nerve endings. What is this?

‘Because you had already seen it. You knew it was there and you did not ask me to retrieve it, or do anything else. Nor had you taken it from the house when you first saw it. Rygo told me he was waiting to hear from you as to where to send the book. Hagg Nar, of course. But I presumed you had plans of your own for it that were none of my concern. If I have done wrong, I beseech your forgiveness, my queen. I followed the orders you gave me – perhaps I should have thought for longer on the consequences but…’ She shifted her weight back, just a little, and Belleth let go of her chin so she could speak more freely. ‘But it seemed… it seemed the sort of thing I should not carry alone through the streets for fear of ambush. It seemed too precious an object. You had not taken it from the house when a whole troop of blade-dancers could have protected you and it as we returned here. But you didn’t, so who am I to do what you would not?’

Too late she realised that sounded like an insult, a comment on Belleth’s actions – or lack of. The hag queen scowled and death was in her eyes. Again, Trisethni resisted the urge to reach for weapons. Combat was sacred, and battles to the death between sisters were common, but this was Belleth. Trisethni held her peace and swallowed more anger, rubbing deliberately at the finger marks pressed into the flesh of her face. To be treated so, in the temple itself, under the very gaze of their god. As if she was nothing more than a servant, a leathanam!

‘If you wish it, I will return immediately and retrieve the book for you. I did not read it before – I will not read it now, but bring it to you unopened. I swear it on my devotion to Khaine.’ There was the faintest growl to her voice despite her efforts, but if the hag queen noted it, she gave no sign. Perhaps she approved.

‘He thought to set you against me,’ Belleth said instead. ‘Governor Rygo. He thought to seduce you with promises of wealth and power to see whether you would allow him to live. He failed. You did not.’

Trisethni’s eyes widened slightly and much of the tension ran out of her shoulders. She let out a quiet breath, more relieved than she expected at the hag queen’s sudden softening towards her. ‘It was a test? You used a human to test my loyalty?’ She didn’t know whether to be pleased at passing the trial or insulted at the method.

‘I knew how he would react to his impending death,’ Belleth said and shrugged, flicking long black hair over her shoulders. ‘I wanted to see how loyal you truly are after… what happened between us ran its course. As for the book, it is not as important as he believes it. There is little of real import within its pages. Still, I will send someone to collect it before dawn.’

‘I can–’ Trisethni began, for she knew the location of the study. Even now, if any of the guards had lived, the alarm would have been raised.

‘No,’ the hag queen interrupted her, the word harsh. Then she softened and cupped Trisethni’s cheek in one long-fingered hand. Heat blossomed within the aelf and before she could stop herself, she pressed her face into that palm. ‘No. You passed my test and I did not set it idly. High Oracle Morathi herself has informed me of an infestation in the Realm of Shadow, an infestation she believes only a witch-aelf of Khailebron has the necessary skills to eradicate. I needed to know your mind and heart, and now I do. Of all of our sisters here on Ghyran, and in light of your newly-proven fidelity to our god and your coven, I select you for this task. I select you to carry our name and glory into Ulgu itself.’

Trisethni’s throat tightened until just breathing was an effort. A task from Morathi herself? The chance to travel to Ulgu and fight for Khaine on its sacred ground? A chance to prove myself and my skills before all, before the First Daughter? Passion rose in the assassin’s heart and twisted her usually inscrutable features into wonder and humility. She fell to her knees and pressed her fingertips to Belleth’s bare feet.

‘I will do all the First Daughter and you command, my queen. I will make you proud. I will make you love me again.’

Belleth licked her lips but didn’t respond to the unspoken plea that hovered like wings behind Trisethni’s last words. Their ways had parted a year before, but still she felt Belleth’s absence as she would a missing limb. The hag queen took a decisive step back, leaving Trisethni on her knees, her fingertips brushing only air and another crack shivering through her heart.

‘The way will be long and dangerous, even before you reach your destination,’ Belleth warned her. ‘You must take the Ebonfire Gate – and you must live to reach it first.’

Trisethni swallowed her hurt, packing it down inside her chest until it was a hard ball of ice, its edges smoothed so they could no longer cut her. She rested her hands on her thighs and schooled her face into a mask of impassivity. ‘I offer my life and my skill to Khaine for his glory. If I die in the attempt, I will die a warrior with blood on my blades and Khaine’s name in my heart.’

A smile flickered across Belleth’s face, there and then gone so fast she almost missed it. The ice unfurled a shard and skewered Trisethni again. ‘Then, my favoured child of Khaine, you will travel to the Ebonfire Gate and from there take the shadowpaths through Ulgu to the Spyrglass Warrens. That vast underground labyrinth of tunnels and caves and bottomless pools has been infested by a trio of daemonettes. They weave foul magic and seek to sever Hagg Nar’s communications from the temples scattered across the other realms. Who knows what other horrors they have planned, or where they could strike next when their hold on the Warrens is secure? If they are the frontrunners of the forces of Slaanesh, the Shadow Realm could be facing another war. You stand between them and their master’s darkest desires. Go to the Warrens and kill them.’

Trisethni’s mask cracked and a rush of fear twisted her features before she could suppress it. Daemonettes. The courtiers to and torturers for the Dark Prince himself: Slaanesh, the Lord of Pleasure. Morathi’s greatest and most implacable enemy.

Belleth saw her doubt. ‘I have chosen you for this,’ she reminded her. ‘I do not do that lightly.’

‘No, my queen,’ the assassin said and her usually liquid voice rasped like a whetstone. ‘The task is great, but so too will be the glory. To defeat the monsters of Slaanesh himself. To rid Ulgu of their taint…’ she sucked in a deep breath. ‘Yes, the glory will be great.’

‘And your name will be sung by the Khailebron,’ the hag queen promised her. Again that smile, hotter than before and loaded with memories of the past and, perhaps, promises for the future. Trisethni took courage and heart from it.

‘You know the daemonettes’ magic is in glamours and auras,’ Belleth continued. ‘They will try to make you hate yourself, doubt yourself. They will seduce you with stories of the Dark Prince, of the delights inherent in submission to him. They will promise you rewards larger than those Rygo offered you. They will promise you immortality and eternal youth, power beyond reckoning. Only because you passed the test in Rygo’s household do I trust you to stand firm against their temptations. You are Trisethni the Unseen for a reason, and you will need to remain so to defeat this enemy. Will you take on this task, for me? For the High Oracle and almighty Khaine?’

Trisethni swallowed against the tightness of her throat and rose fluidly to her feet. Slaanesh’s pleasure meant nothing to her; the daemonettes would not win her so easily. Her heart was Belleth’s; only the hag queen could command it.

‘With honour and devotion, I will exterminate these monsters from the holy ground of Ulgu, my queen. I will not return without victory. For you, for High Oracle Morathi and for almighty Khaine.’

They shared a smile then, one heavy with the weight of a different memory, a distant memory: the aftermath of Trisethni’s first battle as a Daughter of Khaine when, exultant and gore-streaked, exhausted and yet still filled with bloodlust, she had found Belleth standing among the corpses of the enemy, tears of joy carving lines through the blood caking her face. She’d dedicated her victory to the same trio that day, in thanks to Belleth for allowing her the honour of battle, and the hag queen had danced with her, there among the dead and the dying, and promised her more glory than she could imagine.

Young as she was, Trisethni had known in that moment that Belleth was the mentor and priestess she’d always sought to guide her through the world and through the connection she felt to Khaine and her destiny. Belleth would never stifle her ambition or her talent; instead, she would nurture both. And despite everything that had passed between them and ended so badly, despite the hurt and the blame they threw at each other’s feet, Belleth continued to guide her, putting Khaine and the Daughters first as she had always taught Trisethni to do.

And it had finally all led to this moment, this culmination of it all. A task set by Morathi herself and for which Belleth had chosen her from among all her sisters. Trisethni could have forgiven her anything in that moment, seeing the approval and faith in her face. The love.

But still excitement and caution warred in her belly. Belleth’s trust in her was great, but the chances of failure were equally large. Three daemonettes, wandering somewhere below ground in the Spyrglass Warrens. Daemonettes who had not fallen to the confusing mists of Ulgu, who had not been stopped by Morathi’s magics or other Daughters of Khaine.

She knew, even without Belleth’s warning, that this would be her greatest challenge yet. Not just death, but dishonour and the fouling of the Shadow Realm’s sacred ground by the Forces of Chaos would result if she failed.

Then I cannot fail. I must not fail. And by the love of almighty Khaine and my hope for his return, I will not fail. The prayer echoed inside the chambers of her heart and fed it strength and determination.

‘The journey is long and will be fraught,’ Belleth warned her again. ‘Take whatever supplies you need and set out no later than dawn. Travel fast and light, let none turn you from your path. And may almighty Khaine’s blessing speed your blades as you drive them into our enemies’ hearts.’

Trisethni bowed to Belleth, almost overcome with emotion, though all that showed on her face was fierce delight. She strode from the temple, all weariness forgotten despite the lateness of the hour. It will be different when I come back, she promised Belleth and herself. Things will be as they were between us, and I will stand high in the First Daughter’s favour, my duty to her undeniable, my adoration of Khaine writ in my flesh and my deeds for all the realms to see.

Moving silently like smoke on a breeze, the aelf collected trail rations from the kitchen and a blanket and fresh clothes from her alcove in the sleeping hall. She padded to the herb room and took an assortment of poisons, antidotes and medicines, marking off the quantities in the ledger and putting Belleth’s name down as authorisation. She didn’t think the commonest poisons would work against daemonettes, but she planned on taking anything that could give her an advantage and besides, she would lose nothing in the attempt. She was going to be facing three of them, after all. Three.

Trisethni’s heart was thumping with nerves when she wrapped herself in a dark cloak and pulled up the hood to hide her restored silver-lit hair. Sciansá sheathed at each hip and pack settled over her back, she paused to look back one last time; perhaps Belleth would come to fare her well. No. The temple steps were empty. Trisethni didn’t let herself be hurt by it; she had a task and from now on it was all she would think of. Silently, she slipped out of the temple grounds and into the heart of Greywater Fastness.

As she moved through the blackened streets and into the steelworks district with its blasts of superheated air and blinding brightness from rivers of molten metal, the enormity of the task before her grew in weight and malevolence until it was a wave threatening to break over her head, drowning her. She was a lone aelf, lacking even the power to transform into a Medusa, and within months she would be facing down three of Slaanesh’s favoured torturers. Months during which they could familiarise themselves with the Warrens, learning their every twist and tunnel. Gaining every advantage against her.

Feverishly, Trisethni thought through the contents of her pack again. What else might she need? What else could give her an edge against her enemies? Should she go back and take more poisons, some traps, one of the coven’s spell scrolls to lend her strength or speed?

Panic threatened, and it took all her training and control to push it away. She would not fail. She could not fail. Morathi herself would know her name if – when – she was victorious. And Belleth had trusted her with this task, so she would see it done. No matter the cost.

Dawn was a purple promise on the edge of the sky as she exited through a small land gate in the Fastness’ huge iron wall. All the gates were heavily fortified and guarded, but when she pushed back hood and cloak to reveal herself, they let her through without comment. As she passed, she heard one mutter: ‘She’ll run afoul of those accursed Sylvaneth, most likely. Still, one less of her sort in the city and I’ll sleep easier.’ There was a grating of ugly laughter and the gate clanged shut behind her.

‘Humans,’ Trisethni sneered back at the sealed door, and then drew cloak and hood and shadow and magic about herself. Less visible than a gheist in the last of the darkness, she left behind the endless, grinding industry and foul smokes of Greywater Fastness and set out into the blasted no-man’s-land of the Ghoul Mere, her easy loping stride eating up the ground. She stayed far from the trade roads, taking the most direct route across the mere to her distant destination. Her magics would hide her from the gun emplacements and spotters lining the wall; she didn’t trust them to identify her as an ally.

As for the treelord known as Pale Oak and his band of Sylvaneth who haunted the wastes, killing inhabitants of the city and enemies of Chaos alike, she could do no more than hope that the Daughters of Khaine’s well-known loathing for the enemy would be enough to give them common cause and see her safely through their territory, supposing they did manage to penetrate her magics and intercept her.

Despite her focus on the task ahead of her, Trisethni’s heart stuttered at the devastation wrought so long ago by the duardin and humans, and though she knew it was the result of defeating hordes of Chaos-tainted enemy, still the dead land ate at her, its wrongness a prickling of her scalp. Blasted tree stumps and thick roots told her how ancient the woodland had been that had once stood here, bursting with all the life that Ghyran had to offer. The desolation was all the more sickening in light of the vibrancy that it replaced. The woodland spirits’ fury was justified; in fact, she shared it, for while the Forces of Order needed the majority of the weapons produced in Greywater Fastness, surely this only confirmed that some of them, their most despicable inventions, should not be used. Those ones, it seemed to her as she pulled her boots free of clinging, stinking mud, did Nurgle’s work for him by turning a verdant forest into a rotting, haunted hellscape.

If even the Realm of Life cannot overcome the poisons left by these weapons, then how can their use ever be considered a victory? What have we gained but dead land? There is no triumph in this, no matter how many of the enemy were eradicated.

There are nobler routes to victory on the battlefield, yet too many of our allies shy away from the purity that is strength and skill and wit pitted against the foe, close enough to smell their fear. Humans and duardin in particular, always looking for the next weapon to put distance between themselves and those they kill. Where is the delight of battle, the thrill of the chase and leap and slaughter? There is no ritual or glory in lighting a fuse from a hundred paces away. No satisfaction can be had if you cannot see the light die in your enemy’s face and feel the warm spray of their blood across your cheek.

The aelf shook her head in pity at their stunted lives and disgust at the destruction they had wrought here, in the Realm of Life itself. She suspected Pale Oak would be pleased to learn what she’d done to one of the lords of Greywater Fastness and his many guests, if she did chance to meet him out here in the bleak.

Trisethni stumbled as something rolled under her boot. She splashed into the shallow edge of a mire, sending up a wave of foul water – and flesh. Before she could even step out of the pool, a tentacle, long as a vine but as thick as her wrist, lashed up and wrapped her calf and thigh, serrated suckers latching on and cleaving easily through the sturdy material of her leggings before ripping into her flesh.

A second burst out of the water and flailed for her; the aelf drew her sciansá and hacked it away, but didn’t draw blood. Its hide was tough and rubbery, and though her blades were wickedly sharp, they lacked a serrated edge that would let her cut through the tentacle that crushed and ate into her leg and the others writhing towards her.

Trisethni pulled hard, her empty hand grabbing a rotting sapling and anchoring her partially on land as the creature tugged in turn, its suckers chewing into flesh and muscle. She stabbed and hacked again, rage and pain bursting into a visceral need to kill. This time the sciansá scored a line in the thick hide, but again it didn’t bleed or hinder the thing. The tentacle tightened even further and Trisethni’s hand slipped from the sapling’s slimy bark. Immediately she was dragged a step forward, both feet in the murky water now and a second tentacle coiling around her other boot.

‘Khaine!’ she screamed and sheathed the long blade in favour of a simple hunting knife kept in the back of her belt and a barbed, poisoned arrowhead from the quiver on her back. The assassin stabbed and sawed at the tentacle until it gouted green blood and writhed away from her. She kicked free of the second tentacle and then the thing’s bulk rose from the deeper part of the mire.

Trisethni dropped the arrow, pulled the longer blade and leapt forward, jumping onto its back to avoid more tentacles, each located near a gaping maw lined with backward-facing teeth like a snake’s. She rode it as it thrashed, sciansá plunged deep into its body to steady her and knife stabbing between thick plates of horned exoskeleton until its tentacles spasmed and tried to curl in around its bulk.

Panting, elated, hot with rage and bloodlust, she pulled her sciansá from the creature’s flank and stabbed it back in, twice, three more times, until it fell back, bubbling a dying shriek from its many mouths as it flopped and thrashed in the fuming pool. Wincing, Trisethni drove the sciansá into it one last time, to be sure, then ripped it free and vaulted away, leaping a dozen feet to put her out of range of its tentacles. Her injured leg flared with bright pain as she landed, threatening to dump her back in the water. She braced against the hurt and stood on the bank, weapons ready and senses sharp, in case it made another attack or its cries had attracted others like it.

The assassin was soaked in blood, her own and the monster’s, as well as muddy water, by the time she was convinced it was dead. She put an arrow in the nearest gaping mouth, but the thing didn’t even twitch. She didn’t know what it had once been, but Nurgle’s rot had warped and twisted it by foul magics into something she’d never seen before.

A sudden rustle of noise sent the assassin into a long, graceful jump away from the water and towards the shelter of a small stand of trees. Her injured leg buckled on impact and she went to her knees, then threw herself into a forward tumble to gain cover and protect her back so her next attackers couldn’t come at her from behind.

By the time she came to her feet in the cluster of half-dead, drooping trees, the wounds in her leg were burning and she was already surrounded by Sylvaneth. Trisethni blinked; how could she not have noticed them approach? She felt a lurch of anxiety that had nothing to do with the creature she’d just killed. She hesitated, forcing away pain and then carefully sheathed knife and sciansá and held up her green-bloodstained hands. Nothing had been able to take her ­unawares since she began her training so long before. She blinked sweat from her eyes.

‘I am Trisethni, witch-aelf of Khailebron and a Daughter of Khaine. I have no quarrel with you, lords of the wild. I seek only passage west through the mere.’

The Sylvaneth were silent, their branching forms and alien faces making it impossible for her to gauge what they might be thinking. She counted seven of them; if they were hostile, she was in trouble, because the familiar symptoms told her that the monster’s serrated suckers had carried a venom and now it was burning its way through her body. She could feel herself weakening, a clammy sweat breaking out across the back of her neck. Nausea roiled in her gut.

‘I wish you good hunting, lords,’ she tried, and took a step forward. Limbs and weapons stretched to bar her progress. Trisethni licked her lips, thirst clawing at her throat. Dizziness threatened. ‘Can I ask what that creature back there was? Its venom works fast.’

There was a rustle of conversation at that and then one of the spirits glided forwards. ‘You are hurt?’ it asked, in a voice like dry leaf-litter.

The aelf indicated the oozing holes twining around her leg like ivy. ‘I have a selection of antidotes, but I don’t know… what…’ She blinked furiously, her tongue thick in her mouth, breath whistling from a tightening throat. ‘I just… need–’

The wood spirit caught her as her legs buckled and sat her down. ‘Your antidotes will do little,’ it said, ‘but I wonder why I should help you, either. You stray through the remnants of our land, far from the trade roads. You come from the cursed city and its wilful, careless inhabitants, the murderers of our home.’

‘I was not born there,’ Trisethni managed; the world was spinning slowly and tongues of fire were burning in her leg and licking up through the rest of her. There was a band of iron tightening around her chest. ‘I had a job there. I slaughtered one of their lords, his son and all his guests. Killed for their… impropriety. What they did here, so long ago, was not right. But I… must go. Important.’ She still couldn’t read its expression. ‘Please.’

It was a word unfamiliar in the mouth of any Daughter of Khaine, but it slipped from hers easily, greased with fear and not a little shame. To have defeated the creature only to be killed by its venom. To be helpless in front of the Sylvaneth, who at any moment might consider her an enemy. She scrabbled at the hilt of her sciansá, but her fingers couldn’t close. She had begged. She had lost her honour. It was only fitting she would not die with blade in hand.

The spirit laid its woody fingers on Trisethni’s leg. Tiny tendrils grew from the tips and snaked their way into the tears in her thick leggings; she could feel them sliding across her burning flesh. She gritted her teeth, groaning as they jabbed into wound after wound. Her fingers dug into the dirt and she glared at the Sylvaneth looming over her, willing her tears not to fall, chanting prayers in her head to prevent herself screaming as it killed her.

Slowly, as slowly as trees grow it seemed, the burning began to fade and the sickness radiating through her began to abate. She started to shake, darkness threatening at the edges of her vision and chills racking her. And yet she lived.

The spirit pulled its hand away from her leg; the tendrils it had exuded, like tiny roots, were black and pulsing. It snapped them off one at a time and dropped them into a small pouch. Then it stood.

‘You must sleep. Some of the injuries will need stitches. The mere ends half a day’s journey that way. If you are within its bounds by dusk tomorrow, I will put these back in you and leave you to die. Only the Everqueen’s love of all living things stays us, but even Alarielle’s mercy has its limits.’

Trisethni blinked up at the Sylvaneth, almost too weak to form words. ‘I praise the Everqueen’s mercy,’ she whispered. ‘Almighty Khaine will favour you. And I thank you. I will be gone well before tomorrow’s dusk.’

‘It was once a man, long ago,’ the spirit said, and Trisethni frowned. It gestured. ‘The creature. It was turned by Nurgle and sent here to plague us and infect others with its sickness, as if humans had not already done enough damage to our land. We thank you for its death.’

They didn’t wait for her to respond, and she wasn’t sure what she could say anyway. They faded into the lowering afternoon light and were quickly lost to view. Trisethni leant her head back against the soft, rotting trunk of the tree and closed her eyes. Pain washed through her, chased by cold and thirst and discomfort. She ignored them all. She slept.

She’d slept through the last of the day and all of the night. It was thirst that woke her, and the stiffness in her muscles. Her leg burned with a fierce hurt, but a clean one. The tree-spirit’s magic had drawn out the poisons even if it couldn’t heal the wounds themselves.

Trisethni grunted as she levered herself to her feet. She drank and then stitched those wounds that were too deep to heal without help. She bandaged her leg and, teeth gritted, pushed herself through a basic combat sequence, working the kinks from her muscles and getting used to the restricted mobility in her leg. There was still a long way to go, not just through the Ghoul Mere but to the Ebonfire Gate and from there to the Spyrglass Warrens; she needed to know her limits.

Satisfied she could both run and fight as needed – a few torn stitches could be mended; a torn-out throat could not – the aelf settled her pack on her shoulders and began to limp through the misty, blasted landscape. The Sylvaneth had warned her to be out of their territory by dusk, and even if Belleth hadn’t ordered her to travel quickly, she would have obeyed their command. The bleak remains of the forest unsettled her. She didn’t want to spend any more time here than she had to.

The sun was at its height when the mere came to an end. There wasn’t an obvious border, a line over which life once again flourished. Rather, life began to creep into the mere. Pools and swamps dried out and weeds and bushes sprouted among the fallen carcasses of trees. The dead silence was broken by more than just the whine of the wind – birds began to sing and insects droned among the plants. Soon there was more life than death, and then more and more until it was as if the Ghoul Mere had never existed and Trisethni again moved through the voracious plant life of Ghyran. It lightened her heart and she realised then how oppressive the silent threat of the mere had been and, before that, the stinking sterility of Greywater Fastness. She shook off the last clinging tendrils of depression and picked up her pace, eating trail rations as she strode west, ever west, towards the mountains and the hidden Ebonfire Gate.

Aelves were built for speed, and her years of martial training and the battles she’d fought had hardened her to privation and granted her endurance far beyond that of her non-martial kin. Still, the knowledge of the miles she had yet to cross and the precipices she would need to climb was daunting. Even at her swift, ground-eating run, she was a month’s travel from the gate, for the mountains were treacherous and would slow her. A month of constant wariness and solitude, of hard trail rations and cold camps, even colder weather.

‘I offer my sufferings to Khaine, that he might know my devotion,’ she muttered, and pushed herself faster, relishing the tug and throb of the punctures in her leg. Reminders of victory, not defeat. Of one less monster at the call of Chaos masters. She’d move as fast as she could for as long as the ground was flat enough. Once she was in the mountains, she’d have to sacrifice speed for safety.

As the weeks passed, Trisethni skirted wide of four ranger parties she spotted patrolling between Greywater Fastness and the foothills. She had no need to be delayed and distracted by their suspicion. A week into the forested hills before the true mountains began, she fought a huge black bear tainted by Nurgle’s rot, great weeping patches of raw flesh among its thick fur, its eyes blind and drooling yellow pus, but fast, so fast despite all that. Maddened, starving, and driven by a need not solely its own to rend her flesh, it homed in on her scent and the soft noises she made and charged.

The aelf leapt up and back, somersaulting to a nearby tree and swarming up it, then slashing down at the bear’s face with her sciansá when it reared up on its hind legs.

The bear roared in pain and fury, long black claws swiping so close to her legs that Trisethni was forced to leap over its blind head out of the tree. She landed behind it and dealt it two raking cuts across its back before it could turn, but its thick fur and skin protected it. She needed to go for the patches of rot gnawing on its hide if she was to deal it a telling blow.

The aelf danced away from its slashing claws, then kicked a stone away from her. The beast’s head tracked the sound and she lunged at it, splitting open the raw flesh of its flank with the razor edge of her blade. The bear squealed and then bellowed rage, and Trisethni had to run clear, both from the paws that could crush her skull and the hideous flow of brownish, infected blood. The stink from its wound brought bile to the back of her throat, while the sight of it, roaring and bleeding and mad, pricked at her eyes with unwilling pity.

The bear hadn’t been tempted by Nurgle or one of his monstrous creations; it hadn’t chosen to give itself to Chaos or evil or infection. It had been made this way simply to hinder the Forces of Order and those travelling from the Fastness into the mountains, to cause as much disruption and anxiety as possible. It was just a bear, and a dying one at that, maddened by its own hurts and the ones Trisethni dealt it.

Death would be a mercy for it, and Trisethni set about giving it that mercy with single-minded intensity. She lost her grip on one sciansá when she had to dive out of the way of a sudden charge and replaced it with her hunting knife, hatching its forelegs, muzzle, thick neck and chest with slices from the blades as she backed slowly away.

The bear was wily and quick, despite the damage she’d dealt it and its own infected flesh. Eventually she leapt into another tree and peppered it with arrows from above, aiming for the soft underbelly whenever it reared up to try and reach her. It broke off or pulled out most of the shafts, but then one went in low down in its gut and sank deep. The bear’s bellow was tinged pink with blood, its breath vast and rotten, enveloping her despite her perch high above it.

It staggered on its hind legs, tottering, and then dropped onto all fours. Another bloody roar burst from its muzzle, but now its head hung low and weary. Trisethni took aim and dropped out of the tree onto its broad back, both hands wrapped around the sciansá’s hilt and her bodyweight adding to the force of the blow. She drove the blade deep between its shoulders and down into its lung. It collapsed beneath her, trying to roar its battle-fury one last time, but the blade had stolen its breath along with its life.

Wanting only to hasten its end, the aelf twisted the blade as she pulled it free, opening up more veins inside it. She knelt by its side as it died, her silver-gilt hair dark with sweat and dirt, her weapons sticky with poisoned blood and the almost-healed wounds in her leg throbbing from the exertion.

Trisethni stumbled away from the massive corpse, wincing, and stared without seeing at the shattered ruin of the glade, its saplings trampled and tree trunks scarred by blades and claws. There was none of the battle-elation that usually coursed through her veins, and though she muttered the words of the Red Invocation, somehow this didn’t feel like a victory.

‘What did that Sylvaneth do to me?’ she muttered softly. Doubt plagued her: why hadn’t she revelled in this kill as she did all others? Why hadn’t the thrill of combat lent strength to her limbs and brought joy to her heart? Why pity, instead of rage? Why sadness, instead of dark delight?

Trisethni wiped sweat from her face and used a rag from her mauled pack to clean her blades. ‘No. It’s nothing. I have a mission from Belleth and the High Oracle. My concern was for that, for bringing them victory. I allowed that task to distract me from this one. The kill was just and swift. Khaine will be pleased.’

She salvaged what she could from the scattered contents of her pack and filled it back up, settling it on her shoulders. She centred herself again, drawing close the threads of her soul and the core of her power in the fight’s aftermath. She cupped them within her, a shimmering crimson globe of strength and magic and will that had no space for doubt or anxiety, no room for distraction. She would need it all soon, every scrap of determination, every breath of the faith that beat so fiercely within her. Fighting the bear would be nothing more than a pleasant memory when she was deep within the Spyrglass Warrens.

Trisethni didn’t look at the bear’s corpse as she set off west again, up into the mountains and towards the Ebonfire Gate. She didn’t dare.

The aelf’s fingers teased at the pommels of her sciansá, but she didn’t draw them from their sheaths. They were a mixed mercenary company, some Freeguild soldiers and a few duardin, and they had wounded with them. The assassin would have skirted around the company, except they were coming from the west and she needed to know the threats that were awaiting her in those tree-clad hills and snow-swept peaks.

She’d announced her presence loudly as she made her way towards them, but they still had weapons trained on her when she stepped into view. Hence her fingers tickling at her blades.

‘May the Realm of Life grant you health and bounty,’ she called, sweeping back the hood of her cloak to reveal her aelven features. ‘And may almighty Khaine bless your efforts against our enemies. I am Trisethni of the Khailebron.’

A few faces twitched at that, as they realised what she was. A heavyset woman with a scarred face stepped forward. ‘What do you want?’ she asked gruffly. She didn’t order her archers to lower their bows.

The duardin in the company clumped together as they recognised her, muttering questions and theories they thought she couldn’t hear. A Daughter of Khaine. Ruled by bloodlust. A berserker in battle who’d as soon slaughter her allies as her enemies in order to fulfil her profane oath to the Lord of Murder. She drank blood and spitted infants over fires, apparently. Captain should order the archers to loose.

Trisethni cocked her head as she faced them. Slowly she drew her lips back from her teeth in something that definitely wasn’t a smile. One duardin shoved himself forward at that, but the others hauled him back, their gazes flickering between her and the captain. She snorted gently. Duardin were fierce allies in the battle line, but like so many other races scattered across the Mortal Realms, they did not understand aelven devotion, nor did they understand the ways of Khaine. Even those men and women of other races who requested the quiet aid of Trisethni and her sect did so with distaste. Their political manoeuvring and greed might necessitate the use of assassins every now and then, but they didn’t like them, and they certainly didn’t honour them.

When the aelf looked back at the captain, she found her with arched brow and folded arms. Trisethni dismissed the duardin from her thoughts; they wouldn’t act without this woman’s say so, no matter their prejudices. So it was this woman she needed to deal with.

‘I travel to the west. You have injured fighters – news of what befell you would aid my journey.’ Still no softening of stance. ‘We all fight on the same side, captain,’ Trisethni added. Some of us with more skill and dedication than others, she added silently.

The Freeguilder eyed her for a few more seconds, and then grunted again. ‘Brida Devholm, captain of Lady’s Justice Freeguild company. Two days ago we ran into a large party of beastkin. We fought and killed most of them, but not all. Perhaps a hundred escaped. We lost them in the storm and besides, we had our injured to tend to. We’ll send out a heavier patrol once we get back to Greywater Fastness.’

She paused to check her company, the action unconscious, reflexive, assessing their readiness, their positions, the tension in the bows still pointed at Trisethni. She signalled and they lowered their weapons.

‘Anything we should know about between here and there?’

‘I killed a rot-plagued bear some days back. I’d wondered how it had got so close to civilisation without being dealt with, but from what you say, it seems likely it got parted from the force you encountered. Stick to the trade roads through Ghoul Mere – there are things in the desolation you don’t want to meet, especially with wounded slowing you down. And the Sylvaneth are active.’

The captain started a little at that, and then nodded. ‘My thanks and the Everqueen’s blessings go with you, aelf.’

‘May Khaine find you foes worthy of you, and lend you strength in the killing of them,’ Trisethni replied. Devholm’s mouth twisted a little, but she said nothing. Instead she signalled, and the Freeguilders began slipping through the forest again, parting like water around a stone and giving Trisethni a wide berth.

‘If you stay on this trail, you’ll come across the battleground, but there’s a fork about four hours’ march from here, signalled by a small stone cairn. Take the right-hand path and you’ll miss the carnage. It’ll add ten miles to your journey but, unless those who escaped doubled back, it should take you wide around where we last saw them.’

‘Thank you, Captain Devholm,’ Trisethni said. The woman nodded again and backed away. She slung her shield over her back before she turned it to the assassin and vanished beneath the trees. Trisethni watched, still and silent, until they were gone.

A hundred enemies between me and the Ebonfire Gate. She showed her teeth again; it still wasn’t a smile. Belleth told me it would be a challenge. I should have known she didn’t just mean the daemonettes.

Checking the forest for danger, for patches of silence in the birdsong that indicated a predator moving, feeling outside of her skin with her senses in case she was watched still, the assassin followed the faint trail the Freeguilders had left into the west.

When she came to the fork in the path, she studied them both. Devholm had no reason to lie to her, other than Trisethni’s being a Daughter of Khaine. Her leg was almost fully healed, but still, the thought of an additional ten miles grated at her need to hurry. On the other hand, dying in a mountain pass at the claws and fangs of beastkin, her body never found, her fate never known by Belleth and – worse than all that – her task for the First Daughter unaccomplished, was far worse than weary feet.

‘If you lied to me, Brida Devholm of Lady’s Justice, I will find you and kill you,’ Trisethni promised, and then she took the right-hand path and broke into a light-footed run. She’d cover the additional ten miles as fast as if she walked the shorter path, she vowed, the pack bouncing on her shoulders and her weapons bobbing on her hips.

As she ran, her keen eyes and ears quartered the trail ahead and the trees to either side for any danger. The Ebonfire Gate was another two weeks away at least, unless storms or predators or enemies slowed her further. She didn’t have time to hunt for food or for foes; instead, she’d eat trail rations and avoid conflict, much as it rankled her and went against everything she believed. But loyalty meant following orders, not blindly seeking glory and the fierce, red joy of combat. And loyalty and the sect’s rituals circumscribed Trisethni’s every day, every decision, so that if she was ever in doubt, she knew that to follow orders was always the right decision.

The path wound higher up into hills that became progressively less forested as she climbed. The soil thinned, its skin peeling back to reveal the stone bones beneath. As she came out onto a wide expanse of scree, the path vanished. Trisethni scanned the ground and the trees dotted on the other side. There. The resumption of the trail, perhaps, or maybe just a rabbit run through the scrub, disappearing into a crack in the rockface barring her way. Either way, it was her only option.

The aelf set out across the loose scree, stepping sure-footed across the shifting stones so they barely slithered beneath her and no small stone avalanches clattered away to betray her position. She reached the other side without mishap and the gap revealed itself to be the resumption of the path, though this time hemmed in between the broken slabs of tumbled rock faces. The gap was narrow, even for her slender frame, and the possibility of ambush was great. An enemy could follow her in, or come at her from ahead or above.

She hesitated in the mouth of the gap and then decided against it. She backed out and looked up at the rocks to either side. She chose the one that looked hardest to climb – it was less likely that if there was an enemy waiting above, they’d be guarding the most difficult route up.

Trisethni ran forward five steps and leapt, clearing six feet and landing catlike on a tiny ledge barely wide enough for her toes. Before she could tumble backwards, she stretched and hooked her fingers onto another ledge and pulled herself up. Her heavy pack tugged her backwards, inviting gravity to drag her back to earth, but she declined, pressing herself tight against the rock and traversing sideways like a spider, before jumping up for another hold. She clung one-handed, feet dangling free, hauled herself up higher, planted a boot and eased herself up with infinite patience until just her head and eyes cleared the top of the rocks. The area above the trail was deserted.

A deep breath and a final shove, and Trisethni rolled onto the top of the outcrop and up to her feet. The path was now at the bottom of a shallow gorge; she could still follow it, but she had room to run and fight and manoeuvre if she needed to. Shaking the dirt off her palms, she set out again.

Dusk found her sheltering beneath a rock overhang with a clear view downhill towards the treeline. The overhang was deep enough that she could risk a small fire, one that wouldn’t be seen from above, and she heated water in the small tin dish she carried. She washed the grime of the journey from her face and arms and hair, then peeled off her leggings to check the wounds in her leg. They’d sealed up well and did no more than ache after a long day’s march now. They’d scarred, but only until her next rejuvenation. Until then, they were a proud mark of survival.

Trisethni heated water over the fire and crumbled her rations into it to make a thick broth, and then she practised her blade-dance and sword drills, dedicating each move and step and strike to her god and his First Daughter. There was no blood spilt during this ritual, but the movements themselves were sacred and the intention behind them was one of worship as much as practice.

She used the ritual as a moving meditation, to once again centre herself. Over the last days, she’d been so focused on making progress across Ghyran, on not being tracked to the Ebonfire Gate’s hidden location, that she’d almost forgotten why she was travelling. Her every movement, her every breath, should be dedicated to Khaine. Instead, she’d passed hours running and daydreaming of the songs they’d sing of her, Trisethni the Unseen and her single-handed destruction of three daemonettes. Glory and progression within the Khailebron sect had become the reward she sought, when the only outcome she should crave and dedicate her life to was Khaine’s return to the Mortal Realms.

The admission caused a bloom of shame within her chest; if Belleth knew the bent of her thoughts, she would never have selected her for this task. Even after all these years of service, Trisethni couldn’t ignore her own desire for power and triumph.

The aelf threw herself back down next to her fire, sweat misting her face. She unbuckled her sword belt and laid the sciansá aside carefully. Rolling up her sleeve, she drew her hunting knife instead. ‘Almighty Khaine, Father of War, forgive the impropriety of my thoughts. My ambition is a failing unless it is used in your regard. My pride has placed itself between you and my task. With this, my blade, I cut it away, that nothing stands between us.’

Trisethni drew the blade down the back of her forearm, a long slice that gaped the flesh and instantly filled with ruby blood that dripped onto the stone beneath her and then into the fire as she held her arm above the flames, teeth gritted at the heat boiling in the cut.

‘Each time I falter, lord, each time I picture my triumph instead of yours, I will look at this scar and know that all I do is in your service. Through Morathi your High Oracle I know your will. Through my deeds I honour you – with my blades I deliver to you the strength of your enemies on wings of blood and screams.’

She pulled her arm back and sat looking at the oozing cut. ‘Forgive my failings, lord,’ she whispered, her aelven reserve broken here in communion with her god so that she had to press her lips together against the sob that threatened in her chest. The bloodlust and elation of battle had its opposite in this quiet opening of her soul to Khaine. Here it was humility and fear of failure that dominated, a desire to do better. To be better.

But even the strength of these emotions made her anxious. Never had she heard Belleth talk of sobbing through a communion. Was it another of Trisethni’s own failings that she was so overcome when she opened herself to her god? Or was it only a sign of the depth of her faith?

So many questions that the strictures and rules of the Khailebron and the Daughters as a whole forbade. Unquestioning obedience and the joy of combat, yes, those she understood. But this… yearning, this longing for the touch of Khaine upon her brow. Did they all feel so?

As ever, Trisethni received no answers to these questions, questions that had plagued her all her life as she progressed through the ranks of the cult.

She wrapped the wound in her forearm and ate her meal in morose silence, holding her promise to her god close in mind and heart. All she did was for him. All she was, was what he made her. All she craved was his return. She turned her mind from her own insignificant glory to the task ahead – the long miles and the traverse of the Gate; the shifting, treacherous shadowpaths she would take once in Ulgu; and the coming conflict with the daemonettes.

Trisethni bound all her thoughts to victory – victory for Morathi and for Khaine. She was but the blade while they were the hands that wielded her. And like a blade, she had but a single purpose: to make the blood flow.

Captain Devholm’s directions proved sound, and Trisethni never ran across the remaining beastkin that had attacked the Lady’s Justice Freeguilders. The rest of her journey was uneventful, though hard. A storm blew in to the mountains just as the last of the forest fell away below her, and she was forced to shelter in little more than a scrape in the rock for a day and a night until it passed, wrapped in her cloak and all her spare clothing. When she emerged, the sun was gone and winter had arrived, carrying snow in its teeth, its breath laden with ice.

Through her magic, she sensed the distant pull of the gate – or rather, the pull of Ulgu, the Shadow Realm and the seat of Morathi’s power, leaking through it. It drew her inexorably, like a lodestone to the north, so that despite the hardships of the terrain and the snow drifts in the lee of every outcrop, she could do nothing but increase her pace, having to force herself to stop and rest each night to replenish her strength.

When she rose at dawn, Trisethni knew instinctively that this would be her last day in Ghyran. The shadows called her, stronger than ever, and she could see the glittering of the lake in the distance, a morning’s run, no further. She shivered to think that she would be back in Ulgu after all this time.

The witch-aelf had spent a decade there years before, immersed in Khainite lore so that the weapon that she already was against the Ruinous Powers could be honed to a more lethal edge. There, the hag queens and slaughter queens had tested her, physically, mentally and emotionally, taking her to and past her breaking point again and again until she learnt that there were no limits to devotion, and that anything could be endured as long as the love of Khaine burnt within her. The memories were traumatic and triumphant in equal measure. She had lived in Hagg Nar; she had worshipped at the great shrine in the presence of the First Daughter herself; and she had been broken and put back together in Morathi’s own image. Stronger than before, with little mercy and less regret.

In the decades since, she had returned to Ulgu only four times, on each occasion travelling to Hagg Nar itself. This would be the first time since her final testing, so long ago, that she would travel the shadowpaths alone, and to a different destination in the Shadow Realm.

All she knew of the Spyrglass Warrens was their approximate location and the particular shadow-sense of them that Belleth had given her before she left, to enable her to locate them during her journey. The Warrens were an underground labyrinth formed in the Age of Chaos by who knew what. They had never been completely mapped, for they were far from Hagg Nar or any part of Ulgu useful to Morathi. Trisethni was entering a region she knew almost nothing about and to which she could expect no aid to come should she need it.

As she ate cold trail rations and then moved through her morning devotions, the solitude pricked at her, sharper than she would have liked. It undermined both her courage and her determination, and she chanted prayers as she practised her drills, letting the rapture of movement and the flash of winter sunlight on steel steady her nerves. She was strong, she was fast, and she had Belleth’s faith and Morathi’s command nestling in her heart. Over all, draped like a great warm blanket, was her love of Khaine.

Wrapped in its cocooning strength, Trisethni left her cold camp behind and broke into her easy, loping run towards the lake, her legs and lungs strong, her body eager. Towards the Ebonfire Gate and Ulgu. Towards her prey, which would fall beneath her sciansá.

For Belleth. For Khaine and Morathi.

For glory.

The lake glittered blue as sapphire beneath a pale winter sky. There was little snow within the bowl in the mountains that held it, nothing to detract from its stark, cold beauty. When Trisethni reached it, she had to pause just to marvel at it. Despite having seen the lake before, the place didn’t fail to exact its toll in awe. She stood on the shore, the reeds slashing upright against the ripples of wind caressing the surface of the lake, the geometry pleasing to her eye. Slowly, as if in a trance, the aelf began to strip, the cold biting at her exposed flesh and whipping her hair into a silver corona about her head and shoulders and back.

She folded everything, even her boots, into her pack, the sharp gravel of the shoreline digging into the soles of her bare feet. ‘Morathi, High Oracle, this is Khaine’s will through you. Guide my steps. Belleth, my queen, I will not disappoint you again.’

She held the pack above her head and walked into the water. Shudders ran through her at its icy touch as it crept over her feet, up her calves and thighs, over her hips and stomach, up her ribs. Her feet lost contact with the bottom and then found it again and she stumbled on, teeth chattering despite the clenching of her jaw, water lapping up to her chin now.

Eventually it became too deep and she rolled onto her back, pack held up above her chest, and kicked on, glancing up and back every so often until the island came into view. She’d drifted too far to the left and had to correct course, adding more freezing minutes to the swim, but finally, finally, she reached it, turning back over and finding the lake bottom once more beneath her feet.

Trisethni stumbled up and out onto the tiny island, little more than a huddle of stunted trees and a few bushes. Birds nested there, but there was no other life – it was too far from shore. The aelf ripped open her pack and used her dirty shirt to scrub the water from her limbs, shivering continually and stamping from one foot to the other. Then she dressed and pulled her cloak on and tight around her, hood up to conserve what little body heat she had left.

The urge to kindle a roaring fire and thaw out her frozen limbs was strong, but now that she was here, Ulgu’s pull was undeniable. She’d make a fire on the other side of the Realmgate, rest and eat and regain warmth and strength there. For now, she just wanted – needed – to cross.

Pack settled once more on her shoulders, Trisethni wove through the small copse of trees deep into its heart, where a cairn of black stones, out of place in this part of the mountains, sat waiting. She threw herself onto her knees at their base and pulled ironoak and heartwood from her pack, tiny splinters of wood she built into a pyramid. Next she took wool, silk and leather, and placed them carefully around the edges. Finally, she cut her finger and let three drops of blood fall onto her flint, then struck her knife against it.

The blood and the poor kindling shouldn’t have taken a spark, let alone a fire, but black flames raced up the tiny pile of fuel and from there leapt greedily to the blackened cairn. Trisethni sheathed her knife and stood. The flames were cold, doing nothing to leaven the ice in her veins, but she ignored it now. Ignored everything but the black fire. Waiting.

There was an instant where the flames parted and behind them wasn’t the stone of the cairn but… space. A place. Another realm. It lasted less time than it took the aelf to draw in a breath, but when it appeared, she was ready. She closed her eyes against the evidence that told her she was running at a burning pile of stones and leapt forward. She met no resistance, nothing but a heartbeat of even deeper cold, a cold so intense it froze the breath in her lungs, the moisture in her eyes, the blood in her veins.

And then she was through. Through the Ebonfire, through the Realmgate. She was in Ulgu. She was home.

Trisethni stood on the other side of the gate, a matching cairn of stones similar to the one on Ghyran, though this one didn’t burn. It didn’t need to now that she’d passed through it. The sky was blackened with clouds and mists, the landscape one of rocky outcrops and dark soil. Black-leaved bushes and trees of bone-white and charcoal spread before her, a deep forest in which animals moved, predator and prey in the ancient dance. She saw nothing of them; either they were well camouflaged or they were made of spirit and shadow only, invisible until the moment they struck.

It was warmer than the mountains of Ghyran. Cloying fingers of mist drifted close and wrapped around Trisethni’s limbs, investigating her. Was she friend or foe? Did she belong here or was she, like Slaanesh’s minions, an intruder to be hounded and attacked? The aelf spread her arms wide and let the mists do their work, filling her heart and lungs with the moist air of Ulgu. The deathly cold of the lake was a distant memory; Trisethni didn’t need a fire. She didn’t need rest or warmth. Ulgu’s strength filled her, flaring deep inside and sparking a fierce battlelust that could not be denied. She would go now.

The mists touched the magic at her core and found it to be good. She reached after one coiling tendril as it began to retreat, satisfied with who she was, and wrapped it around her fingers; drew it softly back so that it smoked up her arm. Letting a trickle of magic run into her fingertips, she moulded the mist into shadow, drawing more to herself, spinning it into a cocoon, wrapping it around her like a cloak.

When she was the small point of light at the centre of the shadow, Trisethni flicked her fingers, chanting the words that opened the way onto the shadowpath. And there it was, stretching away before her into darkness. A path of ebony, walled with shifting, swirling mists laced through with crimson flashes of magic.

‘The Spyrglass Warrens,’ Trisethni said, holding the image of them in her mind that Belleth had shown her. She stepped forward, hands still weaving complex patterns, and the shadowpath took her. It felt she walked only a few hundred steps, but she knew each one took her miles.

She was nearing the end of the journey when the magic around her crackled and changed. The deep blood-crimson colour of it curdled and darkened, sparking against her skin like acid so that she cried out at the unexpected pain of it. Something was very wrong and her fingers wove faster as she visualised an exit to the shadowpath.

Instead of slowing and parting, the shadows coiled thicker and faster, the magic edged with purple and gangrenous green. Trisethni stopped walking, concentrating on ending the spell, but she was dimly aware of the landscape still speeding past her – she was still moving, still being drawn along the path to the Spyrglass Warrens. To the daemonettes.

The aelf stopped the weaving of her fingers entirely, despite the risk that releasing her grip on her magic and Ulgu’s could tear her apart. Instead she reached for her sciansá, and had barely drawn the blades when the path ended and spat her out – into utter blackness.

Not the perpetual soothing twilight of Ulgu but true darkness that not even aelven eyes could penetrate. Trisethni’s breathing echoed harshly off stone. Blindly she thrust out both blades, one ahead and one behind; the latter screeched off stone and she stepped backwards until her pack rested against it. At least nothing could come at her from behind.

They’d brought her here. She was inside the Spyrglass Warrens and the daemonettes had corrupted the magic of the shadowpaths to bring her into the depths instead of her intended destination on the surface. Were all the paths thus infected, or just the one that led to the Warrens, a precaution taken by the daemonettes to disorient their enemies?

Irrelevant to my purpose. There’s nothing I can do about it even if they are, not until I get out of here. She tucked the worry away to reconsider once she had victory.

The specific place within the Warrens they’d brought her to would be to their advantage, not hers, so Trisethni began to move, stepping as lightly as she could, wincing every time her boot scuffed over a rock or rise in the tunnel. She folded her right arm, bringing her weapon across her body and using her elbow to stay in contact with the wall she couldn’t see. She was painfully aware that she could be walking towards a trap, or towards the daemonettes themselves. But she had to choose a direction and she had to put distance between herself and the corrupted shadowpath’s terminus.

The tunnel curved slightly, almost imperceptible except that Trisethni was straining every sense to pick up any information she could. It angled downwards, too, and she realised she was travelling deeper into the Warrens and likely further from any of the exits.

Without warning, the echo of her breathing changed and a chill kissed her exposed face. She halted and then probed carefully at the ground, first with her boot and then the reach of her sciansá. The tunnel floor vanished beneath her touch. Blind and groping, Trisethni moved her blade back to solid ground and walked it left and then right. Was that a ledge around the hole?

A sudden skittering from far behind her and she jumped, cold sweat prickling across her back. The urge to step forward increased again. It probably wasn’t very wide; she could jump it, she was sure.

The aelf was so sure that she was in the act of sheathing her blades to do it when she paused. She didn’t know; there was no possible way she could know how wide the hole was, or how deep if she fell into it. Why was she so convinced that jumping was the best option?

Because I’m already under their glamour.

The cold sweat that should have warned her returned, accompanied by a prickling of awareness – Trisethni was being watched. Something wanted her to jump and miss, to fall into the hole. Something was in the hole, waiting to catch her or simply slaughter her when she landed, screaming. She knew it as surely as she knew where her body was in space, though she couldn’t see it or the environment around her.

The skittering from behind her this time was closer – much closer. Trisethni smiled without humour. So they were herding her, trying to make her panic now that she hadn’t fallen into their first trap.

But there was the path around to the right, the ledge she’d felt with the tip of her blade. Head right, around the hole, probably the route they took themselves. The aelf took a pace to the right before something in her screamed a warning. She took a deep breath and held it, calming the whirl of thoughts.

The ledge was on the left, not the right. It was left. I know it was left.

It was right, whispered a silky voice in her mind. She swayed on her feet and then took a decisive step away from the hole and towards whatever was behind her. She was trapped between them either way – one below in the pit, one advancing. No point throwing herself forward and trusting she made the leap. Better to ready herself to fight here, now. Take them by surprise as they’d tried to do with her.

To that end she shrugged off her cloak and wadded it tightly, then took a few steps back and ran to the edge of the pit. She froze there and launched the cloak into the blackness, careful it didn’t catch on the edge of her sciansá. An ululation of triumph rose from beneath as something leapt high and tore into her cloak and Trisethni threw herself at the sound, left blade angled down to punch through the creature, the right slashing around her in case there was more than one.

She slammed into something big and warm, its limbs smooth like hers until they weren’t, until skin became something else, hard like bone, like shell. The creature screeched its surprise and the aelf used the sound to locate its head. Her right blade hooked around and sliced, bit in, bit deep.

Trisethni was thrown clear as the creature she’d attacked screamed and convulsed. She hit a wall hard and slid down, winded, still blind, and filled with a sudden panic. ‘Belleth?’ she croaked, arm wrapped around herself to clutch at the ribs that had smashed into the wall. ‘Belleth? My queen?’

She could hear sobbing and fumbled blindly towards it, horror-struck. How could she have attacked Belleth, her mentor, her love?

Why is Belleth here?

The voice was tiny and easy to ignore amid the fear that her hag queen was mortally wounded.

That’s not Belleth.

A little louder this time, and Trisethni stumbled to a halt. She’d lost one of her sciansá and became aware of the sting of a head wound and the hot trickle of blood down her brow. She didn’t know how she’d got the injury, but she knew, suddenly, that it was bad. Disfiguring. Not even a rejuvenation bath would heal this scar, twisting her features into monstrousness.

Stop it. These thoughts are not yours.

The sobbing became a laugh, a sultry low sound that sent a shiver of unwelcome desire through Trisethni. A soft, very soft, glow of light began to emanate from her left and the pit resolved itself out of the blackness. It wasn’t deep, no more than a dozen feet, with enough outcrops she could climb out within seconds. But the figure in the centre held all her attention.

It was the most beautiful creature the aelf had ever seen, tall and slender with masses of deep red hair and wide, vivid eyes. Eyes that were crinkled in amusement at Trisethni’s open-mouthed shock. There was no wound across its face, or anywhere on its perfect body.

Trisethni realised how dishevelled she was in contrast. Her pack was tattered, one strap half-broken. Blood was dribbling down the side of her face and her hands were abraded. Her clothes were filthy and her tight braid of silver hair had come loose. She licked her lips as shame welled in her throat.

How could she kill something so perfect? How could something so perfect be dedicated to evil, to Chaos? It was all some terrible mistake. Belleth was wrong. Morathi was wrong.

The light swelled a little more and the assassin wrenched her gaze from the figure to find its source. A crystal the size of her fist: native to Ulgu but rare, it sat on the floor only a few steps away. The gleamstone gave off a wavering light when shaken, a light that faded over time. She needed that light to help her find her way out, to lead this beautiful being to safety.

Kill it and you kill the glamour that confuses your mind. Kill it and take the gleamstone. Kill it or it kills you.

Trisethni blinked and lifted her face to the scrabbling from above. A… thing was hanging over the lip of the pit, its face twisted into a mockery of aelven beauty more hideous than the most bloated Rotbringer. She gasped, repulsed, and when she looked back down, the one in the pit with her had changed, too, though the image rippled and doubled, a nauseating switch between beauty and horror and back again. Elegant hands became cruel claws, finely-muscled legs became chitinous, scrabbling appendages, and the face Trisethni could have looked at forever became nightmare incarnate. And it was bleeding. She had cut it after all.

It laughed again, beckoning, and the aelf threw herself towards her fallen sciansá and swept it up in her free hand, spun and leapt up onto the wall and used the momentum to fling herself back at the creature, blades extended, her body an arrow behind their lethal tips.

The daemonette watched her come and then slid sideways at the last second. Trisethni responded by sweeping her weapon wide; she caught it a glancing blow on its claw, scoring a line across the stone-hard shell. Barely a scratch. It didn’t bleed, didn’t even seem to notice what she’d done.

The assassin rolled as she landed, tucking her shoulder and head and coming back up on her feet. She snatched up the gleamstone and shoved it down inside her shirt, muffling much of the light. A faint glow still came from it, a glow that moved as she did, pinpointing her location.

Trisethni leapt for the wall again, one blade in her teeth and free hand hauling herself up. She rolled over the edge of the pit on the far side from the second daemonette, rolled to her feet and sprinted away into the blackness.

Shame dogged her heels. Her first encounter and she had failed. More than failed – she was hurt, staggering, the cut on her brow and the thudding ache in her ribs slowing her. Making her weak. She had no plan, no way out, no idea what to do other than run. She was the worst choice Belleth could have made for a task this great. Better to let the daemonettes catch up with her.

Run. For Khaine and Morathi, for Belleth your love, run.

Tears pricked the corners of her eyes as the daemonettes’ manipulations battered at her and she stumbled on in the almost total darkness, the tiny flicker from the hidden crystal just barely showing her bends in the tunnel, no more.

I am Trisethni the Unseen, witch-aelf of Khailebron. Trusted of Hag Queen Belleth, on a mission from Morathi the First Daughter, the High Oracle. My heart belongs to Khaine.

I am Trisethni the Unseen, witch-aelf of Khailebron. Trusted of Hag Queen Belleth, on a mission from…

Come back to us, pretty aelf. Come back and play.

Trisethni shook her head as she ran, trying to dislodge the words, the imperative, the beseeching command to return and throw herself into the daemonettes’ embrace. She stumbled on.

Eventually she found a crack in the side wall of the tunnel she was in and forced herself through, dragging her pack after her. It was so tight she felt her shirt tear on the sharp stone, but that didn’t matter as much as finding a hiding place. Somewhere to rest, to strategise. To pray for guidance.

She reminded herself that she hadn’t failed; she’d barely even begun. And in that first interaction she’d wounded one of her enemies. Already, she’d drawn blood. Her hand went to her brow and the stinging cut there. Fine, they’d both drawn blood, but Trisethni’s had been the more serious strike, even if she hadn’t been able to see it on the creature’s face beneath its glamour. She knew she’d cut it. She knew it. She could recall the sensation of flesh opening beneath her blade; there was no other feeling like it. The daemonette might have confused her eyes, but it couldn’t defeat the knowledge of her body. That was what Trisethni had to trust until this was done – her body, her reactions and skill and movement. Not her senses, and certainly not her emotions. Perhaps not even her thoughts.

The crack in the rock had opened into a tiny cave, so small she could neither stand up nor lie flat. She huddled in the bowl of stone deep beneath the earth and took the crystal out of her shirt; its glow was fading now that she was still, but she knew it would brighten every time she moved. Now that she had it, she didn’t know if it was wise – it was a beacon in the darkness, a clear indication of her location. There could be more than just daemons down here who would like to make a meal of her. Trisethni licked sweat from her upper lip and then folded the gleamstone in her hands and shoved them between her thighs, stifling its glow.

The blackness was complete. As it rushed in to fill the space where the light had been, it seemed to bring whispers and emotions with it until she was gasping at the fear clawing at her. Desperately, Trisethni shook the crystal and the glow flared up, illuminating the tiny bolthole. Slowly her breathing steadied and the panic receded. She put down the crystal and used her pack to stuff the crack she’d slid through to keep the light from escaping. For now, at least, she couldn’t bear to discard it.

Later, when I know this place better. When I understand the Warrens and am sure of the exits, then I’ll get rid of it.

Come and play with us, sweet one. Come, little aelf, come and play.

No, Trisethni thought at them fiercely. You speak only lies.

She was tired and hungry and cold, a chill leaching from the walls and the ground and into her bones. She longed for the comfort of a fire; instead she dug through her pack for hard bread and dried meat. Her bottle was full of lake water, but she’d have to make it last.

The gleamstone faded as Trisethni ate, and the aelf steeled herself to the encroaching darkness. She ate the last bite of food as the light blinked out and then folded her hands in her lap and mouthed invocations, seeking the calm clarity of meditation, of ritual.

Less than a hundred increasingly rapid heartbeats later and Trisethni kicked out, knocking the crystal tumbling so that as the light flared up it bounced and skittered about her. Her breathing was harsh in the confines of the space. Images of the glorious creature – daemonette, she’s a daemon, a plaything of Slaanesh – had danced before her in the dark, beckoning, promising.

Leaving the crystal glowing, the aelf attempted her rituals again, yearning for the space to dance with her blades and lose herself in movement. Her mind found it easier to free itself to worship and Khaine through ritual combat. But she sat still, barely breathing, casting her mind towards her god and the blessings and strictures of the temple, to anchor herself once more within its rules and requirements and use them to strengthen her will.

It was pathetic that she could be so easily dissuaded and distracted. Her strength was paltry against the daemonettes’ perfect devotion to the Lord of Pleasure. Trisethni shook her head violently to dislodge the thoughts. Again, she brought her mind to stillness, nestled in Morathi’s teachings, and sought to still her soul so that she might plan an offensive.

Morathi, not even a god, no longer even of true aelven form but a monster, and Khaine not interested enough in his followers to return to them. Lost. Probably destroyed for all time.

Trisethni gritted her teeth and forced the thoughts away. They returned with all the power and inevitability of an incoming tide and she realised, belatedly and with dread, that her task wasn’t to ignore them, but to endure them. To plan and stalk and attack and kill despite the whispers and the promises. To be battered by them every waking and sleeping moment and not give in. She’d never make them stop; she had to survive them. To remain uncorrupted.

Sly laughter drifted through the tunnels – or perhaps just through her mind.

‘So be it,’ Trisethni said aloud. ‘So be it.’ She wanted to utter promises and threats of her own, but firstly they must know she was here to kill them, and secondly any plan she did devise she mustn’t give away. So she held her tongue and concentrated instead on burgeoning herself with love of Khaine and Morathi and Belleth, who trusted her, who named her for this task out of every witch-aelf of Khailebron. Who had wooed her and loved her and cast her aside.

Stop it!

She began to plan. She needed to understand the layout of the Warrens, or at the very least the nesting areas used by her enemies. She needed to know how they moved between nests and how fast they could travel, whether they needed light as she did, how they manifested their magic. Belleth had told her she would need to be Trisethni the Unseen in order to defeat these creatures, and she knew what that meant; as much as the thought terrified her, she knew she had to give up the gleamstone. Or, at the very least, bury it in her pack or a pocket so that it didn’t give her away.

She needed to find one of the daemonettes and trail it back to their principal nest. And she wouldn’t be going unarmed. With the gleamstone’s glow beginning again to fade, Trisethni worked quickly and mostly by feel, removing items from the pack still stuffed into the gap in the tunnel wall. The blow pipe and feathered barbs were intimately familiar to her and she didn’t need the light to know where they were and which was which – the pattern of lines and dots carved into the shaft of each one told her which poisons their tips carried.

She hung the light blowpipe from its cord around her neck, inside her shirt, and strapped the package of darts around her waist, feathered ends upright for quick use. She had other poisons, many of them, in powder form, and she tied the poison pouch to her belt and hung a black silk mask around her neck. The sciansá she removed from the sword belt and strapped to her back so they wouldn’t scrape and clatter against the walls in the darkness.

Lastly, she took the innocuous, plain-hilted little hunting knife from its sheath against her spine and summoned her magic. Trisethni bent low over the blade and chanted, her voice so low it was more breath than sound, more a caress of air against metal than an invocation. Scarlet magic spooled from her fingers and into the weapon. ‘All Chaos turn from me. No evil can stand against me. No life remains where I have been. No life returns where I have passed. For almighty Khaine and for Light, I will strike down my enemies and bring ruin to Ruin.’

The assassin fed her knife with magic until the crimson orb within her had shrunk to a dull bead of blood, almost gone. She was shaking by the time she finished and nausea clawed at her throat while spots danced before her eyes. She drank some water and then pulled at a little of the ambient magic of the Shadow Realm to replenish what she had given. But not too much, or her enemies would sense it.

The crystal’s glow died as she rested and she was plunged yet again into the black. Trisethni closed her eyes and moved by feel, keeping her mind occupied. She wouldn’t think about how thick the darkness was, so thick it was almost tangible, brushing against her face and hands like spider webs. She wouldn’t think about the daemonettes and their ethereal beauty, waiting for her with promises of pleasure and immortality in return for a surrender that would steep her in bliss.

But she was thinking of it, and her hands had stopped moving. Methodically, Trisethni rechecked the rest of her preparations, tightening buckles and straps and strings. She didn’t attempt to dismiss the silent suggestions, only to move through them and emerge unscathed. To acknowledge the promises and yet decline their offers, one after another. It was a little easier if she was busy, and so she checked every­thing again, from the beginning.

Eventually the aelf had run out of excuses. There was nothing for it but to venture back into the tunnel. She decided the crack in the wall would be her refuge, and so she left her pack behind. She took the gleamstone, its glow muffled in a velvet bag and shoved deep into her pocket.

She shuffled to the exit and listened, straining over the patter of her heartbeat, and then pulled the pack out of the split in the wall and squeezed through, into the tunnel. She flattened herself there, listening again. Still nothing. Or nothing she could detect with her dull aelven senses, anyway.

Trisethni told herself those weren’t her words. Sciansá on her back, knife at her hip and swathed in poisons, she put her left hand on the wall and began to walk back the way she’d fled. She counted her footsteps as a guard against the murmurings and to aid her in her return.

Come and learn pleasure at our hands, little aelf. Look on our beauty and understand your place in the world. See how high our lord lifts us and the gifts he gives us, of power and beauty and knowledge. Such knowledge. Come, come to us that we might make you worthy. Worthy of him. Worthy of love. Belleth’s love.

Trisethni had stopped walking and her hands were hanging by her sides when she came back to herself. There were tears on her face. She sucked in a tremulous breath and placed an image of Khaine, drawn from the oldest relics in the cult’s possession, between her heart and the temptations of the daemonettes. It shivered beneath the onslaught – she shivered beneath the onslaught – but held firm.

The aelf wiped her face and reached back out for the security of the wall. Taking a deep breath, she began walking again. Laughter bounced and echoed around the tunnel, behind and ahead of her at once. Trisethni kept walking.

‘Of course Belleth stopped loving you,’ a voice said, and it was a voice this time, not a thought in her head, insinuating its way into her consciousness. She stopped again, this time to draw a sciansá from her back. ‘How could she love a twisted, broken little thing such as you?’ it went on, and despite the cruelty of the words, the voice itself was perfect. Low and sultry and enticing. Its words were reasonable, obvious even.

‘We can tell you how to make her love you again,’ said the voice, or perhaps a different one. It sounded from behind her and Trisethni whirled, slashing blindly in the darkness.

‘But you already know how to make her do that,’ came the first, and she twisted again, thrusting this time. She’d lost contact with the wall and stumbled left until she bounced off it, all her usual grace lost.

‘You just need to speak his name,’ came a third voice, and this one seemed, impossibly, to be above her. The aelf swiped upwards and the chorus of laughter echoed around her once more. ‘Speak his name. Speak his name. His name.’

‘Khaine!’ Trisethni screamed. ‘Khaine!’ She fumbled in her pocket and grabbed up the gleamstone, shook it furiously, sciansá ready. She was alone.

‘Slaanesh,’ came the sibilant whisper from ahead.

‘Pleasure,’ from above.

‘Surrender,’ from behind.

‘Never,’ Trisethni breathed. Holding the crystal up she advanced, faster until she was running with blade in hand, racing towards the pit where she’d first encountered the daemonettes. When she reached it she simply sped up and then leapt, clearing the ten or twelve feet without effort. As she flew over, she glanced down, but it was empty. Wherever they were, it wasn’t down there.

Soon enough she’d pass back through the area where the corrupted shadowpath had spat her out, so she slowed down and cupped her palm around the gleamstone, directing its meagre light forwards only. Cautious now and focused on the hunt, it was a little easier to ignore the persistent whispers that slid through her ears to twist and warp her mind.

Something that might have been movement, right at the limit of the light – a slide of pale, smooth limbs disappearing around a corner. The tunnel forked and whatever she’d seen, it had gone left. A grim smile split Trisethni’s mouth. Finally. She slowed still further as she approached the fork, creeping along, the light almost fully muffled in her hand and giving off just enough to show her where to place her feet to avoid making noise.

The stone was black in the dim light, but the shadows were blacker still – surely the pale flesh of the daemonettes would stand out in contrast? Despite her care, the walls echoed Trisethni’s slow breaths back to her, though she could just make out a furtive scrape of chitin on rock from ahead. Where the tunnel split, the two new passages watched her like the eyes of the Dark Prince himself, beckoning and judging. Offering her a choice.

The merest breath of fresh air from the right hand passage promised an escape to the surface: freedom; life. To go left was to scurry to her death like a beetle – or to run forwards in ecstatic surrender. The aelf stopped a pace back from the fork. She would go left, but she would go as herself, as a witch-aelf devoted to her god, neither insect nor apostate. Trisethni took a slow breath in through her nose, mouth open to let the air caress her palate as well. There was… something. A musk, a scent. Faint but unmistakable. The scent of vibrant life, almost as perfumed as a wild glade in Ghyran’s Nevergreen Mountains. Trisethni began to smile and pulled in a second, deeper breath. She could almost feel it race from her lungs to every part of her, tingling and intoxicating.

A laugh rose in her chest but then her eyes widened in horrified understanding and she fumbled at the mask hanging loose around her neck with her sword hand. She tugged it up over her nose and mouth, holding her breath until it was in place and then gusted out the air. She knew poisons and narcotics; she knew too the smell and taste and effect of dream-pine. Stupid, stupid, she cursed herself.

Yes, something agreed and knocked the gleamstone out of her hand.

Trisethni jumped backwards, away from the fork in the tunnel as the crystal bounced and skittered along the stone, each impact brightening its glow but its movement making shadows leap and dart. Her sciansá caught its light and the edge gleamed with righteous vengeance, reflected in the eyes of the…

Of the most beautiful being Trisethni had ever seen. Eyes of a vivid green, wide with welcoming delight and youthful innocence. Eyes that mesmerised and pulled her not unwilling towards the creature who wore a skin of honey-brown and a great mass of black, tumbling curls that draped artfully, seductively, over one brow. So beautiful. So voracious and perfect and…

For Khaine’s sake, don’t look!

The aelf closed her eyes and leapt to the attack, aiming for where she’d last seen the daemonette but slashing in a wide arc to catch it if it had moved. It hadn’t, or at least not far enough. Impact and a screech, the spray of hot liquid over her hand and up her arm. The glorious sensation of that flawless flesh cleaving beneath her sacred blade.

Trisethni looked, and she saw what it was she faced. Her blow had sliced the creature across the midriff and the pain had made it drop its glamour. Claws and teeth and a mouth that opened impossibly wide, a crest of ragged hair and eyes too big for its face, black and pitiless and quite mad. Its skin was wound with tattoos that writhed and chased each other in the uncertain light, seeking to draw the aelf’s eye and confuse it. Instead she looked aside, keeping it in her periphery so that when it lashed out with its clawed arm she knocked it away, her blade biting deep and bitter into the inside of its elbow. Ichor spurted and it screeched again, higher this time, louder.

Trisethni reversed her blade, the backhand sweeping towards the daemonette’s unprotected throat. A blast of sensation struck her – touch and smell and the overwhelming sense of her own insignificance, her myriad failings heaped up on her shoulders like a cloak of iron. The stroke faltered, slowed enough that the daemonette could duck it and strike in turn, her other arm ending in long fingers tipped with curved black talons. They caught Trisethni across her upper arm, an upward sweep that laid open flesh and continued on to peel open her cheek like a ripe fruit.

Trisethni bellowed hurt and blood and fury and shame, shame at all the daemonette was showing her and making her feel. Her mind shut down, unable to cope with the battering of her senses, but her body, trained for decades in the dance and duck and strike of combat, reacted without conscious intervention. She tossed the sciansá into her other hand and leapt, planted one foot on the daemonette’s knee to drive herself upwards, and hacked down with all her strength. Its severed arm tumbled to the tunnel floor, bouncing the gleamstone into a corner and brightening its glow once more.

Trisethni back-flipped away from it and landed in a fighting crouch, dragging the second sciansá from her back.

The daemonette screamed this time, a scream high and pure in its agony. There was no assault on Trisethni’s senses as it tried to disorient or distract her; it turned and fled up the right-hand fork of the tunnel, leaving its severed limb leaking ichor. The aelf snatched up the crystal and set out in pursuit, the pain in her face and shoulder pounding at her nothing compared with her fury and righteous bloodlust.

The chase went on for miles, Trisethni following sound and ichor spattered on the walls and floor but leaving her own blood trail in turn. The mask protecting her against poisons and fumes had been torn off by the claws, and the hot rush of blood down her neck into her shirt seemed as if it would never stop, but the assassin ignored it: the frenzied joy of combat and victory was singing in her veins and every drop of blood she lost was replaced with fury and dark, churning delight at the battle to come. She was Trisethni the Unseen. She was a Daughter of Khaine. And she was unstoppable.

Slowly, almost without realising, she began to slow. She wouldn’t catch it; the daemonette was too swift, even injured. She should rest, recuperate, follow the occasional breath of fresh air back to the surface. She couldn’t win anyway. She should flee, save herself while she still could and bear the scars across her face until the day she died, years from now, broken and ashamed.

Trisethni growled at the alien, lying thoughts and tried to speed up, but it was like running through sand. She was heading uphill, but the roaring in her ears was more than breath and heartbeat. A chill wind beat against her face now, whipping her braid behind her. It carried moisture with it. Still it was more than the slope and the wind slowing her. There were no thoughts or images, no crushing humiliations or reminders of past mistakes. Just weight, and pressure, and the imperative, pounding along with her slowing feet, to stop. Stop and rest, sit, tend wounds.

The aelf was walking now, head down as she trudged, and wherever the daemonette was, it was long gone. She probably should stop and rest. Why not? What harm could it do?

It was that last thought that hooked its claws in her, but not with the effect the daemonettes had no doubt wished for. What harm can sitting down on a well-travelled path used by my enemies do me? Trisethni managed a weary snort. She did stop, but only to close her eyes and let the darkness take her. She tried not to think, to let her body understand her surroundings rather than her fallible and easily manipulated mind or senses.

She was close to water. She’d come a long way uphill and miles from her hideout. It wasn’t fresh air she tasted on the breeze after all, but the movement of a waterfall ahead that pushed the air into motion. A waterfall that would disguise even the loudest scuff of foot or claw on rock, or the keening cry of an injured foe.

She had to go back.

Thirsty. So thirsty. Need to wash out the wounds.

Trisethni was tired, both in mind and in body. So tired she wasn’t sure if the thought was hers or not. She thought back to the route she’d so blindly taken – the fork in the tunnel with its many ambush sites, the place where the shadowpath had deposited her, the pit she needed to cross, all the way back to the tiny crack in the wall and her hiding place. Where her water was. And she was so thirsty.

Her hand rose without volition to probe gently at the slices in her face. They were puffy and hot, almost certainly infected already – another ploy of the daemonettes’. She needed to wash them out. She began to walk, putting the gleamstone back in her pocket as she did, not in the sock this time so the tiniest glow shone through the material, just enough for aelven eyes to see the lay of the path. The roar of the waterfall increased, the chill of the air on her hot, scored face and shoulder.

Trisethni walked a little further and then came to an abrupt halt. She put her hand over her pocket, blocking the crystal’s light – she could still see. More light, ahead this time. Dim but there, unmistakably there. An exit? The aelf rushed forward, heedless, and rounded a bend to find a great waterfall blocking the passage and thundering on down below her into inky blackness. She teetered on the edge and then pulled herself back, fingers digging into cold wet stone.

She looked up. High above, the underground sky that was the roof of the Warrens was fractured and through that crack pounded a river, its forward motion across the surface of Ulgu arrested into a waterfall that plunged deep into the guts of the Realm of Shadow. No way out above, while below was the roaring unknown. Tumbling water and sharp-edged rock and the absolute absence of light.

But here, here on the ledge, was water and refreshment and a way to soothe the claw marks in Trisethni’s face and shoulder. She threw herself onto her knees at the very lip of the path and reached out cupped hands. The water was shockingly cold, making her back teeth ache as she brought it to her lips and drank. She held a palmful to her ruined face, gasping at the chill in the wounds and relishing it, too. She drank some more, filling her belly, and then bathed her face and shoulder again.

And now your form is as ugly, as small and wanting, as your soul.

It was so unexpected that Trisethni gasped and opened her eyes, staring around in bewilderment. She rocked on her knees, as if someone had shoved at her.

‘What?’

Only Slaanesh can restore you now. Only the Lord of Pleasure will give you a form to match your secret soul, the aelf you’ve always wanted to be.

Strong.

Beautiful.

Fierce.

‘No,’ Trisethni managed. ‘That’s not true.’ She looked to her right and saw the creature, beautiful beyond compare, kneeling at her side and watching her with such pity that she sucked in a breath. ‘No,’ she tried again.

The being ran gentle fingers over the slashes in Trisethni’s face, her own a mask of grief. ‘Just say his name,’ she breathed, ‘and it will all stop.’

‘I… Slaan… I can’t.’ Trisethni pulled herself back from a brink that had nothing to do with the edge and the waterfall.

The creature’s perfect face crumpled with sadness and her hand fell from the aelf’s cheek. ‘Then throw yourself in,’ she murmured, ‘for you cannot live as this pallid, broken thing. Just throw yourself in and end it now. The pain, the suffering of never being good enough, of not being worthy of Belleth’s love. Just die, little aelf. Die now.’

A sob broke from Trisethni’s chest, the sound of a heart splintering into pieces that would never be put back together. She rocked forward on her knees, her centre of balance teetering. The salt in her tears burned in the cuts, a clean hurt that spoke to her, warned her.

‘What?’ she tried, and looked again.

The daemonette shrieked in her face and plunged her claw at Trisethni. The aelf parried with her forearm, an instinctive defence that required no thought from a mind reeling from pain and confusion and the hot, sick glamour cast over her. Its other arm was missing at the elbow and it thrust at her again, and again she deflected, her mind coming back to her, struggling against a web of self-loathing and self-doubt.

‘No,’ she snarled. ‘No, you won’t have me.’

The daemonette laughed, a mad skirling noise that shrieked across Trisethni’s ear drums. It jumped up and sideways, clinging to the cavern walls with clawed feet, and raised its arm.

‘Die!’ It slammed the claw downwards into the stone ledge and a crack erupted, zig-zagging rapidly between Trisethni and the tunnel mouth.

The slab she was standing on tilted and began to slide into the abyss into which the waterfall fell. Trisethni launched herself at the daemonette and wrapped her arms around her. ‘Die?’ she growled and sank her teeth into the creature’s throat and tore out a chunk; ichor flooded her mouth and across her face as they peeled off the wall and began to fall. She spat out meat as the daemonette tried to scream. ‘You first.’ Trisethni reached back and drew the enchanted knife and stabbed it into the side of the creature’s neck. ‘Ruin to end Ruin. No life remains where I have been. No life returns where I have passed. Blade of Light, burn blood of Chaos.’

The daemonette didn’t scream now; it gurgled and choked as red light burst from the knife and snaked along its veins and arteries swifter than thought. The aelf wrenched out the blade and let go as they vanished deeper into the chasm of the waterfall. She flung out her hands, twisting through space like a cat. She hit the wall hard, the snap of a finger loud despite the roar of the waterfall, and began to slide down it, following the choking, dying daemonette into the depths of the Warrens to drown or be shattered on rock.

And then her free hand caught and arrested her movement so hard Trisethni nearly dislocated her shoulder. Desperately, the aelf tightened her grip and put the knife between her teeth and scrabbled with her right hand and her boots until she found another hold, and then another. Cursing at the pain of her wounds, shaking with adrenaline, fear and roaring, churning fury and the crystal-bright, diamond-hard elation of bloodlust, she began to climb back to the remains of the ledge. Back to the tunnels.

Back to her surviving enemies.

One down. Two to go.

Praise Khaine.

Trisethni couldn’t find her hiding place again. The aelf was sure she had returned along the same path, but when she took the fork in the tunnel, she began immediately to descend where before the path had been straight, and this time there was no pit to jump across. Her hiding place, her supplies including her food and water, were gone. But so was one of her enemies. One of Morathi’s enemies, a cruel and poisonous creature of Slaanesh and his foul perversions. Tumbled and dead and lost at the bottom of an underground waterfall.

As the hunger grew in Trisethni’s belly, it seemed scant reward. There were still two more. Two who whispered and sighed to her, two whose beauty would never be marred as hers now was, whose bodies would not fail as hers failed from want of water, food and healing. They would never bear such marks, such sickness. Two whose dedication to their lord and master would never be called into doubt. Not like the aelf’s, with her questions and her misgivings about Belleth and the book.

And always, as insistent as the beat of her pulse, the command: say his name. Surrender. Say his name.

And ‘Khaine,’ she would respond in a halting tone when she could bear it no longer. Always, it was received with sly and disbelieving laughter as they herded her about in the darkness, always just out of reach.

Will Khaine make you beautiful? they jeered. Will Khaine return Belleth to your arms or show you pleasure such as you have never even imagined could exist? No. But you know who will.

Say. His. Name.

Trisethni was on her knees, both hands pressed over her mouth, the right one digging into the scabby wounds on her cheek. She gagged at the stink of corruption and the hot stickiness of pus against her palm as the infection broke free under the pressure. Her mind screamed the name of the Lord of Murder; her mouth and tongue formed the name of the Lord of Pleasure.

Morathi cannot help you.

Morathi doesn’t know you serve her. She doesn’t even know you exist. She doesn’t care whether you survive in here or not. And Khaine is dead. Dead and not coming back. You should ask your High Oracle about Khaine’s fate. Ask her about his heart.

Say his name. Slaanesh. Say it. Say it!

Abruptly, again, Trisethni became aware of the scent of dream-pine. She stuffed her broken finger in her mouth and bit down savagely so the urge to speak became a sharp inhalation of agony, and her other hand reached into her pocket for the gleamstone. She drew it out gently, slowly, so as not to light it. So slowly that she couldn’t help but take a breath of the narcotic. Contentment nibbled at the edges of her fraying mind and dulled the pain in her hand and face and shoulder and ribs. The aelf held her breath and took her finger from her mouth. She gritted her teeth so hard that new pain erupted, through her sinuses this time, and drew the hunting knife silently from its sheath. Stealthily she rose to her feet.

Morathi cannot save you. Your god is dead, your sect is dead – give in or you are dead. Come to us, love. Breathe. Dream. Say his name.

Trisethni’s lungs were burning but she didn’t dare take a breath. Gripping the knife tight in one fist and the gleamstone hidden in the other, she shook it hard and as the light burst from it, she flung it in one direction and leapt in the other.

The daemonettes were either side of her, as if their night vision was sufficient to know her location in even the darkest tunnel. Yet both threw up their arms as the light burst upon them. Trisethni, her eyes screwed to slits against the glare, stabbed at the closest and gutted it as it shielded its face, chanting the invocation that prevented a being of Chaos from being reborn. She was already moving before it knew it was dead, before an agonised keening burst from it and its glamour vanished so that she saw, clearly, not only its hideousness but its stinking intestines bulging from the slit she had carved in its belly.

The other raked its talons down her back, but the sheathed sciansá turned the blow and only a single claw seared into her shoulder blade. Trisethni caught a glimpse of outcrops of rock and climbed the wall; the daemonette came after her and it was fast. Faster than the aelf and with a longer reach. Claws or teeth, Trisethni couldn’t tell which, pierced the stiff leather of her boot and cut into her calf and she screamed and let go of the wall. She fell back into her enemy’s embrace and the daemonette caught her up easily and cradled her as if she were a child. It was still halfway up the wall, balanced on wide, clawed feet as easily as if it stood on flat ground. She looked into its face, perfect and yet cold, its eyes pitiless. Trisethni wanted to drown in them.

‘Say his name, little aelf,’ it whispered, caressing her hair. ‘Pledge everything you are to the Lord of Pleasure and I might let you live.’

‘I am a Daughter of Khaine,’ Trisethni began, and stabbed. The daemonette slapped the knife out of her hand and it clattered down out of sight. It threw itself off the wall with the aelf in its arms and landed with a soft thump near its dying nest-mate. It looked down and a terrible sadness crossed its features.

Tears pricked at Trisethni’s eyes and shame closed her throat. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she whispered to the glorious being holding her, to the one dying on the cold rock. ‘I’m so sorry.’ She turned her face into the creature’s shoulder and sobbed, hitching in breaths of its musky skin. Shame welled in her, both at her actions and that she would never be as perfect, as devoted or as skilled as the one who cradled her.

‘Say his name,’ it commanded again in its low, lilting voice. ‘Who do you love above all others?’

‘Khaine,’ Trisethni said, her tone begging, as the daemonette’s claws drifted down her unscarred cheek to her throat. ‘Khaine.’ She knew it would be the last thing she ever said and she poured her heart into it.

‘No, my little one,’ the daemonette corrected her and the talons dug in, just a little, enough to dimple the skin but not break it. ‘Not Khaine. Who? Take a deep breath and tell me. Say his name.’

Its skin was perfumed, more intoxicating than even the dream-pine, and Trisethni pressed her face against it and inhaled again. ‘I’m not worthy,’ she cried. ‘Not of you, not of any of them.’

‘No. You are not,’ the daemonette agreed. ‘Not until you say his name. Who do you love? Who, above all others?’

And it was there, on her tongue, fizzing like bubbles, warm like blood. Her mind began to form the shape of it, her heart began to yearn towards it. The Dark Prince. More tears warmed her face and the daemonette hushed her as if she was a babe. ‘Say his name,’ it breathed again and she could feel it drinking in her despair as if it were wine. A delicate shudder rippled its lithe form, pleasure at her pain. It squeezed, cutting off Trisethni’s breath, and the wound in her shoulder spasmed into sudden, burning life.

That, too, the daemonette imbibed. The musk of its skin grew stronger. ‘Mmm,’ it hummed and squeezed again, eliciting another stab of agony and a wheezed, strangled cry from the aelf. Even though it was hurting her, Trisethni wanted nothing more than to surrender – to it and to its commands.

Say his name. Say his name and know all the delights of the Lord of Pleasure and his worshippers.

‘Put me down,’ Trisethni managed as her ribs creaked under the pressure of its embrace. ‘Put me down so I can breathe and I’ll say whatever you want.’

It reared back enough to look in her face and the aelf’s breath caught in her throat at its perfection again. ‘Are you lying, little aelf?’ it asked.

She shook her head, mute.

‘Pleasure and power, immortality and beauty await you,’ it promised her. ‘An end to any pain that isn’t also pleasure. All you have to do is renounce Khaine and give yourself to Slaanesh. Pledge your heart to the Dark Prince. Will you say his name?’

‘Yes,’ Trisethni whispered, broken and hurting and wanting it all to end. She was so tired; she carried so many wounds, inside and out. ‘Yes.’

The daemonette tucked her against its chest and jerked the sciansá from her back, then threw them singing into the blackness out of the gleamstone’s reach. They landed with a skirring clatter far off in the tunnel’s blackness. Then it set her on her feet.

‘Say his name,’ it commanded and its features now were twisted with excitement. It was still beautiful and Trisethni was as a worm in comparison. It was everything worship of Khaine should have brought her.

It was everything and Slaanesh had made it so. The other daemonette was finally dead. There was only this one left, this perfect embodiment of the Dark Prince’s will. Of everything Trisethni could be – once she surrendered.

Trisethni’s legs buckled and she fell to her knees on the stone as if in worship. Perhaps it was. Her fingers raked the ground, searching, while she held the daemonette’s gaze with her own. Searched. Found. The daemonette cocked its head, birdlike, and its elegant, long-fingered hands came up before it.

‘Say his name. Say his name and be damned and saved and loved. Slaanesh. Say it. Say it!’

The name thudded in her blood, in her heart and her head and tingled across her skin like a lover’s touch. Slaanesh. Slaanesh. Slaanesh. It ate at the last tattered shreds of her will, gnawed at her faith in Khaine, her god, her lord. It placed itself between her and Morathi, as the daemonette placed itself between her and memories of Belleth.

Slaanesh.

Slaanesh.

Slaanesh.

The aelf’s faith hung by a single shimmering thread of habit and magic and loyalty and the decades of worship. Shuddering, she stood and her feet began to move, taking her through the opening steps of the blade-dance that was ritual.

The daemonette hissed and the strength of her glamour increased, cutting at that last thread of belief until it was fraying in the face of its power. The name built in Trisethni’s stomach and grew in strength, travelling up into her chest, burning as it came – a sweet burning that she found she liked, that she craved – and into her throat and the last vestige of her faith was unravelling…

Trisethni opened her mouth to speak. The daemonette’s shriek of triumph echoed along the tunnel, but the aelf roared and grabbed her own tongue and hacked it off with the knife.

Blood spurted in her mouth. Pain like she’d never known exploded through her face and the daemonette paused in disbelief, then screeched with laughter, revelling in Trisethni’s agony, shivering with the rapture of it. Its glamour winked out of existence and its unblemished skin vanished, its hands became claw-tipped and stunted even as they reached for her.

Bellowing and spraying blood, Trisethni threw the stump of tongue at the daemonette and hurled herself after it. She struck it full-force in the chest, all her bodyweight behind it. The knife went into its shoulder and out; into its chest, the side of its neck. Its claws tore at her back, shredding scabbards and shirt and flesh, tearing into muscle. It went over backwards and Trisethni rode it down like a bucking horse, knife hand pumping as she carved its face and chest into bloody ruin. She chanted the invocation in her head with every thrust of the knife, praying it would be enough to extinguish the daemonette from existence.

Its hands fell limp at its sides and its only movements were the jerks of the blade punching in and out of its flesh.

And then the magic, the glamours and auras and whispers, faded. Still Trisethni stabbed, weeping, drooling blood and saliva and bleeding from a dozen wounds, her knife hand slowing now until eventually she collapsed on top of the ruined monster.

Khaine, her mind whispered as her mouth could not. Khaine.

The Khailebron had left the Draichi Ganeth temple in Greywater Fastness months before. By the time Trisethni tracked them to Hammerhal Ghyra, the winter had deepened and her wounds had healed. Physically, at least.

It had taken her days to retrieve her weapons and supplies and then find a way out of the Warrens. Drinking had been an agony; eating impossible. Both accepted punishments for her failure, for how close she had come to betraying everything she held most dear.

With the daemonettes dead, the shadowpath magic would have taken her back to the Ebonfire Gate without interference, but she had no tongue to command it. And so she had walked, day after day through the mists that slowly, patiently, helped her heal. Once back in Ghyran, she had stayed on the tiny island for a week, sleeping and weeping and bathing her wounds in the icy lake every day to flush them clean. Even now she could taste her own blood. She wasn’t sure the stump of her tongue would ever stop bleeding.

And yet despite it all, and the months of travel alone and on foot, first back to Greywater Fastness and then along the trade routes to Hammerhal, she was alive and she was victorious.

Trisethni’s hair was loose and pulled around her scarred cheeks, the hood of her tattered cloak up to shadow her face. She climbed the steps to the temple’s main entrance and the witch-aelves there lowered spears to bar her path.

‘Who seeks entry to Khaine’s sanctuary?’ one demanded.

Trisethni shoved back the hood of her cloak to reveal her aelven features and then showed them the hilts of her sciansá. The scars the daemonettes had tried to make her believe were her shame blazed now as testament to her devotion.

‘Well met, sister,’ the second said. ‘Where do you hail from?’

Trisethni closed her eyes for a brief second. When she opened them, she pointed at her mouth and then shook her head. The aelves exchanged glances. She held out a piece of paper.

The first read it and her mouth dropped open. ‘Stay here. Guard her,’ she said and fled inside before the other could respond. Trisethni waited. The months had taught her patience. Soon enough the guard was back and gestured Trisethni inside. ‘Go to the hag queens’ private sanctum. Belleth will meet you there. And,’ she paused and then grinned, ‘and it is an honour to meet you and know you victorious, Trisethni the Unseen. You… you are victorious?’

She managed a small smile, a smaller nod. The other aelf grinned again and clapped her on the arm.

‘Welcome home, sister. Go now, she’ll be waiting for you.’

Trisethni walked slowly and took the long way around to Belleth’s sanctum. Now that she was finally here, now that it was all so close to being over, she was afraid. She was held together with determination and loyalty all the more fierce for having been so nearly abandoned. Yet shame coated all of it, thick and cloying. She had been so close to giving herself to Morathi’s greatest, most implacable enemy. Belleth would see it and know it, for it was surely as clear on her face as the claw marks.

‘She cannot be alive,’ a voice murmured as Trisethni reached the door. It wasn’t Belleth.

‘Clearly she is. Clearly she succeeded. Against all the odds she went to the Spyrglass Warrens and singlehandedly killed three daemonettes. I can scarce believe it.’

That was Belleth, and Trisethni smiled just a little, but then it faded. Why could she scarce believe it? It had been the hag queen who chose her for the task, out of all the Khailebron witch-aelves.

‘And she knows of the book,’ the first voice said. ‘What is–’

‘Enough. Leave me now – she will be here any moment.’

Without quite knowing why, Trisethni fled back down the corridor and then turned and made her slow way towards the door again, as if only just arriving. She didn’t recognise the aelf who hurried from Belleth’s rooms and paused to stare at her as she passed. She was Khailebron, but not of Trisethni’s coven.

When the other had padded around the corner, Trisethni approached the door and tapped on it. She was wary now, wary and worried.

Belleth opened the door, backlit in the yellow glow of many torches and candles, tall and dark and beautiful. Ageless and fierce. Trisethni’s heart tightened at the sight of her after so long, but she only held her gaze for an instant before dropping her head and teasing her silver hair forward across her ruined face. All her noble convictions about bearing the scars with pride faded at the thought of her old lover seeing them.

She heard Belleth draw in a sharp breath. ‘Tris,’ she said, the nickname one the aelf hadn’t heard in a year. She gritted her teeth, stoic. ‘Come in, come in, my sister. My glorious, victorious sister. Let me look at you.’

Trisethni followed her into the sanctum, warm and smoky with incense. She stepped around Belleth before the other aelf could speak and approached the altar, with its images of Khaine and Morathi, its small cauldron. She made an inarticulate sound and fell to her knees and pressed her face to the stone. Forgive me, my lord, forgive me, High Oracle. I was tested and found wanting. I so nearly supplanted you both in my inmost heart. Forgive me.

Belleth knelt next to her and pulled her into an embrace. ‘Hush, sister, hush. You are home and you are safe. You have done a great thing, Tris. There will be songs sung about your deeds in the Warrens once the details are known. You’re safe.’ Tenderly, she pushed Trisethni away and brushed back the hair from her face. Horror flickered across the hag queen’s features, followed by pity. Both emotions carved at Trisethni’s heart anew.

‘Tell me what happened,’ Belleth commanded.

Again Trisethni pointed to her mouth and shook her head. Belleth frowned and hugged her again.

‘Then worry not tonight, sister. You will sleep in my quarters and tomorrow you can give me a full written report, when you’ve rested and eaten.’

The hag queen stood and stepped away, leaving Trisethni kneeling in disbelief on the stone. A written report? What about rejuvenation? I can speak what happened then – I will have my voice back to raise in praise of Khaine and Morathi.

She scrambled to her feet and grabbed Belleth by the arm; the hag queen wrenched away, fury twisting her features, there and gone in an instant.

Fury about what, Trisethni’s victory?

‘Rest, sister. For now, just rest. I will have food and drink sent to you to restore your health.’

Food would not restore Trisethni to the aelf she had been before; only rejuvenation in the cauldron could do that. Why would Belleth refuse her such a boon, when it was she who had sent Trisethni on the quest in the first place? Why was she not allowed to heal?

Unless she knows. Cold washed through her and she made no further efforts to stop Belleth leaving. Her hag queen knew. Knew how close Trisethni had come to abandoning her sisters, her faith, her god. She was tainted and Belleth could sense it on her. Sniff out her doubt and shame and see their cause.

Numb, she retreated to the small room off the sanctum and stripped out of her filthy, travel-worn clothes and broken-down boots. There was a full-length mirror opposite the bed; the aelf hung her ragged cloak over it. She had no wish to see the broken thing she had become.

Trisethni washed in the basin and combed out her hair, let it fall free around her face so that when the leathanam brought her food, it hid her scars. She cut everything up into tiny pieces to eat; without a tongue, it was hard to move the food around her mouth. It smelt good; tasted of nothing. She left the wine and drained her waterskin instead, then curled up on the bed. All this way, all these months, and she was finally safe. It didn’t matter; sleep eluded her as her mind thrashed like an animal in a snare with questions and no answers.

She lay staring at the ceiling for an hour before getting up. Maybe the wine would help, after all. She padded across to the table and picked it up, brought it to her lips, and paused. There was the tiniest skin on the surface of the wine, like oil floating on water. As if something that had been mixed into it had separated while it stood there untouched.

Trisethni swirled the glass beneath her nose and inhaled, then she shoved the cup away from her and snorted. Dream-pine, she’d swear it. Its potency in its liquid state was far stronger than the smoke and changed it from a pleasant narcotic to a poison. In large enough quantities it was fatal.

She stared at it with fixed intensity and then flinched at the sound of footsteps. She lunged into the sanctum and spotted another cup; she swapped them over and hurried back into the bedroom. She put the new, empty cup next to the plate – was the food poisoned, too, she wondered with a lurch in her gut – seized her weapons and flung herself onto the bed.

Belleth came in, and the aelf from earlier followed her. They paused in the doorway to the bedroom.

‘Is it done?’ the stranger breathed.

The hag queen came to the bed and checked Trisethni’s pulse. ‘She lives still, though not for long, I imagine. She won’t wake now.’

‘Her survival was unexpected. Hellebron does not like things to be unexpected. First she finds the book, and then she returns from what you assured us was certain death. The high priestess will not be pleased.’

‘The high priestess has nothing to fear,’ Belleth said smoothly as they moved back into the sanctum, their voices becoming muffled. Trisethni strained her ears. ‘I have the book in my safekeeping as agreed. I wait only for Morathi’s eyes to turn away and I will bring it to Hellebron myself. My coven is loyal to me – I am loyal to her.’

‘Be sure that one never wakes,’ the stranger said in a dark tone, ‘or none of your coven will live through the transition of power.’

Trisethni heard the quiet click as the outer door shut, and another as the lock was engaged. A long pause and then Belleth’s shadow fell across her. ‘Tris, let me explain,’ she began, stepping further into the room.

Tris. The pet name Belleth had given her when they were together.

The witch-aelf came up off the bed with sciansá flashing. She’d heard enough – more than enough. No fine words and no allusions to their past could convince her that Belleth wasn’t the blackest of traitors. She had lied to her and arranged for her death at the hands of a pitiless enemy. Trisethni would repay the latter favour.

The tip of one sciansá caught Belleth along the line of her jaw, opening up flesh for blood to pour through. The hag queen’s shout of protest became one of pain and then fury. She jumped backwards into the sanctum and snatched up a weapon of her own – a long spear with a wicked steel tip.

‘It’s not what you think, Tris,’ she grunted as Trisethni hacked at the spear, trying to batter it down so she could slip past it. ‘Morathi keeps secrets from us – Mathcoir is not safe in her hands anymore! Hellebron will–’

She bit off the words as Trisethni skidded across the polished stone on her knees, beneath the spear, to hack at the hag queen’s legs. Belleth hissed in fury and surprise and jumped back, her usual grace missing as she scrambled to make enough space to bring the long weapon to bear. She was fighting defensively, still trying to make Trisethni understand, to save her and bring her to her side. To Hellebron’s side.

There was so much Trisethni wanted to say: how it had been Khaine and Morathi who’d given her the skills to defeat the daemonettes, but Belleth herself who’d given her the self-belief. But she couldn’t.

Instead, in her head, she began reciting the words of the Red Invocation, the promise and prayer that meant her sciansá could not be sheathed without the taking of life. For good or ill, one or both of them would die in this room.

Perhaps Belleth intuited some part of Trisethni’s determination, because she stopped defending and attacked, driving the witch-aelf back across the sanctum and almost into the bedroom. She spun the spear in her hand and punched the blunt end into Trisethni’s chest, slamming her into the wall and holding her there.

‘I could have killed you twice already,’ she panted. ‘I could have driven this through your ribs and out of your back, but I didn’t. Listen to me, Tris, just listen. Morathi is–’

Trisethni threw one of her sciansá, scything it end over end through the air. It sheared through Belleth’s arm, severing her hand at the wrist. The hag queen roared in shock and agony, rearing back and releasing the pressure on the spear. Trisethni threw herself clear, tumbling past the altar and the small table with the votive offerings of food and wine upon it. There was a ritual knife next to the wine glass and she hesitated for just an instant and then snatched it up.

Another roar from behind her and a sudden pulsing blast of magic that had her diving for cover again. She rolled behind the small altar and peered out, sciansá and knife clutched tight.

Hag Queen Belleth’s form shifted and twisted within a writhing column of shadow and crimson magic. She grew in size, taller and heavier, her legs lengthening into a great muscular tail that whipped back and forth, destroying furniture as she transformed into her Medusa form.

Trisethni tried to strike at her while she was still changing, but that tail flailed so hard and fast she knew it would shatter all of her ribs if it caught her. Instead, she ripped the ritual knife across the back of her forearm, clamped the blade between her teeth and scurried back to the front of the altar. The carven image of Khaine sat heavy and aloof above a trio of red candles. The aelf swiped a palmful of blood from her arm and slapped her hand down before the idol, leaving a red handprint. The first part of the offering for a blood sacrifice. She glanced over her shoulder; Belleth’s metamorphosis was nearly complete. She didn’t have much time.

The siren song of combat was singing in her veins as Trisethni snatched up a piece of vine-cake from the plate. She crushed it in her fist and let the crumbs trickle down onto the red handprint. Glanced back again; the aelf was no more. In her place a Medusa twice Trisethni’s height and four times her strength – bones and muscles fortified with magic and the spirit of Khaine.

Belleth roared.

Desperately Trisethni turned back and snatched for the wine glass. The hag queen’s tail lashed out and knocked her sideways, then thumped down where she’d been lying just as she rolled away. Fire coursed through her side as broken ribs grated against one another. Still she rolled up onto her knees and lunged again for the glass to complete the sacrifice and invoke Khaine’s aid in this holy battle, to make him see who fought with truth and devotion and who planned betrayal.

Belleth beat her to it, snatching up the glass and facing her with a mocking, pitying smile. ‘So close, Tris. And yet so, so far. I don’t know how you defeated those daemonettes, and I confess it was death well done, but you should never have come back here. And when you did, your loyalty should have stayed with me. I’ve known you in ways no other aelf ever has. Did you think I wouldn’t see that your love for me had faded? Did you think I wouldn’t know why, Trisethni the Unseen? Or should that be Trisethni the Tongueless, who will die with no words left to speak.’

She shook her head in mock regret as Trisethni jumped, hand clawing for the glass. Belleth thrust her away and then saluted her with the wine, before draining the glass in one long swallow.

Trisethni bellowed in rage and slashed at Belleth’s torso, where moonlit aelven skin darkened to the red of old blood and the tough plates of scales. Belleth roared and threw the wine glass to shatter against the far wall, twisting sinuously as Trisethni ducked behind her and somersaulted over the thrust of her spear, tucking her feet, her breath caught on the jagged ends of the bones broken inside her.

She landed and Belleth thrust again, then swept the spear laterally to crack into her back. She turned the fall into a tumble and came up in the slim gap between altar and wall. Not even Belleth would risk desecrating Khaine’s idol to reach her.

But Belleth didn’t need to. She reared up on her coils and stabbed over the altar and downwards; the witch-aelf was forced to throw herself clear again, each impact with the floor jolting her injuries and knocking free a little more of her strength and speed. Trisethni gathered the pain of her injuries to her, as she’d done so many times in the past months, and she fashioned them into a shield between her heart and what she had to do. Privation and pain and solitude had hardened her from aelf into diamond, and she shone with the brightness of her devotion.

What she had done in the Spyrglass Warrens was a feat no other aelf had matched. What she had suffered had not broken her faith, but tempered it. She had walked the edge of surrender and stepped back. Trisethni had nothing to rebuke herself for. The realisation was as if an anvil had been lifted from her back.

With a ruthlessness she had only discovered in the blackness beneath Ulgu, Trisethni excised Belleth from her heart and viewed her with the cold dispassion of her kind. Traitor. Disloyal to Morathi and therefore to Khaine. Disloyal to me.

Belleth’s next strike was slow and clumsy and she paused to shake her head. The witch-aelf slid behind her and scored a cut across her back and skipped away.

And poisoned.

It was as if she’d spoken the words aloud. Belleth twisted to the altar, where the wine glass had sat, and then to face her old lover. ‘You switched the glasses. That’s why you’re not dead – that’s the only reason you’re not dead. You put a poisoned glass on the altar? Heresy.’

Trisethni just shook her head. It was Belleth who was the heretic, Belleth who sought to overthrow the First Daughter, founder of their very way of life. She wondered how long ago Hellebron had seduced the hag queen away from the true path to Khaine’s resurrection. She dismissed the thought as she parried the spear thrust with her sciansá, chipping wood from the haft. She didn’t want to know how much of what she’d shared with Belleth had been to secure her loyalty. It was bad enough the other aelf was betraying them all now; to know she’d been manipulated, perhaps for years, would be too much.

Trisethni was grimly amused that the act of carving out her own tongue in the depths of her distress was all that now prevented her from asking whether Belleth had ever loved her.

It doesn’t matter, anyway. I have been tempted, both by the daemonettes and by her. I have not surrendered to either. I will never surrender my faith or my devotion.

And I will never place anyone between me and Khaine again.

Trisethni leapt high over the slashing of Belleth’s tail, scoring a cut through the Medusa’s forearm as she passed. Belleth hissed and struck back, but the sweat on her face and the pallor in her cheeks told the assassin the poison and blood loss from her missing hand was working fast now. It probably wasn’t enough to kill Belleth in this form, but it was all that evened the odds between aelf and Medusa. Trisethni would have been torn to pieces if she hadn’t tricked Belleth into drinking the wine. Even so, she was reaching the limits of her own endurance.

And yet there was still a battle to be fought, with steel and flesh and will and heart and devotion. Grim-faced, Trisethni set about winning it. She didn’t know how long it would be until others heard the sounds of battle, and she wouldn’t survive if Belleth’s co-conspirators broke down the door. She spotted her second sciansá under the shattered remnants of a table and threw the sacrificial knife. The slim blade thunked into Belleth’s stomach just above where the scales began. It sank in deep.

Trisethni snatched up her second sciansá, back-flipped over the spear and again over the thrashing tail. Dizzy and slowing now, she dared to put one foot on the edge of the altar and pushed upwards in a final desperate burst of strength, leaping higher even than Belleth’s head as the Medusa reared up on the coils of her tail.

The hag queen began to lift her spear; Trisethni ignored it. She reached the apex of her jump and fell like an arrow into Belleth, her feet smacking into the Medusa’s torso and bearing her down. She drove her sciansá down too, the sharp points entering Belleth one above and one below each collar bone. The razor-edges sliced through flesh and muscle, through lungs and veins and arteries, the points coming together in the hag queen’s heart.

Belleth gave a great shudder and all the magic left her; she shrivelled in on herself, losing her battle-form until Trisethni crouched over the beautiful, black-haired aelf who had made her the devoted assassin she was.

Tears pooled in Belleth’s eyes, her face twisted with a silent plea for forgiveness. Trisethni had fought coldly and without pity and now, coldly and without pity – and certainly without that forgiveness Belleth craved – she ended it. The assassin twisted both blades inside the aelf’s body, bursting her heart and sending her into death on a wave of agony that was the last thing she’d ever know. That, and who had killed her.

The hag queen was a traitor and Khaine would mark her as one. Forever.

Trisethni left her blades quivering in Belleth’s corpse and slumped back, the rush of hurts making themselves known as the hyper-focus of a battle to the death began to leave her. She groaned, pressing a hand to her broken ribs and staring with dull fascination at the blood leaking from the slice in her forearm. Another scar to match the many given her by the daemonettes.

Eventually she stood and surveyed the damaged sanctum. The altar was almost the only piece of furniture still intact. Trisethni found the sacrificial knife and retrieved the glass from the bedroom, then she drew one sciansá out of Belleth’s heart and caught some of her blood in it. She put the knife and glass on the altar.

Almighty Khaine, in your name I took your servant’s life. Murder for the Lord of Murder and to protect your Daughters and your worship. To protect First Daughter Morathi and her plans for your return.

If I have done wrong, I beg your forgiveness.

She knelt a few moments longer, staring sightlessly into the shadows beneath the altar, before a small frown marred her brow. She reached into the recess and her fingers brushed something heavy and square-edged. She drew out the book she’d last seen in Lord Rygo’s mansion in Greywater Fastness. It was thick and heavy and burgeoning with secrets. Trisethni stared at it for a long time, and then she sighed and ripped off one of her sleeves. She tied it tightly around the book and pressed her finger to the knot, infusing it with a trickle – almost her last trickle – of magic. She mustered what will she had to bind the knot so that none may break it save Morathi herself, and then she wrapped the book in half a bedsheet and put it in the bottom of her much-abused pack.

She buckled her sword belt and sheathed the sciansá she’d removed from Belleth’s still-warm body. Again without pity, without much of any emotion at all – perhaps she was simply too exhausted after the months of her trials and this unforeseen and unforgivable betrayal – she used the other to sever the hag queen’s head. Trisethni wrapped it in the rest of the bedsheet and put it, too, in her pack. Then she replenished her waterskin, took up Belleth’s spear, and left the room.

The aelf padded through the dark and empty corridors of the Khailebron temple and slipped out of a small, little-used exit. If any had heard the battle, they dared not approach to see who had taken the victory. Perhaps the unknown aelf, the agent of Hellebron, had ordered them to leave Belleth alone, or led the others in ritual in the main worship space, the better to provide herself with an alibi should one be needed.

Trisethni didn’t care; if any stepped from the shadow to confront her, they would die. The temple grounds were guarded, but she evaded the sentries and scaled the wall, dropping down into a well-lit main thoroughfare in the heart of Hammerhal Ghyra.

She was only a few miles from the Realmgate into Aqshy, and from there, eventually, she would reach the Tarnish-life Gate to Ulgu and the shadowpaths back to Hagg Nar.

She had been tested past all limits of endurance – and yet she had endured. She had been betrayed by those she loved the most – and yet her love for Morathi and Khaine only grew stronger. She would not be stopped, and she would not be turned from her path. Morathi would know all Belleth had done, and all Trisethni herself had accomplished to bring her this warning.

She didn’t walk with excited purpose or nervous anticipation towards the Shadow Realm this time. She didn’t wonder what to expect or whether she would distinguish herself. She didn’t worry about covering herself in glory or making her hag queen proud.

Instead, Trisethni walked with danger radiating from every limb and the flash of her eyes. Head high and unhooded, silver hair matted with blood, she bore her scars with brittle pride and dared those she passed on the street to so much as glance at her. None did. Heads down, they crossed the road to avoid her, or flattened themselves against buildings as she strode past, trailing the scent of blood and an aura of righteous fury.

Every dark rumour about the Daughters of Khaine, every piece of malicious gossip or wondering tale, she embodied, and none who saw her doubted that her god was the God of Murder.

Driven by icy anger and burning faith, Trisethni the Unseen stalked the streets of Hammerhal Ghyra with a traitor’s head and a book of secrets in her pack.

And though she was the Unseen, many marked her passage through both halves of the city of Hammerhal. Marked it, but dared not follow.