Morathi’s emissary came at sunset.

She emerged from the shadows with the red light behind her, painting the black-lipped scales of her body with blood and casting her eyes into terrible darkness. The Kharumathi sisters, who were no strangers to such tricks themselves, were nevertheless awed by the deftness and totality with which the melusai welded the sun’s death to her own grandeur. Their coven had never been deemed worthy of a direct visit from one of the High Oracle’s snake-bodied handmaidens before, and this one was all they’d imagined.

Smoothly the emissary climbed onto the great black rock that thrust up over the Kharumathi’s enormous blood cauldron, her serpentine body undulating across the stone. Hundreds of sacrificial victims had died on that rock, their blood poured into the cauldron’s gaping maw as an offering to Khaine’s glory. The emissary’s scales scraped up the rust-coloured flakes of their lives, and the dried blood floated before her like rose petals thrown to carpet her arrival. Little flecks clung to the pale skin of her aelven upper body, stippling her abdomen and elbows with pinpricks of brown and red.

The Daughters of Khaine fell to their knees in a ring, eyes downcast and knives outstretched in ritual supplication. Rhaelanthe, their hag queen, prostrated herself at the head of their circle, though it was excitement rather than terror that tensed the aelf’s body. No greater honour had been bestowed upon the Kharumathi during her reign.

‘Sisters of the Kharumathi!’ the emissary called from the sacrificial stone. As one, the witch-aelves of the coven lifted their eyes, though they remained kneeling with their hands flattened on the ground over the hilts of their knives. ‘I am Myrcalene, Blood Herald of Khaine, Fatescribe to High Oracle Morathi, Finder of the Volathi Shard. I bring you greetings from the High Oracle, and instruction.’

‘Loyally we serve!’ Rhaelanthe cried, though the melusai had not indicated that she should speak.

In the ranks behind the hag queen, one of the kneeling witch-aelves snorted, very quietly, in disdain.

Nepenora, kneeling next to the disrespectful aelf – Thaelire, her oldest and only friend – stiffened in instinctive alarm. Very deliberately, she forced herself to relax. If Rhaelanthe or any of her pet kittens noticed Nepenora’s reaction, they’d assume she, too, was disloyal, because she’d heard the seditious noise and hadn’t reported it.

Which would end very badly, and messily, for her.

Fortunately, it seemed that none of them had. All the other Kharumathi were riveted by the melusai on the blood-streaked stone. Nepenora exhaled a silent sigh of relief and fixed her attention on Myrcalene too.

‘In the fiery Realm of Aqshy,’ Myrcalene told them, ‘there is a fortress said to have been raised by Khorne. Whether this is true – whether the Lord of Battle has the patience, or the skill, to build anything – is unknown, but doubtful. Most likely that is a lie that his slaves tell to cover him with unearned glory. Regardless, the fortress stands. Its original name is long forgotten. We know it today as Redhollow Ruin. Khorne held it for a long and terrible age, and then it was taken from his servants, and sat empty for another.’

The melusai’s voice hardened, and her beautiful face took on a predatory aspect.

‘Now one of his Bloodbound has come forth to claim it again. Graelakh the Gore-Gorger, he is called, and on his right hand he wears a gauntlet of iron and blood with a pulsing ruby in its palm. This is the Goregorge Claw, and the power it grants Khorne’s brutes is stolen from us, for the ruby it holds is none other than a Shard of Khaine.’

A gasp swept through the circle of aelves. Nepenora echoed it too, for she could hardly miss the implication. There was only one reason that an emissary of High Oracle Morathi would come to them with news of a Shard of Khaine.

‘You, sisters of the Kharumathi, must reclaim this shard of our wounded god from the brutes who hold it now. You must fall upon Redhollow Ruin and tear the blasphemer Graelakh apart. Seize the Goregorge Claw, shatter the Blood Lord’s prison, and free our wounded god’s soul-shard from his grip.’

‘For Khaine’s glory, it will be done,’ Rhaelanthe swore, leaping to her feet and clashing her knife’s hilt against the crosspiece of her plated harness. The other witch-aelves were swift to their feet beside her, and Nepenora got up as well, shouting with the rest, for anything less would be viewed as treason.

One of the witch-aelves called for the leathanam. The cry was soon taken up by others, and the leathanam hastened to answer. Heads bowed in mute subservience, the gaunt and wretched half-souls scurried from their dirty slave-tents, bearing loads of cut wood that seemed far too heavy for their frail frames. They heaped the wood about the cauldron’s base, covering its nest of bloodied ashes with a ring of fresh fuel.

Their task done, the leathanam retreated. Not all of them, however, were quick enough to reach safety. A laughing witch-aelf seized the nearest half-soul by his wrist, pulling him to her in a wild, whirling dance around the cold cauldron and its firewood.

He didn’t resist. There was no use in a leathanam trying to resist anything a female wanted to do to him. The gold-crowned witch-aelf tossed the male about like a toy, yanking him close and hurling him away, until she’d danced a complete circle around the cauldron. At the end, she threw him to the next Daughter of Khaine. She, too, spun the hapless leathanam through a furious revel and cast him to the next Kharumathi.

They spun him around and around, their dance growing steadily faster and angrier, their treatment of the unlucky half-soul rougher. The leathanam’s wrists and arms bled from a hundred shallow cuts that the female aelves’ bladed gauntlets and bracelets had slashed in him, but he never made a sound. He never even lifted his eyes from the pounded earth beneath his feet. Nepenora took her turn, and Thaelire too. Then the last of them took her dance, and hurled the leathanam to Rhaelanthe when she was done.

The hag queen brought the exhausted, injured male stumbling up the stone to where Myrcalene waited. Blood from his dance-inflicted lacerations pattered onto the rock between the hag queen’s feet and the melusai. It was the only sound in the hushed, reverent silence that weighted the air.

Some of the Daughters of Khaine, after their dances, had gone to get their ritual drums. Softly, then with greater insistence, they took up the rhythm of the leathanam’s dripping blood on their instruments, first echoing and then drowning out the thudding of his heart.

‘We pray, now, for the glory of Khaine and the favour of his High Oracle, Morathi,’ Rhaelanthe pronounced. The hag queen gripped the leathanam’s hair and slashed her ritual knife across his throat, splashing his lifeblood into the cauldron in a messy, erratic fountain. After a few thrashing moments, the male went limp in her grip, dying with no sound save a choked, involuntary gasp. Blood continued to pour from him even as his heart stuttered to a stop and his flesh went white. Drawn by the cauldron’s magic, it spilled out until all that remained of the leathanam was a dried husk, light and empty as a cicada’s shell.

The drums, which had fallen silent for a beat so that all could hear the first sacrifice die, took up their hammering rhythm again.

‘We pray,’ Rhaelanthe said, letting the male’s body fall from the rock onto the heaped firewood, ‘and we dance. We dance, my sisters. We dance!’

As she shouted, the leathanam’s withered corpse burst into red flame, igniting the fire around the cauldron and washing the Daughters of Khaine in its bloody light. The Kharumathi cried out in furious joy. Those who were not drumming went out into the camp, seizing war-slaves and prisoners and unfortunate leathanam, then pulling them back to the cauldron to dance.

They whirled madly, the witch-aelves wild and terrible and beautiful in the scarlet light, the orruks and humans and leathanam held helplessly in their thrall. Around and around they spun, and the aelves’ ritual knives flashed in their dance, and the air smelled of copper and sweat. The cauldron filled with blood, first slowly and only from a few scattered streams, then in dozens of bright overlapping arches at once, like a grisly fountain running in reverse.

Above them all, Myrcalene watched, impassive as an idol. Wisps of red steam twined about her scales and stirred the loose strands of her white hair. As the last of the sacrifices emptied his life into the cauldron, the bloody steam grew thicker, enveloping the Kharumathi in a warm red fog.

The dancers vanished in its embrace, only shapely limbs or an occasional toss of red-streaked hair emerging from the fog. The drummers remained visible at its outer edges a while longer. Then the mist swallowed them as well, so that their thudding song resonated through the blood-cloud like the disembodied beating of all its harvested hearts.

In that hot red haze, hardly able to breathe, buffeted by the thunder of the Kharumathi drums, Nepenora felt herself seized by a transcendent, incandescent ecstasy. Exhilaration flooded her veins, sang in her heart, filled her sight with a swirl of tingling stars. She was cradled with her battle-sisters in their god’s embrace, suffused with the greatest satisfaction that any male could give them, sated and supreme.

Graelakh and his Bloodbound were doomed.

The blood-cloud began to dissipate, releasing them back to the cool shadow of the world. Witch-aelves emerged from the fog, slowly, unwilling to relinquish the red pleasure of the night. Many, including the hag queen, went off to their own tents in twos and threes. A few eccentrics who preferred males, like Thaelire, took what they could from the leathanam or their surviving captives. Thaelire herself kept a pair of rune-scarred warlocks as pets, and Nepenora was unsurprised to see her summon them to her side.

A comely witch-aelf beckoned to Nepenora, breaking her chain of thought. Blood smeared the woman’s upper arms and chest. Her cheek was daubed with crimson, stark against her bone-pale skin. She beckoned again, her smile alight with promise, and Nepenora laughed and followed her into the shadows.

The last she saw of the revelry was Myrcalene, still standing sentinel on the sacrificial rock, watching the Kharumathi disperse with hot, red eyes.

Thaelire came to her the next morning. The sorceress wore a hooded robe of grey velvet, soft around her face and hands, but crinkled about the hem with a rime of dried blood.

Nepenora looked up from her morning tea and waved away the leathanam who had brought it. She’d already dismissed her companion from the night before.

‘Unwise to show your disrespect so openly. You would have been punished severely if you’d been caught last night.’

Thaelire shrugged. She settled onto a cushioned stool and poured her own cup of tea from Nepenora’s tray, after peering into the kettle to determine whether it was a kind she liked.

‘Even if Rhaelanthe had noticed – and she wouldn’t have, because she hadn’t a thought for anything beyond trying to impress the High Oracle’s emissary – she wouldn’t have done anything.’

‘She could have condemned you at the blood-dance. You’d have made a marvellous sacrifice to Khaine’s glory.’

‘No.’ Thaelire sipped her tea, unconcerned. ‘If she’d done that, she would have conceded that she has no control over her own people. Perhaps in another fortnight, if she’s won some other victories and proved her worth to the melusai, she’ll feel at liberty to punish us for small transgressions. But to do so on the first night, over something so petty? It would make her look weak. Frantic, ineffectual. She isn’t especially bright, but she is acutely conscious of her pride. So even if she had noticed, she would have pretended not to.’

‘It’s not a gamble I would have chosen to make,’ Nepenora said.

‘Ah.’ Thaelire smiled, the corners of her eyes crinkling with gentle amusement. ‘But you didn’t. I did. Now, if you’re finished chastising me for it, perhaps we can decide what to do about this Goregorge Claw and the expedition to Redhollow Ruin.’

‘Do you think it’s a true Shard of Khaine?’ Nepenora asked. Both had heard the stories of covens sent on quests for shards that, once obtained, proved to be false artefacts – but they had also heard tales of the glories earned by those who restored true shards to their god. Each soul-shard, they were told, healed one of Khaine’s innumerable wounds and brought him that much closer to reclaiming his true splendour. A Daughter of Khaine could perform no greater service, and know no holier communion, than touching a shard of the god’s essence with her own hands, and returning it to his whole.

Thaelire shrugged. She finished her tea and set it aside, steepling her fingers and resting her chin upon them. The nails were stained a dark, gleaming ruby. Nepenora knew that the sorceress indulged herself by using her magic to paint them with her captives’ crystallised blood.

‘Does it matter? Even if the Claw isn’t really a shard of Khaine, it’s most assuredly a powerful weapon for Khorne. Capturing such a trophy, and shaming the champion who held it, would be a worthy victory even if we can’t turn that weapon to Khaine’s service afterward. But that presupposes that we can win.’

‘You don’t think we can?’ Nepenora asked. Lightly, so lightly. As if it weren’t the thought that had consumed both of them since the melusai’s arrival.

‘Not with Rhaelanthe leading us,’ Thaelire replied.

And there it was, the forbidden truth, laid out all-too-casually over their morning tea. Nepenora glanced reflexively at the tent’s door, but of course there was no one there. Her leathanam servant was well trained, and had the scars to prove it; he knew better than to lurk nearby when the witch-aelves were discussing serious matters, and he also knew enough to ensure no one else was listening, either. His life depended on such vigilances.

‘Do you suppose Myr– the emissary knows?’ Nepenora sipped her tea to cover her discomfort at almost having used the melusai’s name. Perhaps it was only superstition that claimed the High Oracle’s handmaidens could hear anything that followed the mention of their names, but… superstition or not, it seemed wiser not to take the chance.

‘I don’t know,’ Thaelire admitted. ‘But how could she not? The Kharumathi are a thin shadow of what we were before Rhaelanthe claimed the mantle of hag queen, and our losses far outnumber our victories. The shadowlands whispered Hag Queen Orimache’s name with awe. They speak Rhaelanthe’s with scorn. The melusai must know how weak she is.’

‘Then this isn’t a real shard quest.’ Nepenora felt an unexpected pang of disappointment. She hadn’t realised how badly she’d hoped to achieve something of significance in Khaine’s honour until the possibility had been taken from her. ‘It’s a suicide mission. An excuse to be rid of a coven that’s become an embarrassment.’ They’d heard those stories, too.

‘Maybe. Maybe not. The quest for the Goregorge Claw might be a test – if the Kharumathi are truly worthy, we’ll defeat Khorne’s warlord and seize his prize for Khaine’s red glory. But if we’re not…’

‘Then we’ll deserve to die.’ Nepenora traced the enamelled inlays of her bladed gauntlet with a fingertip. Red and gold in slashing runes, interspersed with razor-sharp blades that lifted the same designs into lethality. It was an heirloom of the Kharumathi, passed down from one devotee to the next for centuries. She couldn’t imagine a day when there might be no witch-aelf of their coven left alive to bear it into battle.

She looked across the tea table to Thaelire, her eyes alight. ‘We can’t allow Rhaelanthe to destroy the Kharumathi.’

‘I’m not sure we can stop her,’ Thaelire said dryly. ‘We’ve never seen Redhollow Ruin. We have no information about what its fortifications might be, or who its defenders are. All we know is that it was held by Khorne in one age and reclaimed in another, which suggests that those fortifications and defenders are formidable. Perhaps too formidable for us.’

‘Our chances would be better with different leadership.’

‘Would they?’ Thaelire arched her eyebrows, all innocence. ‘Whose?’

Nepenora leaned across the table, her voice low and intent. What she was saying now was treason, worse by far than what Thaelire had said a few moments earlier. Worse than anything either of them had said to the other over the long years of their friendship – but, perhaps, what all those years had been leading up to.

‘Ours. Yours and mine. Rhaelanthe can’t lead us to victory, we both know that. She’s a fanatic, not a general. She hasn’t any of the skills needed to prevail. But you and I, together, do. We have all of them. We could bring the Kharumathi to glory. For Khaine, for the High Oracle, and for the coven.’

‘Maybe. If we had the opportunity,’ Thaelire agreed. ‘Though I suppose there’s a fair chance that Graelakh the Gore-Gorger might be able to make a persuasive case concerning the deficiencies in Rhaelanthe’s leadership. Until then, I’m afraid, this conversation strikes me as slightly premature.’ The sorceress stood, her grey robe whispering as it fell into place around her. ‘The Kharumathi have a hag queen. We can’t move against her until she’s… discredited. Whether that will happen at Redhollow Ruin is uncertain. But we should keep to safer plays until Rhaelanthe’s fate is clear, I think.’

‘Meaning?’

‘Meaning we focus, for now, on keeping our own followers safe. My witch-aelves, and yours, should be under clear instruction to follow no orders but ours. Rhaelanthe is free to kill herself with her zealotry, but I don’t intend to let her bring the rest of us down with her.’ Thaelire made a small, dismissive gesture, mostly hidden under the loose shroud of her robe, as she moved to the tent door. ‘We can make no other plans until we’ve had a glimpse at the field of play.’

In the stillness following the sorceress’ departure, Nepenora shrugged. ‘Then perhaps we should have a look,’ the aelf murmured to herself. She refilled her cup with the last of the kettle’s tea and drained it in meditative quiet. When she felt sufficiently calm and focused, Nepenora went to the door to summon her favoured leathanam.

He came quietly, head bowed, eyes fixed deferentially on the ground. ‘Mistress?’

‘I require a sacrifice,’ Nepenora told him. ‘Find one from the pens.’

‘Yes, mistress.’ The leathanam hesitated, visibly resisting the reflexive temptation to glance up at her for guidance. He’d been lashed too many times for that mistake to make it again, but plainly the impulse remained. Nepenora decided to ignore it for now. ‘The sorceress sent… one of her warlocks. With a gift. She suggested that you might find this gift suitable as a sacrifice. Shall I bring him to you?’

‘Yes,’ Nepenora decided, after brief consideration. She had a good guess which captive Thaelire might have sent. The sorceress had captured a human wizard during one of their previous raids – the only glimmer of success from an otherwise wretched foray. Evading Rhaelanthe’s repeated demands to sacrifice the wizard, Thaelire had kept him alive for months so that she could interrogate him about his arts. She’d recently lost interest in her captive, however, which suggested that she’d learned all she could from him.

Sometimes Thaelire freed her playthings when she tired of them. She could, Nepenora knew, be dreadfully soft-hearted that way; she hardly ever disciplined her warlocks, and seemed amused by infractions that any other witch-aelf would punish viciously. But the wizard had evidently annoyed her, or else had showed a glimpse of power in his blood that was too great for even Thaelire to resist. He had not been released, and never would be.

Nepenora was, accordingly, unsurprised to see one of Thaelire’s warlocks, and the shackled wizard, following her leathanam back towards her tent.

The wizard was a miserable creature, haggard under his unkempt beard, his once-fine robes reduced to gilded threads on rags. His wrists were chafed raw and weeping under the coarse rope that bound him. The warlock – Fealorn, the crueller of the two that Thaelire kept – was dark-haired and white-faced, unearthly in the shadowy robes that the doomfire warlocks all wore. Inky runes scarred his brow, and his eyes were black and hateful.

‘She says you can kill him,’ Fealorn said, gesturing to the wizard. Unlike the leathanam, he didn’t look down when he spoke to Nepenora. He met her eyes insolently, daring her to punish him and knowing that she wouldn’t.

‘And you?’ Nepenora asked, acidly. She disliked the warlocks. They were strange, cursed creatures. Their affinity for the shadow-spirit of Ulgu was unnatural, so deep that it ran almost to consanguinity, in some way that she didn’t fully understand but instinctively distrusted. It made them stronger and less biddable than other males, and therefore more dangerous. Most witch-aelves avoided them, preferring to let the doomfire warlocks congregate into small bands with their own kind.

‘She still wants me. You only get the human,’ Fealorn said with a smirk. He tossed the wizard’s rope to Nepenora’s leathanam. ‘But he’s no small gift. There is a magic in his blood, even now. Some she took, but some remains. His mastery was in deciphering patterns in the puzzle-weaves of fate. Reading omens and auguries, listening to the winds of prophecy, all those desperate human attempts to divine the future. Many of his gifts belong to my mistress now, but… if you want a sacrifice to offer for a glimpse of what might lie ahead, this one should serve well.’

‘Good. I accept. You can go now.’ Nepenora waved the warlock away. Fealorn bowed mockingly and departed.

When he was gone, she turned to her leathanam. ‘See that I’m not disturbed,’ Nepenora ordered, and took the wizard’s rope to lead him into her tent.

She had her own private Khainite altar, as any witch-aelf of sufficient standing to claim a personal tent did. Some were no more than especially blessed sciansá, holier versions of the ceremonial blades that all witch-aelves carried. A few were even smaller: shards of ruby or engraved gold reclaimed from broken artefacts and used as pommel or blade decorations to consecrate a devotee’s otherwise ordinary ritual knife.

But Nepenora had a proper altar, gilt and bladed. It was built in three parts: a low pillory that held the kneeling victim’s head and wrists; the wide, shallow iron bowl, its base inscribed with stylised flames to mimic the coven’s great cauldron, that collected the blood offering; and the terrible likeness of Khaine that stood over the bowl, watching the victim’s death and taking the red god’s due.

She took the human’s head by its filthy hair and dragged him across the tent to kneel before the pillory board. The wizard moaned and struggled as Nepenora pushed him down and latched the hinged board over his neck and wrists, but there wasn’t much fight left in him. With an easy twist of her knife, Nepenora opened his throat. As the iron bowl filled with the human’s life, she prayed.

Red steam rose from the bowl and caressed her face as she spoke the ritual incantation and drew Khaine’s four sacred signs in the blood with the tip of her sciansá. Each line in each rune was followed by a trail of bubbling steam as the holy magic took hold in the blood, and Khaine accepted his servant’s offering.

Nepenora closed her eyes and breathed in deeply. The steam was warm, animalic, redolent of hot iron and fading life and the prickling half-scent of magic. A tense and thrilling focus filled her, like the clarion moment of calm that came before the charge to battle sounded.

‘Give me a sign,’ Nepenora whispered into the steam. Her hand tightened about the dagger’s carved grip. ‘Show me, Khaine Iron-Hearted, what awaits your daughters in Redhollow Ruin. What snares have been set for us? Whom must we kill? Let me see clearly, that I may serve well.’

The blood roiled around her dagger, boiling violently across every line of every rune that she’d traced into the liquid. Steam buffeted Nepenora’s face and blew her hair back and up, over her head, in a tangling cloud. She squinted into the red haze, trying to make out some symbol, some glimpse of guidance, in the hissing rush of her god’s answer.

Images rose in bubbling lines within the bowl and collapsed just as quickly, one cascading rapidly after another. Many formed and vanished too swiftly for Nepenora to grasp their contours, but she was able to pick a few out before their bubbles burst back into shapelessness.

A bolt of lightning. A warhammer crossed over a sciansá. A mailed fist with drops of blood or sparks squeezed out between its armoured fingers. Two snakes tangled together, each swallowing the other’s tail. A melusai crossing a chasm on a bridge of aelven bodies, each gripping the ankles of the one in front to hold themselves together and suspended, precariously, above disaster.

Other images, too many, too fast. Nepenora couldn’t follow them, couldn’t squint through the buffeting rush of steam long enough to see them clearly. Red droplets fogged her vision and weighted her eyelashes, gluing them together when she blinked. Finally she couldn’t see anything else through the stinging, opaque film of blood on her eyes. There was red, only red.

She pulled away from the bowl. The last of the wizard’s blood boiled away, leaving its iron mouth open and bare. Only a faint sheen of moisture clung to the idol of Khaine standing above the sacrificial bowl. There was nothing left inside the vessel, or in the husk of the wizard she’d drained.

Nepenora wiped her face. The cloth came away crimson. She folded it absently, not really noticing the scarlet fingerprints that she left on the other side, and tossed it onto the basket of laundry that her leathanam would take away later.

Signs and portents. That was all such rituals ever gave her: signs and portents, symbols whose meaning became clear only later, often too late to do any good.

But this time, maybe for the first time, two of the symbols were clear enough to be read immediately. The lightning and the warhammer were unambiguous. Together, they could mean only one thing – but even that answer only led to more questions.

What do the Stormcast Eternals have to do with Redhollow Ruin?

A week later, the Kharumathi marched through the Argental Gate.

The Realmgate was held by the Eluathii coven, a far older and more powerful sect than the Kharumathi. The Eluathii hag queen came forward with great pomp and ceremony to wish the Kharumathi well in their venture to Aqshy, but Nepenora noted that she didn’t show the least bit of jealousy that they, and not her war coven, had been given the shard-quest, and she didn’t offer to send any of her own witch-aelves or Sisters of Slaughter with them.

It is a suicide mission, Nepenora thought grimly, as she followed her sisters-in-faith towards the vastness of the Argental Gate. She stole a glance at Rhaelanthe, standing proud at the head of their formation, but the hag queen never turned back, and would only have been irritated if she had noticed Nepenora looking her way. Rhaelanthe had wanted to give Thaelire’s wizard to the Eluathii as a token of gratitude for their welcome, and had been vexed to learn that Nepenora had already sacrificed the human.

He was better spent as our offering. The Kharumathi had needed Khaine’s guidance for the task they now confronted. Without the wizard as sacrifice, they might not have got it. To them, he’d been potentially invaluable.

But the wizard would have been worth nothing to the Eluathii. They had slave pens that held hundreds; they would hardly have been impressed by the gift of a single ragged, half-dead human. Rhaelanthe would only have shamed herself by presenting such a paltry gift. It was better for the Kharumathi’s honour to offer nothing. Then Rhaelanthe could claim that the High Oracle required her people to move with such urgency that they had to forgo such courtesies. That explanation elevated the Kharumathi by showing that they were entrusted with a task of such importance, and it did not insult their hosts, since the Eluathii could hardly say that a token gift was more pressing than Morathi’s shard-quest.

This was, ultimately, the position that Rhaelanthe had been forced into. Not ideal, but vastly preferable to the alternative. But, rather than being grateful that Thaelire and Nepenora had protected their coven’s dignity by preventing their hag queen from making such an obvious blunder, Rhaelanthe was bitterly angry with them both for stymying her plan.

Nepenora shook her head and turned back to the march. If indeed Myrcalene’s shard-quest was meant to put an end to the Kharumathi – as the Eluathii seemed to believe, and as she herself was becoming convinced – then Rhaelanthe, plainly, couldn’t be relied upon to spot the trap before it closed. She couldn’t even navigate something as simple as a tribute gift.

And there was no time to change any of that. Already, the Kharumathi were marching through. Already, Nepenora could feel the Realmgate’s chill reaching for her.

The Argental Gate appeared as a stillness within the endless gloom of Ulgu, a pane of grey and black fog trapped in mid-swirl like dark paint washed across glass. A deep and subtle cold surrounded it. Not biting, like a blast of winter wind to the face, but a slow drain, almost imperceptible at first, that bled out living warmth with seductive, languid ease.

The Eluathii had surrounded it with a thin frame of iron and silver, inscribed with blades and the howling likeness of Khaine. It was a strange thing, the frame, for it had been built to trace a line between reality and not-quite-that, and as such it was peculiarly angled and bizarrely proportioned, like the drawing of an imaginative but clumsy child. Along its outer edge, the frame appeared ordinary enough, but along the inner rim, the metal seemed to pull inward, its shape subtly distorted and liquefied, as if iron and silver were as easily deformed as the water at a whirlpool’s mouth.

The last of the previous war-leader’s witch-aelves passed through. Nepenora glanced back to her followers, raised her arm, and signalled their advance.

‘Kharumathi! We go through!’

With her witch-aelves’ obedient shouts ringing in her ears, Nepenora strode to the Argental Gate. As she drew near, she felt the Realmgate’s magic pull at her. It was a profoundly unsettling feeling: a magnetism that tugged at her skin and bones and hair and blood all at different frequencies, such that her blood rushed forward and her bones vibrated uncomfortably while her skin prickled with fine electric tingles and her hair flew towards the gate in stronger, but slower, pulses.

It was hard to see, hard to breathe, hard to think with every part of her body drawn to the Realmgate in a chaotic, uneven thrum. Her eyes jumped inside her skull. Her tongue pushed spasmodically forward against her teeth, each of which shivered in her gums in answer to its own separate call.

It was unbearable. It would drive her mad. Nepenora screwed her eyes shut and stumbled forward, unable to tell whether her warriors were following.

Cold buffeted her, and a howling black wind. Then light, brighter and brighter, battering at her eyelids and the hand…

And then she was staggering out onto a plateau of cracked grey rock. A huge red sun blazed overhead, burning with an intensity unlike anything Nepenora had ever seen. The landscape around it was scorched and withered, burned down to bare skeletal stone.

Behind her, the Realmgate roared. From this side, it appeared to be a towering firespout issuing from a rift in the smoking rocks. She could discern no sign of its realm-crossing magic; perhaps it was only a one-way passage. Kharumathi sisters moaned around the gate, covering their eyes and shouting for leathanam to bring them cloaks, cowls, anything they could use to block the hellish glare.

But there was no answer. The leathanam were at the back of the Kharumathi train, behind all the war companies, as befit their lowly status. They had not yet passed through the Realmgate, and they could not serve.

‘Here. Put it on.’ A bundle of cloth was shoved into Nepenora’s hands. She shook it out clumsily, feeling more than seeing the shadowsilk cloak, and draped it over herself gratefully. Protected by the hood’s deep shade, she finally dared to squint at the fiery realm. Nothing seemed about to attack them while they staggered about blindly, which was some small relief. At least their lack of preparation wouldn’t be immediately fatal.

Thaelire stood next to her, wearing a near-identical grey cloak. Her witch-aelves were similarly outfitted, but none of the others were. The sorceress shook her head, surveying the Kharumathi disarray.

‘Inexcusable. Rhaelanthe knew we were coming to Aqshy.’

‘Yes.’ Nepenora fingered the fine grey silk. Woven in Ulgu, it carried a great and soothing depth of shadow, but weighed almost nothing. It wouldn’t burden them in Aqshy’s heat. ‘How many do you have?’

‘Not enough for your warriors as well as my own.’ Thaelire shrugged, lifting a hand to her eyes as she took in the blasted landscape. The blackened hills spiked up into fiery mountains to the north. The horizon glowed red over those mountains’ crowns – from their own fires, Nepenora suspected, not the sun. Not a trace of water, greenery, or settled civilisation was anywhere in sight. ‘The baggage train will come through soon, though. They won’t be blind for long. Consider it a lesson, if you like. We’ll all have to do better to anticipate dangers here. Not just Rhaelanthe.’

‘Duly noted,’ Nepenora said dryly. Thaelire was right; the leathanam and baggage-slaves were coming through the Realmgate now, bent low under their heavy burdens. The witch-aelves fell upon them at once, covering themselves in cloaks and hoods against Aqshy’s brutal sun.

Nepenora strode over to join them. She directed her witch-aelves into some semblance of order, forming them into a line and seeing that cloaks were disbursed more or less evenly, with those already sheltered from the sun assisting the warriors who were still suffering under its blaze. When all her witch-aelves were protected, and even the leathanam had been given time to adjust their rags to cover their bare skin and shade their eyes, she ordered them to fall in with the rest of the Kharumathi. Slowly, their coven was returning to readiness.

Too slowly, if there’d been any threat waiting on this side of the Realmgate. Nepenora adjusted her cloak, feeling the silk again. Aqshy was a strange, hard place, as far from their shadowy homeland of Ulgu as it was possible to imagine. None of them, save perhaps Myrcalene, had ever set foot in it before, and they knew little of what to expect.

If their arrival had been an early test, they’d failed decisively.

And nothing would get easier from here.

For three days and four nights they traversed the Sootstain Hills, following a path mapped out for them in their captives’ blood. These lands, though bitterly inhospitable, were not as devoid of life as they’d initially appeared – there were tribes of humans, stunted and scarred and sworn to Khorne, who clawed out an existence amid the smoking stones.

The Kharumathi took them. Rhaelanthe ordered the captured tribespeople to be bound and given to Thaelire, for the sorceress was by far the most adept blood-mage among them. From their blood, Thaelire drew their memories of where water could be found, and food, and the largest of their camps. She tasted their fear, and their anger, and their prayers for vengeance, and she learned the rough direction of Redhollow Ruin, where they hoped the witch-aelves might meet their destruction.

And then, time and time again, Rhaelanthe had the captives finished in the Kharumathi cauldron. Myrcalene watched all these sacrifices, and the red dances that accompanied each one, but the melusai never manifested either pleasure or disapproval at the rites.

The third time, Thaelire objected. ‘We’re wasting these captives. There’s so much more they know that I can’t draw out through the spells. All I can read are old memories, the ones sunk deep enough to be in bone and blood, and the strongest emotions that course through their veins when I work the magic. Everything else – everything these people know about Redhollow Ruin and its defenders – escapes. We need to question them conventionally.’

‘We need to honour Khaine,’ Rhaelanthe replied flatly. The hag queen was uncommonly beautiful, even by the standards of aelvenkind. The High Oracle was known to favour the fairest of her servants, and few in the upper echelons of the Daughters of Khaine were anything less than stunning. But when Rhaelanthe was irritated, that beauty hardened into something brittle and sharp.

Thaelire shot a pointed glance back to where Myrcalene accompanied their train, keeping always alongside the sacred cauldron and its leathanam bearers. The melusai made an unsettling figure with her head and upper body draped in shadowsilk, and her serpentine lower body painted a reflective, satiny white to turn away the sun.

‘This entire shard-quest is a test.’

‘Do you think I don’t know that? How stupid do you imagine I am?’ Rhaelanthe snorted. Her long hair, white down to her shoulders and dyed in streaks of pink and red with sacrificial blood below, swirled in Aqshy’s furnace-bellows wind. Tiny steel blades had been woven into her hair like beads and enchanted to supernatural deadliness. They rang against each other in the wind, chiming a quiet, hungry song. ‘Of course it’s a test. Therefore we must take every opportunity we can to show our faith. We must honour the Lord of Murder with every sacrifice we can capture, so that Khaine will be pleased and his emissary will witness our piety.’

‘I think she’d prefer to witness our victory,’ Thaelire said acidly.

‘There can be no victory without piety.’ Rhaelanthe stared hard at the sorceress, her eyes ablaze with fanatic certainty. ‘Do you doubt this, Thaelire? Do you wish to challenge my leadership?’

Thaelire bowed her head and steepled her hands in submission. The sorceress was unparalleled in her mastery of magic, which was why Rhaelanthe allowed her as much leeway as she did, but she was clumsy with a sciansá. Any girl in training could best her in single combat, and all knew it. ‘No, hag queen. If that is your order, I will obey.’

‘See that you do. And don’t question me again.’

‘You really do want to die,’ Nepenora marvelled to Thaelire later that day, when the Kharumathi had made camp and it was possible for her to speak to the sorceress without drawing the loyalists’ suspicions. She’d surreptitiously watched the entire conversation with Rhaelanthe, as had every other witch-aelf close enough to catch the words.

‘We’re all going to die if we march blindly into Khorne’s teeth,’ Thaelire said gloomily, sorting through the powders and potions that enhanced her rituals. Silver dust and the fine-grained powder of dried, deadly resins sifted through her fingers. ‘The prisoners’ emotions were very clear. Whatever waits in Redhollow Ruin, they believe it will destroy us, and will do so with such savagery that the thought consoles them even as they die. It isn’t just Graelakh, or even his Claw. The memories run older than that, and deeper, and grislier. There’s something else in the fortress. If we’re to have any chance against that doom, we must know what it is.’

‘I’ll send out my scouts to see what they can spy.’ Just as Thaelire’s warriors focused on weaving steel and spellcraft into a distinctive fighting style, so Nepenora’s specialised in stealth and quick, surgical strikes. If there was anything worth scouting in this wasteland, they’d find it.

‘Tell them to be careful. We’re drawing near. The captives’ imaginings have got stronger by the day. The last one had seen Redhollow Ruin with her own eyes. Her thoughts of what would happen to us weren’t just hopes and prayers. They were mingled with memories of horrors she’d actually witnessed. She thought of long, pale claws that towered to the sky. They were threaded with the bodies of her dead kin like meat on roasting skewers.’ Thaelire dropped a handful of spiky seeds into a mortar and began crushing them with quick, violent twists of her black granite pestle.

‘I’ll warn them.’ Nepenora caught a whiff of stinging red dust and covered her nose before she could inhale any more of whatever delirium-inducing powder the sorceress was grinding. ‘Have you seen anything of the Stormcast Eternals in your spells?’ She’d told Thaelire about the vision in her prayer shortly after she’d seen it, but thus far none of the Kharumathi had seen any sign of the Stormcasts in Aqshy, whether with their own eyes or through their divinations.

‘No. Nothing.’ Thaelire shrugged without looking up. She measured three drops of bitter-smelling ink into the crushed seeds, then pricked her finger and squeezed out a single drop of blood. Curling steam rose from the mortar. ‘I don’t think that, at least, can be blamed on Rhaelanthe’s refusal to let me question the humans. The Sigmarites are terrifying enough that, even if only glimpsed once, they would be remembered in the blood. I can say with some assurance that no one we’ve captured has seen them.’

‘Maybe they aren’t here yet.’ Nepenora frowned behind the shadowsilk sleeve she was holding against her nose. ‘Prophecies can be inexact. It could be that the Stormcasts will arrive later in the game. Perhaps in response to something we do.’

‘I hope not,’ Thaelire said dryly. She scraped the mortar’s contents into a smoked glass jar and capped the steaming mixture. ‘I don’t think I’d care to have them coming down on my head for something I’d done.’

‘No.’ Nepenora shuddered. All the tales she’d heard of Stormcast Eternals suggested that they made terrifying allies. They were said to be heedless of lesser races’ fragility when unleashing their destructive tempests, and to be brutally unforgiving of transgressions that offended their moral codes. Perhaps not all Stormcasts were as harsh and haughty as the ones she’d heard of – like the Daughters of Khaine, they had their own factions and divisions of belief – but she found it difficult to imagine that such powerful creatures could ever really be trusted, whatever their intentions. They were simply too far from mortal.

‘Well, if they are here, they should be easy to find,’ Thaelire said. ‘Behemoths armoured in sigmarite and crackling with lightning? Even in Aqshy, they’ll stand out.’

Guided by Thaelire’s divinations, Nepenora’s scouts needed only a few nights to locate Redhollow Ruin.

As soon as they relayed word of their discovery, the main Kharumathi march stopped, drew back, and went into concealment. Thaelire and her warlocks wove shadows into a barrier around their camp, deflecting outside eyes, and the Daughters of Khaine settled in to await the scouts’ report.

Nepenora, cloaked in shadowsilk and subtle magic, went out with her warriors. They were all lightly armoured, even by the standards of the Daughters of Khaine, and carried few weapons beyond their ritual sciansá, envenomed throwing knives and spiked bucklers. Their purpose was speed and stealth, not sustained fighting with Khorne’s heavy brutes.

Under the cloudy stars, they crept towards the red fortress. Even by night, Aqshy was hot: the sun-baked stones exhaled the day’s heat back out into the darkness, and the hills were pierced by gouts of flame from subterranean gas vents or the realm’s own bizarre creatures. Glowing insects fluttered past them, and jewel-bright lizards with incandescent eyes and claws skittered between the smoking rocks underfoot. Ahead, white spines erupted from the blackened earth and stretched up towards the sky. They looked like immense, eight-fingered skeletal hands outstretched in unspoken greed. Broken bodies, tiny from afar, were impaled on several of them. A few still twitched in the night.

Past that grisly gauntlet loomed Redhollow Ruin. A slow-moving river of liquid fire poured from the wounded black hill into which the fortress had been carved, surrounding the edifice with a deadly moat and casting an unholy red light up to its battlements. The fortress itself was coated in ancient soot, which hung off its towers and crenellations in craggy black beards. There was something strange about the stone beneath that grimy coat, but from this distance, Nepenora couldn’t be certain what it was.

Drums carried faintly on the night wind, and with them the ineffable, blighting touch of Khorne. Nepenora felt the music as a shuddering thump against her bones, a vast and rageful heartbeat that swallowed and dwarfed her own. It had an echo of the sacred songs that the Daughters of Khaine drummed around their own cauldron fires, but twisted into a mockery of their hymns to Khaine. As if the Blood God, who had stolen their own deity’s heart and squeezed it dry, couldn’t be content with that great theft and needed to steal Khaine’s songs and worship, too.

The sound filled her with anger. The warm wind seemed to blow hotter as Nepenora listened, ruffling her hair and stroking her cheeks with a touch that felt almost alive. That enraged her too – the presumption of it, the gall.

It was only when she looked at the faces of the scouts around her, each one tense with her own near-boiling fury, that Nepenora recognised the trap for what it was.

‘Be calm,’ she hissed. ‘The anger is Khorne’s, not ours. He seeks to provoke us out of hiding and into an open attack, so that we can be slaughtered. If you cannot resist it, you must draw back.’

‘If we can?’ Ivoreine, one of her senior scouts, asked in a rough whisper.

‘Then come with me.’ Nepenora slid away from the hillside, quiet and fluid as moonlight, her sciansá close at hand. ‘Let’s get a look at who’s inside.’

In loose formation they slipped forward, each witch-aelf breaking off from the others as needed to find cover in the smoking dark. Their white hair was gathered beneath shadowsilk cowls, and their pale skin had been rubbed with handfuls of ash, so that nothing betrayed them in the night. They were careful, well-practised and soundless.

And still, as they came to the barren white monstrosity of the eight-clawed hands outside Redhollow Ruin, the corpses threaded onto those bones lifted their tortured heads and looked down.

They were dead, clearly dead. Nepenora could see the withered black holes of empty eye sockets, the puckered gape of mortal wounds baked dry in Aqshy’s heat, the yellowed knobs of dirty bone exposed by receding flesh. Some were fresher than others, but none was new, and all were dead. Still they lifted their heads. Their jaws sagged open in ghastly grins, and a red glow welled in their ruined throats. The two nearest corpses vomited gouts of blood, splashing across the Daughters of Khaine.

The blood was virulently crimson, shockingly hot, impossibly wet. It stank richly of iron and meat and stolen life.

It was rage made manifest.

Three of Nepenora’s scouts were caught in the crossing splashes. Instantly, howling in banshee fury, they set upon each other with spiked buckler and sciansá. The fight was swift, vicious and impossible to stop. Within moments, all three were dead beneath the monstrous claws of Khorne.

Even before they’d fallen, Nepenora signalled for the others to pull back. ‘Go. Go. We can’t fight this.’ She needed to consult with Thaelire, to learn what strange sorcery this was. The Blood God infamously hated magic, and she hadn’t expected to encounter any outside his domain.

Foolish. Khorne wasn’t the senseless beast that some made him out to be, and there was no telling whether this was his warding, anyway. Nepenora had known that Redhollow Ruin had been occupied by some other power after the Blood Lord lost it, and perhaps even before he’d first claimed it. Other hands had touched this place, and might have laid their own traps. In any case, she couldn’t counter it, and there was no clear path through the impaling claws to the fortress gates. The witch-aelves had no choice but to withdraw.

Nevertheless, after the rest of her scouts had withdrawn to the relative safety of the hills, Nepenora came back. Crouched in the last bit of cover that offered a good vantage of the fortress, she settled down to wait. She wanted to see whether any of Khorne’s followers emerged to claim the bodies.

None did. Instead, a blue star broke away from the heavens, growing brighter as it arced across the dim and smoky sky, then vanishing as it plummeted towards the hills. Nepenora squinted into the gloom, perplexed by the shooting star’s course, until she spotted a single cloaked figure striding out of the hills towards her dead scouts’ remains.

That cloak fluttered over armour enamelled in blue and white, and around an unsmiling mask of gold. Its wearer was taller and broader-shouldered than any aelf or human, yet moved faster than the swiftest of Nepenora’s scouts. The Stormcast Eternal – for so it was, so it had to be – stooped over the dead and picked up their broken bodies, all three, as if they weighed nothing. Then the Stormcast turned back towards the hills and carried the dead aelves away.

It all happened too quickly for Redhollow’s impaled corpses to react. Nepenora blinked, unsure that she’d seen it clearly herself. But the bodies were gone.

She lifted a hand to signal Ivoreine. ‘Take the others back to camp. Tell the hag queen what we saw – and find a way to tell Thaelire, discreetly, too. I’m going after that Stormcast.’

‘Alone?’ Ivoreine balked.

‘I’ll move faster alone. If I don’t return in two days, you have my witch-aelves.’ Nepenora waited until she’d seen that they’d gone, and then she set out after the Stormcast.

She couldn’t hope to match the Stormcast’s pace, and she didn’t bother to try. Such warriors were not mortal flesh; they were forged by the divine power of Sigmar, their god and creator, and they had a speed and endurance that no natural-born creature could rival.

But they did leave tracks. Surprisingly clear ones, in this case.

At first Nepenora was startled by how little the Stormcast Eternal seemed to have bothered trying to hide them, but after a moment it made a sort of sense to her. Sigmar’s chosen had little reason to fear pursuit, for who could harm them even if they were found? And perhaps it was possible that this particular Stormcast was unfamiliar with Aqshy, and failed to realise how easily soft ash and brittle cinders were stamped into sign.

Or the Stormcast could be baiting me on purpose.

That was, Nepenora supposed, the likeliest explanation of all. ­Nevertheless she continued her pursuit across the soot-flecked hills, until morning began to break red on the horizon and the small fires of Aqshy’s night faded before that far greater blaze.

The Stormcast Eternals’ camp lay before her. It was smaller than Nepenora had anticipated, and less guarded. Judging by the number of tents, there might be ten Stormcasts, and no mortal allies or fortifications as far as she could discern.

She withdrew. Daybreak was coming, and she’d seen more than enough for one night.

‘We should go to them,’ Thaelire said. ‘Ten Stormcast Eternals. Think of the power. They could make all the difference in this fight.’

‘We don’t know that there are ten,’ Rhaelanthe snapped. ‘Nepenora didn’t actually see them. No one did.’

They were gathered in the hag queen’s tent, discussing the news Nepenora had brought back. All the witch-aelf leaders were present, save Myrcalene. The melusai had offered no excuse for her absence, and none knew where she was. Nepenora suspected that the melusai’s apparent absence was merely a ruse to trick the witch-aelves into speaking more freely than they might have otherwise. She thought Myrcalene was probably hidden in this very tent, or otherwise spying with her magic.

She bowed her head. ‘You are correct, hag queen. I didn’t see them. Ten is only my guess.’

‘Ten or one, it hardly matters. They’re Stormcast Eternals,’ Thaelire said impatiently. ‘Sigmar’s power made flesh. If we can win them to our side–’

‘No.’ Rhaelanthe’s tone was hard. ‘We can’t trust them.’

‘They’re sworn against Khorne. They hate the Blood God as much as we do. They’ll surely join battle–’

‘No.’ Rhaelanthe’s hand flew out. She struck Thaelire hard across the cheek, knocking the sorceress to the pillows and rugs that covered the floor. The hag queen, furious, stalked after Thaelire as she scrambled away. ‘Why do you suppose the Stormcasts are here? Perhaps they’re seeking the Goregorge Claw themselves. Even if it isn’t why they came, do you imagine they’ll let us keep an artefact that they believe to be tainted by Chaos? No. They’ll take it, they’ll destroy it, and then we will have failed.’

‘But–’

‘Not another word, Thaelire.’ Rhaelanthe put a hand to her sciansá, clicking her long nails against the rune-inscribed hilt. ‘You’re alive now only because we need you to get past the corpseclaws. But if you utter another word, we’ll have to find out how well you work your magics without a tongue.’

Thaelire lowered her head to the floor, flattening her hands against the piled rugs, but not a single witch-aelf in the tent believed she had really been cowed. Nepenora saw the hag queen’s nostrils flare and her fingers tighten about the knife’s hilt, but in the end Rhaelanthe spun away in barely-restrained fury.

‘You are fortunate, sorceress, that I have no better wizard.’

‘What would you have of us?’ Melletiora, one of Rhaelanthe’s favourite kittens, asked.

The hag queen’s anger softened as she looked at her pet. ‘Nothing yet. Not for you. Nepenora will go out at dusk with her scouts to make another try at the fortress. Thaelire will go with them, and will find a way past these Khorne-cursed corpses. Then we will follow. When they’ve found their way in.’

Thaelire touched her sciansá to Nepenora’s neck, opening a light nick over one of the life-veins but not cutting deeply enough to pierce it, and wet her thumb in the blood that welled up. She sprinkled sand and ashes onto the blood, then pressed it onto Nepenora’s forehead, sealing Aqshy’s dust onto the witch-aelf’s skin. Magic prickled across Nepenora’s skin and lifted her hair, and when the crackle of its completion passed, her complexion was cast in grey.

‘The illusion will mask you as ashes, and your movements as the blowing of the wind,’ Thaelire told her, already moving to the next aelf. ‘Your blood will seem as cinders to unliving eyes, your skin will seem as dust. Aqshy’s flesh is your own, and yours will seem as its.’

‘How long will it last?’ Nepenora asked.

Thaelire finished her spell on the next scout before answering. ‘A day and a night, at most. The magic will fade faster if you tax it. Fighting, shouting – any action that could be undertaken only by a living creature will burn the magic faster. Much faster, in some cases. You’ll know it’s gone when your skin returns to its natural complexion, or when the blood-print has faded entirely. Wiping off the blood-print or its earth will end the spell at once. And it is possible that it may not deceive some of Khorne’s creatures. His flesh-hounds may scent you through the spell, especially if it’s been weakened already.’

‘Good to know.’ Nepenora did a last check of her equipment and circulated through her scouts to ensure that they, too, were as prepared as they could be for the unknown. Just on the other side of these hills, Redhollow Ruin and its ghastly corpseclaws waited. They’d got as close as they dared before Thaelire began her spells, so that the magic would cover them as long as possible inside.

Nepenora had taken thirteen hand-picked witch-aelves, the best of her scouts, on this second attempt at the fortress. The remainder, under Ivoreine, had stayed back at the camp, keeping ready in case Rhaelanthe called for a full attack. Thaelire had come with them too, both to examine the corpseclaws first hand and veil the scouts against them, and then to splinter off on her own task.

Nepenora finished her circuit of the scouts and returned to Thaelire, who was pressing a bloody thumbprint to the last witch-aelf’s brow.

‘You’re certain you want to do this?’ she asked the sorceress. ‘Even if you succeed, Rhaelanthe will kill you for the insubordination.’

Thaelire completed her spell, examined her handiwork critically, and then turned to her friend. ‘Then she kills me. We need allies, Nepenora. Mistrust has always been the weakness of our people, and we can ill afford it now. Redhollow Ruin is already fortified by Khorne’s power. He didn’t raise these bony claws – that has the imprint of Nagash’s death-workers, through and through – but the Blood God has claimed them, and has turned them against their original masters to serve his ends instead. That means his servants are here in force, and are in his favour enough to have earned a signifier of his approval. Khorne does not grant such things lightly, we all know that.’

‘And if Rhaelanthe’s right, and the Stormcasts seize the Goregorge Claw for themselves?’

‘Then perhaps that’s for the best.’ Thaelire shrugged, wiping dust and blood from her hands. ‘If the Claw is truly built around a Shard of Khaine, and that shard can be salvaged to heal our god, then there is no reason for our allies to keep it from us. We fight beside them against a shared enemy – they should want us as strong as possible. But if the shard is false, and there is nothing in the Goregorge Claw but Chaos’ taint, then the Stormcasts will sense this, and will keep Rhaelanthe from sacrificing us to her folly.’

‘You place a great deal of faith in their judgment,’ Nepenora said doubtfully.

‘Of course.’ Thaelire smiled briefly, lifting her shadowsilk cowl over her hair. ‘They were forged by a god for that purpose. I presume they’re good at it.’

‘It’s not a gamble I’d take.’

‘No. But, once again, it’s not one that I’m asking you to take.’ Thaelire shaded her eyes as she scanned the horizon, pausing at the little landmarks that Nepenora had told her would guide her to the Stormcasts’ camp. After a moment, the sorceress nodded to herself and looked back to Nepenora. ‘And, anyway, I wouldn’t take your gamble. A fortress that passed from Khorne to Nagash and back again, with who knows how many other masters along the way? Even with my spell to cloak you, it will be perilous in the extreme.’

‘Probably,’ Nepenora agreed. She raised a fist, signalling her scouts to move out. ‘But it won’t get any safer for waiting. Khaine be with you, my friend. May he bring us to victory, or at least bring our enemies to woe.’

‘To victory,’ Thaelire echoed, setting off in the other direction, ‘and woe.’

Etanios lowered the spyglass from his eye. ‘There’s a witch-aelf coming.’

‘Only one?’ Othoros sounded mildly surprised. The Lord-Aquilor held out a gauntleted hand for the glass.

Etanios passed it wordlessly to his superior, and waited in silence as Othoros scanned the soot-dark hills himself. At length, Othoros lowered the glass and handed it back.

‘Only one,’ he repeated, bemused.

‘Is it the one who followed your trail last night?’ Etanios slid the glass back into its protective case. Aqshy’s hot, scouring winds swirled endlessly with grit, and the mechanism would be ruined within moments if he left it out.

‘No. That one was a warrior. This one, I think, is a wizard. But of the same tribe, unless I’m mistaken, and following the trail that we laid for the other one. I expect she’s being sent as an emissary.’ Othoros clapped the younger Stormcast’s armoured shoulder and went back towards their camp. ‘Receive her with courtesy. Let’s find out what the Daughters of Khaine want with Redhollow Ruin.’

‘Yes, my lord.’ Etanios bowed and turned back towards his watch.

The hills were grey and barren, devoid of life or movement save the slow curl of smoke wafting from the burning rifts beneath their rocks. Few animals braved these treacherous slopes, and the only birds he glimpsed were black-banded vultures and the occasional high, distant hawk. For lack of anything else to watch, Etanios found himself uncasing his spyglass and checking on the witch-aelf more often than he needed to.

She was a strange creature. Beautiful, he supposed, although it seemed peculiar to think of Khaine’s murderous devotees in such terms. She moved through the hills with unearthly grace, apparently untroubled by the blasting heat. Her dark grey cloak flowed like water in the wind, sometimes wrapping tight about her slender figure and sometimes billowing so loosely that he could scarcely make her out at all. There were sigils embroidered about the hood and sleeves, which he supposed had been how Othoros had recognised her tribe.

Etanios was relatively sure that he’d never seen a Daughter of Khaine before, although it was hard to be certain. He was new-forged, having come to his immortality in Sigmar’s service only recently, and he retained more of his memories than did his senior comrades, like Othoros, who had died and been reforged so many times that they had lost almost everything of their onetime humanity.

Still, it was impossible to know how much he’d forgotten. Perhaps he had encountered the Daughters of Khaine as a mortal, and there was no reason that the pale, lithe woman approaching across the hills should strike him as so unsettling.

Then again, Etanios thought, perhaps witch-aelves only became more disquieting once you knew them.

Etanios stood and went halfway down the hill. He removed his golden mask as a courtesy as he approached. Mortals often felt reassured by seeing a real face.

‘Be welcome to our camp. I am Etanios, a Stormcast Eternal sworn to the service of our Lord Sigmar. The commander of our brotherhood is Lord-Aquilor Othoros. May I escort you to his tent?’

The aelf lowered her hood slightly, shaking away the cinders that had collected on the cloth, and regarded him with amusement. Her hair was white at the roots, but darkened rapidly to the red-black of poisoned blood as it grew longer, so that she seemed to be crowned in white and mantled in darkness.

‘What if I said no?’

‘Then I would turn you away from our camp,’ Etanios said, perplexed. He had the sense that she was wrong-footing him on purpose, but he couldn’t fathom why. Most mortals approached the Stormcast Eternals with awe, and this one… didn’t. ‘Did you not come here to see us?’

‘Oh, I did. I was merely curious.’ The aelf smiled. That was a strange expression too. It put him in mind of vampires, with the cold veneer of control thinly disguising something hungry and bestial underneath. ‘My name is Thaelire. I am a sorceress in the Kharumathi coven of the Daughters of Khaine. Please, show me to your lord.’

‘Of course. If you would follow me.’ Tucking his masked helm under an arm, Etanios led the aelf into the Stormcasts’ camp. A few of his fellows glanced over as they passed, but most of the Stormcasts were away, either sparring in the field to adapt their fighting techniques to Aqshy’s treacherous terrain, or scouting Redhollow Ruin’s defences.

They were a small contingent anyway, numbering only nine, but Etanios felt himself wishing, for some obscure reason he could not name, that more of his brotherhood had been in the camp. He wanted their visitor to be impressed.

Etanios announced them as they came to Othoros’ tent. The Lord-Aquilor greeted them within, standing as they entered. He towered over the aelf, as they all did, but such was his courtesy that it hardly seemed to matter – even as all present knew that it mattered very much.

‘What brings you to our camp?’ Othoros asked, after the introductions were made.

‘I thought I would offer an alliance,’ said the sorceress, ‘against our mutual enemy in Redhollow Ruin.’

The Stormcast Eternals exchanged a look. Othoros’ expression didn’t change, but Etanios knew his commander well enough to sense the Lord-Aquilor’s amusement. He, himself, felt only a tinge of mild embarrassment at the witch-aelf’s presumption. Few they might be, but the Stormcast Eternals vastly outstripped these witch-aelves in power.

It would have been proper for the aelf to request their help, certainly. But to speak of an alliance, and to offer such a thing as if the Daughters of Khaine were granting them a favour, was arrogant in the extreme.

‘An alliance?’ Othoros inquired politely.

‘Our gods are allied,’ Thaelire replied. If she sensed the Stormcasts’ scepticism, she betrayed no sign of it. The aelf’s face and manner remained as coolly serene as a lake in winter. ‘It seems only logical that their servants should be as well. We share a common enemy in Khorne. Why not join forces against Graelakh and whatever else waits within Redhollow Ruin?’

‘What would you propose to bring to such an alliance?’ Othoros asked, cordial but noncommittal.

‘Magic.’ The aelf lifted a slim, pale hand and turned it up so that her palm cupped the air. ‘We cannot rival you for sheer force, obviously. But I suspect you might find some of our other talents intriguing, and very probably useful.’

‘Such as?’ Othoros pressed.

‘May I show you?’ Thaelire gestured to the Lord-Aquilor’s armoured hand and drew the knife sheathed at her hip. Its hilt was made of bleached and polished bone, richly engraved with aelven runes and flowing, sharp-tipped geometric forms that evoked both grace and lethality. The steel blade was straight on one side, curved along the cutting edge, and perfect in its simplicity.

Othoros removed his gauntlet and extended his hand. ‘Certainly.’

Etanios leaned forward slightly, caught by curiosity, as the aelf took the Lord-Aquilor’s hand. She studied it for a moment, tracing Othoros’ veins across the back of his hand and then the palm as if she were memorising a map of unfamiliar terrain. Then, carefully, she put the point of her knife to the Lord-Aquilor’s second finger and pricked the tip, drawing a bead of blood. At the same time, she murmured an invocation softly, the words too foreign and fluid for Etanios to follow.

The drop of blood on Othoros’ finger melted into scarlet mist. It drifted upwards, smoothing into a hazy pane. Shadowy figures materialised hesitantly on its face, like reflections in a darkened mirror.

As they grew and gathered definition, Thaelire murmured, ‘Interrogation is one area in which we may be able to assist. We can draw memories from the blood. Deep ones, old ones, things that even the holder may no longer consciously recall. But they are there, buried in the blood. Waiting.’

The images in the red mist solidified into children. Two little boys, laughing together. One of them, Etanios could dimly perceive, was Othoros. The Stormcast Eternal bit back an exclamation, stealing a glance at the Lord-Aquilor’s reaction. He had never imagined his superior as a boy – as a human boy – even though he had known that, of course, at one point it must have been so.

Othoros watched motionlessly, enthralled. Reflected red light played across the hard planes of the Lord-Aquilor’s face as the vision pulled back, showing the boys scampering across a lightly wooded hillside towards a creek. Sunlight slanted through the green leaves around them, sparkling across the stream. There was a dog with them, a floppy-eared mongrel with a white blaze across its chest, gambolling happily down the hill with the children. The vision was so clear that Etanios could see that the dog’s white toes were stained green by crushed grass.

‘Visconya,’ Othoros breathed, and then seemed surprised that he’d spoken. He cleared his throat, looking at the other two as the vision swirled and dissipated into air. ‘Our dog. I had forgotten about her. I had forgotten… all of this.’ He shook his head, glancing at the emptiness where the image had been. A faint tang of copper lingered in the air. ‘Strange to see it. I had forgotten… yes, everything. My own brother. That dog. I loved that dog. I loved them both. But they were… gone from me.’

He shook his head again, a lion emerging from enchantment.

‘It’s true. It is all true, that day in the sun. I remember it now.’

‘What else can you do?’ Etanios asked the aelf, mostly to give the Lord-Aquilor time to recover. He’d never seen Othoros so shaken. He’d seen his superior stand against Nurgle’s pestilent knights and the howling wraiths of Shyish without flinching, but this memory in blood… this had affected him.

‘There is more in your blood than what was. We can see, also, what is. Not only memories of the past, but desires for the future. Anything that is wanted strongly enough to set the blood afire.’ Thaelire beckoned for Etanios’ hand. ‘May I?’

He offered it to her, suppressing a flicker of misgiving. Strange that he feared nothing on the battlefield, and yet this single aelf had him off balance. Both of them, really. Two Stormcast Eternals, held briefly but undeniably in thrall.

She pricked his finger. Then, to his surprise, she brought it to her lips and licked away the bead of blood. The aelf was still for a moment, tasting it, and then she laughed in sudden, delighted mirth. Othoros, still distracted by his own reverie, startled at the sound.

‘You can still feel desire,’ the aelf marvelled. She glanced up at Etanios, eyes bright. A daub of crimson smeared her upper lip, and she licked it delicately away. ‘I didn’t know that was possible.’

‘I don’t know what you mean,’ Etanios demurred, uncomfortable. The warm rasp of her tongue had been… disquieting.

‘No?’ Thaelire let his hand slip out from between hers. Her smile lingered, and her amusement. ‘I could tell you more, if you liked. There is a burn of sigmarite in your blood, as in his. It tastes of lightning, and it stings. But in him there is more divinity, less of what made a Stormcast once human. In you, more humanity lingers. More blood runs through your veins, and less sigmarite. Your emotions, and your desires, are clearer. I expect you are younger, and have been across the anvil fewer times.’

‘Interesting,’ Othoros said, clearing his throat, ‘and enlightening. I understand more of what the Daughters’ magic is now. But I am not yet clear on how you mean for these spells to aid us in Redhollow Ruin.’

‘There are others,’ Thaelire said with a shrug. ‘We can mask you as dust to pass the corpses strung on claws, or as lesser creatures to mislead Graelakh and his berserkers. We can incite your blood to heighten strength and speed, or to help you heal wounds more swiftly. We can intervene with Khorne’s spells, for he, too, exercises his power through his servants’ blood, and we can spill or slow it to interfere.’

‘You keep saying “we,”’ Etanios interrupted. ‘Can every Daughter of Khaine do what you describe? Do you all have the same spells?’

‘No,’ Thaelire admitted. She wiped her knife delicately, though no blood dimmed its blade, and slipped it back into its sheath of braided red silk. ‘Only I can work the spells I have described. But others in my coven have their own skills, which you may also find useful.’

‘No doubt.’ Othoros stood, signalling that the audience was at its end. ‘You’ve given us much to consider. We will be in contact. I believe my rangers can find your camp.’

The aelf bowed politely to each of them in turn, pressing her hands together sideways over her chest. Etanios supposed it was some sort of ritual farewell, but not knowing its meaning, refrained from imitating the gesture.

He escorted Thaelire back out into Aqshy’s scouring winds and furnace heat, and then hesitated as she drew up her hood again. It seemed discourteous to simply abandon her in such a brutally inhospitable place, and yet he saw no alternative. He could hardly leave his post to walk her back to the Daughters’ camp.

‘Do not worry for me,’ the aelf said. He couldn’t see her face with the hood up, but he could hear the laughter in her voice well enough. ‘I can go back as easily as I came here. It is not so far. But it is possible – if you will allow me the immodesty of the suggestion – that your lord’s rangers may find it harder to locate our camp than he imagines. This will help you find us.’ She held out a loop of braided white hair bound together by an elongated, blade-shaped bead. Half of it was stained a rusty brown, as if it had been dipped in blood.

Almost certainly, it had been. Etanios took it with no sign of his distaste. ‘Thank you.’

‘Best if you carry the talisman,’ Thaelire advised. ‘It will find its strongest echo with you, I think.’ She walked away, then, her grey cloak blowing in the wind, its billows becoming smaller and smaller as the aelf’s figure receded.

Etanios went back to the Lord-Aquilor’s tent. Othoros was buckling his gauntlet back on, his demeanour reflective.

‘What did you think of our guest?’

‘She didn’t ask about the bodies,’ Etanios said. It had just occurred to him. ‘The three witch-aelves we recovered from Redhollow Ruin. She didn’t ask after their remains.’

‘No,’ Othoros agreed. ‘What do you make of that?’

‘I don’t know. Don’t the Daughters of Khaine care about honouring their dead?’

‘They do. But this one didn’t. Which suggests a few things to me.’

‘Such as?’

The Lord-Aquilor regarded the pinprick that the witch-aelf had left on his finger. ‘Why would she decline to bring them back? Perhaps because she didn’t want her comrades to know that she was here.’ Sigmar’s blessing granted his Stormcasts swift healing, and already the pinprick was fading. As Othoros rubbed the mark thoughtfully with his thumb, it vanished altogether. ‘Curious, don’t you think? For someone proposing an alliance.’

‘What does that mean?’ Etanios asked.

Othoros shrugged, heavy gold and sigmarite plates clanking like solemn bells at his movement. ‘It means be careful, young Etanios. The Daughters of Khaine may be part of the Grand Alliance, but they’ve never been trustworthy. Useful, yes. But never trustworthy, not to us and not to each other. Forget that at your peril.’

The pen was bleeding.

Thaelire glanced back at the Stormcasts’ camp. She was out of view behind the hills by now, and she could see no indication that the Sigmarites had followed her. Opening her satchel, the sorceress spread a curling sheet of parchment across the hillside and weighted its corners with rocks, then took the pen from the bone case that rattled against her sciansá. She uncapped it carefully, withdrew the rune-carved finger­bone from its case, and set the bone pen to the thin-scraped skin.

As soon as it touched parchment, the pen began scrawling its message in shaky, bloody script. The handwriting was recognisably Nepenora’s, though agitated by emotion, and further distorted by wind buffeting the fingerbone as it traced its scarlet letters against the skin.

We are in Redhollow Ruin. Past the corpseclaws, across the fiery moat, through the skull fields. The gates appear unguarded but they have eyes. Beyond them are quill-cats and Graelakh’s screamers. We are trapped. Must find a way out before the spell fades.

Thaelire waited a long moment, forcing herself to be patient, until it was clear that the fingerbone had nothing else to write. Its magic spent, it teetered and fell onto the parchment, smearing the last few drops of blood into a jagged comma at its tip.

Carefully Thaelire removed the stones, shook off the grit that dusted the parchment, and furled the grey-tinged skin. Aqshy’s relentless heat had already dried the bloody letters.

She would have preferred to answer Nepenora’s call for help herself, with only her own trusted witch-aelves in support, but that was impossible. There was no way to pull her forces out of the Kharumathi camp without Rhaelanthe noticing.

Which meant that Thaelire had no choice but to offer the Kharumathi an invitation to disaster. Rhaelanthe would hear none of the warnings in Nepenora’s message. She’d see only a list of enemies, and an excuse to incite her followers to bloodshed. That it would be mostly aelven blood that was spilled would do nothing to stop her. Thaelire harboured no illusions about how highly the Daughters of Khaine valued their people’s lives. The Kharumathi killed one another routinely in jealousy and sacrifice. They didn’t think of each other as friends, or even valued subordinates; they viewed their kin merely as pawns and enemies, evaluated solely to the extent that they might be useful or dangerous.

She was tired of it. Tired of dodging snares, tired of trying to show any of her sisters a stronger, surer path. Death, at this point, would be a welcome reprieve from her people’s endless, short-sighted treachery.

It alternately amused and irritated Thaelire that Nepenora worried so constantly about the consequences of her insubordinations. She was touched by her friend’s loyalty – a rarity among the Kharumathi – but also bemused, and faintly insulted that Nepenora seemed to think she hadn’t already considered such things.

Of course she was going to die.

Possibly even today.

‘We attack,’ Rhaelanthe announced jubilantly. She clapped her hands in vicious joy, clanging her spiked bracers together, and then thrust them upward, towards the great idol of Khaine and the melusai lurking behind it. ‘Let the Lord of Murder see and be pleased by the offerings we make in his name.’

‘Praise Khaine!’ the witch-aelves cried. A dozen sciansá and spiked bucklers thrust into the air, shredding imaginary foes. Thaelire breathed out a silent sigh, resigned to their exultation. As the other war-leaders dispersed to gather their own followers for battle, the sorceress turned away to summon hers.

Before she’d taken two steps, Rhaelanthe’s hand closed hard about her elbow. ‘You veiled Nepenora’s warriors to get them through the corpseclaws.’

‘Yes.’ There was no sense lying about it. The hag queen sniffed out lies effortlessly.

‘How many of our witch-aelves can your magic hide?’

Thaelire considered it. ‘Only as far as the corpseclaws?’

‘To the gates. Past whatever “eyes” Nepenora encountered there.’

So the hag queen had taken heed of the warning. Thaelire spent a moment trying to calculate the burden on her magic. ‘Presuming that the same spell concealed her from those watchers, and it wasn’t simply her scouts’ skills that got them through… I might be able to veil seventy or eighty. As many as a hundred if you want me to exhaust myself, but then I’ll be of no use for anything else for at least two days, perhaps longer.’

Rhaelanthe nodded. The knifelike beads in her thin braids clattered, and Thaelire fancied she could see some of them straining to stretch upwards, like the hungry snakes in a melusai’s hair.

‘How long will the magic last?’

‘Stretched to cover that many? A few hours at most. The magic fades faster when it’s taxed. Once they start fighting, it’ll evaporate within moments.’ Thaelire hesitated, glancing around. The others had gone, and there was no one obvious in earshot. Which did not, of course, mean that they were actually alone. ‘But we’ve no real idea what we face in there.’

‘Oh, I know.’ A sudden, dark mirth lifted Rhaelanthe’s eyebrows and curled her lips. It was the first time she’d shown anything but rabid fanaticism to Thaelire, but then it was also the first time they’d spoken in anything like confidence. The hag queen pulled the sorceress closer, her expression masked between their bodies and her voice kept low. ‘Do you really think me that foolish, Thaelire? I should be insulted. Of course I know we’re charging blind into the unknown. Although it’s not quite as “unknown” as you might imagine. Graelakh doesn’t have many more than two hundred bloodsworn screamers, two or three quill-cats, and perhaps a hundred slaved conscripts, less however many he’s killed by now. Ah, that surprises you?’

‘You didn’t mention it during the briefing,’ Thaelire muttered.

‘Are you entitled to an explanation?’ Rhaelanthe’s fingers tightened painfully on Thaelire’s upper arm. ‘I am the hag queen of the Kharumathi. You owe me fealty without question.’ She relaxed her grip minutely, still smiling in bitter amusement. ‘And our trackers are better than you seem to credit. So. Our numbers are almost equal. Those are not impossible odds, if we can even out the advantage of their terrain. And, perhaps more importantly, we must attack. Myrcalene is impatient. The melusai has been pressing me to seize the Goregorge Claw since we came through the Realmgate.’

‘Why does she want it so badly?’

Rhaelanthe shrugged, releasing the sorceress’ arm. ‘Because the High Oracle wants it. Because it is an artefact of power. What else do we need to know? Even if Myrcalene wants it for no other reason than to wear it as a decoration on her tail-tip, we must obtain it, or be deemed disloyal. Under the circumstances, charging blind into the teeth of Khorne’s fortress seems a less certain death.’

‘But surely we can find a better approach,’ Thaelire protested. ‘We could at least try to extract Nepenora’s forces first. We’d have more blades then, and the advantage of whatever intelligence they’ve gathered.’

Rhaelanthe pushed her away with a sharp little shove. Any glimmer of warmth or shared confidence was gone from her. Only the familiar hard fanaticism showed on the hag queen’s face. ‘I’ve given my order. Prepare the warriors. Cast your spell over the full hundred, whatever it costs you. Veil mine first, then Yveline’s, then on down the war-leaders’ ranks until you are exhausted. Your own contingent will come last. If you can’t summon the energy to protect them, they don’t deserve to be safe.’

Ultimately, Thaelire managed to veil one hundred and seven witch-aelves, a little over a third of their force. So exhausted she could barely stand, she watched from afar as the dirt-daubed warriors slipped between the corpseclaws towards the fortress gates. They were moving under cover of darkness, where sharp aelven eyes might give them an advantage that human sight couldn’t match.

Past the field of immense, curving bones was a charred and desolate plain, then a river of molten stone that ringed Redhollow Ruin. A single bridge, blackened and adorned with spiked skulls, crossed the burning moat. Beyond that lay the fortress gates, immense and immobile.

Rhaelanthe’s plan was simple, and as likely to succeed as anything else they could do with the little information she had. The first wave of the Daughters of Khaine would advance under stealth, relying on Thaelire’s spell to blind the corpseclaws and their own skills and shadowsilk camouflage to hide from ordinary eyes in the night.

Then, once they were in position around the gates, the rest of their force would make an open assault on Redhollow Ruin, hoping to bait the fortress’ defenders into an attack. While conventional enemies would probably have remained behind their walls, defeating Rhaelanthe’s plan without even meeting her, Khorne’s Bloodbound were unlikely to ignore such a challenge. The hag queen expected them to pour out in a wild tumult, vying to be at the fore, after which her hidden witch-aelves could pounce upon them from behind.

At the agreed-upon count, the remaining Kharumathi began filtering through the corpseclaws. Thaelire led her contingent along with the rest of the main body, keeping to the rear. Over two hundred Daughters of Khaine moved with unearthly grace between the high, impaling stakes and the withered corpses threaded upon them, flitting through them with such quick, light steps that the dust was barely disturbed beneath their feet.

Still the corpseclaws awakened. The mummified dead convulsed obscenely on their nightmarish spikes of bone. The ruined sockets of their eyes strained open, and blood fountained from their lips. Witch-aelves evaded the sprays with impossible agility, bending their bodies away sinuously so that the corpseclaws’ poison spattered over empty stone and air. Exhausted by her earlier spellcasting, Thaelire didn’t have the energy to dodge. She dropped her head and ran forward, relying on blind luck.

Hers held. Not all of her sisters were so fortunate. Several Daughters were caught in crossfiring sprays between two or more corpseclaws. Blood splashed across one red-tattooed warrior to Thaelire’s left. She froze for an instant, then thrashed her wet hair in sudden bloodlust, flinging ruby droplets across the corpseclaws’ pale bases. Shrieking, the corrupted witch-aelf threw herself at her nearest comrades, stabbing wildly.

Thaelire grabbed reflexively at the threads of magic that always hovered around her, and then gasped as if she’d been punched in the gut. She’d worn out her control earlier. Touching magic now felt like grabbing at glass-coated razor strings. It was nothing but burning, slashing agony, impossible to weave into meaning. She let go, tears streaming from her eyes, and ran from the corrupted aelf instead of attempting any further defence.

Around her, the others were running as well. Perhaps a dozen Kharumathi had been caught by the corpseclaws, and each spun her own little whirlwind of destruction through the ranks. The other Daughters split away from the stricken warriors, darting ahead rather than risk getting trapped amid the claws, but here and there a witch-aelf was caught by one of her maddened sisters and forced to defend herself.

Some fought free, but most, unable to devote their full attention to dodging the corpseclaws’ vomited hate, swiftly succumbed to either their attackers or Khorne’s madness. Chaos multiplied through the ranks.

For a moment, it looked like that chaos might consume the Kharumathi attack. But most of the witch-aelves stayed focused on their forward run, and most broke free of the corpseclaws’ ring to reach the blackened, rubble-strewn clearing before Redhollow Ruin.

Now, on open terrain, it was a simple matter for them to surround and slash down their rage-mad pursuers. The work was swift and brutal. Within moments, twenty or so blood-cursed Kharumathi lay dying at the periphery of the corpseclaws. The rest were through. And the Bloodbound host, somehow, hadn’t emerged to capitalise on their initial disarray.

Thaelire doubled over, heaving for breath. The sulphurous air scorched her throat, forcing her to hack painfully, but she couldn’t stop gulping it down. She wasn’t accustomed to running like that, and she’d been wrung out before they began.

But she’d made it through. All of her witch-aelves had made it through. She hadn’t lost one.

Ahead, the gates of Redhollow Ruin opened with a thunderous groan. Only darkness showed of the fortress’ maw beyond the river of flame.

From that blackness, across the skull-spiked bridge, a single man emerged.

He was tall, bare-chested, fearsomely musclebound. To his lips he held a great curled horn, so massive that he wore a harness around his chest to help support its weight. Then, as the man came to the peak of the skull-spiked bridge and the fiery river’s light washed over him, Thaelire saw that he wasn’t holding the horn. He was its prisoner. His hands were chained to it, and his lips were welded to it in thick, blistered ribbons of cauterised flesh. The harness that bound it to his chest was anchored by dozens of bleeding spikes that had been hammered into the man’s body.

He blew the horn. A low, dolorous groan rolled across the quaking night. Liquid wept from the sides of his mouth and pattered onto the bridge. In the red-lit gloom, Thaelire couldn’t see whether it was blood or saliva or sweat, and she certainly couldn’t hear it sizzle away on the hot metal, but she imagined it all the same.

He blew again, and glistening liquid ran down his scalp. Smoke plumed from the horn’s deep mouth. A second cry shivered through the night. Where the first had been mournful, cutting through listeners’ courage, this one spoke of swelling rage. The Daughters of Khaine shivered, and then answered with a roar of their own, and a clash of sciansá against buckler.

They should be using arrows, Thaelire thought, but of course they had none. They’d had to travel as lightly as possible to twist and dodge through the corpseclaws, and Rhaelanthe thought bows would slow them, so she’d ordered the Daughters to leave them behind. Nor did they have much magic, with Thaelire exhausted and her warlocks held, by her own order, in reserve. Rhaelanthe had gambled everything on Graelakh’s forces coming out to answer her challenge.

The horn-blower wavered on his feet. For an instant Thaelire thought he’d been cowed by the witch-aelves’ cries, but then he turned in the burning river’s glow and she saw that his eyes were empty and filmed with wet darkness. Beads of liquid wavered on his bald head, some as large as coins, and their crimson sheen told her, finally, that they were blood.

He blew a third time. Now it was pure fury that roared through the night, the cataclysmic rage of a territorial alpha scenting interlopers in its domain, and the Daughters of Khaine shuddered before its force. More smoke poured from the horn, hanging thickly above the bridge.

No, Thaelire realised, as the haze steamed in the bridge’s heat. It wasn’t smoke at all, but the blower’s vaporised blood.

The man’s scalp split and sloughed away. His mouth split open as well, ripping wide as the horn pulled down his jaw and fell out in a dark, splashing gush of half-boiled blood. The blower collapsed over his instrument, still haemorrhaging from his mouth and scalp and ears.

No one except Thaelire seemed to notice. Because now there was a new fire in the gate’s gullet, and a new cry from a horde of rage-choked voices, and a new, cataclysmic cacophony of metal clashed against metal.

Graelakh’s screamers poured out in a river of iron and brass, and the battle was on.

The horn echoed wildly through the crimson halls of Redhollow Ruin. Nepenora lifted her head, trying to track the sound through her exhaustion.

Everything was distorted here. Outside, she’d thought the fortress clearly the work of Khorne’s followers, apart perhaps from the corpseclaws having been raised originally by Nagash’s necromancy. Once within its gates, however, Nepenora realised that the taint of Redhollow Ruin ran deeper.

It wasn’t only one of the Ruinous Powers that had touched this place. It might have been all of them. At the very least, Nepenora thought, the Changer of Ways had laid a heavy hand on the halls of Redhollow Ruin.

Nothing here was constant. Corridors turned into blank walls or doubled back onto themselves, twisting into impossible loops even as her warriors traversed them. Rooms were too big, too small, filled with strange echoes and apparitions. The marks that the Kharumathi left to chart their passages appeared in front of them, or around them, often inverted or turned upside-down or bunched together into nonsensical patterns, mocking their attempts to impose any semblance of reason on this place.

The floors and halls seemed half alive, half hallucinatory. They were hot as a still-beating heart to the touch, and they thrummed in every imaginable shade of red: the vaporised spray of a spell-burst artery, the glossy red of a fresh spill, the gritty black of blood digested by a dying, wounded thing. Some of the walls were glittering red crystal, mad with fractures, that reflected non-existent scenes. Wet curtains of liquid fell through alien, pulsing apertures to form walls elsewhere. In some places there were no walls at all, only banks of warm red mist that swam and coalesced according to their own unknowable logic.

Ever since her warriors had infiltrated Redhollow Ruin, Nepenora had become increasingly convinced that they’d stumbled into the latest stage of an ancient, ongoing war. She didn’t know what the Blood Lord’s servants wanted here, any more than she knew what the Undying King or the Great Conspirator had wrought in this place. But she knew they’d been here, all of them, and that they’d scrawled a ­palimpsest of madness and cruelty into the fortress so profound that merely witnessing it threatened her sanity. The fingerprints of Chaos were smeared everywhere in Redhollow Ruin. The place would never escape their grip.

All Nepenora wanted, now she’d had a glimpse of what lay within, was to get her people out. And the nightmare baying of that Khornate horn, awful as it was, signalled that they might just have that chance.

That was a battle cry. If they were fighting, the fortress gates were open. Perhaps Graelakh was marching against the Daughters of Khaine, perhaps the Stormcast Eternals – but to Nepenora, right now, it didn’t matter.

The gates were open. There was a chance to slip the trap. The rest was unimportant.

‘Kharumathi, forward,’ Nepenora whispered. The signal passed through her scouts’ ranks, muted as a ripple of wind through grass. ‘Follow the horn.’

Three times that terrible horn blew. Three times, it sent a beacon flare through the disorienting madness of Redhollow’s interior. Nepenora’s scouts followed it intently, using the sound of Khorne’s rage as a lodestone to guide them through the mazed insanity.

Finally, they glimpsed the fortress gates, flung open to darkness and violence.

A battle raged before Redhollow Ruin. It seemed surreal against the hellish glow of the fiery river that encircled the fortress, like a shadow-play of puppet silhouettes. Lithe, lightly armoured witch-aelves spun their deadly dance around hulking Bloodbound slaughterpriests and the gaunt, ropy-muscled humans who called themselves Graelakh’s screamers. These, Nepenora had glimpsed several times while scouting outside Redhollow Ruin, and she knew that the tattered, lumpen cloaks that flapped about their shoulders were the flayed hides of their foes and brethren, welded together by clotted gore. Their mouths were cut wide in ritual scars that stretched to their ears, so that their faces could stretch open fully to shriek the glorious horror of their god’s name.

She didn’t care about them now. She didn’t even care whether the Daughters of Khaine were winning their battle.

This place was poison. All Nepenora wanted was to escape it, and to bring her own aelves through. Whatever victory Rhaelanthe and Myrcalene sought in Redhollow Ruin, they were welcome to it.

Nepenora motioned for her aelves to slip across the skull-spiked bridge. Quickly, quietly, hunched almost double, the witch-aelves crossed the blackened bridge under the blind grins of its skulls. Aqshy’s winds had polished the skulls smooth as river stones and filled their empty braincases with grit. They rattled softly in mindless, cinder-blasted mirth, empty eyes flickering with fire shadows, as Nepenora’s scouts sneaked past.

They came up behind Graelakh’s screamers. Foulness hung heavy over the Khornate troops: the gobbets of human meat that festered between their teeth, the caked and grisly trophies they wore across their backs, their unwashed bodies after weeks of sweating in Aqshy’s heat. Many of them wore skulls knotted into their hair like crowns, and few had bothered to clean their ghastly trophies first.

They deserved to die. Nepenora felt her lips pull back in a feral snarl. Filthy creatures, stained by Chaos to their marrow. And – most importantly, most unforgivably – between her aelves and safety. There was no room to skirt around them. She could not escape Redhollow Ruin without cutting them down.

‘Kharumathi!’ Nepenora shouted, feeling the last strands of Thaelire’s illusion snap around her as she cried out. Dust sifted from her brow as the magic failed, revealing her to the Bloodbound. ‘Slay our foes! Let none escape alive!’

Her warriors needed no further incitement. Unleashed, they leapt into the fray.

Nepenora sprang forward with them. She whipped her sciansá across an unsuspecting gore-priest’s throat, choking off his prayers in a scarlet spray, and then dipped low to slash her blade across the backs of a screamer’s knees.

Another warrior in crusty skin-rags turned on her, chopping at the aelf with a two-handed swing of his axe. But he was only human, and to her laughably slow. Nepenora dodged the axe, stepped in close, and thrust her sciansá up through his scarred jaw, shattering teeth and splitting his tongue. The man’s last scream exploded from his mouth in blood, and the skull knotted into his filthy hair rattled as if in macabre glee as Nepenora jerked her knife away and let him fall.

Most of her scouts had done equal damage. But their advantage was fading swiftly. The Khornate warriors had recovered from their surprise at the witch-aelves’ sudden appearance and set into their new foes with savage glee. Two of Nepenora’s scouts were caught in a knot of howling screamers, and though they twisted and dodged as deftly as only aelves could, they had nowhere to go. A gore-cloaked screamer grabbed one aelf’s long hair, pulling her into his comrade’s axe. The other tripped on her wounded sister, and was hacked apart herself.

A high-pitched, grating shriek jerked Nepenora’s attention upwards. She caught a glimpse of a sleekly murderous, raw-muscled beast clinging to one of the corpseclaw spires. Its ribcage had split open and spread wide into flexible bone spikes, each as long as her arm, upon which human and aelven skulls bobbed. Daggerlike teeth distended its scab-bearded jaw, and eight wet little eyes gleamed along its quilled skull.

Daemon.

The quill-cat coiled itself and leapt into the fray. More screams followed, but these were torn from living throats.

A space opened around the daemonic cat and the mangled bodies of its victims. Kharumathi and Bloodbound alike shrank back from the beast. Those who failed to retreat quickly enough were swiftly torn down.

Across the gap, Nepenora finally spotted Rhaelanthe. The hag queen was lost in joyous wrath, her knife-tipped braids flying like crimson serpents as she scythed through the screamers around her. Her honour guard ringed her in a blossom of bristling sciansá, each one moving so quickly that they could be seen only by the scarlet sprays they threw.

Fierce they were, but not invulnerable. A witch-aelf fell, cut nearly in two by a gore-flecked warrior twice her size. The others stepped in seamlessly to close the circle over her body, but Nepenora could see now that the aelven ring was far smaller than it had been in their camp, and its surviving members danced over the bodies of their dead.

And there, closing on the hag queen and her defenders, was Graelakh Gore-Gorger, his clawed arm red to the elbow. He was a tall man, grey-bearded and sun-browned, with muscles strung like corded jerky over his bones. On his chest he wore a human skull at the centre of an iron torc, its terminals wrought into spiked fists that punched into the skull’s temples. His blood-soaked beard draped the skull in grisly tendrils, leaving clotted red streaks as they slithered across the bone.

As Graelakh advanced, he reached out almost casually and ripped a Daughter’s heart from her chest, tossing the ragdoll corpse aside with a contemptuous flick of his wrist. Graelakh threw her heart in the other direction, spattering Rhaelanthe and her warriors with the aelf’s bright lifeblood as her heart spun over their heads.

The quill-cat sprang up to snatch the gobbet from the air. It swallowed convulsively, landed on all fours, and snarled through reddened teeth as it looked about for its next morsel. Witch-aelves and Khornate screamers backed away, all eyes on the daemon.

But Nepenora, who had seen the quill-cats before, kept her attention on Graelakh.

He’s hurt. Graelakh had been scored across the lower ribs and his left tricep. The latter injury was bleeding freely, and judging from the way he held it, had caused enough damage to slow his shield arm. He was limping, too, favouring the same weakened left side. His heart-throwing was only a spectacle to distract the witch-aelves from his wounds, and to keep them filled with fear.

He was vulnerable. And Rhaelanthe still had almost half her honour guard, some of the fiercest fighters that the Kharumathi could field. She had a chance. Even with the quill-cat. The hag queen could prevail. Nepenora felt an unexpected rush of hope at the realisation.

Perhaps she’d been so quick to believe that escape was the only thing that mattered because she’d thought it was the only thing that was attainable. But if victory, actual victory, was possible, and they truly had a chance of destroying their enemies and winning Khaine’s shard…

A second disturbance was breaking through the melee: an invisible wave of force that bulled aside aelves and humans alike, with one of Thaelire’s warlocks at its centre. Fealorn, again, as black-eyed and spiteful as ever.

‘Come,’ he hissed to Nepenora, his words bubbling up in puffs of shadowy smoke from the blood spilled around her feet. ‘I can’t hold them back for long. Bring your witch-aelves if you want them to live.’

‘We can win,’ Nepenora protested. She gestured to the hag queen with her sciansá. Rhaelanthe was shouting taunts at the Khornate warlord. Around the hag queen, her honour guard clashed knives against spiked bucklers to show Graelakh that they were unafraid.

‘Stay, then,’ Fealorn said, ‘if you believe that. But you’ll die, and so will your aelves. If you’re too stupid to see that, you deserve it.’

‘Thaelire must delight in your endless charm,’ Nepenora snapped. She had no idea whether Fealorn could hear her over the battle’s clamour, and didn’t care.

The calculation she had to make was simple, but surpassingly hard. If she abandoned Rhaelanthe, and the hag queen prevailed, then Nepenora and all her witch-aelves would be tortured to death for their disloyalty. On the other hand, if she joined the fight, then Rhaelanthe might win where she would otherwise have lost, and the Kharumathi would remain trapped under her leadership.

And that was without considering the Shard of Khaine in the Goregorge Claw. If they could salvage a fragment of their god…

‘The hag queen won’t hold him for long,’ Fealorn said. He turned on his heel, his inky black cloak whirling behind him in the empty space created by the force-wave. Again aelves and screaming Khornate ravagers were thrust aside by his spell. ‘Come or die.’

Cursing inwardly, Nepenora made her bet. ‘My aelves! To me!’

Without looking to see who followed, she rushed after Fealorn, chasing the path of emptiness he cut through the battle. As she closed on the warlock’s heels, however, Nepenora stole a glance over her shoulder at Rhaelanthe. Have I doomed us?

The hag queen met her eyes. Raw hatred contorted Rhaelanthe’s beauty into something blind and monstrous; Nepenora broke away from her gaze with a shudder. They were dead, worse than dead, if Rhaelanthe survived.

Snarling, the hag queen turned away, ripping open one of Graelakh’s screamers from throat to belly. She kicked the eviscerated warrior into the bloody mud. Her honour guards stamped his face into the sludge, choking off the man’s last gasps. Over his croaks, Rhaelanthe shouted: ‘Graelakh! You puling, cowardly wretch! Face me if you dare!’

‘Stop throwing your little dolls in my way,’ Graelakh snarled in return. It wasn’t a witch-aelf he struck next, though, but one of his own screamers who’d stumbled into his path. Graelakh bashed the man in the face with a backhanded blow of the Goregorge Claw, splitting his cheek open and scattering teeth like hail.

Rhaelanthe swept her sciansá in a wide arc. ‘Kharumathi, hold back.’ Her honour guard retreated obediently, forming a protective half-circle around the hag queen. Brutally efficient, they slashed the throats of any humans who stepped into the empty space and kicked away the bodies. Graelakh growled and hacked at any of his own underlings who dared to interfere, and soon the two leaders faced each other in a makeshift arena of blood-dark mud.

‘Keep moving,’ Fealorn told Nepenora, with only the briefest look at the two circling each other in the mud. ‘You don’t want to be caught here when it’s over.’

But she could win, Nepenora wanted to say, and didn’t. She turned away from the fight and followed the warlock through the cinder-strewn rubble field. They came to the corpseclaws, and passed through. Their grisly guardians were dead, or exhausted, and never stirred as Nepenora slipped beneath their contorted shadows.

A victorious cry jerked her attention back to the duel so quickly that Nepenora’s forehead brushed against a corpseclaw’s dangling hand. Even this failed to rouse the creature, though. She hurried past it, urging her scouts along. When the last of her witch-aelves was through, Nepenora turned to squint through the corpseclaws’ bleached curves to see what was happening in the arena.

She could make nothing out from this distance. Nepenora hissed in frustration, and Fealorn cast her an amused look. The warlock seemed to have relaxed now that they were out of immediate danger.

How could he be so calm? It was maddening. Rhaelanthe would eviscerate them all the instant she’d finished with Graelakh.

‘Do you want to see what’s happening?’ Fealorn asked. The question was a taunt.

Nepenora refused to be baited. But she did want to know. ‘Yes.’

‘I thought you might. Add this to the list of favours you owe me.’ The warlock scanned the witch-aelves who had followed Nepenora out of Redhollow Ruin, stopping when he came to a young scout, Halumai, who’d been wounded during their retreat. She was putting a brave face on it, but Nepenora could see how badly she’d been hurt. Blood dripped steadily from a gash in her side, soaking through the balled shadowsilk she clutched over it.

‘Come,’ Fealorn crooned to the young aelf. With a hesitant look at Nepenora, who nodded her onwards, Halumai approached him. When she was within reach, the warlock seized her by the chin and slit her throat, twisting her body deftly to spill the blood into a shallow indentation he’d dug into the rocky earth with his foot.

Nepenora turned her face away from the spray, annoyed not at her scout’s murder but that Fealorn had seized her without asking permission. From the mutterings of the witch-aelves behind her, she knew that her warriors felt the same. But none of them spoke out, not even Sacrima, who had been Halumai’s most frequent lover. The young scout had been seriously injured, and even if her wound hadn’t killed her – which, Nepenora thought, it might well have – it was shameful to have been cut so deeply in a mere retreat, and one guised by magic, no less.

Halumai had been weak. They were better off without her. The only insult was that a warlock, not even an oath-sworn Daughter of Khaine, had taken her life without Nepenora’s grant. And that he’d had the presumption to talk of her owing him favours. Ridiculous.

But reprisal could wait. In the spill of fresh hot blood, a vision was taking shape, and Nepenora squatted at the puddle’s edge for a better view. Around her, the Daughters of Khaine crowded in, all staring at what the warlock’s magic showed.

Halumai’s blood did not reflect their own gathered faces, but rather the view from a different pool of blood somewhere on the battlefield. The view was slanted and distorted, its figures stretched into rippling disfigurement, but it was sufficient to show that Rhaelanthe and Graelakh were still locked in their furious battle. Quill-cats, witch-aelves and gore-streaked, shaggy screamers ringed the makeshift arena, all watching, none daring to interrupt.

Rhaelanthe had the advantage, or so Nepenora thought. It was hard to tell. Both combatants were soaked in blood, their own and each other’s, and she couldn’t make out any nuance of shifting position or intent in the puddle’s murky scene. They might as well have been mirror images of each other: twinned apparitions masked in red, circling around one another with weapons drawn.

Not for the first time, Nepenora reflected on how close their two gods were. Khorne and Khaine, Khaine and Khorne. Both gods of blood, death, murder. One was aelven to the core of his soul, the other drew worshippers primarily from crude human tribes, but still they might have been branches sprung from the same tree.

That was why their enmity was so bitter. It wasn’t the Chaos blight that spurred such vicious hate, not directly. Hating the taint of Chaos for its own sake was for Sigmar’s fanatics, not the Daughters of Khaine.

No, the Daughters’ hatred ran deeper. Theirs was the hatred of true believers for blasphemers, of loyal followers who had seen their god murdered and consumed by a grotesque pretender who had devoured all there was of Khaine save his iron heart. Every death claimed by Khorne’s hordes, every drop of blood spilled for his glory, was a theft of what rightfully belonged to Khaine. Even Khorne’s name sounded like a defilement of Khaine’s. Another warping, another lie. Another encroachment on divinity.

That the usurper was befouled by Chaos only worsened his sin. But the original affront, the deepest and worst of Khorne’s offences, was that his entire faith was nothing but a trespass against, and a mockery of, Khaine’s.

Even knowing what it would mean for her, and for her aelves, Nepenora found herself bitterly hoping that Rhaelanthe would prevail. She hoped the hag queen would smash Khorne’s warlord into the mud, and open his throat so his death rattle could form a proper, final prayer to the true god of death.

Graelakh’s blasphemy deserved no less.

The puddle erupted into a flurry of shadowy blurs, the combatants moving too fast for the uncertain image to track. Rhaelanthe’s elongated knife stabbed in, once, twice, then too many times for Nepenora to distinguish. The hag queen’s visage was just a pale blotch with black pits for eyes, but all could see the sudden, victorious smile that drew dark across her face as Graelakh’s wounds flooded red. Rhaelanthe liked to poison her weapons, Nepenora knew, and the slightest nick meant an ugly death by haemorrhaging. Having been cut, the human was doomed.

Words passed between them, though the spell conveyed nothing more than the movement of lips and the stiffening of postures.

And then Nepenora glimpsed a spark of light that hadn’t been in the reflection a moment earlier. ‘What is that?’

Something was glowing amid the blood-bedraggled tendrils of Graelakh’s beard, as if his heart had ignited into flame within his chest. Its light swam in the puddle’s reflection; Nepenora couldn’t make out what it was.

Fealorn settled back on his haunches, grimly satisfied. ‘She fought well. Khorne will honour her.’

‘He’s cut,’ Nepenora told him, as if she were explaining matters to a simpleton. ‘Her blades are venomed. He must die.’

‘You may find that the gods have their own ideas about such things,’ Fealorn replied.

The light was growing brighter. Now it blazed hot and red through the eyes, nostrils and missing teeth of the skull that Graelakh wore on his torc, and through the spill of its flames showed itself for what it was. Even in the poor reflection they could see Graelakh’s beard blackening in its heat.

‘What is it?’ Nepenora asked, hating the apprehension she heard in her own voice.

‘Khorne’s honour,’ Fealorn said, amused. ‘You were close to right. She should have won.’

Even as the skull on Graelakh’s chest burned, he shivered with blood loss. Thin cuts on his upper body – small and shallow enough that they wouldn’t have shown in the puddle if they hadn’t bled so profusely – bled like torn arteries, pumping out Graelakh’s life.

Yet he did not fall. He seized Rhaelanthe’s shoulders with the last of his strength, pulling the aelf close enough that even in the puddle, Nepenora could see the hag queen trying to recoil from Graelakh’s stench as much as the burning skull on his chest.

She could escape neither. The skull’s jaw sagged open. Fire erupted from between its teeth, igniting Rhaelanthe’s hair in a ghastly burning crown. Skin and flesh crisped instantly, bubbling brown and then black in the puddle’s view. At the same time, Graelakh plunged his clawed hand into the hag queen’s chest, tearing out her heart in his gory fist.

Rhaelanthe slumped forward. Her skull, burned loose, tumbled from her neck and into the torc’s ready maw, as its original skull crumbled to ash between the iron fists and the ensorcelled metal seized hold of Rhaelanthe’s instead.

Graelakh held up the hag queen’s heart in impossible triumph, ignoring the blood that still streamed from his poisoned wounds. He’d lost at least twice what any mortal body should hold, yet he seemed unaffected. Graelakh shouted something, and though Nepenora couldn’t hear the words through the spell, she did hear the Khornate troops’ answering roar, which rolled across the burned plain and through the corpseclaws like the thunder of a coming storm.

‘We should go.’ Fealorn stood and kicked dirt over the pool of blood, ignoring Halumai’s corpse lying in the dirt nearby. ‘It won’t take them long to finish the remainder of Rhaelanthe’s forces.’

‘Where’s Thaelire?’ Nepenora asked.

‘Over the hills. She thought if she stayed behind, you’d waste too much time trying to convince her to go back for Rhaelanthe. Whereas if she sent me, you’d know to save your breath.’

Nepenora cast a last look back through the corpseclaws. She couldn’t make out individual battles from afar, but she could sense the overall tide as well as anyone, and she knew it was running badly against the frightened, demoralised witch-aelves. They had seen their hag queen mortally wound a human who had failed to die; they had seen her heart-torn and beheaded by the grisly might of Khorne.

They would fall.

She nodded to Fealorn. ‘Let’s go.’

Thaelire was waiting for them in the Kharumathi camp. It looked shrunken and tired with almost all the warriors gone. Weak. Only leathanam and slave drudges walked among the tents, bent double under heavy loads of water and firewood. The supplies they’d carried through the Realmgate were running low, and what they’d been able to forage from the harsh native terrain fell far short of their needs.

Although, Nepenora reflected, those needs were likely to be considerably reduced now.

She dismissed her surviving followers to rest and tend to their wounds. Alone she continued to the great cauldron, where Thaelire had asked her to meet.

To Nepenora’s eyes, after their misfortunes in Redhollow Ruin, the cauldron of Khaine seemed strikingly alien among the blasted hills of Aqshy. Its belly was full of ash and dust instead of ripe red blood. The great idol of Khaine was filled with wind-cast grit that dulled its shining surfaces and filled its crevices, giving it the aspect of something ancient and neglected, like the last relic from some ancient, long-dead civilisation.

Perhaps that wasn’t so far from the truth, or what would soon become truth. Nepenora grimaced as the cauldron’s shadow fell over her face.

‘What becomes of the Kharumathi now?’

Thaelire was sitting in the shade, reading a worn old book lettered in a soft grey ink that glimmered softly in the shadow. The sorceress looked up at Nepenora’s question. ‘We still have two companies of warriors, and most of our captives and drudges. It’s enough to rebuild.’

Not enough to take Redhollow Ruin. That was too obvious to need saying. Over two-thirds of their force had perished along with the hag queen. What remained was a slender core, perhaps strong enough to regenerate the Kharumathi eventually, but far too weak to challenge Graelakh or his screamers. Even with the losses that Rhaelanthe had managed to inflict on the Bloodbound horde, it would be purest suicide for the Daughters of Khaine to try the fortress again.

‘Do we try to rebuild in Aqshy, or return to Ulgu?’ Nepenora asked instead.

‘Neither.’

It wasn’t Thaelire who answered, but Myrcalene, rising sinuously from her hidden perch coiled atop the cauldron’s great idol. Both witch-aelves stiffened; neither, evidently, had known she was there.

‘You will go back to Redhollow Ruin.’

‘You weren’t there?’ Nepenora asked. Perhaps it was exhaustion and desperation that made her so bold, but abruptly she didn’t feel like being deferential to Morathi’s handmaiden. Had Myrcalene been there? Nepenora hadn’t seen the melusai in the fighting, but her view had been limited, and she had assumed that Myrcalene would use illusions to disguise her true nature anyway. The snake-bodied handmaidens rarely revealed themselves to outsiders, and Nepenora had presumed that meant Myrcalene wouldn’t show herself to Graelakh’s horde.

It had never occurred to her that Myrcalene might not have joined in the fighting. Or, if the melusai had been there, that she would have abandoned the hag queen and her witch-aelves before the end. That crept too close to… cowardice, or treachery, or any of a dozen different words, each equally treasonous to consider.

But, apparently, that was the truth. The melusai had either abandoned the hag queen early, or hadn’t fought at Redhollow Ruin at all.

Myrcalene bared her teeth, ignoring Nepenora’s question. ‘You did not reclaim the Goregorge Claw. You returned empty-handed from Redhollow Ruin, and have thus failed in the High Oracle’s task. But I will, in my beneficence, allow you one more chance to prove yourselves in Khaine’s eyes. Go back. Retake our artefact from the hands of the unclean. Or else it will be clear to all – to our lord and god, to his High Oracle, and to me, as her handmaiden and the instrument of her will – that you are unworthy to be counted among the Daughters of Khaine.’

‘Yes, handmaiden,’ the two aelves chorused humbly, in unison. Myrcalene watched them with hot eyes for a long and hostile moment, breathing shallowly through her mouth as if tasting the air for the telltale scent of their defiance, then slithered down the immense effigy of Khaine, along the cauldron’s bloodstained lip, and away across the sand.

When she was gone, Thaelire tucked her small book away. ‘So.’

‘So.’

‘We don’t have a chance against Graelakh’s horde.’ Thaelire watched Myrcalene’s figure dwindle between the tents. ‘We’d probably have better luck trying to kill her instead.’

‘Thaelire.’ Even breathing a word against one of Morathi’s handmaidens was suicide.

The sorceress shrugged. ‘It’s true. The only way to change the outcome is to change the equation. We’ve lost too many aelves to win on our own strength, if we ever could have. We need allies, and there’s only one prospect worth pursuing in this waste.’

Nepenora nodded, eager to move away from the dangerous suggestion of treachery. ‘How do we win over the Stormcast Eternals?’

‘If they were men, I’d seduce them. One of them, at least. There’s a young recruit in their retinue who seems likely. But they aren’t human, so that may not be possible, and even if it is, it may not be wise. So we must find another way.’ Musing, Thaelire tapped the cover of the book tucked beneath her shadowsilk cloak. ‘Stormcast Eternals are permitted only one desire – to destroy the Chaos fiends who are their god’s greatest enemies. Anything else they may want… those desires are not gone from them, not entirely, but I think they will resist admitting that any other wish exists. Our easiest path, then, is to offer what they are permitted to want.’

‘How? They’ve little use for us as battlefield allies. Especially now that two-thirds of our fighting strength is gone.’

‘I’m not sure that’s true,’ Thaelire said. ‘There are so few of them that they might well be grateful for whatever help we can give. But, in any case, that wasn’t how I planned to open my offer.’ She regarded Nepenora with the bare hint of a smile. ‘We – you – have something they do not, and which they will want very badly, the better to serve their god.’

Nepenora raised a sceptical eyebrow. ‘What’s that?’

‘You’ve actually been inside Redhollow Ruin. You have seen what lies within the fortress with your own eyes. There’s something the Stormcasts want in that place, badly enough to have staked out a camp in this barren waste, and while I don’t know what that is, I’m willing to wager that they’ll be very interested in your observations.

‘Think. These are Stormcast Eternals. Serving Sigmar’s holy tasks is the only purpose, the only pleasure, that exists for them across their long march through eternity. They are immortals slaved to that end. Redhollow Ruin, for whatever reason, is their task here. Therefore they must know what you’ve seen.’ Thaelire’s smile sharpened, and took on some of the twisted contentment of victory. ‘Yes. I think I can secure our alliance with that. What you and your scouts saw in that place is our key. So. I will need your blood. And then we will see what weight of sigmarite that blood can buy.’

‘She came back,’ Etanios murmured, astonished.

There was no one to hear him. Othoros had taken the rest of the Stormcast Eternals to scout the aftermath of the witch-aelves’ attack on Redhollow Ruin. In part they’d gone to pick off any surviving followers of Khorne they could kill without revealing themselves, but mostly Othoros had wanted to see whether any of the fortress’ secrets had cracked open in the fighting. The Lord-Aquilor had been visibly agitated when he’d received news of the witch-aelves’ attack – the first time Etanios had ever seen him show any emotion that might be characterised as even a distant cousin to ‘fear’ – but whatever Othoros had been afraid might happen had, evidently, not come to pass.

Still, the Lord-Aquilor had gone with some urgency to reconnoitre the battle’s bloody leavings, and he’d taken almost all of their fighting force with him. Only Etanios remained behind to watch over the scorched wastelands surrounding their camp, and so only Etanios saw the lone aelf approaching over the blasted hills.

It was the same one who’d come before. Thaelire. He was certain of it. She dyed her hair dark red, almost black, where most of the Daughters of Khaine wore theirs white, or stained a vibrant crimson with the spell-touched blood of their victims. While the shadowsilk cloak might have belonged to any witch-aelf, and she was too far distant for Etanios to make out her face even through his spyglass, the sorceress’ hair was distinctive.

It was her. It could be no one else.

He was surprised by the relief he felt. There was no particular reason that Etanios should care whether Thaelire had survived the attack on Redhollow Ruin. As far as he knew, it didn’t matter to the Stormcast Eternals whether every last one of the Daughters of Khaine had perished in the hag queen’s foolish charge. The aelves were not important to any strategic concern. And Etanios had been sent to spy on the aelves’ camp a few times, enough to see how they treated their captives, and to lose whatever illusions he might have had about their sometime allies’ morality. The Daughters of Khaine were very nearly as cruel as the worst of Chaos’ servants.

And yet…

Etanios couldn’t explain, even to himself, why he cared that the sorceress had survived. But he did. With more anticipation than he would have liked to admit to any of his fellow Stormcasts, he watched her approach across the hills, appearing and disappearing with the smoke that drifted across the slopes. When finally she reached his sentry post, he had to subdue a little thrill under his mask of solemnity.

‘Sorceress. What brings you back to our camp?’

Thaelire lowered her hood, looking up at Etanios with a curious, lopsided little smile. ‘You’ve surely noticed that our hag queen made her attack on Redhollow Ruin.’

‘Yes. It appears fortune did not favour her.’

‘I’d lay the fault more with her planning than with the whims of fortune,’ Thaelire said, with a little shrug that suggested she considered this to be of no moment. She shook her cloak out carefully, and cinder-flecked dust billowed from the shadowsilk in gritty puffs. ‘In any case, she’s dead, and the greater part of our strength with her.’

‘Yes,’ Etanios agreed cautiously. He was, as ever, astonished by her boldness. He couldn’t imagine any Stormcast so casually admitting to an outsider that their fighting strength had been demolished, or blaming it so openly on poor leadership. It was true that she hadn’t told him anything that their own rangers hadn’t already seen, but even so, her attitude was breathtaking. ‘Is that what you came to tell us?’

‘No. I came to discuss the alliance that I proposed on my last visit.’ Thaelire smoothed her cloak, caressing the dusted silk with another little smile cast up through her lashes. Her fingers lingered on the fine grey cloth, and Etanios’ skin prickled as if her touch lingered on him, instead.

Foolishness and fancy, but his throat was suddenly dry. He cleared it awkwardly. ‘The Lord-Aquilor is presently afield. Would you care to wait inside? The climate here is harsh.’

‘It is,’ she said, and Etanios led her towards their camp. After a moment’s indecision, he guided the aelf towards his own tent rather than Othoros’, because he wasn’t sure that they should risk the possibility that the Daughters of Khaine would see anything sensitive that the Lord-Aquilor might inadvertently have left on display. They hadn’t expected visitors, and it was possible that the sorceress might catch a glimpse of something she wasn’t meant to.

So he told himself, anyway.

‘I’m surprised you notice the harshness,’ Thaelire observed conversationally, as they walked. ‘I wouldn’t have thought Stormcasts would be troubled by it.’

‘Of course we are,’ Etanios told her, surprised. ‘We are still flesh, and our equipment is still cloth and metal. Even if Aqshy’s fire-winds can’t harm sigmarite – and, between the two of us, I’m not entirely sure they couldn’t erode it, given time enough – they can certainly scour away everything else.’

‘Yes, I suppose so.’ Thaelire glanced about the spartan furnishings of Etanios’ tent as she stepped inside. He had a canvas cot, a folding table, armour polish and buffing cloths, a sigmarite-flecked whetstone for his blades, and not much else. Little that spoke of personal interests, and nothing of recreation.

It hadn’t occurred to him, until just now, that someone might find this strange.

He’d had more, much more, when he was mortal. There had been cherished keepsakes from loved ones and mementos from his travels. Perhaps a prized weapon from a vanquished enemy, or a lock of hair from a sweetheart. Maybe a favourite spice blend carried from his homeland, or an instrument to play the songs of his youth through lonely, foreign nights.

Or… something of that sort. He couldn’t remember. But there had been more. Etanios was sure of that, just as he was sure, looking around his tent, that he could no longer recall what any of it was, or why it had mattered.

Thaelire touched the plain clay jug and cup that Etanios used for water. There was only the one cup. ‘Do you mind?’

‘No. Not at all. Please.’ He cleared his throat again. ‘We… don’t entertain guests very often.’

‘It rather seems that you don’t “entertain” at all. Even yourselves. What do you do in your spare moments?’ The sorceress poured and sipped gracefully, looking about the tent again.

‘We don’t really have many,’ Etanios said self-consciously. ‘Spare moments, that is. There’s always some other task to be done. Our work in Sigmar’s name is unending.’

‘Even when you die. Does that trouble you?’ Thaelire asked coolly, giving her water a second look after she’d tasted it. There was a skin of gritty dust on it – Etanios hadn’t covered or emptied the jug in almost a day, he belatedly recalled, far too long to keep water unsullied even inside his tent – but she swirled it as if fascinated by the way the grit vanished into the cup’s whirlpool, and then drank the rest without complaint.

‘No. Sigmar’s is a worthy cause. It is an honour to be counted among his chosen.’ This, Etanios felt to be true with every fibre of his being, and he answered with absolute conviction.

‘What is that cause, exactly?’ Thaelire looked pointedly about the tent, so utterly barren of any signs of personality, curiosity or joy. ‘I suspect you could tell me very clearly what it is you fight against, but what – in your view – do you fight for? Is there anything? Or does it exist only as abstraction and generality?’

Etanios shrugged, helpless and a bit nettled. ‘Maybe we fight so that the rest of the Mortal Realms can enjoy the luxuries we’ve forgotten. Would it even make sense if we wanted to… carve sculptures, or the like? It’s mortals who want to achieve eternity through art. We already have it.’

‘You do,’ Thaelire sighed. She set the cup aside and stood, coming closer. ‘Immortality. An eternity of war and death, fighting in the service of a cause you can’t articulate and possibly don’t remember. How terribly tragic.’

‘It is an honourable fate,’ Etanios said stiffly. The aelf was close enough that he could feel the soothing coolness trapped in her shadowsilk cloak, and smell the curious resins and spices of her spellcraft. He fought the urge to step back.

Thaelire smiled gently. A little sadly, perhaps, though he might have imagined that. ‘Oh, of course. It would hardly be tragic otherwise. But you make me rather glad that I will die, and then be free. I don’t think endless servitude in the model of Sigmar or Nagash would suit me.’

‘We’ve little in common with Nagash’s slaves,’ Etanios told her, even more stonily.

‘No? I suppose not. Vampires, at least, want things. And decorate with a certain amount of personality, even if they really only have two or three modes.’ Thaelire lifted a slim hand to stave off further protest. ‘No, I know, I shouldn’t mock. I’m being an ungracious guest. But… really.’

She took Etanios’ hand and held it lightly between both of hers, gazing up at him with a serenity he couldn’t read. Her touch was as soft and cool as the silk of her cloak.

‘When we first met, I was surprised that I could taste desire in you. And that remains – the surprise, and the desire. Doesn’t it? But it isn’t all you want.

‘You are lonely, Stormcast. When was the last time someone touched you with kindness? With your fellows, you have friendship. Camaraderie. It is very strong, strong enough to sustain immortality. But it is the brotherhood of the battlefield, bound in violence and rough in its ways, and you have no one outside that. And you want it. You still have enough humanity that you want it. Even now, you’re hoping that I’ll call you by your name. Aren’t you?’

‘Yes,’ Etanios said. But before he could think of what else to say in response to the aelf’s astonishing, perplexing words, he heard the rush and clamour of the other Stormcasts’ return.

Thaelire heard it too. She drew back, releasing his hand from hers. ‘Ah, they’re back. Marvellous. Do you suppose I should give them a moment, or will the Lord-Aquilor want to hear my proposal now?’

‘Lord-Aquilor Othoros appreciates efficiency,’ Etanios said, trying to disguise his regret. He would have liked to keep her to himself a little longer. To understand the riddles she’d given him. Perhaps, simply, to feel her fingers on his palm a moment more.

His own wishes, however, were of no importance. Etanios stood, with as much graciousness as he could manage, and offered his arm to escort the sorceress out. She took it lightly, and together they went out to meet the Lord-Aquilor.

Othoros’ expedition had been unsuccessful. Etanios recognised the blend of frustration and relief in his superior’s demeanour at once, and wondered whether Thaelire saw the same. The Lord-Aquilor was a master of restraint, but the aelf had shown herself to be a sharp observer.

‘Daughter of Khaine,’ Othoros said, removing his masked helm courteously as Thaelire drew near. ‘I’m pleased to see you survived the attack on Redhollow Ruin. It appears many of your sisters did not.’

‘Our hag queen was a poor leader.’ Thaelire shrugged. ‘But now she’s dead, and with her, the primary obstacle to our alliance.’

‘I see you’re heartbroken at the loss. Well, you knew her better than I.’ Othoros kept his manner solemn, but Etanios could see a sardonic amusement lurking at the corners of his mouth. It seemed the Lord-Aquilor’s guess about disloyalty in the Daughters’ ranks had been on the mark. ‘Remind me, please, what terms you hoped to offer for that alliance?’

‘We need your help defeating Graelakh Gore-Gorger and seizing the Goregorge Claw,’ Thaelire replied. ‘Regrettably our own strength is not sufficient to this task, now that our late lamented hag queen’s got most of our witch-aelves killed. Without your Stormcast Eternals, we have no hope of fulfilling our charge. Which would be unfortunate on a number of fronts, not least that of our continued survival.’

‘I see,’ Othoros said, with the same near-perfect gravity over subdued mirth. ‘What do you offer in exchange for this help?’

‘The chance to kill Khorne’s Chaos-corrupted fanatics isn’t enough? I’m grievously disappointed. Everything I thought I knew about Stormcast Eternals seems to have been false.’ Thaelire sighed theatrically and reached into her cloak to draw out a small, wax-sealed vial of dark red liquid. ‘But, as it happens, I do have something else to offer.’

‘Yes?’

‘I don’t know what you want in Redhollow Ruin, but I do know it isn’t Graelakh or his cursed Claw. If it were, you’d have swept in to seize it while he’s still licking the wounds we left him. I must presume that it’s something within the fortress itself, then, and not merely the warlord currently occupying the place. And that you can’t simply go in to get it yourselves, at least not yet, or else – again – you’d already have killed Graelakh and done so. Am I right?’ Thaelire lowered her lashes minutely, then glanced up through them, hardly bothering to hide her victorious little smile.

Othoros’ amusement dimmed abruptly. ‘Yes.’

‘Then this might be of interest.’ The sorceress held up the little ­bottle again, sloshing its crimson contents. ‘Some of our scouts entered the fortress, as you might already know. They saw strange things in Redhollow Ruin – things that they couldn’t begin to describe, things that bore the imprint of not only Khorne, but multiple Ruinous Powers. Perhaps even all of them. You can, I’m sure, imagine the conflict and confusion in their accounts.

‘But I have distilled their memories into their blood, and so you can witness all that they saw, just as they did, without the clumsy intermediary of words. And without worrying about tipping your hand as to what, exactly, it is that you seek in that place. You need not ask us anything. The blood will show you all.’

‘A tempting offer,’ Othoros said. He sounded noncommittal, but Etanios saw the tension that suddenly gripped the Lord-Aquilor. ‘And all you want is our assistance in defeating Graelakh’s host?’

‘That and the Goregorge Claw. Yes. You needn’t even tell me what draws you to Redhollow Ruin – although, of course, I might be able to offer more assistance if I better understood your needs.’

‘No doubt.’ Othoros extended a hand for the bottle. It was tiny in his palm, a doll-sized absurdity. The glass caught the late slant of light and flashed as he studied it. ‘But I think this will suffice. What lies in Redhollow Ruin is best not disturbed. Or, frankly, discussed.’ The Lord-Aquilor closed his fingers around the vial. ‘What must I do to watch the memories?’

‘I will perform the spell for you. As I did before.’ Thaelire brushed her fingertips over the hilt of the knife at her hip. ‘Have we a bargain?’

‘We do.’

‘Excellent,’ Thaelire said briskly. ‘First I will show you the aelves’ memories, and then I will paint you with their faces.’

The Lord-Aquilor arched an eyebrow. ‘What?’

From her cloak, the sorceress withdrew and unfastened a small case of matte grey leather. It held rows of tiny glass bottles, even smaller than the one she’d given Othoros, nestled neatly in little loops of braided silk. Many were empty, but about a dozen were filled with blood.

‘The faces of the dead,’ she explained, holding out the case. ‘You and your host are formidable, but you’ll be more formidable yet with the advantage of surprise. Graelakh doesn’t know exactly how many warriors we have, but he does know that he defeated us decisively when we had three times our present number. Therefore I expect he won’t notice, and certainly won’t care, if our companies hold nine additional aelves. On the other hand, he very much would notice and care if we marched on him with nine Stormcast Eternals. So we will make you look like aelves, and remove that trouble from his mind.’

‘I see.’ Othoros squinted into the wind-scoured distance, where the sun was falling from Aqshy’s cloudless sky. Nothing could be glimpsed of Redhollow Ruin beyond the smoking hills, but all felt the weight of its presence, perhaps more ominous for being unseen.

He turned back. ‘Yes. I accept.’

‘The Kharumathi will need a new hag queen,’ Myrcalene said.

Nepenora paused in mid-stretch. Twice a day, at morning and dusk, she and all the other Kharumathi went through the series of flowing, dancelike stances and transitions that they relied upon while fighting. The Daughters of Khaine practised these movements again and again, unceasingly, honing their bodies and embedding the memories into their muscles so that they could perform perfectly even in the throes of their wildest rage. Each sect had their own preferred style, but they all practised with equal fervour. War was prayer, and dance was prayer, and there wasn’t a Daughter of Khaine in any of the Mortal Realms who would dishonour her god by displaying incompetence in either.

It was possible, Nepenora thought, that the melusai meant to bait her by dangling a promise of advancement to see whether it distracted the witch-aelf from her piety. If so, she was resolved that the trick would fail. She nodded as briefly as she dared, stealing only the quickest of glances at Myrcalene, and continued through her stances. Only when she’d finished the full, exhausting sequence did she stop and sheathe her weapons. Gritty black dust flecked her sweaty brow and neck and clung to her damp garments. Nepenora ignored the irritation.

‘What of it?’

‘Morathi is watching you. Closely. The recovery of the Goregorge Claw would be a considerable triumph. Of course it is a test of your sect’s worthiness to survive… but that does not mean that survival must be the only reward. A leader capable of bringing her people to victory in such difficult circumstances would have proved herself able indeed.’

The melusai’s eyes were hot in the twilight, burning against the vertical black slits of her pupils. Nepenora stared at them in fascination. She’d never noticed that Myrcalene’s eyes were snake-slitted before. Perhaps they hadn’t been, and the melusai had just now dropped – or used – an illusion to make them so.

‘Am I clear?’

The back of Nepenora’s neck prickled, and not with drying sweat. ‘Yes.’

‘Good. It would be unfortunate if you thought that the High Oracle relied only on threats to secure her servants’ loyalty. Nothing could be less true. To the clever and courageous, she can be very generous indeed.’ Myrcalene smiled, showing the tips of her teeth, and abruptly her eyes were aelven again. Her gaze glittered as hard as it had before, though; there was no comfort in her thin pretence of normalcy. ‘Your ruthlessness with the former hag queen did not go unnoticed.’

Nepenora nodded again, not trusting herself to say anything. She’d been afraid that Myrcalene might suspect her abandonment of Rhaelanthe to be cowardice. That would have been unforgivable. But opportunistic treachery among the Daughters of Khaine was considered understandable, even commendable, under the right ­circumstances. If the High Oracle agreed that Rhaelanthe had been an inept leader, then deposing her and arranging her murder was clearly the correct course of action.

Perhaps it was even worthy of reward.

‘I’m glad we understand one another. The Kharumathi will need a strong leader when this is done. And there may yet be other rewards in store. The High Oracle may wish to see the Kharumathi made more powerful than they were before – and their new hag queen, mightier yet. But the Goregorge Claw must come first.’ Myrcalene slithered away, her serpentine body leaving a wavery trail across the coarse, rock-splintered sand.

Nepenora brushed the remaining grit off her skin. Her sweat had baked dry in the furnace-blast heat, and the dust fell easily from her clothes. As she stooped to pick up her spiked buckler, she heard a chorus of vyatti bird cries spread through the Kharumathi camp.

That was an alarm. The shy, reclusive vyatti bird lived in the shadow-draped heights of Ulgu, and could not survive in Aqshy. The Kharumathi used its soft, whirring cry as a warning when they dared not raise a louder call. Thaelire’s warlocks had wrapped their camp in illusions to hide them from Graelakh’s screamers, but if the Kharu­mathi had raised a full alarm, its noise might have broken through the magic. Even now, it wasn’t the witch-aelves who raised the cry, but the leathanam, so that any intruder who might have breached their camp would follow the noise only to their near-worthless slaves. The witch-aelves, meanwhile, could melt into the shadows and spring on interlopers by surprise.

It wasn’t an intruder who came through the cracked grey hills, however, but Thaelire – and nine witch-aelves that Nepenora knew for a fact had died outside Redhollow Ruin.

She knew that because she was the one who had slit their dead veins and collected the cold blood from their bodies. She’d filled the vials that Thaelire had used to disguise the Stormcast Eternals now accompanying her into the Kharumathi camp.

Nepenora smiled, and then smoothed the expression away as she strode through the tents to greet the newcomers. Cinders crunched under her boots, alerting them to her arrival.

‘Welcome, Stormcast Eternals,’ she said. ‘Welcome to our war.’

The second time the Daughters of Khaine came to Redhollow Ruin, they didn’t even try for stealth.

They came openly, beating drums and flying makeshift banners of shadowsilk cloaks strung from spears. Nepenora marched at their head, and when they came to the fortress, she ordered their archers forward. The leathanam set down pots of coals and hurried away, and the archers dipped their alchemically treated arrows into the flames.

Then they shot the bodies threaded on the fortress’ towering bone spikes, igniting the impaled corpses from afar. The cursed things writhed and screamed through blackened teeth as they burned. They vomited sorcerous blood onto the sand, convulsed in shrouds of carrion-foul smoke, and died.

Behind them, the fortress gates opened. Fifty, sixty, seventy gore-streaked howlers poured forth, thundering their own drums in answer. Daemonic quill-cats slipped out to a chorus of deafening, bone-shrilling shrieks, the gory spines of their ruptured ribs grabbing hungrily at the air. Graelakh came out last, flanked by the most devout of his Bloodbound. He was shaggy in ropes of hair and gore-caked skin, Rhaelanthe’s skull trapped in the grip of his torc.

‘Little dolls! Have the rest of you come back to die with your sisters? I thought you’d run away, weeping in fear.’

‘Little human!’ Nepenora shouted back. ‘Have you come out to fight us like a warrior this time? Without hiding behind walls and dead things and’ – she drew a circle over her chest, as if tracing the shape of a skull on a torc – ‘magic?’

That taunt drew a chorus of gibes from the Daughters of Khaine, and an inarticulate roar from Graelakh’s horde. Khorne’s brutes hated nothing so much as sorcery, viewing it as the province of weaklings who used guile and deceit to overcome the stronger and more worthy. Any insinuation that an artefact of Khorne’s favour was a mere wizard’s trick was the vilest blasphemy to them.

Nepenora hoped it would enrage them enough to make them overlook the Stormcast Eternals disguised among the Daughters of Khaine. Although Thaelire had altered their faces, and even their armour and weapons, no magic could grant them the grace of true aelves. Close scrutiny would reveal that the Stormcast Eternals moved with the heavy deliberation of plate-clad warriors, and that they clustered together in disciplined groups of two or three, unlike the witch-aelves, who moved far more fluidly across the rough terrain. An especially sharp-eyed observer might even note that they left heavier footprints in the sooty, rock-studded grit.

Therefore Nepenora needed to prevent Graelakh and his minions from studying her aelves that closely.

‘Stung, eh?’ she taunted. ‘Ashamed we all saw that you had to resort to sorcery to defeat our hag queen? It wasn’t your axe that killed her. It wasn’t your claw. It was your toy skull’s magic.’

‘She was dead already!’ Graelakh screamed back. Thrusting the Goregorge Claw into the air, he led the charge over the fiery bridge and into the corpseclaws.

As they crossed the killing field, the Bloodbound horde kicked up the coarse black dust, and Aqshy’s ever-vicious winds whipped the grit into a storm. Graelakh spat it out viciously, still shouting.

‘She died by my hand! Mine! The Blood God took her skull as a trophy. Khorne honoured her skill. But it was I, Graelakh Gore-Gorger, who killed her!’

‘You killed nothing, except your own feeble claim to glory,’ Nepenora sneered. Around her, witch-aelves tensed, sciansá drawn and spiked bucklers held at the ready. The archers dipped their bows towards the fire pots once more. The Bloodbound host was nearly in range.

‘I’ll kill you next,’ Graelakh promised. One of the charred corpses strung overhead tumbled from its claw, showering him with gory cinders. He slapped them away, leaving his face and shoulders flecked with black and red. ‘I’ll tear out your heart. But never fear, little doll. I won’t take your worthless skull. I’ll crush it for pig food instead.’

The Daughters’ archers nocked and loosed their burning arrows. Arcs of fire hissed from the sky to strike Khorne’s warriors down. They fell howling, but Graelakh was deaf to their cries. The screamers in the next rank cursed their wounded comrades as weaklings, kicking them savagely and spitting on their dying pleas as they charged past. Then they were through the corpseclaws, and their stench engulfed the aelves.

Nepenora’s archers loosed their last arrows, almost point-blank, at the wall of oncoming warriors. A screamer lunged forward, ripped the bow from an aelven archer’s grasp, and whirled its shaft like a ­quarterstaff to smash her throat. She dropped to her knees, clawing at her crushed windpipe. A moment later she vanished, trampled underfoot, as the two armies crashed together.

The clamour of flesh and steel and screams was deafening. Nepenora squinted against the whipping wind, slashing at any howler who came near. She nicked one, spun away, hamstrung another. Neither was a killing cut, but both of her victims would die. The venom on her sciansá would see to that.

The dust storm grew thicker, its gritty motes coarser. It was near blinding now, and its cinders battered against the combatants’ shields and armour like black hail. The quill-cats were lethal blurs in the storm, each one invisible until it tore into its next victim with a mad, yowling shriek.

Nepenora grimaced, trying to track the nearest cat through the blowing ash. Distracted, she almost blundered into a pair of enraged Bloodbound. One had a broken arrow sticking out from his back. He’d fingerpainted red streaks across his face with the blood from that wound. The other had slashed his own mouth from ear to ear so that he could howl more fearsomely to his brute god. Windblown cinders caked the dripping wound, lining his lips with ghastly, half-dissolved spikes of black.

Both of them attacked her. Nepenora ducked under a goreaxe, sidestepped, and slashed underhand at its wielder. She scored a long, bloody scratch – enough to kill him in a few moments, but not enough to disable the man at once. As if to prove the point, the Bloodbound screamed and swung at her again. This time he clipped her, and though Nepenora managed to avoid decapitation, the force of the blow still drove her to a knee. A shock of heat, then numbness, seized her shoulder.

She stumbled away. Seeing their advantage, the Bloodbound chased her, shouting in glee.

Another witch-aelf darted in, stabbing at the brutes to protect Nepenora. They roared and set upon her. She dodged the one Nepenora had wounded, but failed to evade the other.

The storm has blinded her, Nepenora thought, even as the Bloodbound’s axe buried itself in the aelf’s side. The Daughter of Khaine fell with an unvoiced cry of astonishment on her lips. Cinders battered her face, clinging to her sightless eyes. The Khornate warriors stepped over her body to pursue Nepenora; one of them crushed the fallen aelf’s skull, casually, as he left her in the ashes.

Nepenora danced back, worried now. There hadn’t been as much poison left on her sciansá as she’d thought. The injured one wasn’t dying fast enough. He had scarcely slowed, even as blood ran down his body and left black dust-clots in his wake. The Bloodbound fanned out, widening their angle to trap Nepenora between them as they continued to drive her back, away from the main body of her force. The ash was blowing thick and fast, cutting her off from any other witch-aelves who might help her. Everywhere, it seemed, the battlefield had broken into isolated duels and small knots of fighting separated by walls of blowing grit.

Then Nepenora heard a quill-cat’s cry, and her blood curdled cold. The daemon stalked through the billowing blackness like an apparition out of nightmare, broken bodies briefly visible in the eddied storm behind it.

Even the Bloodbound hesitated at that eerie, keening wail. They paused, just for an instant, and Nepenora seized the opportunity to skitter away sideways, retreating as quickly as she could with her injured shoulder still throbbing in protest at every step.

If she was lucky, the cinder storm would hide her. If she wasn’t, she’d be trapped between quill-cat and Bloodbound.

She was better than lucky. Through the veils of falling ash, she glimpsed three witch-aelves just as they slaughtered the last of the Bloodbound in front of them. Nepenora veered towards the trio, prepared at any second to feel the quill-cat’s claws thudding into her back.

‘Cat!’ she shouted, both to get their attention and to warn them.

They turned, showing neither fear nor the delirious, wrathful joy she would have expected from the Daughters of Khaine, and instantly fell into a defensive formation. Their fighting stance clicked in Nepenora’s head as an abruptly wrong-shaped thing, like the sight of a Chaos rune on a Khainite prayer scroll, or a possessive daemon grinning from behind a once-familiar face. The three aelves stood like a single body, ordered and disciplined, in a manner utterly alien to the witch-aelves’ fluid, individualistic fighting style.

She thought: Oh.

The quill-cat shrieked again, close enough for the vibrations to thrill against Nepenora’s spine. Hot breath lashed her back. She couldn’t tell whether it was from the cinder storm or the quill-cat, and she didn’t care. She threw herself flat on the ground, undignified and helpless, and exhaled through her clenched teeth in bitter relief when she felt the quill-cat leap over her, unwilling to waste its strength on such pitiful prey when there were three better challengers waiting to be fought.

Khorne’s creatures had his spirit. Probably the quill-cat intended to come back and eviscerate her slowly, at its leisure, to show her the cost of weakness after it had finished with its worthier foes.

Nepenora didn’t think it would survive to have the chance.

She lifted her head as the quill-cat sprang over her, raining cinders from its paws. It extended its claws as it prepared to land on the frontmost witch-aelf, and then screeched in shock as the aelf caught it and bashed it aside with an impossibly strong, impossibly fast swing of her spiked buckler. The quill-cat twisted in midair, righting itself, only to scream again as a second witch-aelf hurled her sciansá like a javelin through its exposed belly.

The cat hit the ground hard, rolled twice as it strained to avoid driving the knife any deeper, and gasped in frantic disbelief, its flanks heaving under a prickly coat of black grit, smeared blood and daemonic ichor. Gathering its strength, the quill-cat twisted upright again, but the witch-aelves were already upon it.

Nepenora couldn’t see what followed. The wind turned, then turned again, and the cloaking cinders swirled in its grip. It had only obscured the false aelves for a split shard of a second, but that was all it took for them to disembowel the quill-cat and hack its head off for good measure.

No witch-aelf could have done that. And now Nepenora wasn’t the only one to have seen it. Thaelire’s disguising illusion was rapidly failing as it strained to cover the impossible. In another moment, it would give away the truth hidden beneath her spell’s false faces.

But even before the magic crumbled, Graelakh’s shout rang out.

‘Stormcasts! These are not aelves, but Stormcast Eternals! Sigmar’s hammers are here!’

The closest Etanios ever came to understanding the destructive joy of Chaos was in the heart of battle.

There was a terrible exultation in feeling the rightness of his Sigmar-blessed body moving in the brutal rhythms of war. This was, in the most literal sense, what he had been made for. The weight of the ­hammer in his hands, the gratifying crunch of slamming it into a foe’s head or torso – this, this above all, was the purpose of his reforging.

War sang to his soul. His muscles and sinews rejoiced at the exertion, at the test of their strength and the fulfilment of their duty. His heart swelled with a strange and angry pride, a volcanic glow of pleasure, at the slaughter of Sigmar’s enemies. Their broken bodies stirred no pity or remorse in him, only savage contentment that he had done his work well.

Afterwards, when his blood had cooled, he often felt confused and ashamed by his excesses while in the grip of battle-lust. It seemed… unbecoming, in some way that Etanios couldn’t quite articulate, that one of Sigmar’s honoured servants should take such satisfaction, such delight, in death and destruction. Even when it was Chaos’ corruptions that were destroyed, it felt… wrong.

But those regrets always came later. In the heat of the moment, there was only ever joy. And that joy filled him now, pounding through his veins with every beat of his heart, as Etanios crushed the howling Bloodbound beneath his hammer. His spell of disguise had failed at some point. Etanios hadn’t noticed when. One moment, his hammer had appeared to be a ritual sciansá, and his limbs had looked pale and slender as a witch-aelf’s. Then he’d pulled his hammer out of the gory rubble of a screamer’s skull and had realised that it appeared to be itself once again, and so, too, did he.

This detail had registered distantly. It was unimportant. All that mattered was tracking Graelakh’s howlers through the swirling blackness of the cinder storm, and smashing them into ruin when he found them.

Grit beat against his gold-masked helm. To his left, a gore-painted screamer hurled a glowing skull into a cluster of witch-aelves. It exploded, obliterating two aelves and ripping the arm off a third. The Bloodbound threw more exploding skulls, demolishing the remaining Daughters of Khaine, then rushed into the wash of fire, tearing at anything still standing.

Two Stormcast Eternals met them with hammer and sword. The Bloodbound, expecting to find only dying aelves, ran full into the force of their weapons. Human bodies flew like dolls, limbs wrenched awry and faces gaping sightlessly into the wind. From the grey-gold lightning that crackled through the melee, Etanios knew that one of those Stormcasts was Agashon, whose reforgings had imbued her with an aura of tempestuous stormlight that flared uncontrollably in a fight.

That stormlight flashed through the cinder clouds, illumining hunched, scuttling figures that scurried towards the melee with their heads low and odd, glowing objects clutched close to their chests. More exploding skulls, perhaps. Beset by the Bloodbound horde, the Stormcasts didn’t notice them, or didn’t care.

Agashon thrust her spike-headed hammer into a screamer’s chest. Lightning burst from her weapon, illumining the incandescent red cavern of the man’s ribcage as it broiled his heart and lungs. Steam heaved from the dying man’s mouth like the last sigh of his soul escaping, and Agashon cast the wreck of his body into the storm.

She turned immediately to the next warrior, and so didn’t see the scuttling ones converge on the broken thing she’d tossed aside. Not exploding skulls, then. Lifting a gauntleted forearm to shield himself from the battering wind, Etanios bulled across the battlefield to intercept them.

He didn’t reach them in time. One of the scuttlers tipped the dying man’s face up, and another crammed its glowing burden into the ruined warrior’s mouth. A veil of windblown cinders obscured them momentarily, then swirled away again. When it cleared, Etanios saw a vile, purplish-red glow sliding down the man’s throat.

The broken man hissed, soft and low and far too long for any mortal lungs to sustain, much less lungs that had been charred by Sigmar’s lightning. He sat up in a quick, inhuman jerk of movement, and his hands snapped out to seize the throats of the two scuttlers who had revived him. The bones of his fingertips burst out into grisly claws, tearing out their throats, and the broken man hooted a gleeful, mindless laugh. Some glowing object, the same colour as the one he’d already swallowed, tumbled from one of his victims’ lifeless fingers. He pounced upon it and stuffed it down his throat with both hands.

Then Etanios was on him. Up close, he saw a horrible fractal light spinning in the pits of the broken man’s burned-out eyes and emanating from his throat. It spilled from his ruptured ribcage and flooded from the bone claws that thrust out of the ragged ends of his fingers. Perverse shapes and eye-searing sigils formed and collapsed in that ugly purple light, some of them traced in radiance, others pulled from the fibres and sinews of the screamer’s body, all of them endlessly consumed and reborn by the glow that had seized him from within.

‘Tzeentch,’ Etanios hissed. Was this what the Lord-Aquilor had feared? That the servants of one Ruinous Power, delving into Redhollow Ruin, would unlock the forces of another?

‘No,’ the broken man whispered, but the word he said was crowded by a thousand others that the glow in his throat emitted as echoes: yes and fools and mine mine mine. ‘No. Blood for the Blood God. Skulls for Khorne.’ He lunged at Etanios, bony claws outstretched, and the glow in his chest whispered: blood to ichor, skulls to looking-glasses, and what Khorne takes will take him too, the fool the fool the fool.

Etanios swung. His hammer pulverised the broken man’s hands, burst apart his spell-rotted forearms. Fragments of bone and purple light scattered into the cinder-black wind. But rather than falling inert to the ground, they knitted themselves into a nightmare constellation of gristle and broken fingerbones, a hollow structure that billowed like a wind-filled sail in the storm. This hideous apparition threw itself at Etanios, clattering against his armour and digging furiously to reach any exposed skin or flesh it could.

It will transform me too. He slapped at the skittering filth, trying to keep its poisoned splinters away. The broken man cackled and lunged again, thrusting the jagged stumps of his arms out at Etanios like spears.

Inches before he would have hit Etanios, the shadows seized him. A gossamer net of cinders and darkness covered the broken man and crushed him small, holding him bound in its depths. One of the aelves – a male, a warlock, Etanios remembered dimly – gestured, and the shadows knotted tighter, while inside the corrupted thing thrashed.

‘Crush it,’ the warlock spat, and Etanios did. He hammered the shadow-bound ball again and again, until the thing inside it stopped moving, and the male aelf released his spell.

A lump of macerated flesh fell out, unidentifiable as anything that had ever been human. It was dead, finally, and the ash storm buried it swiftly.

But it hadn’t been the only one. Other warplings dotted the field, appearing and disappearing with the vagaries of the storm. Blue lightning suddenly spiked from the earth to the sky: one of the Stormcast Eternals, slain.

‘Do you suppose the reforging will purify out the Changer’s taint?’ the warlock asked, almost meditatively, as he turned his white face towards the lanced sky. There were black runes scarred on his face. They made him look almost as sinister as the Bloodbound themselves. ‘Or will it merely spread Tzeentch’s poison across the anvil so that it stains all the souls that follow?’

‘Sigmar’s might must prevail,’ Etanios answered grimly. Nothing else was imaginable.

‘Ah. Yes. I forgot who I was asking.’ The warlock smiled mirthlessly. ‘Perhaps we should go and make sure of that, then.’

They did. Again and again, the warlock wrapped the tainted Bloodbound in nets of shadow, and Etanios crushed them. He glimpsed other teams doing the same: another warlock paired with Agashon Storm-Crowned, and Thaelire with a Stormcast Eternal he couldn’t identify through the sweeping ash. Around them, witch-aelves and Bloodbound spun in dances of mutual slaughter. The Lord-Aquilor wrestled a quill-cat, hugging the beast’s back against his armour while he punched a gauntleted fist into its side, again and again, splintering its ghastly ribs apart until he could reach and rip out its heart.

Then Graelakh Gore-Gorger came back into view, coated head to toe in blood-damp ashes, and Etanios glimpsed a depth of bleakness that he could never have conceived of existing.

Graelakh had been defeated. No – destroyed. Utterly. Not by the Daughters of Khaine, nor even by the Stormcast Eternals, but by what he himself had wrought and witnessed in the cursed halls of Red­hollow Ruin.

In Graelakh’s face, in his haunted eyes and the slope of his shoulders and the defiant, hateful fury that hunched his skin-cloaked back, Etanios saw the defeat of the fanatic who has seen his god’s power defied, of the Bloodbound berserker who sacrificed his fellows’ strength to sorcery, of brute rage spun round by deceit. In that moment, Graelakh suffered every agony of the accidental traitor, and Etanios almost pitied him.

Almost. The warlord was still Bloodbound, and though he was defeated, Graelakh had not given up. His despair was absolute, but he would never surrender. To his last breath, Khorne’s champion would destroy all he could, and take every possible soul to damnation with him.

‘So,’ Thaelire called across the smoke-swept field, ‘you begin to comprehend your failure.’

Cinders eddied about the aelf’s shadowsilk cloak and rattled against the armour of the Stormcast Eternal beside her. Now Etanios could see the Stormcast’s white-enamelled sigmarite well enough to recognise its wearer as Valancar, a gaunt-cheeked giant originally from somewhere in the high mountains of Ghyran.

Graelakh snarled at the witch-aelf and stepped away from the Daughter he’d just torn apart. Blood dripped from the Goregorge Claw as he straightened. ‘My enemies are dead before me. I have not failed.’

‘Are they?’ Thaelire made a show of looking around. Not much was visible through the blowing ash, in truth, but most of what Etanios could see nearby were the corpses of Tzeentch-warped Bloodbound. ‘I see many dead, but few of ours. But – oh. You didn’t say they were ours. You said they were enemies. Which, I suppose, is true. Even if they did begin as your people.’

‘Die, witch,’ Graelakh spat. He flexed the Goregorge Claw and stalked towards his adversaries. Halfway there, Graelakh tore the skull from his gore-matted torc and hurled it at Thaelire and Valancar. The Stormcast Eternal blocked it effortlessly with his shield, and it bounced to the ground at their feet.

Perhaps they thought Graelakh had only thrown it out of contempt. The skull had come from the Kharumathi’s previous leader, Etanios had heard.

But it wasn’t merely a taunt. Fire pulsed in the skull’s empty braincase, intensifying rapidly. It looked just like the ones Etanios had seen explode before.

He ran forward. Kicking the skull away would only detonate it – he’d seen what happened when the Daughters of Khaine tried that earlier – so, instead, Etanios grabbed an astonished Thaelire by the shoulders. Spinning to put his own bulk between her and the skull, he hurled the sorceress away.

‘Bomb!’ he shouted to Valancar.

The other Stormcast raised his shield and turned to follow, but the skull exploded before he could. The blast engulfed Valancar and knocked Etanios forward. Lightning crackled behind him and flashed to the heavens: Valancar, returning to Sigmar’s anvils to be reforged.

Etanios rolled over, spitting out rocks and cinders. He felt his limbs hastily. Nothing broken, nothing maimed. Maybe he’d chipped a tooth hitting the rocks when he fell. Hard to tell now. He wondered, briefly and absurdly, whether his tooth would stay chipped if he died and was reforged, or whether he’d wake in the halls of Azyr to find the tooth repaired.

He looked up. Thaelire hurried towards him, unscathed. She was lugging his hammer awkwardly, using both hands.

‘I presume you’ll want this. I don’t. It’s abominably heavy.’

Nodding dazedly, Etanios took back his hammer. He stood, trying to regain his bearings. Graelakh was battling another Stormcast Eternal, and to Etanios’ surprise, was more than holding his own.

No human could stand toe-to-toe against one of Sigmar’s chosen, yet somehow the bedraggled man was doing exactly that. The Goregorge Claw flashed on his hand, red as iron, red as blood. Moving of its own accord, the Claw blocked the Stormcast’s swings with swift, loud clangs and lashed out with vicious blows in return. Bright scars opened on the Stormcast’s armour where the Claw gouged through enamel and even sigmarite itself.

‘You could have let me die,’ Thaelire murmured beside him. Shadows gathered around her, filling the folds of her cloak as she began another spell. ‘You should have. Death is the only way to break our enslavement, Stormcast. Haven’t you seen that by now? All our gods are gods of war, and they bring us all to ruin. Only in dying can you finally escape their game.’

Etanios didn’t know what to say to that. He didn’t have time to answer, anyway. Graelakh had won his contest. The Bloodbound warlord tore off the Stormcast Eternal’s loosened gorget and plunged the Goregorge Claw into the immortal’s unprotected neck, tearing out his throat and sending another blast of lightning to the sky.

Then a noose of shadow interwoven with cold, dead blood shot out of the air to grapple Graelakh’s wrist. As the warlord strained against the shadows’ unnaturally solid grip, the blood seeped out of the ­magical shackle and into the joints of the Goregorge Claw. A sheen of blood, old and new, built between Graelakh’s skin and the Claw, separating it from his body.

‘No,’ Graelakh protested. His eyes widened, and a mixture of disbelief and abject pleading – and then, a split second later, hatred that he’d been made to plead – filled his voice. ‘No.’

But the spell didn’t stop. The Claw wrenched upwards. One of Graelakh’s fingers cracked audibly in its metal claws as he failed to straighten them swiftly enough. The Goregorge Claw heaved again, cracking another bone, and then toppled off Graelakh’s hand and to the ground. A ghostly, hollow fist of blood showed briefly inside the gauntlet, then collapsed into shapeless liquid and trickled away.

‘No!’ Graelakh dived for the fallen Claw.

A thrown sciansá found him first. The ritual blade skewered Graelakh’s wrist, pinning him to the earth. As he grabbed at the weapon’s handle, trying to free himself, a second Daughter of Khaine approached him. This one was taller and more muscular than Thaelire, and garbed in light, scant armour rather than flowing shadowsilk.

She stooped, planted a booted foot on Graelakh’s back, and wrenched his head up painfully by his hair. ‘In the name of High Oracle Morathi and our great god Khaine, I take your blasphemous life. The Goregorge Claw is ours, defiler.’

The aelf jerked her sciansá out of the ground and slashed it across Graelakh’s throat. She held the warlord’s head up until the crimson arcs of his lifeblood failed. As the spurts slowed to trickles, she dropped his face into the wet ashes. Then, with an air of relief as much as victory, she picked up the Goregorge Claw.

From there, the fighting came swiftly to a close. The Bloodbound didn’t retreat – Khorne’s sworn fanatics never did – but they fought with suicidal fervour, all but throwing themselves onto the Khainites’ weapons in disorganised, self-destructive charges. The warplings had already mostly been subdued, and it didn’t take long to destroy the last few.

Yet, curiously, it was in those last few minutes that both of the warlocks died. Etanios didn’t see either of them fall, but he saw the bodies as the storm finally began to calm, and he wondered at their carelessness when victory loomed so near. Why now?

Perhaps it was only bad luck. The fates could be perverse in war.

Othoros took off his helm and surveyed the field when it was over. ‘Closer than it should have been. We lost three Stormcast Eternals today.’

‘What were those… warplings?’ Etanios asked. He nudged one of the corpses, now little more than a pile of cinder-cloaked pulp, with the toe of his boot. ‘Was that what you feared might lie within Redhollow Ruin?’

‘That was one of my fears, yes,’ Othoros admitted. ‘I expect those were the work of falsity mirrors. The witch-aelves’ memories suggested that some of those artefacts might be found in the upper halls. They are creations of the Changer of Ways – crystals that reflect lies about what the future might hold, and offer deceptive visions of the transformations they might provide. You will have noted, I’m sure, that all the warped Bloodbound had claws of one kind or another. I presume Graelakh believed he could amplify Khorne’s blessing in his followers, and give them all a semblance of the Goregorge Claw’s power, by using the falsity mirrors.’

‘Just as they tried to use Nagash’s artefacts outside,’ Etanios said, eyeing the corpseclaws. Even stripped of their impaled bodies, they were obscene things, pale and monstrously alien to this land.

‘Yes. Or, at least, that would be my guess.’ Othoros shrugged. ‘But the falsity mirrors, though terrible, are only a fragment of what we believe Redhollow Ruin might hold. It is not a place that can be left standing, and it is not a place easily destroyed. That is why we were sent to watch over it, and no more.

‘Though, after this, the lords of the Stormhost may wish to revisit their calculations. If a single Bloodbound warlord and his ragged human host could successfully unlock several of Redhollow’s secrets, and kill three Stormcast Eternals in a single battle, it may be time to take Redhollow Ruin more seriously. Still, this need not be our concern today.’ He paused as the witch-aelf who’d killed Graelakh approached. ‘My lady.’

‘I am Nepenora,’ the aelf said. She inclined her head politely, but there was nothing subservient about the gesture, and nothing warm in her manner. ‘We thank you for your aid, and congratulate you on our shared victory.’

‘You are most welcome,’ the Lord-Aquilor said solemnly. He looked to the fortress. ‘Will you require anything else from us here? If not, I believe the terms of our agreement have been met.’

‘They have. We thank you again.’ Nepenora nodded to Etanios, as well, and left. She was still holding the Goregorge Claw. Gingerly, but firmly, as though it were a slippery and dangerous beast that might try to bite her and escape.

Othoros seemed to approve of her caution with the artefact. He watched the aelf go with a touch of bemusement. ‘Strange allies, the Daughters of Khaine. I feel I know even less of them after this.’

‘Will we stay?’ Etanios asked. ‘To investigate the fortress,’ he added hastily, though that wasn’t really why he had asked.

The Lord-Aquilor shook his head. ‘We return to Azyr. As I said, our report may be what finally compels the lords of the Stormhost to take more serious action in Redhollow Ruin. At the least, they’ll certainly want to know what happened today.’

‘Of course.’ Etanios bowed in acquiescence. Yet as he fell in behind Othoros, following the Lord-Aquilor from the field, he stole a glance backwards.

He wondered whether he’d see the Kharumathi again. Aelves were long-lived, and the Stormcasts immortal, but the Daughters of Khaine pursued a violent path, and the Mortal Realms were very large. The chances, he thought, were not good.

He wondered, too, whether he would remember Thaelire if he did see her again. Reforging stripped memories, as every Stormcast knew all too well, and it was possible that if Etanios died and was remade on Sigmar’s anvils, he might not recognise the aelf even if their paths did cross.

That, Etanios feared, would be far worse than simply never seeing her. Forgetting was a crueller loss than absence.

But it was out of his hands. It was all out of his hands. Sigmar called, and he served.

He was a Stormcast Eternal. This was all that was left to him.

Myrcalene did not show herself until the Stormcasts were long gone. Then, and only then, did the melusai let her veiling illusion fall.

Nepenora fell to a knee immediately, as did the rest of the Kharumathi on the field. Not that there were many left to grant obeisance. Those who were too wounded to kneel had been dispatched, since their warlocks were dead and Thaelire’s magic had been exhausted in the fight, and there was no other way to heal those so gravely injured. Seeing their ranks so badly thinned filled Nepenora with a curious kind of sorrow: the grief of seeing a dreaded but expected fate confirmed, and of knowing that she dared not voice the foremost thought in her mind.

This wasn’t worth the cost.

She could not say that. She couldn’t even mourn her fallen warriors, for mourning implied that she regretted their deaths, rather than accepting them as welcome sacrifices to Khaine’s glory. So Nepenora remained silent, and lifted the Goregorge Claw above her bowed head with both hands as she knelt and awaited Morathi’s handmaiden.

‘We have fulfilled the High Oracle’s charge,’ Nepenora said. She kept her head low, but pitched her voice so that it filled the hushed field of the dead. Whatever happened next, she wanted the surviving Kharumathi to know their triumph. They had done all that was asked, and more. ‘We defeated Graelakh Gore-Gorger. We seized the Goregorge Claw. The shard of Khaine is ours.’

‘You have served well,’ Myrcalene agreed, her voice carrying to match Nepenora’s. She took the Goregorge Claw in both hands and held it high, signalling to the Daughters of Khaine that they could lift their heads to behold their trophy. ‘You fought bravely and with skill, and honoured Khaine with your piety. The field is washed in our enemies’ blood, and the High Oracle is pleased. The Kharumathi have proved their worth, and will be rewarded.’

Such praise should have filled Nepenora with elation, and yet she felt little more than creeping dread. There was something else coming, she was certain. Some other demand. If there was anything she had learned during this shard-quest, it was that Morathi and her servants were never satisfied.

Even so, she couldn’t deny the thrill that swept through her when Myrcalene said, ‘In your new age of glory, you will need a new ­leader. One who is clever and courageous, loyal and resourceful. Worthy of the Kharumathi. The High Oracle believes that Nepenora is such a leader, and has named her as your new hag queen.’

A murmuring swept through the surviving Kharumathi. Not of their voices – it would have been unforgivable to utter a word while the High Oracle’s handmaiden was speaking – but the creak of leather-bound armour and the crunch of cinders under shifting weight as the witch-aelves turned to regard Nepenora.

She had their loyalty. Nepenora felt that as surely as if they’d all shouted their acclaim, and it warmed her profoundly. The Kharu­mathi wanted no other leader. Would accept no other. They were hers, and she was theirs, with a fierceness forged in battle.

‘But there is one among you who is disloyal,’ Myrcalene continued, ‘and this, our faith cannot forgive. Therefore High Oracle Morathi has decreed that the first act of your new hag queen must be to impose sentence against this apostate soul, and offer her blood as sacrament and sacrifice to Khaine. In this way, the purity of the Kharumathi will be assured, and your sect will seal its place in the High Oracle’s favour.’

Nepenora froze. She knew exactly who this had to be. Even so, her heart sank at the sight of Thaelire approaching.

The sorceress had her hood down, her dark-dyed hair blowing freely in Aqshy’s heated breeze. Against the immensity of the battlefield, with the smoking hills behind her and the bare white corpseclaws reaching high overhead, she was an impossibly tiny figure, yet somehow she commanded the eye. Unchained and unescorted by any other Kharumathi, Thaelire appeared to move towards death of her own free will.

Or perhaps that was only what Nepenora wanted to believe. She had sacrificed countless victims to Khaine’s cauldron, but none of them had ever been a friend. Those sworn to the Lord of Murder didn’t have friends.

But she’d had one.

Shakily, Nepenora walked to the cauldron. She kept her head high and her back straight, as though she, and not Thaelire, were the one condemned.

Perhaps I am.

They met at the side of the cauldron. There was no one nearby. The wind had picked up, scouring the great bowl with rattling cinders and ensuring that none could hear them.

Thaelire touched the rim with a fingertip, faintly amused, though Nepenora could see the apprehension that gripped the sorceress beneath her nonchalant veneer.

‘You did always warn me that I’d find myself here. Are you gratified to be right?’

‘No. Not like this.’ Nepenora steeled herself. She dared not voice anything as damning as regret, not this close to the sacred cauldron. Who knew what the High Oracle, or Khaine himself, might hear through the vessel? But she hoped that her feelings might be clear enough in her tone. She thought they were. The Daughters of Khaine were well versed in hearing what could not be said.

‘No? You should be.’ Now it was Thaelire’s turn to pause. There was a slight softening at the corners of the sorceress’ eyes, and her lips pursed minutely, as if there was something that she, too, struggled not to say.

In the end she only shrugged, gathered up her hair, and pinned it into a loose knot at the nape of her neck.

‘Lead the Kharumathi well. They’ll need it. If you need allies you can trust, in the future – and probably you will, I think – look outside our faith.’

‘The Stormcast Eternals?’

That small, private smile touched Thaelire’s lips again. ‘They do have the rare and remarkable virtue of predictability. That, and they’ll always want things, because their war will never end. So yes. The Stormcast Eternals.’

‘It would be easier to secure their aid with you,’ Nepenora said. It had never been the Daughters’ fighting strength that interested the Stormcasts; it had been their magic. Which would be greatly weakened, with Thaelire and her warlocks gone.

‘Everything would be easier with me. But the High Oracle, in her wisdom, no longer believes that outweighs the trouble of my impiety. And, to be quite candid, neither do I. So. Are you ready?’ Thaelire’s amusement had vanished. Her eyes were dark and very intent. That tension was in her again, thrumming just beneath the surface. Not fear of death, Nepenora thought, but… something else. Something she had no name for.

‘Yes,’ she managed to say. The sciansá in her hand felt unreal. Like a dream. All of this felt like a dream. Even the black grit stinging against her skin felt numbed, as if it struck her through some shielding patina of unreality.

‘Then do it.’ Thaelire knelt smoothly and bent her neck over the cauldron.

And Nepenora, still marvelling at the strangeness of this dream, in which she’d won everything she wanted and lost everything she’d valued, brought her blade down.

To victory, and woe.