Wardens of the Everqueen Page 11

  Morbus, however, was less impressed with the damage he had caused. The ice was thicker here, stronger than it had been near the beach. It was tougher to break, more difficult to split. He wondered if they were straying too near to the jotunberg and if the giant’s wintery emanations were strengthening the ice.

  Angstun held his standard high, using it to signal the Judicators defending the flanks. Poised at the rear of the column, standing well behind the marching sylvaneth, the Knight-Vexillor was in an exposed position, but it was the best place from which to issue commands to all of the Stormcasts. Only Diocletian’s Decimators stood with him as a bodyguard, their presence close to the tree-creatures still proving a strain upon the strange alliance of men and sylvaneth.

  As the shrieks of crippled and drowning horses rang out over the howling storm, Angstun felt regret. It was an easy thing to kill marauders and beastmen, but he loathed the necessity of destroying simpler creatures like horses and hounds. There was a quality of innocence about animals, even those twisted and mutated by Chaos, that made them tragic to Angstun. While the men and monsters that goaded them to war had come to revel in their corruption and praise the very powers that plagued their bodies, the horses were merely victims of the contagion. Death was the only release for them, but that did not make Angstun revel in the deed.

  Tipping the standard towards the left, Angstun directed a volley of arrows across a split that Morbus’ lightning shower had caused. As the Judicators loosed against their target, the crack widened, creating a fissure large enough to thwart the marauder horsemen trying to close upon the sylvaneth exodus. Cursing the Stormcasts, the cavalry wheeled away from the crack, galloping off back into the icy fog.

  The crash of blades against armour rose from the column’s left flank. Turning about, Angstun saw a mob of unspeakably vile mutants throwing themselves upon the Liberators and their shield wall. The flesh of the attackers rippled with disgusting energies, hideous growths erupting from them in spurts of spontaneous mutation. One raider’s head collapsed into a nest of spiny tendrils that whipped and lashed at the Hallowed Knights, while another had his arms slough away to be replaced by great crab-like pincers. Each attacker’s form descended into horrors more grotesque than the last, great spears of horn and bone stabbing out from their skin or massive claws exploding from their hands. It was a sight of such concentrated madness and terror that any warrior less stalwart than the Stormcasts would have lost heart against such foes.

  For all their monstrous aspect, Angstun could see at once that these mutants wouldn’t be able to break through. They fought like wild beasts, lone madmen. They lacked the cohesion and discipline to force a way past the Liberators. The Hallowed Knights, by contrast, fought as a single body, supporting and guarding one another as they defied their attackers.

  No, it wasn’t the claws and fangs of the mutants caused Angstun to be uneasy – it was the very presence of such enemies that troubled him. Horsemen, hounds and flying daemons had been one thing – swift foes who could range far ahead of Torglug’s legion – but these were infantry, however abominable of aspect. Even sent ahead as scouts or skirmishers, they couldn’t have strayed too far from the plaguehosts. The main enemy force had to be getting close.

  Even as he made that realisation, Angstun felt a change in the air. It took him a moment to determine that the Lady of Vines had altered the timbre of her song in some fashion. What that meant, he didn’t immediately know. What he saw at once, however, was the sylvaneth marchers fall still. They’d stopped their retreat. The tree-creatures shifted and swayed, the creaks and groans of their wooden bodies mixing into a weird harmony as they came to rest.

  ‘They’ve stopped?’ Decimator-Prime Diocletian couldn’t believe his eyes. ‘Don’t they know the enemy is close?’

  Angstun shook his head. ‘It must be the Lady of Vines. She’s told them to stop. Maybe she is weary of running.’ He wondered if that was the meaning of the branchwraith’s changing song, but somehow he thought there had to be some deeper purpose. Some glimmer of understanding came to him as he saw a group of towering treelords lumber out from among the sylvaneth, pressing their way past the Liberators and out across the ice field. They cast their inscrutable gaze across the cracked and pitted terrain, studying the fissures Morbus’ lightning had caused.

  Morbus! With his affinity for things arcane, perhaps he would have some understanding of what was happening. Angstun looked towards the left flank, trying to find the Lord-Relictor. He couldn’t see him among the Liberators or the Judicators as they picked off charging mutants as they came lunging out of the fog. The absence puzzled Angstun; Morbus was always the first to take up a fight.

  Then Angstun recalled Lord-Castellant Grymn’s words. Their duty wasn’t to fight, but to protect Queen Alarielle – even if it meant protecting her from herself. That same injunction would apply to the Radiant Queen’s retinue. He knew where Morbus had gone. The moment the sylvaneth stopped, the instant the keening song had changed, the Lord-Relictor had withdrawn. He was going to speak to the Lady of Vines herself and find out why she’d brought her people to a stop and put the queen-seed she carried at jeopardy.

  Morbus was going to demand an accounting from the Lady of Vines.

  Lord-Relictor Morbus ran through the midst of the sylvaneth. The great tree-creatures parted before him, shifting and twisting aside to allow him passage through their ranks. Though they were silent, he could sense the resentment that smouldered within each wooden body. It wasn’t by their own volition they allowed him to move among them, but a command from a higher authority. He knew that command could only have issued from the Lady of Vines, perhaps woven within the melody of her shifting song. It seemed she knew his purpose and had prepared the way for their meeting.

  Behind him, Morbus could hear the sounds of battle. If the sylvaneth resented the Stormcasts, then they had good company with his own offence. His place was back there, helping Angstun fend off Torglug’s raiders, not wasting time urging the branchwraith to get moving again. Whatever madness had caused her to stop the column, he was of no mind to listen to it. Their mission was to keep Alarielle from the grasping hands of Chaos and that was precisely what they were going to do, with or without the help of the sylvaneth.

  A copse of towering treelords stepped aside as Morbus dashed around their root-like feet. He could feel the incredible age of these creatures, could see the ancient wisdom glowing within their eyes and scratched across their knotted faces. Unlike the other sylvaneth, these primordial creatures didn’t exude a feeling of resentment, but instead evoked a sense of profound disappointment. Even Morbus felt a flicker of guilt as he passed the treelords, as though he himself were responsible for some grave tragedy.

  His resolve, his obligations to faith and duty, made Morbus crush down the sliver of doubt. The Stormcasts were the holy warriors of the God-King Sigmar. Whatever they did, wherever they fought, it was by His design and towards His purpose. The nobility of such service couldn’t suffer the pollution of doubt.

  Emerging from the shadow of the treelords, Morbus found he had reached the fore of the sylvaneth column. Before him, her legs folded beneath her arboreal body, was the Lady of Vines. In her lap, the brilliant radiance of the queen-seed cast its glow, bathing the branchwraith in a magical light. In another place, another time, the sight would have been wondrous and enchanting. With the plaguehosts snapping at the rear of the column, it instead provoked only disbelief and frustration.

  ‘Lady,’ Morbus called out. ‘Why have your people stopped? Why do you sit here when Torglug’s army is almost upon us? We must keep moving!’

  The branchwraith turned her head, fixing Morbus with her inscrutable gaze. The eerie song continued to wind from her wooden mouth, but no words disturbed the harmony. Instead she raised one of her slender arms and pointed a sharp finger at the relic hammer clenched in his hands. In the same motion, her finger dropped towards the ice.


  Morbus felt a slight quiver in the ice beneath his feet. Looking aside, he saw several of the ancient treelords leave the column and step towards the Lady of Vines. The gigantic sylvaneth turned towards Morbus. He could sense the tremendous effort they made as tendrils snaked out from their feet and tried to burrow into the ice. Strain as they might, they could do no more than bore holes to the churning sea beneath. The ice pack here was too thick for their roots to dig in and fracture.

  The tactic they’d used to escape the plaguehosts before, cracking the ice and leaving Torglug’s warriors stranded on the shore, wouldn’t work here. The pack ice was too tough for either the roots of the treelords or Morbus’ relic hammer. The Stormcast scowled within his helm. The Lady of Vines had reached the same conclusion that the Hallowed Knights had – they couldn’t outrun the enemy.

  The branchwraith pointed her clawed hand off towards the horizon. A lessening of the storm’s fury allowed Morbus to see what lay in that direction. Huge and monstrous, the craggy body of the jotunberg rose from the frozen waves like some impossible island. Their retreat across the Sea of Serpents had brought them close to where the giant had fallen. This close to the giant, he could see the mossy growths that pockmarked its body, the ugly lines of corruption that snaked through its enormity. Sections of rock sloughed away and went crashing down into the ice. The jotunberg, like so much of the Jade Kingdoms, had been poisoned by Nurgle’s contagion. At first he thought the thing must be dead, but then he saw a slight stir shudder through one of its legs, a faint motion crackle along one of its arms. Even such faint movements sent a noticeable shiver through the ice.

  Morbus held the branchwraith’s gaze. He knew her intention now and it stunned him with its sheer magnitude.

  ‘It’s impossible,’ he declared. ‘No one could command such a behemoth. You can see for yourself that it is infected with Nurgle’s rot.’

  Before he could move forwards to try and intervene, Morbus was struck from behind. The warrior pitched forwards, slamming into the unyielding ice. Before he could recover, he felt fibrous coils winding around his body, lifting him into the air. He was in the grip of one of the treelords, caught in the web of sinuous branches creeping from its beard. The mighty sylvaneth’s clawed hand closed around Morbus’ arm, trapping his hammer within a fist of wood.

  Morbus could have drawn upon the hammer’s power to shatter the treelord’s grip, but it sat ill with him to strike this ancient creature without first trying to reason with it.

  ‘Whatever she’s told you, your first duty is to protect your queen!’ he shouted at the treelord. This time there was no denying the feeling of regret that emanated from the treelord. The creature adjusted its hold on Morbus, allowing him to see what was unfolding around the Lady of Vines.

  The other treelords Morbus had passed, the most ancient of their kind to guard the vale of Athelwyrd, had formed a circle around the Lady of Vines. Their heavy, creaking voices joined in her song, forming an eerily mournful accompaniment to her magic. The queen-seed blazed even more brilliantly; the light surrounding the branchwraith became almost blinding. Even in his captor’s grip, Morbus could feel a tremor crackle through the ice and knew that the jotunberg was stirring.

  How the Lady of Vines fed such a vast conjuration Morbus soon discovered. The ancients of Athelwyrd were withering before his eyes. Strips of bark sloughed away from their trunks, branches yellowed and snapped as their wood rotted from the inside. The face of one treelord crumbled away in a mass of dust. The arm of another fell from its shoulder to explode into splinters as it struck the ice. She was drawing upon their primordial vitality to feed the colossal magic she was evoking.

  The tremors rumbling through the ice became more violent. Through the lessening flurry of snow, Morbus could see the jotunberg lurch back onto its feet. The gargantua took one quaking step and then another, forcing its way out across the frozen sea and crea­ting a shattering wave of elemental fury through the ice already packed around it. The pack ice shattered and crumbled, unleashing a flood of surging waves that reared high into the sky before splashing down in pulverising cataracts of destruction. Even as the tidal waves slammed down and splintered great swathes of ice, the frigid emanations surging from the giant’s body froze them once more, creating weird crests and valleys upon the again unmoving sea. The formations shattered and collapsed as the giant took a second quaking step and sent new tremors through the ice and fresh tides of rolling waves spraying across the sea.

  But the giant didn’t take a third step. With bits of its diseased body crashing away in an avalanche of stone and snow, the jotunberg toppled back into the Sea of Serpents, throwing up one last great sheet of water from the depths that froze around its wintry mass like an icy shroud.

  Around the Lady of Vines, the last of the ancient treelords crashed to the ground, its body little more than a hollow log. The rest of the circle had fared even worse, some reduced to only a few scattered twigs and a heap of dust. They’d sacrificed their immense vitalities, their untold centuries of existence, and all the branchwraith had been able to gain was a few shuddering steps out of the jotunberg.

  The Lady of Vines looked solemnly at the residue of the sacrificed treelords. She rose to her feet, the queen-seed’s glow clenched in one of her hands. Her eyes looked up at Morbus, then shifted away from him, gazing out across the sylvaneth column. It seemed to him that she peered through the tree-creatures, looking instead at the battle unfolding behind them.

  ‘It wasn’t enough,’ the branchwraith said. ‘The spell took too much from them, but it wasn’t enough.’ She returned the glowing queen-seed to the hollow in her chest, then raised her voice in a dirge for those who had sacrificed themselves for a desperate effort.

  No word or gesture passed between the Lady of Vines and the treelord who held him, but Morbus found himself lowered to the ice and released. He could see the jagged crack that ran through it and wondered if the jotunberg’s violence had managed even greater havoc closer to the giant.

  Morbus saw the Lady of Vines turn and begin moving onwards once more. Many of the sylvaneth followed after her, but Morbus noted that many more were turning and marching in the other direction. Her magic had accomplished less than she’d hoped. The Lady of Vines was leaving some of her followers behind to help the Hallowed Knights fend off Torglug’s legion.

  The Lord-Relictor hurried to reach his warriors. If the Lady of Vines was moving on, then some of the Hallowed Knights had to accompany her. To do less would be to forsake their duty.

  Chapter six

  To struggle against Chaos is to embrace pain. It is the misery of hope, the mockery of fading dreams and the anguish of vanquished tomorrows. Defying the Ruinous Powers is but hollow vanity. What triumph can there be, opposing the Dark Gods? Win one battle or a hundred, the war will end the same way. The enemy grows stronger while the valour of men withers and fades.

  In the stinking darkness, in the black pit of despair, the captive looked up. Faint and fragile, a tiny light beckoned, offering comfort and solace. Trembling hands, weak from abuse and neglect, reached up from the filth, desperate to embrace whatever respite the light might give him. To his starving soul, even the smallest scrap of compassion would be a feast.

  Ugly, brutish shapes loomed above him, blotting out the feeble light. The rank stench of their evil wafted down upon him, the slime of their festering sores dripped onto his body. In his ears their hacking laughter roared. It was a laughter that transcended mere flesh and mortality. It was the jeering viciousness of monstrous gods as they snuffed out the dying embers of resistance.

  Torglug’s boots crunched across the bloodied snow. The warlord had stood in silence while Slaugoth Maggotfang cut open the sacrifice. There had been a distant, detached quality in his three eyes, as though he already gazed upon some unseen vista without the benefit of the sorcerer’s magic. Even the closest of his retainers, the fearsome putrid blightkings, knew bet
ter than to intrude upon their master’s reverie.

  ‘The spleen is spotted with the black crab and its offspring,’ Slaugoth giggled, lifting the organ from the butchered body. ‘The stomach is pitted with ulcers and I have found seven stones in the kidneys. Most auspicious, Abominable Torglug.’ The sorcerer raked his dagger across the exposed belly, pulling a parasitic worm from the ruptured flesh. He held it before his face, examining the spots along its slimy, mottled skin. Then he popped it into his mouth and swallowed it in a single greedy gulp.

  Torglug was unmoved by the revolting spectacle of Slaugoth’s auguries. There was nothing the sorcerer could do that might match the horror of simply knowing a being like Guthrax Kingeater was nearby. The Great Unclean One had offered its own prophecies, devouring seven tribesmen and then extruding their still screaming skulls from its gargantuan gut. The daemon claimed the shrieks of its dissolving victims foretold the path before Torglug, offering a confused medley of promises and warnings. Mortal or daemon, prescience, it seemed, was an arcane art riddled with evasiveness and ambiguity.

  ‘Enough,’ Torglug coughed, clapping his hand against the blackened edge of his axe. Flecks of rust and clotted gore crumbled away at his touch, sizzling as they struck the snow. ‘You are weaving victory and failure in every utterance that is slipping from your tongue. I am seeking answers, not looking for more questions.’ A baleful malignance shone in the warlord’s eyes as he turned his horned head towards the storm-swept horizon.