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  The answer certainly revolved around Makvar and his storm-knights, but Neferata couldn’t be certain how. For her, Makvar and his warriors represented power and independence, a way to be free from Nagash’s dominion. They were a force strong enough to oppose the hordes of Chaos and perhaps even defy the malice of Nagash himself – if only she could harness them properly. Her overtures towards Makvar hadn’t been successful and she was troubled by the vanishing of Kismet. Was her handmaiden’s disappearance a reproof of her efforts to insinuate herself into the confidence of the Stormcasts? She had seen for herself how devoted Makvar was to cementing this alliance between Azyr and Shyish. At the same time, she prided herself on ferreting out the measure of the men she sought to catch in her web. Makvar’s sense of honour made it doubtful he had any penchant for intrigue of his own.

  That left Neferata with the frightening possibility that Nagash himself had intercepted her messenger. Perhaps Makvar had never even received the warning about Arkhan. Certainly, if he had, it hadn’t been enough to keep him from marching to Mephitt.

  The crash of battle rumbling from behind the fog intensified. Neferata could see flashes of blue light crackling behind the grey veil. War cries, too proud and righteous to bubble up from the diseased throats of Nurgle’s slaves, rang out. Makvar had sent his knights into battle. The Anvils of the Heldenhammer were on the attack, charging to rescue Arkhan’s beleaguered forces.

  Neferata turned towards Harkdron. She tried to tell her consort to spur his knights into the battle, to fall upon the flank of the Chaos horde. The command faltered on her tongue, crushed into silence by a will far greater than her own.

  Nagash would tell her when it was time to help the Stormcasts. Until then, she would keep her forces back and stay hidden within the fog.

  Until Nagash decided otherwise, Makvar was on his own.

  ‘For Sigmar!’ The battle cry rose from the throats of every Stormcast as they rushed out from the veil of mist, rolling like thunder across the brooding desolation of Mephitt.

  Once again mounted on the back of his dracoth, Makvar led the charge of his warriors through the sunken avenues and out into the vast clearing Huld had described. The translucent ectoplasm had a viscous quality about it, sloshing around the feet of the Stormcasts like mud but at the same time proving far firmer than the bog they had crossed to reach the ghost city. He noted at once that it was more than physical laws that governed the substance. Despite Gojin’s immense weight, the reptile sank no deeper into the translucent sludge than the Liberators around him. It was as though the spectral muck refused to draw an animate body more than a few inches into itself.

  The fog soon thinned and Makvar had an unobstructed view of the clearing. It was like a great plaza, bordered at one end by the sunken mountain and on the other sides by the ruinous sprawl of the city. A thick veil clung to the far side of the clearing, concealing the forces Makvar expected Nagash to bring against the Chaos horde. The end opposite the mountain had no such misty shroud clinging to it, but instead was a maze of walls and rooftops. Ahead of these ruins, squat and colossal, was the horned daemon Huld had seen. Around the diseased abomination, a scummy host of mortals and daemons gathered, abasing themselves before its frog-like feet before rushing away to give combat to their foe.

  True to Huld’s dire prediction, that foe was swiftly fading. The great legions of bone warriors, the troops of malignant cavalry, the swarms of vengeful spirits – these had been battered and shattered by an adversary as persistent as they were obscene. The broken shells of skeletons lay strewn about the plaza, slowly being sucked into the ectoplasmic mire as the sludge drew the inert material down into its depths. The fleshless giants were gone, as were the catapults and chariots. Everywhere, the hordes of Chaos surged and swelled, engorged in their victories and inflamed by the noxious presence of the Great Unclean One. They poured into the undead ranks with an almost fearless ferocity. Beyond the dwindling line of skeletons, Makvar could see the figure of Arkhan on his gruesome steed. It wouldn’t be so very long before the enemy was climbing up the bone-littered slopes to reach the Mortarch.

  ‘For Sigmar!’ Makvar cried out. The foremost of his knights had already reached the flank of the Chaos horde. They struck down dozens of skin-clad marauders and goat-headed beastmen, slaughtering them with hammer and sword. The sparking flashes from their attack shone with magnified brilliance, an aspect of the arcane battlefield that caught Makvar by surprise and which drew the attention of the Nurglesque warriors. Those not embattled by the undead turned to address the assault on their flank. Howling their diseased fury, the brutish throng came rushing at the black-armoured Stormcasts.

  Makvar drew back on Gojin’s reins. The dracoth spat a gout of lightning skyward. It was the signal to the Judicators massed behind the advancing Liberators and Paladins. From the archer formations, a withering volley of lightning came hurtling down into the charging brayherds and marauder tribes. Chaos warriors crumpled as smoke steamed from their scorched mail, and lesser daemons burst in greasy gouts of ichor. From above, the winged Prosecutors swooped down, hurling their stormcall javelins into knots of cavalry and the slithering foulness of Chaos spawn. A sheet of searing lightning hurtled into a swarm of nurglings, exploding the diseased mass before it could come flooding into the ranks of Liberators.

  A note from Brannok’s battle-horn saw the Liberators fall back and close their line as the pulverising wrath of his clarion cracked one of the monoliths and sent its debris slamming down upon the Nurglesque warriors. Each Liberator braced his shield and secured his place in the new formation. The disorganised mobs of gors and barbarians crashed ineffectually against the shield wall, swiftly repulsed by blazing swords and crackling hammers. The Stormcasts pushed them back, taking no pride in repelling these simple foes. The real test of their stamina would come when the heavier troops came against them, when daemons and sorcerers turned their eldritch attentions upon the Anvils.

  Makvar looked beyond the oncoming enemy, watching the far side of the plaza. Before the hordes of Chaos could turn the full strength of their diseased malice against them, he hoped that Nagash would give them something else to worry about.

  A tremor rippled through the translucent ground, but this time it wasn’t provoked by Brannok’s battle-horn. Makvar felt his gaze drawn towards the end of the clearing. The horned daemon was moving, waddling across the carcasses of its own minions as it moved towards the fray. Content to sit back and watch before, now the Great Unclean One had taken it into mind to play a more direct role in the fighting.

  With an obscene grin on its monstrous face and a malicious gleam in its cyclopean eye, the daemon was moving towards the Stormcasts.

  Chapter Nine

  From the shadows, the Great Necromancer watched as Makvar’s warriors met the rancid forces of Chaos. He observed the Stormcasts with cold deliberation, scrutinising their actions as he would any novel specimen he found worthy of study. The conditions were at variance with what he had intended to arrange, but there were things to be learned from this unexpected conflict.

  Nagash was already aware of the steely resolve and nigh-unshakable courage that burned within the spirit of each Stormcast. It was a phenomenon that was, in many ways, an antithetical process to the black art of necromancy. Even amongst the highest forms of the undead, their revivification involved a diminishment of the soul, the peeling away of layers of identity until the spirit was reduced to a blackened core. Such reduction was needful, stripping away the residue of mortal attraction and confusion that would pollute the resurrection process. Only by breaking that connection to the mortal plane, breaking the link between life and undeath, could a new sense of purpose be instilled into the undead. Without that diminishment, there were few souls with the will to endure, capable of embracing eternity without a destructive yearning for the things lost with their mortal existence. Those undead with the strongest attachments to their prior existence would bec
ome crazed, hateful things, either denying the reality of their altered state or mindlessly lashing out at whatever recalled that condition to them.

  Sigmar had found some different path to redeeming the spirits of his warriors. The process employed by the God-King was such that his Stormcasts weren’t reduced by their resurrection, but instead were magnified by it. Nagash appreciated the amount of effort and power it took to craft undead of strength and versatility near to what he had seen the Stormcasts exhibit. The thought that Sigmar could draw upon such a magnitude of arcane energy was something the Lord of Death found both disturbing and enticing. It made the armies of Azyr more formidable than he had imagined, but it also meant there now existed a power strong enough to drive back the spread of Chaos.

  A power that could serve Nagash as well as Sigmar.

  The burn of celestial light lanced down into the Chaos horde. Nagash’s might was such that he drew no discomfort from the purity of the blaze, but he could sense the painful reaction it provoked from Neferata’s vampires. Nearer to that discharge of celestial energy, the lesser undead that formed the basis of his legions would find the arcane bonds that invigorated them coming apart, breaking the cohesion of the spells that endowed them with animation. It gave the Lord of Death pause to consider how his creations could be dismantled by this oppositional force. It made him wonder if there might be a similar force that could break the magic which had reforged each Stormcast from a fragile mortal spirit into a mighty warrior of the God-King.

  The Chaos horde, so near to overwhelming Arkhan’s battered regiments, was now turning the brunt of its fury against Makvar’s knights. Bleating brayherds trampled their own dead as they charged through the volley loosed upon them by Stormcast bows, rabid froth bubbling from their jaws as they snapped and slavered against sigmarite shields. Howling barbarians flung aside the smouldering bodies of their own tribesmen as they endured the divine storm set upon them by Kreimnar’s relic-weapon, brutal axes and flails crashing against the unyielding formations of Makvar’s knights. Despite the distance that separated them, Nagash could hear the Lord-Celestant calling out to his warriors, rallying them against the teeming masses of their foes. Lightning crackled from the scaly jaws of his steed, burning marauder horsemen from their saddles and reducing their grisly standards to smoke and ash.

  Nagash watched as the first packs of daemons came boiling out from the Chaos tide to assault the shield wall of Makvar’s knights. How often he had watched mortal formations crumple before such an attack, their very flesh recoiling from the presence of creatures shaped from the raw stuff of Chaos. The malign aura of a daemon could even disrupt the crudest forms of undead, reducing their motivation to such a degree that they became easy prey for raking claws and slavering fangs. Yet the Stormcasts exhibited no change in their determination. They endured the rush of daemons with the same resolve with which they had opposed the advance of their mortal foes. Just as they had withstood the lascivious malignance of Slaanesh’s minions in the rubble of Nulahmia, so they found no terror in the diseased claws of Nurgle’s obscene progeny.

  Courage and determination could accomplish only so much. Here and there, one of the Anvils fell before the enemy, slain by the blade of a daemon or incinerated by the bilious magic of a Nurglesque sorcerer. From each vanquished knight there blazed forth a flare of celestial light that streaked up into the darkened sky before vanishing into the aether. Nagash could feel the spirit nestled within each flare, could sense its trajectory as it pierced the veils of Shyish to return to Azyr.

  The Great Necromancer reached out with his mind to those of his Mortarchs. His acolyte Arkhan responded immediately to the call of his master. Without hesitation, he acted. The undead legions around Mount Khaerops rallied for a renewed offensive. Necromantic energies crackled about their fleshless limbs, pouring redoubled ferocity into their desiccated frames. The deathly host surged forwards, smashing and battering their way through the brutish tribes that had only the instant before threatened to overwhelm their position. Arkhan remained upon the slopes of the mountain, dropping from the back of his steed and crouching upon the corpse-strewn ground.

  Nagash’s commands extended to Neferata and her warriors. On his order, she spurred her vampiric knights into an assault against the enemy horde. The blood knights would act as the tip of the spear, plunging deep into the corrupt mass of Chaos. After them trooped regiments of grave guard and deadwalkers, flights of morghasts and covens of deathmages. The ghostly fog would magnify the scope of Neferata’s attack, inflicting upon the invaders the illusion of a far greater threat. Already he could see the waddling bulk of the Great Unclean One turning away from the Stormcasts, shifting his attention from Makvar’s knights to this new undead attack.

  The pressure against the Anvils lessened as the minions of Chaos found their focus shifting. Nagash was pleased by the rapidity with which his design unfolded. He had seen how the Stormcasts acquitted themselves against the creatures of Nurgle, there was no reason to bleed their strength further by prolonging such an engagement. Not when there were far more important observations to be made.

  Exerting his will once more, Nagash seized control over a swathe of Arkhan’s legion. At his command, the bone warriors flung themselves forwards in a reckless advance against a warband of hulking Chaos champions. The undead assault was swiftly broken, their shattered bones sinking into the spectral sludge. A bubbling cry rose from the savage victors, a shout of diseased jubilation. Vanquishing these last skeletal foes brought the Chaos warriors an unexpected boon. They had created a break in Arkhan’s lines, exposing a gap that left them with a clear path right to the slopes of Mount Khaerops. It was an opportunity the murderous invaders were quick to seize.

  From above the clearing, Huld’s shout of alarm rang down to the other Stormcasts below, alerting Makvar to the peril that threatened Arkhan.

  Now the real test Nagash had planned for the Anvils would begin.

  Makvar brought his sword crunching down into the shoulder of a festering plaguebearer, a stream of putrid liquid and maggots bubbling up from the wound. Before he could strike again, Gojin’s claw came raking across the creature’s torso, ripping its organs and snapping its bones. The mangled daemon was smashed beneath the dracoth’s feet, its remains swiftly evaporating into a greasy smoke. The reptile threw his head back in a bellow of anger, offended by the unnatural dissolution of his prey.

  Around the Lord-Celestant, the Anvils of the Heldenhammer slowly pushed their way through the morass of Chaos creatures. Blocks of Liberators sought to channel the monsters and marauders into the waiting axes, hammers and glaives of the Paladin retinues. Judicators armed with vicious boltstorm crossbows prowled behind the shield wall, ready to loose a deadly barrage the instant any hole appeared in the defences. More Judicators sent a steady wave of crackling arrows arcing down into the attacking barbarians, leaving their scorched bodies strewn along the course of the Stormcasts’ advance.

  Overhead, Huld and the Prosecutors kept a wary vigilance, monitoring the ebb and flow of battle and warning Makvar the instant they spotted any shift among the Chaos forces. He knew the winged knights well enough to appreciate the frustration such restraint provoked, but the Lord-Celestant needed to conserve them until the last moment. Until it was too late for the foe to react and redeploy their warriors.

  Grateful as he was that Nagash’s army had emerged from the fog to fall upon the Chaos horde, Makvar felt a sense of frustration as well. The undead who attended Neferata and the Great Necromancer had inflicted many casualties and an enormous amount of confusion with their sudden charge. Many of the enemy tribes and herds moving to engage the Anvils had withdrawn to confront this new threat to their rear – including the gigantic daemon that appeared to be commanding the diseased throng. It was only the lessening of pressure against his own lines that allowed Makvar any freedom of movement.

  He had need of such liberty, and it was this that discomfited M
akvar. The diminished regiments defending Arkhan had rallied and attempted to mount an assault upon the Chaos horde they simply lacked the strength to achieve. Whether they sallied forth to support Nagash or to aid the Anvils was of small consequence now. The damage had been done – the minions of Nurgle had ripped a hole in the undead ranks, enabling them to penetrate the perimeter the skeletons had been maintaining. A rancid mob of Chaos warriors now rushed unimpeded towards the rise where the Mortarch of Sacrament stood.

  Even if they annihilated the whole of the Chaos horde it would bring no victory to the Stormcasts if they lost Arkhan. Nagash insisted his Mortarchs were essential to rebuilding the strength of his armies. How much truth there was in his claim made no difference. Finding Arkhan was one of the conditions Nagash had set before Makvar. If the Anvils failed now it would threaten the alliance they had been sent to broker.

  ‘Onwards!’ Makvar cried out to his knights. ‘For Sigmar and for glory!’ He spurred Gojin forwards, crushing another plaguebringer beneath the reptile’s immense bulk. His sword flashed out in a vicious arc, raking the face of a snarling daemon and sending the furry arm of a beastman flying into the air. More foes swarmed towards him to replace the slain and wounded, the stink of their oozing sores and corrupt breath blotting out even the musky smell of the dracoth he rode.

  Press ahead. That was the tactic the situation demanded of Makvar and his command. If they couldn’t fight their way through the Chaos host, if they failed to reach Arkhan before the enemy, then nothing else would matter. A flash of light rose off to his right, a sombre reminder to him of the price such haste demanded. When the fighting was finished, he would learn the names of those Stormcasts who had fallen. For now, it was enough to know they were sustaining losses and that with each knight overwhelmed by the foe, the task ahead of them became that much harder.

  The invigorating glow of Lord-Castellant Vogun’s lantern shone upon Makvar. He could feel the healing energies rushing through him, fending off the contaminated filth that dripped from his blade and spattered his armour. Gojin uttered an exultant hiss as the gashes in his scaly hide began to close and heal. Wails of pain rippled from the fanged maws of the plaguebringers, and they threw up their scrawny arms to cover their monstrous eyes from the celestial light. The resemblance to the aversion exhibited by their undead allies wasn’t lost on Makvar, and did little to comfort the dark turn his thoughts had taken.