WH-Warhammer Online-Age of Reckoning 03(R)-Forged by Chaos Read online

Freya bit her lip as she pouted at the cowardly thought. Her father was waiting for his dinner, depending on her to bring it to him. Would a shield maiden of the sagas betray her trust simply because she heard a noise in the woods that frightened her?

  With a last wary look around, Freya resumed her journey, a quicker pace in her step than before. Now she could hear the faint rustlings and stirrings more frequently, sometimes the knock of something tapping against the frozen trunk of a tree. She stopped, almost tripping over at her own momentum and spun about, trying to catch even the most fleeting glimpse of the thing she was certain was now stalking her. Always her efforts to catch it were thwarted, the sounds always coming from someplace just out of sight, their source vanishing before she could turn. Cold horror gnawed at Freya now, her imagination now thinking of wights and ghosts rather than beasts and trolls.

  Now the girl was dashing through the pines, no longer daring to linger over each sound, terrified that she might see what was making them. Familiar landmarks rose from the snow: a lightning-blackened tree, a grey boulder that looked like a scowling dwarf digging out of the snow. The watchtower was close. A hundred yards, then fifty. The spectral noises came more rapidly now, filling the silence between each pulse of her pounding heart. Freya begged the Wolfhound for some of his fierce courage, the Serpent for some of its sinuous speed and the Raven for the craft to escape whatever was chasing her.

  Perhaps Freya’s grim gods did hear her pleas. Ahead she could see the timber struts that supported the tower, then through the trees she could see the tower itself, its thatch roof groaning beneath its shroud of snow. The girl gave a cry, squealing for her father like a frightened lamb. She fairly dove for the rough ladder that rose amid the nest of support timbers to open in the tower’s trapdoor.

  Freya pulled back her hand in shock, finding it covered in warm, wet crimson. Her terrified eyes stared at the rungs of the ladder and the blood that continued to drip down them in lethargic streamers. She looked with new horror at the tower, then back at the sinister forest around her. Fear finally decided her. Despite the blood on the ladder, the tower offered the only refuge from the thing in the forest. Her father would protect her. Venyar would not allow anything to get her.

  Shivering, Freya climbed into the tower, her tiny body struggling to throw back the ironbound trap. The room she lifted herself into was dark, filled with shadow, the only light coming in from the long window staring out to sea. She was struck by the sinister glimmer of the sea, the play of starlight upon the crashing waves. Faintly, through the fog, she could make out a ship anchored in the fjord. It was not like the longships of Angvold, though. It was a lean, rakish thing with sharp, cruel sails and evil, wicked angles to its hull. It looked to Freya more like some barbed dagger floating on the water than a vessel. Her breath caught in her throat and she dropped the basket of provisions as she realised what it must be. The skalds sometimes related legends, old fables about the terrible elf-folk of the sea, fiends with the souls of daemons and hearts of pitiless malice. It was better, the skalds said, for a man to cut his own throat and curse the gods than fall alive into the hands of the elves.

  The trembling girl backed away from the window, recoiling from sight of the sinister ship. She felt something sticky and cloying tug at her shoes, then felt something push against her back. Freya spun around and screamed as her eyes discerned the shape that loomed over her from the shadows.

  It had been Venyar, once. Now it was a mass of butchered meat, almost unrecognizable as human. Only her father’s face resembled what it once had been; though horribly mutilated, Freya could not mistake him. The old grey scars, the marks of a troll’s claws from the warrior’s youth stood livid upon the leathery skin of his face. Painstakingly and with tortuous patience, each scar had been cut open anew, the old grey tissue saturated in fresh blood.

  Freya shrieked again as the dead thing lurched at her, rolling off as she pushed at it to crash leadenly on the floor. Evil, gash-like letters had been carved into her father’s bared back, some so fresh that blood was still rising to fill the wounds.

  A footfall tore the girl’s eyes from her father. A slender shape detached itself from the darkness, resolving before Freya’s gaze into a lean figure of exquisite beauty, a faerie vision of perfection of limb and carriage. Milky white skin, like polished alabaster, shone from the shadows, broken only by the sharp, bladed blackness of armoured shoulder guards and high leather boots studded with silvery spikes of steel. The curve of the apparition’s legs rose to a chain belt from which clung a brief loin-clout of translucent gossamer threaded with little strings of ruby and gold. The trim body was bare except for the compact curves of a metal bustier that trapped the swell of firm breasts beneath their clawed, blade-like steel fingers. The face of the figure was surrounded by a wild mass of black hair bound by a sort of jewelled crown or circlet, its rubies seeming to twinkle beneath the dark tresses like hungry eyes. The face itself was one of awful beauty, of such perfection of symmetry and aesthetics that it made the soul quiver with shame, desire and repulsion.

  There was a chilling smile on the woman’s face, a smile of sardonic amusement and perverse appetite. Slowly, with a delicate grace Freya knew no human could match, the woman lifted a hand towards her face. Blood dripped from the fang-like dagger she held in her slender, gloved fingers, blood that Freya knew belonged to her father. A pink tongue darted from between the woman’s pursed lips, rolling along the bloodied steel, wiping it clean with languorous indulgence. The woman’s dark eyes closed as an expression of almost ecstatic pleasure throbbed through her features. Freya could only watch in mesmerised fascination as the sinister creature repeated her perverse display with a second dagger held in her other hand.

  When the last drop had been licked clean, the witch elf opened her eyes and fixed her gaze upon the little girl, as though seeing Freya for the first time. A cruel, hungry smile pulled at her mouth. She took a step towards Freya, leaning down. The thorny daggers in the elf’s hands gleamed in the darkness. Freya felt her heart hammering against her chest, threatening to burst with the enormity of her fear, but still she could not force her eyes away from the sinister gaze of the elf.

  The witch elf leaned in close, Freya could smell the exotic powders and perfumes that had been rubbed into the elf’s pallid skin, could feel the reek of her father’s blood in her nose. The black stain of the elf’s lips brushed against the girl’s ear.

  ‘Boo!’ the whispered word shuddered through Freya’s senses.

  The spell of paralysed fright was broken. The girl shrieked, darting to the trap, half jumping half falling to the ground below. As she ran back into the forest, a light melodious hiss pursued her, the harsh, musical laughter of her father’s red-handed murderess.

  Fire raged through Angvold, tendrils of flame leaping high into the darkened sky, thick black smoke boiling through the wide lanes of the village. Shouting Norscans were everywhere, scrambling from homes, struggling to release livestock from endangered pens and stables. Amid the confusion, Jarl Biaerghsven roared commands even as his grandchildren swarmed around him, fastening the straps and catches of his armour. The jarl took his broadaxe from the crippled clutch of his youngest son, maimed during a shipwreck on the Sea of Claws. The chieftain smiled beneath his bushy black beard when he saw the mix of pride and envy in his son’s eye.

  ‘Put down those fires!’ Biaerghsven growled, gesturing with his axe at a knot of thralls who had just come stumbling from one burning home. The slaves nodded hastily, scrambling to join the bondsmen and freeholders already shovelling snow onto the burning roof and wall.

  Biaerghsven scowled at the sight. The fires were no natural thing, they had not leapt from any ill-tended hearth. It was no normal flame that clawed so readily and so greedily at half-frozen timber. Hrokr, Angvold’s seer, would have blamed the fires on the wrath of Tchar or the curse of a witch. Biaerghsven was more pragmatic. Gods and hags did not leave faint footprints in the snow when they worked their magic. />
  Distinct beside a burning storehouse, the snow unmarred by fire fighters, Biaerghsven could see the narrow marks of slender boots. They were dainty marks, those that might have been left by a woman or a boy. The jarl’s scowl grew. It would be like the honourless Aeslings to send children to work their mischief! They had little stomach for a proper fight, more like Kurgans in their ways than proper Norscans.

  Out of the corner of his eye, the jarl saw a black-cloaked figure dart between two buildings. Suddenly, a fire leapt from the wall of the nearest home. Biaerghsven howled in rage as he spotted the saboteur, his fury drawing the armoured bulks of his huscarls to him. The chieftain gestured angrily at the fire, then at a second flame which had started on the other side of the village.

  ‘Sneaking scum!’ the jarl raged. ‘Burn my village, will they. After them! I’ll stretch their skins to make tents for those they’ve ruined this day!’

  Gudhsaerk, the captain of the huscarls, lifted his gold-trimmed horn to his lips and blew a trumpeting note that rose above the crackle of flames and the shouts of frightened children. At his call, warriors detached themselves from the little knots of fire fighters, some dodging back into burning dwellings to fetch swords and axes. Soon a muster of powerful, soot-faced men was forming around Biaerghsven’s huscarls, racing after the chieftain as he pursued the fire starters.

  The cloaked figures had kept to the shadows, using stealth to conceal their activities, but now they broke from cover, converging upon the lane and fleeing from the village. The sight of their terror emboldened the wrathful Norscans and they bounded after the slight, womanish shapes with all the fierce passion of hunting hounds. One of the cloaked shapes stumbled and fell, cursing its comrades as they left him behind in a shrill, lilting voice. The other fugitives turned and mocked their comrade, their cruel contempt impressing Biaerghsven even through the strange, musical flavour of their weird language.

  The fallen man tried to rise and Biaerghsven could see now why he had slipped. An arrow or dart was lodged in his knee, jutting from it like an accusing finger. More prominently, the jarl could see the man’s face, finding that it belonged to no man at all. The skin was too fair, too pallid, too fine, the bone structure too precise and sharp, the features too perfect for anything human. There was an eerie, alien quality, a terrible sense of age and eternity, of horrible malice and malignance in that face. Biaerghsven recalled stories told him about the awful elf-folk across the seas and their loathsome habits. It made him feel a burst of deeper satisfaction when he lifted his axe and brought it chopping down, cleaving through the elf’s upraised swordarm and into the hateful visage it had tried to defend.

  The axe caught in the elf’s skull, forcing Biaerghsven to linger over the body so that he might free it. A few of his huscarls stayed behind with him, but the rest continued their frenzied pursuit of the elven shades. Because he had fallen behind, the jarl had a perfect view of what happened next. The elves allowed the Norscans to nearly close with them, then, with a burst of speed and agility that Biaerghsven found difficult to follow, they pulled ahead. It came to the jarl that the creatures had just been playing with his warriors, allowing them to get only so close before tiring of the game. A terrible presentiment gripped the jarl as he saw the snow banks towards which the elves were now fleeing. He turned to order Gudhsaerk to sound the recall, but it was already too late.

  From behind the snow banks rose a line of elves, but these wore blackened suits of armour and high, narrow helms. In their hands were bulky contraptions of steel. Sickness bubbled in Biaerghsven’s throat as he recognised the similarity of the devices to the crossbows employed by guards on Tilean merchantmen. Some of his warriors must have recognised them too, for they cried out warning to their comrades and threw themselves flat. The warning was far too late. In a single volley, the elves loosed their bolts, sending steel shafts skewering into the bodies of the Norscans. The burly warriors toppled into the snow, each man spitted by shafts in belly, breast and knee. None of the men were killed outright, but lay upon the snow in screaming, bleeding piles.

  The survivors of the volley and those who had thrown themselves flat now rose and charged the line. The veterans among them knew it took precious time to reload a crossbow, time in which a purposeful warrior could strike the head from the defenceless archer.

  The elves stood silent and still, making no move to fit shafts to their weapons or crank back the string. They allowed the Norscans to close the distance to them, then lifted their weapons once more. Some fiendish invention enabled the crossbows to loose another volley, a repeating mechanism strange and horrible. Full into the very faces of the warriors the bolts flew, smashing through bone and flesh with terrible force. The elves did not play further games with their foes, but targeted the backs of the routed survivors of the second volley, loosing again and again with their awful crossbows.

  Now, from behind the snow banks rose a third company of elves, armoured like the crossbowmen but with great scaly cloaks draped over their shoulders. They moved with the rolling prance of seamen as they charged down from their position behind the line of crossbows and began to butcher the men crippled in the volley. Biaerghsven could liken their malicious glee in the activity only to the petty cruelty of a child tormenting a wounded animal. He knew, from the way the scale-backed elves laughed, that it was with the same capricious disregard that they fell upon their prey.

  Outrage swelled within Biaerghsven’s heart, his loathing for these dancing fiends overwhelming his pride. ‘We must abandon Angvold. Send messengers to the other villages, rouse the entire tribe, yes even send to the Sarls and Aeslings! We’ll drive these devils back into the sea and send their corpses to rot in the chains of Mermedus. Sound the retreat, Gudhsaerk!’

  But as the jarl turned to face the captain, he saw the huscarl’s whitening face staring incredulously at the spurting stump of his right hand. In the snow at his feet, still gripping the horn, was the huscarl’s severed hand. Even as Gudhsaerk opened his mouth to cry out, there was a flash of metal and a thin slit appeared across his throat. Gudhsaerk’s eyes became glassy and his head slid forwards, dangling obscenely from a nearly severed neck. The dying Norscan slumped to his knees, then crashed face-first into the snow.

  Behind Gudhsaerk, standing in the same place she had been when she slit the man’s throat, was a vision of impossible, inhuman beauty and savagery, a sinuous, supple shape of smooth, curved limbs, nude except for the scantiest suggestion of raiment and armour. The witch elf smiled at Biaerghsven, Gudhsaerk’s blood still dripping from her long-bladed daggers.

  ‘Animal, I am named Beblieth,’ she told Biaerghsven, her voice giving the Baersonling language a curious, melodious menace. ‘I am going to cut your heart from your breast and present it to my lord Khaine. You may beg for mercy now.’

  Prince Inhin Bonebat watched the Norscan village burn, wrinkling his patrician nose at the odour of dung and animal flesh borne by the hot breeze. He clenched his gloved hands together, his fingers stroking the gemstones set into each knuckle. It was a habit that had become familiar to the crew and passengers of the Bloodshark, a sign that the prince was irritated. Things usually died when Inhin was irritated, often in interesting and outlandish ways.

  The elf turned away from the sight, a look of utter boredom on his pale features. His gloved hands slipped from each other to caress the thorny hilts of the swords thrust beneath the sash of purple thread that circled the noble’s waist above his suit of armoured plate. Inhin fixed his disapproving gaze on the grim features of Abhar Thornstrike, captain of the Bloodshark. The elf corsair was taller than the prince, the body beneath the heavy cloak of sea-dragon scales was thick and muscular, almost freakishly so for a race as lithe as the druchii. Even so, it was the corsair who looked away in deference.

  ‘The beasts might have put up a bit of a fight,’ Inhin observed with all the emotion of a yawn behind his tone. ‘After two months at sea, this sorry spectacle is hardly enough to break the tedium.’
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  ‘They did kill two of my crew,’ Abhar replied, his voice subservient in a way it had never been while the Bloodshark was at sea. ‘And one of your shades fell to them.’

  ‘The shade was a spy and attended to as such,’ Inhin said. ‘As for your crew, a few bumbling ship-rats being set upon by barbarians playing dead is hardly what I’d call entertainment. You bore me, Abhar. I think you should go now.’ The prince gave a dismissive wave of his hand.

  A flash of stung pride flickered in the captain’s eyes, but he quickly recovered, bowing and excusing himself from the noble’s presence.

  Inhin watched him skulk off. Abhar would spend the next few hours working out his frustrations torturing whatever prisoners his corsairs had taken. The filthy pirate was singularly unimaginative. Fortunately his usefulness to Inhin was at an end.

  ‘Even Abhar is not such a fool as to think you made the journey from Naggaroth simply for what sport these hairy animals can provide.’

  Inhin turned, regarding the person who spoke to him. Pyra Nightblade was a striking sight in her purple gown and jewelled girdle. The hem of her dress was slit up the sides, nearly to the hip, exposing every luxurious curve of her slender legs; her bodice was parted almost to her navel, displaying the plump swell of her breasts and the shadowed valley of her cleavage. A tall headdress, tipped with blade-like rays of silver rose from the rich thick tresses of her hair. Her face was beautiful even by the jaded tastes of her people, the sort of face that had sent men to the executioners and their families to the slavepens. Prince Inhin knew, because he had sent many of them there himself.

  Pyra was a sorceress, a creation of the Convents where the arcane arts of dark magic were taught to the chosen daughters of Naggaroth’s elite. They were wedded to the Witch King himself, Malekith, lord and master of the druchii. To violate the vows of a sorceress was a crime punishable by the most excruciating death; even the murderous rites of the witch elves were desirable by comparison. For a creature like Pyra, however, Inhin knew the danger was worth it. A lascivious smile graced his face as his eyes drank in her scantily clad beauty. Malekith would not be master of Naggaroth forever, Lord Uthorin was going to see to that. Then Inhin would be free to openly flaunt his possession of Pyra and her charms.