Wardens of the Everqueen Read online

  Tallon bounded out into the field, growling. The gryph-hound’s feathers ruffled in agitation as he whipped his head from side to side. Grymn could tell that the creature’s keen senses had perceived some sort of danger, a threat far more physical than that of the Cascading Path. While the column of sylvaneth and the Stormcasts flanking their march emerged from the enchanted crack in reality, Grymn stood beside Tallon and tried to make out what had so alarmed the beast.

  Faintly at first, then more clearly, Grymn picked out the tolling of rusted bells and the howls of brutish men. The fields hadn’t merely felt the touch of the invaders’ malign presence – there were forces of Nurgle here already, waiting for them somewhere across the expanse of deathblooms. Whether they were actively searching for the Everqueen or simply marauding across the countryside, they posed a threat to the sylvaneth exodus.

  Grymn signalled to the officers of the Hallowed Knights to join him. He looked towards the sylvaneth, debating for a moment whether he should make an effort to confer with their queen. Alarielle’s palanquin was surrounded by a wargrove of ancient treelords, the huge wooden creatures forming a palisade all around Alarielle’s carriage. Behind this entourage of towering protectors, the Radiant Queen’s glowing aura shone like a lonely candle locked in a distant fortress. There was something both tragic and forbidding about seeing the goddess withdrawn from the rest of her people.

  ‘It looks as though the sylvaneth consider these lands as perilous as those we’ve left behind,’ Lord-Relictor Morbus commented as he followed Grymn’s gaze.

  ‘They are wise to be wary,’ Prosecutor-Prime Tegrus said. ‘The Jade Kingdoms are overwhelmed by the hordes of Chaos. If you had gazed upon these lands from above as I have, you would appreciate better the magnitude of the destruction. We may have left Torglug the Despised and his plaguehosts behind us in Athelwyrd, but there are other legions abroad in Ghyran.’

  ‘Possibly nearer than any of us would like them to be,’ Grymn said, pointing down to Tallon. The other Stormcasts knew the gryph-hound well enough to know it never snarled at shadows. An enemy was out there. How close and how numerous, it was beyond the creature’s ability to convey. ‘Tegrus, I need your eyes again,’ Grymn said. ‘Send your Prosecutors to scout the terrain. Learn where and who our foes are but don’t engage them. Simply return to me and report what you’ve seen.’

  Tegrus bowed his armoured head and saluted the Lord-Castellant. ‘After being restricted to the earth while on the Cascading Path, there isn’t a warrior among my Prosecutors who won’t be thrilled at the chance to take wing again. If we spy so much as a sickly spinejackal, you will know of it, commander.’ Turning on his heel, Tegrus hurried towards the column to gather the Prosecutor retinues to him.

  Grymn faced Knight-Vexillor Angstun, presenting him with his own set of orders. ‘The strength of the sylvaneth lies more in endurance than speed. They can march longer than we can, but not faster. If there is fighting to be done, the Hallowed Knights must be ready to react with a swiftness to take advantage of that fact. I want the Liberator retinues gathered into three groups, one deployed on each flank and another taking the vanguard position ahead of the sylvaneth. Each Liberator formation is to be supported by attached retinues of Judicators with skybolt bows. Those warriors equipped with crossbows will act as a flying reserve.’

  ‘What of the paladins?’ Retributor-Prime Markius asked. His fingers tightened about the haft of the huge hammer he bore, as though already swinging the weapon into the skull of an enemy.

  ‘The paladins will follow behind,’ Grymn said, instantly sensing the disappointment of the eager Markius. ‘There are none better to act as a rearguard, should it be necessary. Our duty is to protect the Everqueen, and it may not be feasible to both support the rearguard and execute that duty. If you are left on your own, I know there are no warriors among the Hallowed Knights who are capable of acquitting themselves better.’ Grymn pointed the tip of his halberd towards the colossal oak that the last of the sylvaneth were emerging from. ‘Torglug can’t use the Cascading Path, but the Despised One may not be as far behind us as we would hope. If his plaguehosts come upon us from the rear, the paladins must keep them from reaching the column.’

  Decimator-Prime Diocletian clapped Markius on the back. ‘Honour is where you find it as much as where it finds you,’ he said. ‘Besides, the forest spirits don’t care for we Decimators and our axes. We’ve grown accustomed to bringing up the tail of this exodus. It will be cheering to have some company for this leg of the journey.’

  Angstun had a different concern. ‘Forgive me for asking, Lord-Castellant, but to what purpose is this retreat? If it is to simply keep the Everqueen out of the grasp of her hunters, then our situation fares no better here than skulking about in Athelwyrd.’ He raked the end of his standard across the deathblooms, knocking petals from the foul flowers. ‘The enemy is already here and even if he isn’t deployed as numerously as Torglug’s plaguehosts, it can be but a matter of time before word of our presence carries to Nurgle’s warlords and brings them hastening to overwhelm us.’ He looked across the other Stormcast officers. ‘There isn’t one of us who fears to perform our duty, but our minds should rest easier if we were aware of the Everqueen’s intentions.’

  Grymn nodded. ‘I cannot command words from a goddess,’ he told the Knight-Vexillor. ‘But I can make her aware of our concerns and the necessity of knowing where she is taking her people.’

  He saluted his officers, then marched across the fecund deathblooms towards the walking palisade of Alarielle’s guardians. With each step, the radiant glow of the Everqueen grew more distinct, no longer a lonely candle locked away in a forgotten keep, but a shining beacon that drew him on. He felt a stirring within him, a gentle whisper that wafted through his soul and urged him forwards.

  When Grymn neared the lumbering barrier of treelords, the huge creatures parted for him, receding like the gates of a castle to allow him ingress. It was the merest crack, the slightest gap to permit himself and no other. Tallon started to follow him, but instead fell back, a petulant whine rasping from his throat. The audience with the Everqueen was for the Lord-Castellant alone.

  Only the Lady of Vines was with Alarielle behind the ring of treelords. The branchwraith fixed him with an inscrutable look when he passed through the guardians, the light in her eyes somehow colder and more withdrawn than he’d seen it before. Grymn noted that her bark had taken on a scaly, brittle appearance, her figure grown more spindly than her martial aspect. He didn’t know why, but he had the impression of a tree in a graveyard, its vibrancy choked with mourning.

  ‘The Radiant Queen will receive you,’ the Lady of Vines told him in a creaking voice. ‘She would allay some of your misgivings.’

  Grymn fixed the branchwraith with a hard stare. There was something unspoken entwined with her words. Something that sent a thrill of warning through him.

  ‘Your warriors have withstood the Cascading Path,’ Alarielle called down to him from her crawling carriage. Some of the leafy tendrils drew back, revealing the splendour of her divine countenance once more. ‘Such a feat is not to be lightly praised, but there is small opportunity to applaud the resolve that guides your steps.’

  ‘It is your resolve I must be bold enough to inquire about,’ Grymn said with deep apology in his voice. ‘These lands you’ve led your people into are filled with the enemy. There is no safety for you here.’

  ‘Our destination lies to the south,’ the Everqueen declared. ‘Beyond these poisoned bloomfields lies the Sea of Serpents, and across those waters we will find places where the enemy cannot follow. Places of old magic that are more resistant to corruption, more resilient in their own right than even the vale of Athelwyrd.’

  Grymn took reassurance from the Radiant Queen’s speech. ‘My warriors will fight the harder for being taken into your confidence, highness,’ he said. ‘This sea you speak of. You have plans for cro
ssing it?’

  ‘All things stand revealed in time,’ the Lady of Vines said. ‘Sometimes it is easy to suspect treachery within discretion. It becomes simpler to forget the dictates of necessity.’ She gestured with her claw and the treelords parted again to allow Grymn to depart. ‘It is easier to understand the tests the enemy places before us than those posed by a friend.’

  Grymn pondered the branchwraith’s curious turn of phrase as he marched out from the walking palisade. Was she apologising for her earlier resentment? Repenting the hostility with which she and the other sylvaneth had regarded the Hallowed Knights? The more he thought about her words and the mournful aspect she had assumed, the less he thought her words were an apology. At least not in the way he had thought.

  The Lady of Vines was apologising to him, indeed, but not for the past. She was explaining to Grymn something that lay before them. Trying to imagine what the Everqueen and her people were planning was more forbidding than trying to outguess Torglug. However diseased, at least the plaguelord had a human mind. Maybe Lord-Celestant Gardus could have predicted the reasoning of the tree-creatures, but Grymn knew it was beyond his own abilities. He was not an oracle.

  Try as he might, Grymn knew he would have to leave the shadows of the future to set upon him in their own course.

  Chapter Three

  The fields of deathblooms spilled across the landscape far beyond the giant oak that had been their gate out of the Cascading Path. The noxious flowers had spread like a contagion, consuming every­thing in their path. The Stormcasts had seen clumps of trees covered in skull-like petals, entire woods that were veiled in the parasitic growths. They’d escorted the sylvaneth column over hills heavy with the deathly flowers and across streams choked by the pestilent weeds. Sometimes they found the sorry remnants of human settlements mouldering beneath a patina of deathblooms. Here would be a tribal totem standing forlorn above a vanished encampment, and over there might be the rubble of a tower carpeted by the vile plants.

  Wherever they went, the slaves of the Plague God were there. Sometimes entire warherds of braying gors would come tramping across the fields to challenge their passage. With the advance warning of Tegrus and the other scouts, these mass attacks were steadily beaten back. More arduous were the raids and ambushes staged by smaller warbands. Barbaric horsemen would gallop out from the shelter of diseased woods to mount hit-and-run assaults. A host of armoured Chaos warriors sprang upon them from concealed pits, dealing several casualties before they were annihilated. In the wreckage of a village, the vanguard was surprised by a lurking maggoth, the monstrosity sending three Liberators back to Sigmaron before a salvo from the boltstorm crossbows brought the thing to ruin.

  The gauntlet of skirmishes posed no immediate peril to the column, but Grymn was deeply concerned just the same. Each attack taxed their strength a little more, wore down their endurance that tiny bit further. On their own, the raids were nothing. Put together, they became an insidious drain on the Hallowed Knights and their allies. They were forced to press on without rest or respite. Never could they let their guard down or relent in their vigilance.

  The moment when Tegrus came back to Grymn to report that the land ahead of them sloped down towards a vast sea was the first cheering news he had heard in a long time – surely this was the Sea of Serpents the Everqueen had told him of. His cheer faded when Tegrus couldn’t report any isthmus or other feature that offered some way of crossing the waters, no fleet waiting on the beach to carry the Everqueen and her protectors across. There was only the rocky shingle of the shore and the rolling waves.

  Grymn recalled Alarielle’s earlier words to him about peril and faith. The Radiant Queen was neither mad nor a fool. She hadn’t rescued her people from the doom of Athelwyrd simply to trap them with their backs to the sea. She had some plan, even if she chose to keep it from her allies. Grymn felt a shiver pass through him when he reasoned that her plan likely involved another arcane crack in reality, some trail perhaps even more unsettling than the Cascading Path. He kept this concern to himself, however. It served no purpose to have his warriors worrying about something over which they had neither control nor influence.

  The sharp briny smell of salt water reached Grymn an hour or so before the column crested a hill and finally gazed upon the Sea of Serpents. It was as Tegrus had reported, a great expanse of rolling waves that stretched out to the distant horizon, its far shore somewhere beyond. The vile deathblooms spread only as far as the rocky shingle, their vitality finally overcome by the combination of barren rock and salt spray.

  The sylvaneth marched down to the shingle with what struck Grymn as almost an exhibition of urgency. The Stormcasts in the vanguard parted to let the tree-creatures pass through them. With the sea in front of them, it was certain that if an attack came, the plague warriors wouldn’t be charging from that quarter. The primes of the displaced retinues redeployed their Liberators with the paladins in the rearguard. At Grymn’s command, the Judicators fell back and took up formation on the hill overlooking the shore. From such a vantage they’d be able to both support the column and rain volleys upon any foe moving along the shingle.

  Lord-Relictor Morbus waited while Grymn dispatched Tegrus and his scouts back into the air. Now that they had the sea blocking their way, it was more vital than ever to know where the enemy was and how great his numbers. Once the Prosecutors were airborne, Morbus addressed the Lord-Castellant.

  ‘Unless we build ships from our allies, we seem to be at an impasse,’ Morbus said. ‘We can’t go forwards and with the plaguehosts all around us, we can’t go back.’

  Grymn looked towards the sylvaneth column, watching the glowing form of the Everqueen as her carriage crawled ahead with its ring of treelord guardians. ‘I think your true worry is that she will set us upon a road even stranger than the Cascading Path.’

  Morbus nodded. ‘Such a worry was in my mind,’ he confessed. He gestured at the shore, at the rolling waves. ‘This place has its own power, but I don’t sense the same potential as when we were in Athelwyrd. If there is a gate such as we passed through before, it is well hidden indeed.’

  ‘Such may have been her purpose in bringing us here,’ Grymn said. ‘Any magic that hides from friend is able to hide from foe as well.’ He patted Tallon’s head. ‘Sometimes faith is needed,’ he said, echoing the advice Alarielle had given him.

  A querulous bark from the gryph-hound had him looking again towards the sylvaneth. The tree-creatures were on the shore now. He watched as the ring of treelords parted. The radiant glow of the Everqueen shone more brightly as she emerged from behind her protectors. To Grymn’s eyes, it appeared that the deathblooms wilted wherever that light reached them, that even the ghoulish stain in the air was diminished.

  The sylvaneth hung back as their queen’s carriage crawled out onto the shingle. Only the Lady of Vines remained to attend the Everqueen, the handmaiden gliding alongside the palanquin. It made Grymn anxious to see Alarielle exposing herself in such a manner. With all deference to her power and authority, while he was responsible for protecting her he felt obliged to demand greater caution. He started to march towards the shingle when Morbus caught him by the arm.

  ‘She’s weaving some kind of spell,’ Morbus told him. ‘Something of enormous potential.’

  Grymn felt that shiver pass through him again. ‘You said this place wouldn’t lend itself to any great conjuration.’ He looked towards the beach. While he watched, Alarielle descended from her carriage. The moment her feet touched the earth, the palanquin began to shrivel and wither, crumbling into a dried mess of wilted foliage. She stood poised where the waters crashed upon the shingle, the transition from one element to another. Her arms were outstretched, her head tilted back and gazing away to the east. Now even the Lady of Vines kept herself at a distance, standing well up on the beach and away from her mistress’ conjuration.

  ‘It isn’t the land she is drawing po
wer from,’ Morbus said. He pointed at the Radiant Queen. ‘Observe,’ he told Grymn.

  Alarielle was standing at the edge of the sea, the waves rippling just ahead of her feet. While he looked on, Grymn noted a change. It took him a moment to understand it was the fading of her radiance. The brilliant aura was collapsing, compressing closer and closer around her.

  ‘Her light is dying,’ Grymn said.

  ‘She’s using her own energies to power whatever enchantment she’s trying to invoke,’ Morbus said.

  Grymn recalled the mournful aspect the Lady of Vines had assumed during his last audience with the Everqueen. He remembered the branchwraith’s words about discretion and concealing things from friends. It was this she had been trying to prepare him for: the sacrifice of the Radiant Queen.

  ‘We can’t permit this,’ Grymn told Morbus as he hurried down towards the shore. ‘Our duty is to protect the Everqueen, not stand idle while she destroys herself. Whatever her reasons, it must be stopped.’

  They raced towards Alarielle, yet even as they did so Grymn could see that they were too late. The mighty conjuration the Radiant Queen had evoked was too much for her dwindling energies. Her light was vanishing, drawing tighter and tighter around her. He didn’t know what would happen when the radiance pressed against Alarielle’s body, when glow and form became one. He was determined not to put that question to the test.

  Ahead of them, Grymn saw the Lady of Vines prowling towards him, putting herself between him and Alarielle. The branchwraith paced like a hungry lion, her bark transformed into a black, scaly wood. Thorns projected from the coils of vines now, poison dripping from each needle. Her hands had elongated, her fingers hardening into great claws. The glow within her eyes was fierce and threatening, the glower of a wolf protecting its pups.