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Cauldron of Blood – Extract

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CAULDRON OF BLOOD

by Chris Thursten

Onto the tourney-ground at ’Aqsha came forth the Burning Rose, war-daughter of Hammerhal, there to match steel with Khaine’s Handmaiden, whom none in our alliance could best. The witch aelf Virathe had held the field for three days against man, aelf and duardin, each duel a dedication to the oracle of the Bloody-Handed God. But the Burning Rose, she stood her ground and let the knife-dance break against her; she took the field, and we loved her for it.

The next reaver came at her with predatory confidence, loping over bodies and ashen rock, bloody and ragged under darkening skies. Captain Ketta Morrow lowered her greatsword and waited. Let his legs do the work, she thought. Even lunatics tire.

She readied herself, taking a moment to relax her grip and loosen the muscles in her arms. This was not Morrow’s first encounter with the Goretide. She had lived to veterancy, and counted Khorne’s marauders among her most familiar foes. Such had been the cost of life in Aqshy since Sigmar’s tempest had lifted Morrow’s ancestors from the cruelties of the firelands. She understood that the followers of the Blood God would not stop, break or buckle until their stock of prey was exhausted. To beat them was to outlast them, and in order to do that, one must protect the kindle-flame of energy that each clash of blades threatened to exhaust.

The reaver raised his axe and began to scream, beard matted with blood and spittle. He leapt the final few paces, throwing all of his weight up into his weapon, bringing it down with frenzied determination. Morrow simply raised her sword and held fast, letting the reaver’s red-eyed fervour clash against the redoubt of her physical strength. The greatsword’s tip caught the reaver through the stomach and Morrow pulled hard, hauling him away and to the side. She hurried only in the vulnerable instant where her weapon was lodged through the reaver’s abdomen, stepping quickly to pull it free, crushing his throat with her armoured boot as she did so.

No wasted effort, she thought. We can’t spare it.

Around her, the defence of the crusade had fallen to pieces. The Goretide had come upon them suddenly, emerging from a pall of unnatural darkness that blanketed the mountain pass. The Dawnbringer companies at the vanguard had understood its nature too late, having become accustomed to marching in the shadow of the great metalith that hung in the sky above them.

This sorcerous gloom was something new, imposing an eerie silence that deadened all but the nearest voices. One moment the crusaders had marched in quiet order, and the next they found themselves joined in battle to the fore and rear. Morrow had directed the rest of her greatsword regiment forward to safeguard the pilgrims that fled further along the pass, and remained behind to see to any stragglers. The sight of this last blood-slick marauder suggested that no more survivors would be forthcoming. Stepping away from the reaver’s body, she began her own retreat.

Morrow reached an escarpment and spied a group of handgunners in her company’s colours. Their regimental form had begun to fragment as the reavers pressed them back against the rocks. They would not hold for long. Expending what reserves of energy she still possessed, she broke into a sprint and attempted to reach them – but as soon as she picked up speed, she felt the weight of exhaustion against her chest and knew, bone-deep, that she would not be fast enough. In this instance, inertia would save her life.

An unnatural voice pierced the gloom with god-granted force, a dark-tongue curse that resonated from the mountainside. Morrow could not comprehend the words, but their malevolence trembled through her body as if seeking purchase, shuddering up and away through the thick air towards the body of the metalith.

Counter-sorcery, Morrow thought, her stomach sinking. Geomancers.

A tectonic groan emanated from the metalith as it listed first to one side and then the other, colliding with the mountainside and beginning to skid downwards. Morrow arrested her sprint and threw herself to the ground as the great mass of stone passed over her, its enchantments broken. The bulk of it impacted where the fighting was thickest, burying reaver, pilgrim and Freeguilder alike.

Morrow stood uneasily. She pinched ash from her eyes and began to move in the direction of the fallen metalith. Lord Somarthun’s Stormcast Eternals had engaged the enemy further along the pass, seeking to break the Goretide and establish a forward path for the Dawnbringers. There was no doubt that they would return upon the sight of the metalith’s destruction. If there was hope for any of the survivors, it lay in that direction.

She pressed on through dust and darkness, her hands stinging as she collided with a tilting spur of fallen rock. She clambered upwards, seeking vantage, and when she reached clear air she saw that the sky had grown even darker. What little light broke through was stained crimson by a malign presence that had settled itself across the firmament. She attempted to see past the cloud of ash kicked up by the metalith’s descent to the battle raging beyond. Then, in the distance, she spied a flash of blue-white energy; moments later, she felt the rumble of natural thunder.

A Stormcast just fell.

There came another flash, another thunder-tremor – and then another, another, another. Streaks of light leapt skywards as Lord Somarthun’s forces were overcome. The flame in Morrow’s chest guttered at the sight of it. She watched them rise, their souls seeking the heavens – and then, with horror, she watched them die for a second time. The malevolence that had claimed the sky seized each bolt in turn, smothering azure flames in darkness.

The sound! The sound was the worst of it – an aethereal discordance with the quality of a scream, followed by a chthonic rumble with the quality of laughter. An evil concordant with the shadow-sorcery that carried it to every mortal ear.

Alone atop her outcrop, Ketta Morrow knew the dread certainty of her own demise. It was almost an anticlimax. Death was often thus: the stray bolt that strikes the eye, the knife that finds sudden purchase. Yet these deaths began with the body; Morrow now knew to count herself among those for whom it starts with the spirit. At her back, the Goretide regrouped. She felt their heavy, accelerating tread in the rocks, then heard their ragged war cries as they burst free of the gloom. Their numbers spanned the width of the pass.

Morrow leapt the final few feet to the ground and rose to meet them, adopted a defensive posture and prepared to sell what remained of her mortal life.

A bow wave of aethereal force struck Morrow from behind. First came pain – stinging heat, up her spine and into her temples – followed by a manic sort of clarity. A keening wail washed over her. It had the quality of song.

Something stirred within the cloud of dust at her back. Darting shadows sped forth, flowing down from the surface of the fallen metalith and emerging from dark hollows in its shattered flanks. Morrow caught the flash of knives, felt the air buffeted by agile figures whose passage left no other trace. First one banner whipped by her, then another: a heart, a serpent, two blades beneath a lidless eye.

The Draichi Ganeth.

The mystery of who resided within the metalith had given the tale-tellers in her company much to work with; Morrow wondered if any survived to know the answer. Unbidden, she smiled. The dread inside her lifted. As the first witch aelves reached the enemy line, Ketta Morrow lowered her shoulders and raced to join them, greatsword high, breath held in anticipation of her own battle cry.

The animating power at her back grew in intensity as she ran. She sensed that it was drawing closer, and then she saw its source: a great bladed shrine mounted on silent wheels, propelled by the fervour of those that rode atop it. It rolled free of the dust cloud, descending smoothly from a cavernous rift in the metalith’s side. Morrow caught the silhouette of a robed priestess, directing the counter-attack with the tip of a long glaive. She saw the wide-mouthed cauldron at the shrine’s heart, and the towering statue at its rear. It collided with the onrushing reavers with scything force, continuing at speed until the sheer weight of bodies forced it to slow. Its priestess leapt high and descended into the melee with acrobatic grace.

Morrow ploughed into the fray not long after. She ended one reaver with the point of her greatsword before twisting to pull it free, letting its edge catch another at the neck. The next she headbutted with such force that it broke his nose. She swung down to finish him before he could rise, half-blind from the impact. Knives danced around her, slicing close but never cutting.

She collected herself and sought her next opponent, orienting herself using the Khainite shrine. Freed of the strictures of the fighting pit, the witch aelves ended lives with merciless grace. Morrow saw a leaping aelf drive bladed knee-plates into the ribs of a charging reaver before vaulting deeper into the melee, trailing crimson as she went. The Draichi Ganeth bled the Goretide in a thousand places, arresting their momentum with savage efficiency.

As the aelves pressed forwards a gap opened, and through it Morrow caught a glimpse of the priestess. Her glaive was blooded to the hilt and riven bodies lay in a semicircle about her; no servant of the Blood God had survived her coming. As she remounted the steps of the shrine, her eyes scanned the field and caught sight of Morrow in the midst of the melee. Her head tilted at the incongruity of the Freeguild captain, her bloody greatsword and battered plate. Their eyes met, and between them passed a jolt of recognition.

Morrow caught her breath.

Virathe.

The light of the cook fire cast looming shadows against the inner walls of the mess tent, a wide oval of flame-treated canvas rigged to vent smoke in the Aqshian fashion. As Morrow approached she recognised the hunched shapes within as companions, people with whom she shared the tested bonds of a lifetime spent in one war-camp or another. She also recognised them as survivors, and knew that these wavering outlines gave a false sense of their real numbers and true strength.

The Goretide had stolen a great deal of both. The remaining Dawnbringers had fled west for three days after the ambush, abandoning the fallen metalith and its geomantic works and seeking shelter in the western lee of the Sorrow Peaks. The unnatural gloom had followed them but the reavers had not. They shed their pursuers as they reached the mountainside and now their camp nestled in a steep-sided escarpment.

Morrow skidded on ash and gravel as she made the short descent towards the tent, unclasping her half-cape as she went. She had two reasons to make this journey and the symbol of her office would help with neither. First, she needed the warriors under her command to understand that she was with them – experience had taught her that the most durable authority was built on trust as much as rank. Second, she was hungry. Soup stains were a threat to her authority too, in their way.

She folded the half-cape under her arm and ducked into the tent, skin prickling at the warmth inside. The air was thick with sweat and boot leather, and Morrow felt relief enter every muscle in her back at once. She approached the edge of the fire and claimed a space, exchanging curt greetings with the soldiers to either side. Someone passed her a bowl of broth and she tested it with a finger, pleased to find the solid evidence of something like meat.

‘As I was sayin’, they’s all gods of death, when you think on it.’

Dour Ossel sat at the far side of the fire and cast his eyes about the huddled company as he spoke. An empty bowl lay at his feet and he rested his forearms upon the unstrung bulk of his great oaken crossbow. It was considered a miracle that he could still load and fire the thing at his age; more so that he was still alive to do so. Morrow smiled to herself as she raised the steaming broth to her lips. The old mercenary was holding court: something was normal.

‘You mean like Elder Bones? He’s a villain, you ask me.’

Morrow didn’t catch the speaker but saw the gleam in Ossel’s eyes, the delight of a trapper whose bait had been taken.

‘Oh no, not just him,’ said Ossel. ‘None of us like a gheist, that I’ll grant you, but the best man I ever marched with, he lived an’ died for the Great Necromancer. Now, I mean that quite literally.’

This got a laugh.

‘I dunno what his name was, but I called him Ben. He was completely dead. Not a scrap of meat on him, but better with a hand-and-a-half than most I’ve known. Didn’t eat. Didn’t snore. Didn’t speak. Perfect man, you ask me.’

Open laughter, now. A few fond curses.

‘I am quite past my original point!’ Ossel exclaimed. ‘They are, all of ’em, gods of death. The Slayer god? He killed, killed, killed, and then he died. The Everqueen? She plants her seeds in the corpse-earth and what comes out ain’t exactly life as you and me know it, is it?’

Morrow watched as Ossel played with the tension in the air. His touch was abrasive one moment, delicate the next. A bristle of disquiet from a few of Kyrggi’s Irondrakes was enough to steer the focus elsewhere, but whoever was next on the receiving end of one of the marksman’s barbs was treated no more warmly. Morrow glanced at the heavy crossbow in his lap and wondered if he’d ever been a string-player: he had the ear for it. She understood that moments like this had the effect of diverting weary minds from the weight of the destiny that had befallen them. Let old, dour Ossel speak a little dissent to the gods, if that was the role he wished to play. There were harder truths to contend with in time.

‘How about the Maker? Him that gives us weapons and walls?’

This interjection came from a young man at the fire’s edge. From the matted emerald feather in his cap, Morrow recognised him as one of the new recruits from Hammerhal Ghyra, a lad of barely twenty. His cohort had crossed into Aqshy shortly before the crusade’s departure and Morrow had not had time to know them well, but knew this one as Neszbern. He had loped into camp trailing his pack behind him on a rope, his arms full with a battered old Aqshian hand-culverin. That was how Morrow had come to know the boy, and he had not yet gone a day without putting his foot wrong in one manner or another.

‘And what do you suppose those weapons do, my boy?’ Ossel said, dryly. ‘And those walls? Let me tell you. Walls kill as many as bolts, blades or blackpowder. Not a war is fought where someone don’t find themselves on the wrong side of one.’

Morrow caught a glint of stubbornness in the recruit’s eyes as the young man took another helping of Ossel’s bait.

‘You can’t mean holy Sigmar, though?’

Careful, Morrow thought. The boy turned a token in his hands: a chip of heartwood engraved with a runic hammer.

‘He that spares and protects us, and sends the best of us back to spare and protect others…’

Ossel smiled, lowered his head. ‘That he does, my boy, that he does. And who else would you have your soul be pledged to, eh? Perhaps one day I’ll be sent back to you with one of those great golden longstrikes in my hands. That’d be something.’

Somebody elbowed the old man from behind. ‘Don’t reckon the Thunderer will consider it heroic when one of yer blasphemies finally gets you knifed.’

Another ripple of laughter passed around the group. Ossel made a comic show of offence and when the crowd’s attention settled on him once more, he leaned forwards and grew serious.

‘Sigmar stands in defiance of death, it’s true.’ His eyes cast about the room. ‘Or perhaps it’s more true to say that he’d be its master on our behalf. I’m not sayin’ I mind. Yet we each have seen that even one of his Stormcast Eternals can end. Gives an old soldier cause for reflection.’

Morrow tensed. What had occurred in the pass weighed on all of them. At a stroke, Ossel had ceased to be a distraction and now directed her company’s minds towards fresh wounds. Neszbern spoke up again, completely without guile.

‘That was death for them, then?’ he asked. ‘When the sky swallowed them up?’

‘Or worse,’ the crossbowman replied, smoothing an imperfection from the corner of his tunic with his thumb. ‘As I’ve been sayin’, lad – they’re all gods of death, in the end.’

His voice grew weak, affecting age. Morrow had seen this part of the act before – knew that Ossel would allow the group’s attention to begin to drift before snatching it back. As caustic as the old man could be, she trusted him to give voice to fears and distractions that would otherwise go unsaid – and she knew that it was better for the warriors in her charge to confront fear and distraction in a warm mess tent than on the field. Yet she had heard, and eaten, her fill. She caught Ossel’s eyes as she stood, offering a glint of acknowledgement, but was surprised by the steel in the look he returned.

‘Of course, better death than murder.’

Morrow froze. Ossel held her gaze for a moment too long before turning, with a soft smile, to the recruit.

‘I’ve got one piece of real wisdom for you, boy, so listen close.’

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