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Conquest Unbound: Stories from the Mortal Realms – Extract

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They made the climb in silence. For hours, the night was only the heavy breathing of the other aspirants, the flapping of their green cloaks in the highland winds, and the tap-tap-tap of a staff on dirt and rock. The way was steep and overgrown, but the five aspirants kept pace with one another and followed the steps of their warden. There was a rhythm to the ascent, a steadiness, and by focusing on the rhythm, Maethys was nearly able to quiet the fear.

A keening broke the silence. An animal cry, but shrill, as if from a rusted tongue in a stone throat. It seemed close. Maethys started, but kept quiet. He wasn’t too proud to let the fear show, but Greatwarden Tythrae had commanded silence, and he didn’t want to give her another reason to frown at him. No small part of his fear was reserved for her.

Ahead, the greatwarden raised a bony hand in the moonlight. The aspirants halted. A few gripped their draichs. Laeren took his hand and pressed the fingertip-cant into his palms.

Look, she said.

But where to look? The vastness of the mountain ahead of them was darker than the starfield above, an immense topography that consumed half the ground and sky, impossible to hold in the eye or mind all at once.

It was hardly any wonder that many in the hollows – even in the cities to the south – believed the mountain was a god. Allpeak, some called it, Height-of-Heights, or Beastgrave, an implacable end of all things that consumed even the god-beasts of Ghur. Others, like Tythrae, said the impossible mountain was a god-beast, the measureless corpse of the first and greatest of titans, fallen from the heavens at the beginning of time.

In Maethys’ family it was only ever ‘the mountain’. His brother said it was too vast a thing for naming.

Maethys followed the line of Laeren’s finger to a massive jut of rock above. Lit by the stars, a family of hale-moths gripped the underside of the crag, long necks twisted to regard the aspirants. Their eyes gleamed in the dark and Maethys shivered. The largest of the animals unhinged its jaw and released another keening, and then the beasts fluttered into the shadows of the crag.

Did you see them? Laeren pressed in his palm. The set of her mouth was serious, but Maethys thought there was a smile in the play of her fingers. He savoured the feeling of her skin on his.

I saw, he answered. He hoped he didn’t look as scared as he felt.

‘This is the place,’ said Greatwarden Tythrae softly. The rasp of her voice was as startling as the hale-moths’ keening. She led the aspirants up a slope that steepened until they had to find handholds in the chalky rock, scraping up little clouds of white dust. They heaved themselves over a ledge and onto a kind of plateau that overlooked the valleys and hollows below. Above the travellers towered the shadowy jut, one among a thousand peaks of the god-mountain. And ahead of them, the jagged mouth of a cave.

‘Horn and mouth,’ said Tythrae. ‘The place of proving.’

The mountain, she taught, was mother to monstrosity. The First Beast was a creature of ruin, and its vast, ancient corpse cast a malign pall over the land. It spoke in the dark of the night, and its voice was your voice, and it called corruption to aelf and human and animal alike.

This peak here, this place of proving, she named the Ruinhorn.

When the half-dozen aspirants had assembled on the plateau, Tythrae spoke again. ‘For generations,’ she murmured, just audible above the wind, ‘all who would be wardens have commenced their service by enduring the voice of the Ruinhorn for a night. If you would have me ordain you as warden, you will do the same. If you wish to leave, you may leave with Baran.’

She gestured to Baran, her retainer. He was a perpetually silent human, one of the only humans in the order, and hardly any younger than Tythrae by the look of him, though Maethys struggled to mark human ages.

Tythrae allowed a long moment for second thoughts. No one left. The Order of Wardens-in-the-Wild was a thankless calling; few entered it lightly, and the least committed – the whimsical or uncertain, or pretenders – had all been culled already.

All except me, thought Maethys. He glanced at Laeren. Not everyone joined the Wardens in a spirit of noble service.

Tythrae nodded at her aspirants. ‘I see. Sit, then, and listen.’

Maethys closed his eyes and assumed the position of solicitude, his legs folded underneath him, his hands clasped at his chest and his head bowed to the dirt. Around him, the others did the same. Tythrae and Baran paced among them, and here and there the greatwarden corrected postures. Maethys held his breath as Tythrae passed him, and exhaled with relief when she passed without comment. She didn’t need an excuse to criticise him, but he preferred not to give her one, if he could help it.

When the crunch of Tythrae’s boots against dirt had quieted, Maethys snuck a glance at the aspirants on either side of him.

To his left, Laeren. She had the same seriousness of purpose as the greatwarden, her grandmother; she squeezed her eyes shut and frowned. She had the wild blood – the graceful horns and hooves that one found in some aelves of the hollows, and which Maethys found inexpressibly beautiful in Laeren.

To his right, the boy Weheol. He had lost the sight of his eyes to coldbone plague, but he persisted in the proving. With a touch of guilt, Maethys had never much liked him; there was a self-seriousness in the boy that bordered on zealotry, and he seemed to follow Tythrae in doubting Maethys’ commitment to the Order. Weheol’s eyes were open, unseeing, and he mouthed some prayer to the dead gods in silence.

Maethys closed his eyes again. He was listening, like Tythrae said, but he wasn’t sure what he was supposed to hear. The night wind whistled and batted at his cloak. Already, the muscles of his legs burned and complained. He heard the shifting of knees in the dirt and rock around him, the breathing of the other aspirants, the flutter of the hale-moths.

You are unwanted here, he thought, and it was true. Tythrae was no fool. She saw him, and knew his mind, and did not want him among the aspirants.

You are unwanted here. You and your family and your people – you are unwanted.

He shifted uncomfortably. He thought of his mother, who had been hounded from the free cities by humans–

You are a broken race. Your gods are dead and your home will fall and you have no place in the future.

Maethys’ eyes jerked open. He was sweating and breathing heavily. The voice that spoke in his head was his own, but the words were not his.

Someone, he realised, was screaming. Was it him? No, no – the scream was further from him. At his side, Weheol was panting into the dirt, tears streaming down his cheeks.

‘Breathe,’ hissed Tythrae, ‘hold your posture. Set your mind to salt.’

Set your mind to salt. Yes, he knew how to do that. Tythrae had taught him, whether she had liked it or not. Accept it all, accept everything wretched and ruinous about this moment and these realms and… set it aside. Like salting meat to preserve it for a time of need: suspend judgement, reserve response until necessary. Wait.

Wait.

The hale-moths trilled in the night and the voices in his head – the voices of the mountain – recited their litanies of annihilation. Your gods are dead and your people are dead and you have no place in the future.

Tythrae circled and whispered, ‘Calm and salt, calm and salt.’ An aspirant was screaming, and all around him the breathing was heavy.

Someone broke. A sharp intake of breath, boots against the dirt. Maethys opened his eyes. It was one of the older aspirants, Aelyth; she stood up and ran for the ledge.

Tythrae moved more quickly than he had ever seen her move. Aelyth’s cloak whipped in the wind and her feet left the ground and she walked into empty night. The greatwarden leapt over the backs of the prostrate aspirants, caught Aelyth’s arm and wrenched her back over the ledge from the sheer drop onto a rocky escarpment.

‘No,’ Tythrae commanded, and it was enough. Aelyth gasped and sobbed, but was still. Tythrae ordered Baran to escort the aelf back down the mountain and resumed her rounds. Maethys strained to keep his mind unresponsive to the voices.

Weheol, beside him, was next to break – or nearly. His tears turned into a howling, and he jerked and pounded his face into the earth. Maethys peered sideways; he thought he heard a crack of bone. Still kneeling, the pious boy Weheol bashed his head into the dirt and rock.

‘No, child,’ Tythrae said, and grasped his shoulders, holding him in place. ‘It is only the mountain. It is only the Beast. Set it to salt.’

Maethys glanced to his left. Sweat dripped from Laeren’s face, but she frowned and kept still.

On the other side of Laeren, the third aspirant broke. A farmhand called Hessiat, who was only too happy to tell anyone who asked that his family had given him to the Order to rid themselves of a hungry stomach. He simply stood and ran as quickly as he could into the mouth of the cave.

Maethys startled upright. Tythrae withdrew her hands from Weheol’s shoulders and made for the cave-mouth, but this time she was too slow. Hessiat of the hungry stomach was gone into the dark.

Greatwarden Tythrae turned back to her aspirants who remained, all three on their knees and uncertain.

‘You stay here,’ she said fiercely. ‘You kneel and you set your minds to salt. Keep faith and show me that you are wardens.’

And then she was gone too, into the dark of the impossible mountain.

It felt like a joke of the gods: Maethys was good at faith. Not the belief, perhaps, but the practice. The waiting and the stillness of mind. He’d never meant to be a warden, never cared about the dead pantheons or meant to serve them and stand against Ruin. Yet here he was.

He glanced aside at Laeren. She was frowning but in meditation as commanded. On his other side, Weheol shook slightly but no longer wept. The three of them were the only ones left, and Maethys couldn’t help thinking he didn’t belong here.

Two watches of the night passed, and still the greatwarden did not return. Neither did the retainer Baran, nor the lost and broken aspirants. The hale-moths trilled, and the voices of the mountain whispered their doom.

Your gods are eaten, they said. Your past is eaten. Your future is eaten.

Yet even through the watches of the night, Maethys maintained his stillness. He set the voices to salt and mastered the ache in his thighs and kept faith. He imagined (though it was not an exercise prescribed by the greatwarden) that the cloak draped around him was the walls of some ancient sanctum, built in the Time Before Times and consecrated to one of the forgotten gods. He could see it so clearly, feel it so clearly – the warmth of a hearth, the light of another sun through sacred glassworks, the name of a lost god nearly on his tongue…

You do not belong here, Maethys thought. He opened his eyes, blinked against the breeze and sat up. His legs were numb, and the hue of the night around them had changed.

‘What should we do?’ he asked.

Slowly, the others rose from their kneeling. Laeren was still frowning. Weheol’s eyes were wide, and his dark skin was a shade paler than usual.

‘We should go in after them,’ Weheol said quietly.

‘You wish to go inside?’ Laeren asked. She sounded as surprised as Maethys was. ‘She said to stay here. She said to keep faith.’

Weheol shook his head. ‘She serves the hollows. She protects. When the coldbone plague came to my holdfast, when I lost…’ he gestured to his eyes, ‘she cared for me and the people of my hollow. She wants to protect us, too. But she is more important. I would follow her example rather than her words.’

‘It might be a trial,’ Laeren said.

‘So it might,’ said Weheol. ‘And what is the right answer?’

The pair of them looked to Maethys.

His stomach turned. He had asked the question of what they should do, but he didn’t mean to answer it.

He didn’t particularly like Weheol, who condescended to him as impious and unserious. More than anything, he wanted to side with Laeren, but he couldn’t. Tythrae and the farmhand might have run afoul of the beasts of the mountain, or the voices, or some fall in the dark. They might have met brigands or the Silent People of whispered myth. If the greatwarden was well, then she would be angry, yes – but if she was in danger, wasn’t it right to try to serve? Selfless and of service: those were the Wardens’ words.

‘We should try to help them,’ he said.

Weheol turned towards him with a mix of surprise and approval on his face, as if he were appraising Maethys anew. He stood, and Maethys stood too. He didn’t want to look at Laeren, didn’t want to see the disappointment on her face, but he couldn’t stop himself. Resigned, she sighed and rose to her feet.

‘We’ll be safer together,’ she said.

In turn, the aspirants each drew their training draichs and stepped forward into the mouth of Beastgrave.

Your gods are dead and your people are dead and you have no place in the future.

As the path steepened, the voices grew more numerous, more urgent. It was Maethys’ own voice, still, layered over itself, like a chorus of dead generations.

You have no place in the future.

There was a terrible fascination in the voices, like the draw of a precipitous ledge at a great height. Some part of him wanted to hear them, wanted to listen more closely, wanted to hear each word.

Your songs are eaten and your children are eaten and your laughter is eaten.

Laeren led the way, a few steps ahead, holding a little foraged spore-light in her palm. The cave passage was narrow, and they each had to crouch to move through. Amidst the deposits of amber on the cavern walls were crude scrawlings: crowns and stagwyrms, knives and hale-moths and unknown beasts of unsettling proportions. The images might have been scratched out days ago, or centuries. No one spoke.

Maethys found setting his mind to salt more difficult, the farther they walked. He watched Laeren’s back, a corona of blue spore-light around her head, and he tried to imagine a future with her, any future. And he couldn’t. He tried to imagine a life with her and simply couldn’t see it – he couldn’t see himself there, or anywhere. It was as though something had slipped in his head; he couldn’t imagine himself as part of the hollows, part of Ghur, any part of the realms. Only an empty space where he should have been.

His breath caught in his chest, and his head felt tight. What was wrong with him?

He was going to be a Warden-in-the-Wild. He knew his path; he knew what was supposed to lie before him.

So why couldn’t he imagine a future?

They travelled down and into the depths for what felt like a watch of the night. The cave-path broadened into a kind of antechamber. Somewhere in the dark, an underground waterfall roared, violent and unseen. Here and there, steep ledges gave way to vast, empty nothing. Maethys kept a steadying hand close to Weheol, but the boy found his way forward steadily, his staff tap-tap-tapping along the rock. Slowly, a stench thickened in Maethys’ nostrils, sour and organic.

Laeren and her light paused. ‘Look,’ she said.

He followed Laeren’s finger to a pile of shoulderbags and oilskins and climbers’ hooks. Swords and helms, bracers and blankets. It was as though some expedition had laid down all their burdens in a haphazard circle and forgotten about them.

‘Travellers’ packs,’ Maethys whispered for Weheol’s sake. ‘Dozens of them, packs and cloaks and weapons. Someone else is here.’

Laeren shook her head. ‘No. They’re all different makes and ages. This sheath is aelven, from the hollows. This cloak is skaven, I think – this one human, but old. You see the heraldry of the free city of Esthu’dor? It burned to nothing two hundred years ago.’

Her spore-light flickered. Maethys felt cold.

‘Some of it is recent, too,’ he said. ‘Look at the mould on those cloaks. But this shoulderbag is clean. As though it was just set down.’

‘The smell,’ Weheol said.

‘It is high-wretched,’ Maethys agreed. ‘I can hardly breathe.’

‘No,’ said Weheol. ‘It is death.’

Laeren frowned back at him and then released her spore-light; it fluttered birdlike through the air and lit the chamber before them.

Not twenty paces ahead, a small group of corpses sat upright, arranged in a circle. As if they were sitting at a campfire.

You have no place in the future, the voice in the mountain whispered.

Maethys gripped his draich. With his free hand he took Weheol’s wrist and pressed, Bodies set upright. Careful.

He forced himself to move forward. Laeren’s light hovered over the little council of corpses; as he drew closer, Maethys could see that none of the dead were Tythrae or Hessiat. They were aelf and human and beastman, hulking and slight, but they had all suffered decomposition reckoned in months or years, some much longer. One of the corpses kneeled in the posture of a warden in meditation.

They have no place in the future. And neither do you.

‘I was wrong,’ Maethys said. ‘This is a bad place. We shouldn’t be here. We ought to leave.’

‘Of course it’s a bad place,’ said Weheol quietly. ‘We are in the horn of the First Beast fallen. Keep faith.’

The boy’s smug piety, his of course, was more than Maethys could bear just then.

‘Keep faith? Who was it that wept in the dirt outside? Who was it that distracted the greatwarden with his tears?’

The boy was silent. Immediately, Maethys regretted the words.

‘There are three of us here alive,’ he said.

‘The greatwarden is worth more than all of us,’ Weheol answered, ‘myself included. She has saved thousands and will save thousands more.’

Laeren opened her mouth to respond, but Maethys never learned what she was going to say.

Laeren’s light extinguished. She cried out.

There was a sound of blade against stone. A grunt of exertion. Maethys released Weheol’s wrist and fumbled in his cloak for his own spore-light. But he was weak in the magics of forage, and the light sputtered.

He caught a glimpse of Laeren struggling with… gods, what was it?

A mound of limbs, a hunched and pallid thing. Arms dangled from its back like a mane of hair; knives gleamed like teeth in the jerky spore-light.

You have no place in the future you have no place in the future–

The light went out, flashed blue and bright again. Laeren slashed the beast with her draich and ducked under its own swing. But she was drenched in her own blood already. Her hooves clapped the stone, and though she kept pace with the monster, her breath came heavy.

‘Run!’ she screamed. He had never heard her scream before. ‘Run!’

The creature’s knives fell on Laeren again; her parries flagged, and she nearly slipped in her own blood. Weheol was gone somewhere into the dark, obeying the command to flee.

Laeren had wanted to obey the greatwarden’s order. She hadn’t wanted to be here. Now she was bleeding inside the Ruinhorn. She was sad-eyed and brilliant and she was dying.

Maethys raised his draich and rushed towards the beast of limbs and knives. ‘Die!’ someone was screaming over and over, and he realised it was his own voice – not in his head, this time. The creature was ineffably fast; it seemed to be in a hundred places at once, to move more swiftly than the eye could follow.

The beast knocked the draich from his hands and slashed at his throat. But his momentum carried him into the monster’s body and still forward, forward and forward and into the dark, over a ledge and into the long, impossible dark – and then they were falling, and falling…

He felt his bones break on impact. Everything was dark, and he didn’t know if it was the lightlessness of Beastgrave or the nothing swelling all around him, thickening and choking. Your gods are dead and your people are dead and you are dead, said the mountain, but the voices were far away now and his head felt clearer than he could remember it being in a long time.

Maethys set his mind to salt. He accepted it all, accepted everything wretched and ruinous about this moment and these realms, and set it aside. He suspended judgement and he waited. He found he could imagine a future for himself again, a future with Laeren; they would serve the hollows and keep a gentle love for one another. It was a good life, and he waited for it.

He bled out in the salt-calm, his body broken in something like the posture of meditation.

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A Black Library Publication

‘The Warden in the Mountain’, ‘Hamilcar: The Age of Enlightenment’, ‘Reflections in Steel’, ‘Heart of the Fallen’, ‘Strong Bones’, ‘Fangs of the Rustwood’, ‘A Tithe of Bone’ first published digitally in 2019.
‘The Harrowing Deep’, ‘The Dead Hours’, ‘Death on the Road to Svardheim’, ‘Buyer Beware’, ‘The Offering’, ‘The Threshold’ first published digitally in 2020.
‘The Perfect Assassin’, ‘Monsters’, ‘The Wolf and the Rat’ first published digitally in 2021.
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