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The Gates of Azyr - Extract

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Vandus, they called him.

It was a name of omen, one that carried the favour of the Golden City. He would be the first, they said. None would set foot in the Mortal Realms ahead of him, though the bringers of vengeance would be close behind. For a long time he had not understood what they meant, for they had had to school him as a child, teaching him to remember what he had once known by instinct.

Now, with the passing of aeons, he understood. The empty years were coming to a close, and the designs of the God-King were at last reaching ripeness. He was the instrument, just one of the limitless host, but the brightest star amid the constellations of salvaged glory.

For so long now, it had just been Azyr, and all else was lost in the fog of time.

But there had been other worlds. Now, very soon, there would be so again.

They were gazing up at him – ten thousand, arrayed in gold and cobalt and ranked in the shining orders of battle. The walls around them soared like cliffs, each one gilt, reflective and marked with the sigils of the Reforged.

Vandus stood under a dome of sapphire. A long flight of marble stairs led down to the hall’s crystal floor. Above them all, engraved in purest sigmarite, was the sign of the Twin-Tailed Comet, radiant amid its coronet of silver.

This thing had never been done. In a thousand years of toil and counsel, in all the ancient wars that the God-King had conducted across realms now lost, it had never been done. Even the wisdom of gods was not infinite, and so all the long ages of labour might yet come to naught.

He lifted his hand, turning the sigmarite gauntlet before him, marvelling at the manner in which the armour encased his flesh. Every piece of it was perfect, pored over by the artificers before being released for the service of the Eternals. He clenched the golden fingers into a fist and held it high above him.

Below him, far below, his Stormhost, the Hammers of Sigmar, raised a massed roar. As one, they clenched their own right hands.

Hammerhand!

Vandus revelled in the gesture of fealty. The vaults shook from their voices, each one greater and deeper than that of a mortal man. They looked magnificent. They looked invincible.

‘This night!’ Vandus cried, and his words swelled and filled the gulf before him. ‘This night, we open gates long closed.’

The host fell silent, rapt, knowing these would be the last words they heard before the void took them.

‘This night, we smite the savage,’ Vandus said. ‘This night, we smite the daemon. We cross the infinite. We dare to return to the realms of our birthright.’

Ten thousand golden helms looked up at him. Ten thousand fists gripped the shafts of warhammers. The Liberators, the greater part of the mighty host, stood proudly, arrayed in glistening phalanxes of gold. All of them had once been mortal, just as he had been, though now they bore the aspect of fiery angels, their mortality transmuted into majesty.

‘The design of eternity brought you here,’ Vandus said, sweeping his gaze across the sea of expectant faces. ‘Fate gave you your gifts, and the Forge has augmented them a hundredfold. You are the foremost servants of the God-King now. You are his blades, you are his shields, you are his vengeance.’

Amid the Liberators stood the Retributors, even more imposing than their comrades, carrying huge two-handed lightning hammers across their immense breastplates. They were the solid heart of the army, the champions about which the Legion was ordered. Slivers of pale lightning sparked from their heavy plate, residue of a fearsome, overspilling power within.

‘You are the finest, the strongest, the purest,’ Vandus told them. ‘In pain were you made, but in glory will you live. No purpose have you now but to bring terror to the enemy, to lay waste to his lands and to shatter his fortresses.’

On either flank stood the Prosecutors, the most severely elegant of all the warriors there assembled. Their armour was sheathed in a sheer carapace of swan-white wings, each blade of which dazzled in its purity. Their spirits were the most extreme, the wildest and the proudest. If they were a little less steadfast than their brothers, they compensated with the exuberance of flight, and in their gauntlets they kindled the raw essence of the comet itself.

‘We are sent now into the heart of nightmares,’ said Vandus. ‘For ages uncounted this canker has festered across the face of the universe, extinguishing hope from lands that were once claimed by our people. The war will be long. There will be suffering and there will be anguish, for we are set against the very legions of hell.’

Besides Vandus stood the great celestial dracoth, Calanax, his armoured hide glinting from the golden light of the hall. Wisps of hot smoke curled from his nostrils and his long talons raked across the crystal floor. Vandus had been the first to tame such a beast, though now others of his breed were in the service of the Stormhost. The dracoth was the descendant of far older mythic creatures, and retained a shard of their immortal power.

‘But they know us not. They believe all contests to be over, and that nothing remains but plunder and petty cruelties. In secrecy have we been created, and our coming shall be to them as the ending of worlds. With our victory, the torment will cease. The slaughter will cease. We will cleanse these worlds with fire, and consign the usurpers back to the pits that spewed them forth.’

As he spoke, Vandus felt the gaze of his fellow captains on him. Anactos Skyhelm was there, lean and proud, master of the winged host. Lord-Relictor Ionus, the one they called the Cryptborn, remained in the margins, though his dry presence could be sensed, watching, deliberating. If the lightning-bridge was secured, those two would be at the forefront, marshalling the vanguard to take the great prize – the Gate of Azyr, locked for near-eternity and only unbarred by the release of magics from both sides of the barrier.

And yet, for all their authority, only one soul had the honour of leading the charge. The God-King himself had bestowed the title on him – Lord-Celestant, First of the Stormhost.

Now Vandus raised both hands, one holding Heldensen aloft, the other still clenched tight. His weapon’s shaft caught the light of crystal lamps and blazed as if doused in captured moonlight.

‘Let the years of shame be forgotten!’ he declared. ‘The fallen shall be avenged and the Dark Gods themselves shall feel our fury!’

The glittering host below clashed their hammers against their heavy shields before raising the weapons in salute and acclamation. The entire vault filled with the fervour of voices raised in anticipation.

‘Reconquest begins, my brothers!’ Vandus roared, feeding on their raw potency. ‘This night, we bring them war!’

A great rumble ran across the floor of the hall, as if the earth were moving. Arcs of lightning began to snap and writhe across the golden walls of the vault. The sigil of the comet blazed diamond-clear, throwing beams of coruscation across the hall’s immense length. Something was building to a crescendo, something massive.

‘This night,’ Vandus cried, glorying in the full release of the divine magic, ‘we ride the storm!’

A huge boom shook the chamber, running up from the foundations to the high roof. The howl of thunder-born wind raced through the hall, igniting into white flame as it reached the full pitch of extremity. The golden ambient light exploded, bursting out from every part of the walls, the arched roof and the glistening floors, and lightning came with it in beams as thick as a man’s arm.

There was a second rolling boom and the space between the walls was lost in a maelstrom of argent fire. The world reeled, as if thrown from its foundations, and the sharp tang of ozone flared, bitter and pungent.

Then, as suddenly as it had come, the lightning snapped out, the brilliance faded and the winds guttered away. The hall remained, suffused with a glimmering haze of gold, still lit bright by the light of the comet-sigil.

Only now the marble floor was empty. No voices remained, no warriors stood in ranks – nothing but the receding echoes of the colossal detonation lingered, curled like smoke across the walls of gold.

There was nothing to do but run. Even that was pointless in the end, since you would always be caught, but the instinct remained – the primal desire to keep living, to keep going, to spite the gods a little more before the blood-sun set.

Her tribe had been ravaged since the last series of raids and now numbered less than forty souls. The old had been the first to go – too slow to keep moving, caught quickly, too tough to eat, their age-withered bodies cruelly toyed with before the scream-filled end. Then they had taken the infants, one by one, dooming the tribe to extinction. Those that remained were the ones who had been fast enough, who were not crippled by the poisons that ran deep in the earth or who were not carrying wounds that made them too lame or too weak.

Now even those last survivors were tiring. There was only so much the body could take, and a diet of gleanings from parched fields could not sustain their flight for long.

It was a shame. She had always been told that their bloodline was long, stretching back to a mythical time before the endless night. She had never quite believed the boasts, but now it hardly mattered – they would all be snuffed out at last, even if the fire-side legends were true.

Kalja squatted in the dirt, panting, pressing her palms into the dank soil, trying to recover. The others knelt or slumped close by – Svan, Renek, Elennar, the rest. Kalja pulled in deep breaths, feeling the ash coat her throat, knowing it would make her choke.

‘How close?’ asked Elennar, her dirt-crusted face white with fear.

Renek shrugged, beaten. ‘Does it matter?’

‘They are bloodreavers,’ said Kalja, breathing heavily. ‘They are no faster than us. We can make the delta.’

‘They eat the flesh of their living victims,’ said Svan dryly. ‘It fuels them. So yes, they are faster.’

Kalja pulled herself to her feet. She was emaciated, her cheeks hollow and her skin a pale grey. Her long hair hung in clumps around her face, and she carried a rough, blunt knife at her belt. Old wounds, the product of a lifetime spent running or fighting, crisscrossed her calloused skin.

Ahead of them, to the north, the dusk sky was lowering into a rust red. Flickers of vermillion lightning jumped along the distant horizon, broken by the vast silhouettes of old skull-towers. The earth in all directions was blasted and open, split into great plates and riven by dry gulches. What little vegetation survived in the wastes was black and gnarled, clinging to survival with the same grim determination that the mortals did.

Kalja sniffed. The wind tasted as it always did – hot ashes, the lingering sweetness of mouldering carcasses – but there was something else there too.

‘I can smell water,’ she said, turning back to the others.

Svan laughed hoarsely. It would not be water worth drinking – the streams of the Igneous Delta were spoiled, and dribbled in their winding courses like hissing lines of mercury. That was why none lived there, not even the most desperate of prey-humans. Its twisting mazes might hide them, but only for a while.

‘We will not last the night,’ said Renek, his shoulders bunched miserably.

Kalja spat on the ground. ‘Then stay. They will feed on your eyes while you beg them to kill you.’

A low rumble of thunder ran along the earth. A long way to the south, the braying of war-horns could be heard. Somewhere out on the charred plains the endless armies were marching again, scouring for skulls. They would not venture this far north – there was nothing here but gnawed bones, the remains picked clean by scavengers centuries ago. Bloodreavers, though, would run down anything.

‘We have to go,’ said Kalja, brushing herself down and getting ready to run again. Her legs ached and her stomach growled from emptiness, but there was no alternative.

They broke into a run, all of them, Kalja and Svan at the forefront, limping and staggering north to where the delta awaited, staying alive for just a few more heartbeats amid a world that wished for nothing but to end them in agony.

Rakh chewed, savouring the tastes, the smells, the lumps of juice that rolled down his chin and trailed over his jerkin. He closed his eyes and drifted off into something like pleasure. He could feel the hot fluid flow into him, lending him divine strength. He licked his lips, and the metallic taste was sharp.

‘Enough,’ barked Sleikh, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. Long trails of blood smeared across his scar-latticed jaw. ‘More of them to come.’

Rakh scowled and grabbed for more meat. It might have been his imagination, but did the corpse twitch just a little? Always best to begin the feasting while they were still alive. The screams improved the taste, as did the tears.

You had to laugh when the tears came. All the others did. Fail to show enough enthusiasm, and when the famine-times arrived you might find yourself stretched over the knife-block yourself.

All around the gore-splattered campfire, Rakh’s fellow bloodreavers were clambering heavily to their feet. Night was creeping in, making the long thorn-shadows slither over the earth. The temperature was dropping fast, and he felt the bite of it under his armour-plates.

There were fifty of them – a big hunting pack. They would need to capture all the mortals they had spied if they were going to eat enough to stay lean and supple, and that did not account for those that would escape the feast and be permitted to join them.

The bloodreavers were not witless savages, and for those who merited it there was always a way to survive. The price was cheap – join in the meat-orgies, learn to savour the quivering fats of a human’s body, suck them up and roll them around your mouth while you spat out praises to the Lord of Blood.

Rakh had made that choice, a long time ago now. Every so often he remembered the first nights, when all he had wanted to do was retch, when he had rocked himself to fitful sleep, keeping his horror hidden lest it make him the next prey.

These days, he grinned to think of it. All had changed now. He had learned to relish the textures, the crisping skin pulled from the muscle, the polyps, the sleek veinous organs. He kept chewing, tonguing the flesh around his iron-capped teeth.

Sleikh raised himself up, sniffing the night air. The pack-leader’s red eyes stared, peering into blackness. Then he hissed, and a smile twisted his wolfish features.

‘They stink yet,’ he whispered, reaching for his bloody axe handle. ‘This way.’

The others crept closer, fingering their hooks, their axes, their chains. The weapons were poorly made, for who but the warlords of the Brass Keeps could command forges to give them what they needed? The bloodreavers were the scavengers, the gory-mawed beasts that prowled the flickering edges of camp-fires. They used whatever they could loot or fashion from the wilds, and that was enough to break flesh and flense muscle.

‘Follow,’ ordered Sleikh, loping out into the night.

Rakh darted after him, as did all the others, and the hunt resumed again.

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First published in Great Britain in 2015.
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