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Inferno! Volume 4 – Extract

A Black Library Publication

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An extract from
The Fourfold Wound

Across the realms, heads drew together in forgotten places.

The God-King, they said, gave out the gift of immortality as he saw fit – sometimes to the brave, or in the wake of great works, but sometimes to the ill or to spinsters or to layabouts.

You couldn’t work or worship your way into the graces of Sigmar. Not reliably. There were those – everyone had a daughter, a cousin, a father – who gave themselves to service in the armies of the free cities, then died a hard death and were gone.

Across the realms, resentments boiled over into talk, and talk bound comrades into enclaves of spite.

The God-King, they said, wasn’t fair.

They met in the cellars of public houses, in stables, in bathhouses. They met in every realm – in Shyish and Chamon and Ghur, even in Azyr. Human and duardin and aelf, they shared grievances and whispered and watched. They tracked the landfalls of Stormcast Eternals, read patterns in their deployments, studied the characters of the Stormhosts.

You learned quickly when you travelled the realms: there were forgotten people everywhere, and they were watching.

Shinua had travelled a long time and a long way to learn what they saw.

This far north, the guild-chartered maps of Ghyran still weren’t as reliable as they might have been. Ice caps jutted from waters that were drawn on cartographs as tundra; old settlements dotted coasts that the last surveys had marked as empty.

Shinua wondered whether it was the maps that were unreliable, or the geography. Out here on the edge of the Realm of Life, where even the Jade Kingdom’s verdancy retreated from the cold, even the air felt tentative – a frozen fog liable at any moment to give way to something impossible.

But she found what she was looking for. The northernmost island, Ark’non – called in some tongues ‘the Land of the Valorous’ – announced itself to ships with the red glow of a lighthouse lantern. She tied her sloop to a dock that moored only two other ships, started into the village without encountering another soul.

Night was falling quickly over the village’s precise grid of squat hovels and yurts. The roads were silent and empty except for a sledge pulled by three woolly, ivory-tusked beasts of burden. The rider was bundled so tightly into his sledge that Shinua didn’t see him at first, took the beasts for pilots without direction. Her breath clouded before her like a spirit familiar guiding the way, and she blinked against the frigid air, half-scared of her eyes freezing shut.

If she understood the cipher, she was searching for a smithy beneath an icon of eight crossed tusks. A longhouse under a sign of tusks stood before her, precisely where it was supposed to be.

Shinua raised a frost-stiff fist and rapped on the door.

No answer.

She pounded on the door again, more urgent this time, more careful to strike the heavy wood in the pattern described by her despatches. Two raps, a pause; two raps, a pause. And then the cadence repeated.

So I’ll freeze to death here, she thought. Knocking on the door of an empty house. She hacked out a painful laugh. Behind her, the neighbouring longhouses were quiet. The sledge was gone, and now the street was empty, lit only by the red glow above.

It would be a fine joke, surely: to track the despatches this far, to wrestle her sloop across cold seas, only to die frostbitten in an abandoned village at the edge of another land. The type of joke only a god would tell.

She started to knock again, but the door creaked open before her knuckles reached the wood. The face that stared back at her was sunburnt and serious and younger than her own. The girl – no older than ten – was bundled in grey pelts and rested a palm on the knife-sheath at her waist, holding the door open only a narrow gap.

‘Yes?’ said the child.

Now that she was here, facing someone much shorter than she’d expected, Shinua wasn’t quite sure what to say.

‘Are your parents here?’ she asked.

The girl shook her head. ‘They were beheaded and thrown into the sea.’

Her northern Ghyranese dialect lent the words a peculiar musicality, but Shinua felt sure she’d heard correctly.

‘I’m… very sorry,’ she managed.

The words turned to fog between them. The girl nodded once.

‘May I… may I come inside?’ Shinua tried.

‘You are welcome here by Guest Right,’ the girl said gravely. Shinua doubted the words had ever sounded less welcoming.

The girl stepped aside to admit Shinua, but kept her hand conspicuously at her sheath. The warmth inside the smithy was a wash of fire against Shinua’s face. She brushed frozen hair from her eyes, breathed as she felt blood traverse her limbs, and tried not to seem too desperately relieved.

If she’d worked out the chronology correctly, she had only hours left. The guild maps’ errors had eaten her time, and now this was becoming too near a thing.

The interior of the smithy was a sort of mandala, with every fur and tool and furnishing arranged around the centrepiece of the hearth and anvil. The forge shone with the same hue of crimson as the lighthouse – a red richer than flame. The glow seemed to cast no smoke, though there was an acrid smell to the air.

Seated by the hearth was a woman of at least seventy, who smiled uncertainly from beneath layers of ornately patterned blankets.

Shinua made a hasty bow. ‘I am Shinua Gan,’ she said. ‘I am here to–’

‘She’s quite a strong-looking girl,’ the old woman said.

Shinua hesitated.

‘A hard worker, I’d wager.’

‘Grandmother is called Hesh-yeh to one housed under Guest Right,’ said the girl, hand still on her knife with all the discipline of a palace guard. ‘I am called Nor.’

Shinua spread her hands in a display of harmlessness. ‘Thank you, Nor,’ she said. ‘Thank you, Hesh-yeh. I am here to–’

‘Would she like some soup?’ asked Hesh-yeh. ‘She looks hungry. We have a mighty lot of soup. Leek and salted eel.’

Shinua forced a smile. The old woman by the hearth didn’t look like a purveyor of anti-Azyrite intelligence. Shinua’s own grandmother would have been a more likely suspect: ninety when she died but still lean and shrewd and entirely capable of slitting a bull’s throat. But Shinua had met many unlikely dissidents in her travels; she pressed on, speaking more quickly now.

‘I am here to speak in the circle of the eye,’ she said, drawing up her sleeve to reveal the tattoos on the inside of her forearm: her old Freeguilder garrison tattoo, cancelled with a jagged line of red ink. And above it, closer to her heart, an eye encircled by radiating arrows. ‘I have questions.’

‘She has tattoos!’ said Hesh-yeh.

‘Yes,’ Nor agreed.

‘So lovely.’ The old woman leaned forwards to admire the ink-work.

Nor sidled behind her grandmother and discreetly, without moving her palm from her sheath, lifted the sleeve of her knife-hand. The tattoo on her arm wasn’t quite the same as Shinua’s – it was more finely drawn, and the circle around the eye was a sort of sunburst halo. The ink was red. But the meaning was the same.

‘I will show the guest to her bedroll and dry clothes,’ said Nor, and hurried Shinua up a ladder to a cramped loft. The bunk was lit by a brazier that shone with the same crimson as the hearth below. The girl sat on the bedroll with crossed legs, her head bowed slightly so as not to hit the crossbeams of the roof, and Shinua attempted to echo the position.

‘The question,’ Nor whispered.

‘You’re… the Watcher of Ark’non?’ Shinua asked, careful to keep her voice low. ‘You wrote these?’ She drew the Watcher’s reports from her satchel.

Nor inclined her head. ‘And so?’

She was a child. How was this possible? Shinua steadied her thoughts. ‘I compile Watchers’ almanacs in Shyish. I received your reports a fortnight ago. The original dating is some time earlier.’

Every sighting of the God-King’s Stormcast Eternals, every known station and deployment, the name and biography of every claimed hero known to the recorders across the realms. The Watchers shared what they knew in a web of vellum and ciphers and post – information that wasn’t even secret, most of the time, but that told stories or posed questions when stitched together into an almanac.

What lands had the celestial armies claimed?

Who was hallowed and chosen?

Why?

This account that had started with Nor had come to Shinua from a Watcher in Ghur, who had it from a Watcher in Hysh. It had passed through many hands before hers, which made the document all the more puzzling.

‘The question,’ Nor repeated.

‘If you have the cipher right, if I do, you date a deployment of the Hammers of Sigmar to this night. This village. Is that what you intended to write?’

The child nodded in the red light. ‘Yes.’

‘How can you know that they will deploy here before it happens?’

‘Why do you wish to know this?’

Shinua weighed the prudence of honesty. At last, the tattooed eye shared between them swayed her to tell the truth. Or most of it.

‘One of Sigmar’s warriors wronged me. I will find him and make him answer for the crime.’

Nor brushed a strand of hair from her eyes and gazed appraisingly at Shinua.

‘What crime?’

Four oilskins arrayed in the blackened earth of the farmstead. They should have been too small to hold bodies, never mind three generations.

‘He betrayed my family to killers,’ said Shinua. ‘He betrayed my family while he lived, but the God-King claimed him as a hero.’

That seemed to satisfy the girl. She nodded.

‘I suppose,’ she said, ‘you must meet my brother, the Lordbreaker. He is the one to tell you about futures.’

The spikes of Shinua’s boots crunched ice as she and Nor hurried down the empty street, their breath rising like chimney-smoke into the red-black sky.

Smoke, Shinua thought. The hearth in Nor’s home had burned, but there was no smoke, and the air was clear. The forge had burned with the same crimson light as the brazier and the village’s vast lighthouse.

The girl wore a small mountain of grey-white furs that hunched over her head and amounted to an armour, trimmed with figures in black and gold. The pelt, Shinua realised, must have come from the little sledge-bearing mammoth-beasts.

If the bulk of the coat slowed Nor down, it didn’t show; she seemed more urgent in her stride than Shinua, darting gracefully across the ice. Or perhaps she was simply more accustomed to the cold. Shinua struggled to keep up, and was relieved when the girl stopped at the base of the lighthouse. Beyond, the tides spoke their cold, hushed language. The signal-light above flickered, like a guttering candle in the night.

Nor pounded on the lighthouse door: twice, a pause; twice, a pause. And then the pattern repeated. But no answer came. The girl fumbled in her furs for a skeleton key, unlocked and heaved open the door. It opened into an unadorned stairwell not much warmer than the street.

‘He lives here?’ Shinua asked. ‘Your brother?’

‘Yes,’ answered Nor, only a little breathless, taking two steps at a time.

‘You called him the Lordbreaker. Who did he break?’

‘Our village…’ she took a breath, ‘…is built on pelt and bone and blood. The tusks of marmut, mostly. Some whaling – in the season. Before, the Old Lords kept my people in thrall. They commanded the hunts and the smithing and they took the coin. They ate the fat and we ate the meat that rots. Anyone who opposed them was beheaded and thrown into the sea.’

‘So your brother broke the Old Lords,’ she said.

‘The horns of our whales and the tusks of our marmut and the blood of our veins – they are of great value. The Old Lords sold our labour to the Kharadron of Barak-Laskar, and to the Azyrite free cities.’ Nor turned her back to Shinua and started up the stairs again. ‘The free world was happy to have their custom. But we ached and ate rot and died. My brother raised a revolt. Ark’non loves him for it.’

Shinua’s muscles burned as they climbed. As they approached the top of the lighthouse, Nor began to call what must have been her brother’s name: ‘Sgon, Sgon.’ Her tone was between a warning and a question, but no answer came.

They reached the tower’s apex. A wave of heat struck Shinua as they entered the room – welcome, but wrong, smokeless and subtler than it should have been. In the centre of the space was a hearth much larger than the forge in the smithy – this was a sanguinary pyre, piled high with obsidian bones. There was a pattern in the architecture of the pyre, a shape that Shinua couldn’t quite name. Small, unburnt bones were scattered on the floor, knuckles or digits or ribs.

Before the pyre lay a young man’s form, pale and bled from the wrist.

Nor took a hesitant step towards the dead boy, glanced back at Shinua. Her older-than-her-age composure was gone, replaced by incomprehension. Her wide eyes darted fearfully around the room. ‘What happened?’ she asked.

Sgon the Lordbreaker’s right hand held a knife, the blade brown with blood that had nearly dried. He was dressed in a robe of black and gold. A trail of his blood ran from the rim of the pyre to a pool around his arm.

For a moment, the light turned black. Not a darkness, but a shadow-light. Then it was red again. A guttering candle.

‘You should be with your grandmother,’ Shinua said quietly. As far as she’d come, as hard as she had fought to be here, she wasn’t prepared to see a child through loss. Nor knelt by her brother, but didn’t touch him.

‘He did this… to himself?’ she asked.

Shinua looked out the aperture of the lighthouse at the emptiness of the night sea. Snow had begun to fall.

‘He saw visions in the fire,’ said Nor, nodding to the lighthouse pyre. ‘That was your question. He knew the Hammers of the God-King would come to raze Ark’non because he saw it in the fire.’

This boy wrote the future, and then removed himself from it. The thought made her shiver.

‘Why would the God-King want to raze this place?’ Shinua asked.

‘Sgon taught us rage as a catechism,’ she said softly. ‘He taught us to hone our wrath and blood into pure and liberating fire. The God-King does not sanction rage other than his own.’

The room’s curved walls bore vellum maps of nearby islands. Stone-scrawled ideograms that Shinua couldn’t read, racks upon racks of obsidian tusks carved into fine bladed weapons. In one corner, a small cot by a desk messy with papers. The home of a revolutionary.

The pyre flashed black again.

‘Do you know how he saw his visions in the fire?’ Shinua asked softly. Her conscience twisted uncomfortably at this pressing of the grieving girl. She thought of her own brother Hsien, burned. The charred remnants of a life, gathered and wrapped in oilskin. As a boy, Hsien had looked up to the man Shinua hunted now; he would have loved that the bastard became a Stormcast Eternal.

Nor looked up at her, wet eyes reflecting a warbling light.

‘The oracle bones. And fire and blood. That is how everything is done here. The bone of the beasts of the ground and sea. Horns and tusks and limbs. Lacquered with the blood of…’ She looked down. ‘One of us. One born of the old families of Ark’non. The Valorous. Lacquered until the bone is black…’

Her voice failed her. She stared at her brother’s sprawled form. Shinua was silent, and after a moment, the girl recovered her words.

‘When it burns,’ Nor said, ‘the fire is holy. The kiss of the flame twists metal, but its glow is a small warmth. It spoke to Sgon. Tongues of fire. It told him what was to pass.’

The tusks on the racks around her. The skeletal construction in the lighthouse pyre. The bones of Hesh’yeh’s forge. All black with the blood of the Valorous.

Who had bled? How much wrath and blood had Ark’non given itself over to? Shinua kept the question to herself, stared into the fire that seemed liable, now, to speak. Then her gaze travelled past the fire to the night sky beyond, and the breath caught in her throat, and all the warmth of the pyre receded.

The stars were falling.

She rushed to the aperture. Above, dark thunderheads parted like mouths and an army of light spilled from the sky.

The descent was silent at first. Then, a shock of sound buckled the atmosphere.

‘Gods,’ said Shinua, startling herself with the words. ‘They’re here.’

Nor climbed to her feet. The fear and grief and exhaustion written across her face made her painful to behold.

‘Grandmother,’ she said. ‘They will kill her.’

‘Her?’ Shinua asked, then felt foolish.

She knew the stories of the God-King’s annihilations. She had compiled the accounts in the almanac.

Nor heaved a carved black tusk from the racks, struggling to lift it by its one leather grip halfway down the blade. ‘She is the armourer,’ Nor said, sounding panicked. ‘She lacquered every wartusk. They will kill her.’

The weapon was clearly meant to be wielded one-handed, slung under the forearm of an adult warrior. It was a sad burden in Nor’s hands. The girl strained to raise the tip of the blade into the pyre.

Outside, the points of light in the sky brightened and grew larger, like sudden morning was dawning.

It’s real now, Shinua thought. The anger of Sigmar was falling towards her.

‘I’ll carry it for you,’ she said. ‘Stay with me. I’ll protect you.’

Nor appraised her for a moment, then held out the wartusk. Shinua hefted the weapon and dipped it in the signal pyre. Crimson flame danced up the length of the blade with a whisper of ignition.

She grabbed a clutch of oracle bones from the floor and stuffed them in her coats.

‘Down,’ she said. ‘Run.’

Nor spared a last glance for her brother and then ran down the spiral stairway, taking three steps at a time. Shinua was behind her, desperate to descend and desperate not to topple Nor, straining to hold the tusk aloft. The blade scored the stone of the wall.

Breathlessly, they tumbled out of the lighthouse and into the cold. She could make out shapes in the radiance now: humanoid forms, some winged; hammers and standards and great bows in silhouette, a luminous judgement.

Around them, the Valorous left their yurts, eyes turned to the lights above. Women and men dressed in black-trimmed furs like Nor’s. Many carried tusks that glowed crimson. Every blade black with blood, lacquered by Hesh’yeh. The people of Ark’non gathered in clusters outside their homes, and they stared at the sky not in awe or bewilderment but in defiance.

They knew. They knew this was coming.

The first blaze of golden light struck the lighthouse. A concussion, a shattering more primordial than thunder. The ground quaked. Shinua risked a glance over her shoulder. Stonework toppled in a flare of auric wash, and the signal pyre was extinguished. Tundra and white stone-dust rose where the tower collapsed, and a gold glow issued from within the cloud of destruction.

Another impact, another rippling of earth beneath them. Nor nearly fell; Shinua steadied her with her free hand. The snowfall thickened, and all at once it felt like the entire realm was falling in on them. Homes cracked and burned, the ground shook as the storm of warriors descended around them.

A shout. Through the sleet, Shinua caught a glimpse of a figure in golden armour, grand and wrong in stature, a head taller than any human she had known. The Stormcast Eternal loomed over one of the island’s tusk-wielding defenders; it raised a warhammer the length of her torso and swung it into the ribs of the Valorous, whose upper body snapped backwards at an awful angle.

The corpse landed bloody in the snow, and the Stormcast turned its impassive mask towards Shinua. An expressionless face was carved into the metal of its armour – or perhaps that was its face, a study in uncaring, holy grandeur.

‘Run!’ Shinua shouted, to the girl or to herself. Her lungs burned as she sucked frozen air. Where were they running? The smithy and Nor’s grandmother? The old woman was doomed already; everything was doomed. Shinua had what she came for, or near enough – the bone and blood to kindle an oracular fire, to know where the Stormcasts would fall.

Take the girl and make for the dock, said a voice in her head, clear and urgent in the chaos.

Right now, they were running towards both the docks and the forge. But another block and she would have to choose.

A golden blaze like a comet careened over their heads towards the smithy. With horrible, majestic inevitability, it fell into the forge and exploded in a riot of sound. Snow and wood and earth erupted in a spume where the longhouse had been. Nor screamed. After the shock, Shinua felt a sick-making relief. She grasped Nor’s shoulder with her free hand.

‘We have to run for the dock!’ Shinua shouted.

Nor turned to her, eyes full of empty horror, tears turning to ice on her cheeks. Then she was looking past Shinua.

She twisted around to find the Stormcast warrior stalking towards her. Liberator, she thought with wry despair. These foot-soldiers of Sigmar were called Liberators. The thing’s stride was massive, and blood stained its armour. Thin scrolls flapped from the edges of deep blue pauldrons, the colour of night falling. It was calling her name.

‘Shinua,’ said the Liberator.

Oh gods, she thought. Oh gods, oh gods.

It was one thing to hate the God-King’s power from afar. But here was divine wrath in front of her, speaking her name.

‘Shinua,’ it said. ‘Shin?’

A question.

The Liberator latched its warhammer to its belt and raised its enormous hands to its helm. Removed the stoic mask that might have been a face.

Underneath: wet, messy hair. A jagged nose and receding hairline. Tired eyes. Immortal now, and still tired.

‘Shinua?’ said Halas.

‘Halas,’ she breathed.

He would have some new name now – some heroic, eternal name. She didn’t care. His armour seemed too large for him. He’d always stood tall, but not this tall. The sigmarite gold seemed to consume him. Shinua stepped towards Halas, her feet moving on their own. The snow fell around them.

‘How are you here?’ Halas asked. ‘Are you real?’ He paused. ‘Sometimes I see you when I close my eyes.’

The snowflakes turned to steam when they fell on his face. But he was flesh, right there in front of her. His skin flush and wet with sweat, the old scar still on his brow.

‘I’m real,’ she said. ‘I was looking for you.’

And it was true. But she wasn’t prepared for the moment to be now. She’d expected months – maybe years – of scrying and searching.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I know that’s worthless to you, but it’s all I have. I am so sorry.’

‘Tell me what happened,’ Shinua said. Her voice was level; a peculiar calm had settled on her.

Halas inhaled. ‘I disgraced myself.’

‘You were drunk.’

‘I was drunk on my post. You’ve known me a long time. You never saw me drink on watch, did you?’

For twelve years of his mortal life, he had been posted as a solitary watchman in the Freeguild outpost on the Gan farmstead. An eye and sword against the bandits and predators of Ghyran. She had seen him every day of her childhood, and he had been kind to her and her brother Hsien, taught them swordplay and taken their enthusiasms seriously. He was too eager to be liked, perhaps, or to share unlikely tales of his old wars. But he was neither a drunkard nor a shirker of duties.

‘Why, then?’ she asked.

‘I don’t know. I was stuck in melancholy and felt my years. Your parents kept a cask of Azyrite wine and the sky seemed heavy. I…’ He hesitated. ‘I had felt a weight over me in dark hours for some long time.’

The Halas she had known – the Halas who had been her teacher and friend – told his tales eagerly. He had spun out a myth of himself facing down orruk cavalries, felling undead gargants.

She had believed in Halas. She had idolised him.

‘And what happened when you were drunk?’

‘The outlanders,’ he said quietly.

‘The bandits from the outlands. They came for the cattle. The grain. They burned everything that remained.’

He was silent.

‘When one of your mates in the garrison leaves his post,’ she said, ‘or breaks his oath, or turns tail, he loses his sash and his life. Soldier’s justice.’

‘I’m so sorry,’ he said.

She saw Halas as he was when he came to them, a decade younger and stubbled, a scar across his brow but his face somehow childish, soft with a capacity for awe. The Gans had welcomed him and fed him their bread; her father had helped build furniture for the soldier’s quarters in the watch-station.

‘They trusted you,’ she said.

‘I know.’

He was barely audible. He couldn’t meet her eyes.

‘Look,’ she said. ‘Look at me.’

He looked up. Shinua showed him the scratched-out garrison tattoo on the inside of her forearm: a skull with skeletal hands over its eyes. He had the same tattoo.

‘I left home to be like you. Someone who could keep watch. I trusted you to keep them safe while I was gone.’

‘I’m so sorry.’

He was right. His sorriness was worthless to her.

‘Four lives you owe me,’ she said. ‘This one is for Hsien.’

She reared back and swung the wartusk up and into his throat.

The burning blade tore through his jaw and into his skull. Immortal blood stained his armour and sizzled against her blade.

His heavy form slackened and fell.

Nor gaped at her. Shinua stared at the body of the Stormcast, watched Halas’ lifeblood spill from his throat into the snow.

One life. One of Halas’ endless lives, taken.

Her hand shook.

All at once, the body hurled away from her and into the sky, as if plucked from the earth by invisible lines. Lightning crashed. Shinua could almost trace the passage of the corpse into the sky, an afterimage against the snow.

One debt paid.

‘I have a ship at the dock,’ said Shinua. She was shaken, but steadying. She smiled down at Nor, and tried to look like she knew what she was doing. The child’s world was in flames. The air was steam and ash. Everyone Nor had ever known was dead already or would die by the hammer.

‘Come with me,’ said Shinua.

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