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Lady of Sorrows – Extract

A Black Library Publication

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CHAPTER ONE

The Belvegrod lighthouse was a relic of another age. It stood atop a great spire of rock that stretched away from the jagged cliff face like the prow of a ship. A sheer drop of two hundred feet from the edge before the murky depths of Graveswater, and still another two hundred feet from the summit of the cliff to the pinnacle of the lighthouse. Colossal in scale, the tower might have been raised by gargants such was its enormity. It was the tremendous scope of its construction as much as its place atop the cliff that was credited with the structure’s survival. It was the only part of Belvegrod that had withstood the cataclysm that drowned the rest of the city centuries ago.

Kvetka always felt a sense of awe when she looked up at the lighthouse. Hundreds of legends were told about it by her people, passed down from parent to child over countless generations. The descendants of those who’d fled Belvegrod’s destruction spoke of the last Keeper of the Light, standing fast at his post as the waters rolled over the city. First his voice had been raised in prayers to Sigmar for deliverance, but as the catastrophe grew worse he began to curse the God-King with the obscenest oaths. Finally, the Keeper’s mind broke and his mad laughter crackled across the desolation, chilling the refugees as they fled the rising tide.

Though it was claimed by the Azyrites that the lighthouse had been cleansed of any malevolent gheists, Kvetka’s people knew better. A place as old as the tower was not so easily parted from its past. The Keeper’s mad spirit still walked in the night, climbing the steps to his eternal post. The only sure way to escape his spectral attentions was to carry a hoop of wolfbloom inside the left shoe or the left glove. A gheist was always drawn to the sinister side of a person, but the spurs of the wolfbloom would turn it away.

Kvetka flexed her gloved fingers and winced as the sharp spurs scraped her skin. ‘You don’t really believe in that,’ she told herself. Certainly the Azyrites disdained what they considered heathen superstition. They took no safeguards against the Keeper’s gheist and none of them had run afoul of his spirit. The Reclaimed had an answer for that, of course. Her people said the gheist only showed itself to those who belonged in Belvegrod, not to outsiders.

The Azyrites made it easy to dislike them. They were a proud and haughty people, arrogant in their customs and manners. They weren’t of Shyish and never failed to seize a moment when they could remind the Reclaimed of that fact. Their eyes had beheld the wonders of Azyrheim and the Celestial Realm and for them there was no other standard of quality. They had no time for the traditions and sensitivities of others, still less for trying to understand.

‘Careful, Kvetka, or you will start sounding like Ivor,’ she chided herself. She pulled her cloak a bit tighter about her shoulders to fight the chill wafting up the cliff from Graveswater. She looked back down the winding trail to the city below.

No, Kvetka corrected herself, not a city but rather two towns. Two settlements that were as distinct from one another as a duardin and an orruk. The Twinned Towns, they were called by travellers, but only because of their proximity to one another. Both had been raised upon the ruins of the old city when the flood was drawn away by the magic of Sigmar’s Stormcasts. A part of Belvegrod was exposed, expanding the island on which the lighthouse stood.

The colonists from Azyr, following in the wake of Sigmar’s knights, established the town of Westreach. They used the old ruins as a quarry, razing what had been to build homes such as they’d known in their own realm. The Reclaimed settled the other half of the island, creating the town of Eastdale. They didn’t tear down the ruins but rather sought to restore them, to recover something of the glories of their ancestors.

Left to their own, the two peoples kept themselves apart. The townmasters made an effort to foster a sense of comradeship between the communities, but the gulf between them was too wide to bridge. The Azyrites were determined to change everything into a semblance of their own realm. They refused to understand the Reclaimed and their determination to recover the legacy of their own past.

Only at the Belvegrod lighthouse did the two communities regularly interact. Here the wise came together to conduct their studies, seeking to unlock the mysteries of past, present… and future.

The future. Kvetka shivered when she considered what that meant for the Twinned Towns. They existed under a baleful curse that infected them all with misery and despair. Each night, phantoms from the ruins came to prowl and prey upon the living. There was hardly a family in either settlement that hadn’t lost someone to the undead. Yet even that was nothing beside the doom that hovered over them all. The Twinned Towns were plagued as no other place by the nighthaunts. Once a generation a great host of the fiends would lay siege to them, driving the people before them like a tidal wave. Commanded by the remorseless Lady of Sorrows, the spectres would sweep over the communities, killing all they caught. For hundreds of years the pattern had been repeated. Each time, the people were driven to the very brink of destruction, but miraculously escaped annihilation. The phantom hosts would falter in the end, receding back into the mists to regather their strength, to await the hour when the Lady of Sorrows would call them once more from their graves.

The future. Was there any for the Twinned Towns aside from this cursed cycle of death and destruction? The answer to that question was what those gathered in the lighthouse sought so keenly. Hope for their people.

Kvetka quickened her step as the path plateaued and she drew closer to the base of the lighthouse. Four guards stood outside the massive iron doors set into the tower’s granite walls. Two wore the gilded armour of Westreach, their breastplates sculpted into the sharp beaks of gryphons. The other two wore the studded hauberks of Eastdale, charms and talismans hanging about their necks. The Azyrite guards moved to bar her path, but the Reclaimed soldiers gave them a sharp look and they desisted. Kvetka thanked the men from her town and walked past the guard post. The iron doors loomed before her. As she reached for them, they were suddenly drawn back.

Standing in the doorway was a man she’d hoped to avoid. The Azyrite had a dusky complexion, with eyes like pools of frost. His pure white hair was cut close to his skull, little more than fuzz. His face was sharp and vulturine, devoid of warmth and compassion. Those were qualities that many of Sigmar’s warrior priests made an effort to cultivate, but not Mahyar. His was a harsh and uncompromising kind of faith – a faith in which all were found wanting.

Especially if their blood was that of Shyish rather than Azyr.

Mahyar gave her a cold look. ‘Ivor has been waiting for you,’ the priest stated, his voice as pleasant as a drawn dagger.

Even among the Reclaimed, there were few who cared to cross words with Mahyar. Kvetka was one of those few.

‘Hierophant Ivor,’ she dared to correct the priest. ‘His rank is due the same respect as yours, Elder Mahyar.’

Fire boiled up in the priest’s eyes. ‘Save your sharp tongue for Ivor. He is the one who believes your presence here has some value.’ Mahyar stepped aside and gestured to the great winding stair that circled the tower’s central column. ‘They’re in the observatory.’

Kvetka gave him a puzzled look. ‘Will you not be attending the augury?’

‘Once I have rendered my prayers to Sigmar and requested his wisdom in interpreting the import of these divinations, I shall return for the augury,’ Mahyar replied superciliously.

‘Oh,’ Kvetka said. ‘I won’t delay you then. It would be a tragedy if your insight was absent. I don’t know how we should accomplish anything without your guidance.’ A puckish smile was on her face when she turned and made her way to the spiral stair. It was probably too much to ask that Sigmar cause one of his own priests to get lost on the way back to Westreach, but she couldn’t help wishing for such a happy occurrence. There were many admirable people in the Sigmarite temple, clergy who strove to treat Azyrite and Reclaimed alike with dignity and consideration. There were also pompous zealots like Mahyar, people so certain of their own rectitude that they treated anyone different with intolerance and contempt.

Yes, Kvetka supposed it was too much to wish Mahyar would break his leg on the way down from the lighthouse, but she made that wish just the same.

Perhaps Kvetka would stumble and break a leg on her way up the lighthouse. It was an uncharitable thing for a priest to wish harm upon someone for anything as petty as the irritation Kvetka always provoked in him, but Mahyar couldn’t help the feeling. He’d have to wear a hair shirt under his vestments on the morrow as penance for his resentment of the scholar. There was a difference between upholding the conventions of Sigmar’s temple and baser, personal enmity. He wasn’t so arrogant as to excuse himself for what he knew was a failing of his own character.

Over the years he’d let Kvetka’s impertinence get to him. She took a wicked delight in challenging his authority, never allowing an opportunity to defy him escape. Mahyar was too honest to abuse his position and retaliate. He’d seen for himself that Kvetka’s animosity was directed at him alone. She was respectful enough to other priests, and made all the proper observations to the God-King. No, it was a personal dislike between them, the cause of which Mahyar couldn’t remember. It no longer mattered. Their mutual hostility didn’t need a reason to endure.

Mahyar paused when he reached the guard post outside the tower. He craned his neck back and saw that the immense perspicillum was slowly extending out from the spire of the lighthouse. He indulged in a brief smile. Ivor was always urging haste, frantic that everything and everyone should be assembled as quickly as possible, yet every time the result was the same. Everything would be in readiness and everyone would wait. Try as he might, Ivor couldn’t hurry the astrological conjunctions that governed the science of divination.

The priest’s footsteps echoed through the lighthouse as he ascended the spiral stairway. The many libraries, studies and laboratories inside the tower were empty now. Everyone was up in the observatory, waiting for the stars to fall into alignment. It was an eerie feeling, to know that he was the only person among all those chambers and corridors. It was a solitude far different from the cell of contemplation in the temple. There, even in isolation, he knew there were other people around. Here, he was alone. That primal, irrational part of his brain magnified every stray sound that reached his ears. Though he would never say it, Mahyar could understand why the Reclaimed imagined the Keeper’s gheist haunting the tower. The faint sound of water dripping in some distant room became creeping footsteps. A draught from some crack in the wall became the touch of spectral fingers. Such superstition was rightly condemned, but Mahyar appreciated why it persisted.

A third of the way up the tower voices drifted down to Mahyar. Sometimes he could pick out an isolated word, distinguish an individual voice, but overall it was as intelligible as a cataract’s rumble. Still, it was enough to fend off that sense of loneliness as he climbed the stair.

At the top of the stairs, a set of gilded doors opened onto the observatory. In times past, the great light had resided here, throwing its rays across Graveswater to guide ships to Belvegrod’s port. The old assemblage for the light, a fabulous mechanism crafted by duardin engineers in a bygone age, still dominated the round room. The light itself, however, had been removed, its role taken over by two lesser beacons constructed by the people of Westreach and Eastdale. Instead, the revolving platform that had once served the light now acted as the base for the perspicillum.

The telescope was immense in its proportions, with a framework of shining bronze inlaid with runes of gold and silver. Within its cylindrical body were concentric rings of the same material, each stamped with their own layers of runes. Mahyar could read enough of the duardin characters to know that many related to vision and distance, perception and understanding. He also knew that the lenses within the perspicillum weren’t fashioned from glass, but rather the shed scales of stardrakes polished and cut until they were as thin as parchment and as transparent as water. These panes were then set into round sigmarite frames, the celestial metal binding the lenses so securely that even falling down the steps of the tower couldn’t dislodge them.

For all that he put his own trust in omens from his god, Mahyar couldn’t help but respect the exacting craftsmanship that had gone into constructing the perspicillum.

The priest turned his attention away from the telescope to the room around it. Scholars sat about the desks, quills in hand, ink and parchment ready before them. He briefly watched Kvetka as she tested the keenness of her quill. Unsatisfied, she began sharpening it with a knife she took from her belt. He frowned when he saw her tap the blade against the edge of her desk three times before returning it to its sheath. If there was any activity the Reclaimed conducted that didn’t have some superstition attached to it, he’d yet to discover it.

The desks of the scholars dominated the left half of the observatory. The right half had been surrendered to charts and diagrams, each exactingly represented on a sheet of vellum that was fastened to an ebony frame. The men and women who walked among the stands and consulted the drawings were a mixed group. Most of the wizards from both of the Twinned Towns were here, from grey-headed masters to eager young apprentices. None among those who studied the arcane arts in Westreach and Eastdale would miss one of these auguries if they could help it. They weren’t alone, however. Mixed in among the wizards were priests of Sigmar, their white robes providing a marked contrast to the colourful raiment of the mages. The priests were here to offer guidance and support, to invoke Sigmar’s favour for the divinations being conducted. At least, that was the more comforting aspect of their presence. Magic, even the most benign kind, could be a capricious servant. There were times when the power invoked by a wizard became uncontrollable and would wreak havoc on the bodies and souls of those it afflicted. Though the lighthouse was defended by innumerable wards and arcane barriers, there was always the threat of a spell running amok or a daemon manifesting itself. If such happened, it was the role of the priests to subdue both cause and effect, to prevent anything conjured within the tower from escaping into the towns below.

‘I began to think you wouldn’t make it back, brother.’ The words were spoken by a tall, emaciated man with a dreamy expression. He wore a golden hammer on a chain around his neck and upon his shorn scalp the same symbol had been branded. His raiment was cut in the same fashion as one of Sigmar’s prelates, but where the priests’ robes were white, his were a bright blue. His hands clenched a staff topped by a golden icon shaped after the twin-tailed comet of Sigmar.

‘Bairam, it is good to see you.’ Mahyar felt like a fool as soon as the words left his tongue. The man in the blue robes was an augur, a holy man who’d surrendered his sight in order to focus completely upon the spiritual rather than the physical world. His eyes were completely white, as lifeless as a boiled egg.

‘You understand if I cannot return the sentiment,’ Bairam chuckled at Mahyar’s discomfort. There was no malice in his levity, but rather assurance that he didn’t resent the error. For all that he was blind, he had a remarkable sense for reading the emotions of those around him. Bairam called it his second sight, an ability to perceive the nature of people he encountered. He could evaluate the health of a person merely by standing in the same room with them and few were the liars who could deceive him for more than the most fleeting of moments.

‘I confess I’m surprised to find you here,’ Mahyar said as he helped guide Bairam across the observatory; the augur might be able to perceive a living presence after his strange fashion, but he wasn’t so capable when it came to desks and lecterns. ‘It is usually your custom to ignore these divinations.’

Bairam nodded. ‘Indeed,’ he said. ‘Many times these rituals reveal nothing of consequence. But today, when I sat before Sigmar’s altar in adoration, I was gripped by a compulsion to come here.’ His fingers tightened on Mahyar’s arm. ‘Tonight,’ he pronounced, ‘they will learn something of consequence.’

Mahyar had heard such assurances from wizards and scholars at every one of these rituals. Never had he given their words any importance. When Bairam said it, however, it gave him a feeling of foreboding. He looked aside at the perspicillum and the two duardin engineers who were operating it. The great telescope now extended twenty feet through the hatch in the observatory’s domed roof. The ceiling was rotating along with the platform, angling so that it was in the proper alignment.

What was it, Mahyar wondered, that they were going to find tonight?

Kvetka felt the shudder that rolled through the lighthouse as the perspicillum was brought into position and locked into place by the duardin. She glanced up at the narrow band of sky exposed by the open ceiling. The stars were dim and ghostly, their rays as wholesome as an open grave. She turned her eyes towards the Azyrite scholar seated at the desk beside her. Envy swelled in her chest. The man’s ancestors had come from another realm, from a place where the sky was beautiful and bright, not menacing and ghoulish. Even if he himself had never seen it, he’d have heard stories passed down through his family, stories about the land they’d come from.

She looked back to the giant telescope. She wasn’t about to let anything as petty as unreasoning jealousy distract her now. Let the Azyrites have their stories. Deny it as hard as they wanted, they were people of Shyish now. No more for them the ease and security of Sigmar’s realm. They must endure the horrors of Nagash’s haunted dominion just like the Reclaimed. They would never make these lands like those they’d left behind, however hard they tried. The sooner the Azyrites understood that, the better things would be for them all.

Ivor walked towards the perspicillum. He was an old man with a long silver beard and pale skin, dressed in golden robes. Most learned of the wizards of Eastdale, he’d ascended to the position of hierophant and governor of the lighthouse by careful politicking as much as for his arcane skills. Ivor knew how to appease his detractors and under his leadership a new co-operation had been reached between the wizards and the Temple of Sigmar, though the gap between Reclaimed and Azyrite was less easily bridged.

‘Comrades and colleagues,’ Ivor called out when he stood at the perspicillum. Kvetka thought he must have worked some minor spell to project his voice, for his words sounded as though he were standing right next to her.

Now that all eyes were turned towards him, Ivor continued. ‘The time is upon us once more. The constellations favour our endeavours.’ He pointed his finger up at the ceiling. ‘Our vision shall be cast out across the realm. We shall stare upon the edge of Shyish! The perspicillum will reveal to us that place where the grains of tomorrow drain away into the infinite.’ He turned his pointing finger upon his audience, making no distinction between wizard, priest or scholar. ‘A last warning, my friends. To hunt the future is to pursue the ultimate unknown. What is revealed to us may be the seed of hope or the blight of despair. Those unprepared for the latter would do well to leave now.’

There was a stir among the crowd as a few of the scholars left their desks and removed themselves. Kvetka felt a pang of sympathy. Those who left were young, and this was their first time sitting at one of the divination rites. She could remember her own initiation, twenty years ago, and how overwhelmed she had been by everything. She’d been tempted to walk out too. Only pride had kept her in her chair, an unwillingness to belittle herself in front of Azyrites.

‘Do not begrudge them their reticence,’ Ivor said. For just a moment Kvetka saw him focus on the augur Bairam and a worried look came onto the wizard’s face. ‘Perhaps after we read the portents, we will wish that we too had absented ourselves.’

The hierophant said no more. Turning to the duardin, he gave them a brief nod. One engineer worked a flywheel at the back of the perspicillum, the other threw a series of levers along the telescope’s side. A low, ghostly moan rattled through the observatory. A grey light erupted from an angled tube at the back of the device. Upon the smoothed dome of the ceiling the light flickered, hazy and indistinct. Ivor now joined the duardin in their labours, helping them adjust the machinery.

From a grey haze, the image being projected upon the ceiling now resolved itself into clarity. Kvetka watched as a rippling wave slowly undulated across the dome: not a liquid tide, but a gritty stream of grains. They were looking upon the sifting gravesands that gathered on the edge of Shyish. Each mote of substance was the crystallisation of a lost tomorrow, all the days and hours stripped away from the dead.

The gathered wizards were intent upon the projected image. Kvetka could feel the atmosphere in the observatory change as they drew on their magic. Each of them reached out to the distant gravesands, seeking to draw meaning from the sifting grains. As some fragment of wisdom was drawn out of the cascade, the gleaning wizard would call out the impression that was conveyed. Random words, shards of a greater whole, but the scholars dutifully copied every word that they distilled from the babble.

Kvetka had a talent for this part of the rite. Over the years she’d honed her concentration like a razor, able to focus upon one thing and ignore all others. Ivor himself was always impressed by her method and had often bemoaned the fact that so few scholars were able to emulate her ability. If they could, then each could record a different wizard and nothing would be lost during the ritual.

Tonight, Kvetka’s focus was on Gajevic, a thin, bookish wizard from Eastdale. Even if he was a wizard, she was still puzzled that Ivor had asked her to pay attention to such an unremarkable man. He was timid, awkward and always furtively looking for some avenue of escape when forced into any kind of social interaction; there was nothing that impressed Kvetka as important about Gajevic.

Clearly, however, something had impressed Bairam. Kvetka could see the Sigmarite augur faced towards Gajevic, his blind eyes staring emptily at the wizard. That, she was now certain, was why Ivor had requested she pay close attention to Gajevic: some premonition Bairam had that was related to him.

‘Crypt’ was the first word Kvetka wrote down. It was far from the last. Over the course of an hour there were many others. Alone they had no meaning. Later, like pieces of a puzzle, they would try to fit them together into some coherent revelation.

Four sheets of parchment were filled with Gajevic’s words. The ink on Kvetka’s quill changed in hue as time passed, from black to blue and then to a fiery orange. It was vital the sequence of the words be known if there was to be any meaning gleaned from them, a purpose the changeling ink fulfilled.

It was as Kvetka was starting on a fifth sheet of parchment that Gajevic’s voice rose in a scream. There was no need for anyone to write down the words he shouted.

‘The Lady of Sorrows!’ Gajevic cried, before collapsing to the floor. In the same instant, the projected image on the ceiling lost its focus. Ivor and the duardin tried to restore the projection while several of the watching priests moved to examine Gajevic. The hierophant and the engineers failed to bring back the perspicillum’s picture of the gravesands, but the priests were able to rouse Gajevic from his stupor.

‘What happened? Is the ritual over?’ Gajevic asked as he was helped back to his feet.

It was the stern warrior priest Mahyar who answered the wizard. ‘You screamed,’ he said. His eyes took on a steely glint and Kvetka could see his fingers curling about the knife on his belt. ‘You invoked something profane before you collapsed.’

Gajevic gaped at Mahyar, utterly oblivious to the menace in his tone or the knife that could be drawn in the next heartbeat. ‘I screamed?’ He ran his hands through his hair, as though he could knead the answer into his brain. ‘What does it mean?’

Kvetka rose from behind her desk. ‘We must study what the wizards have gleaned from the gravesands,’ she declared. Her voice was loud enough to carry across the observatory, but her eyes were fixed on Mahyar. ‘Then, perhaps, we’ll know what it means.’

Mahyar returned her scrutiny with a scowl, but his fingers drifted away from the knife. He walked over to join Bairam. For the moment, at least, the warrior priest appeared satisfied.

‘All of you, gather your notes,’ Ivor called to the scholars. ‘Bring them together and we will try to arrange them as they were spoken.’ He looked over to Kvetka. ‘Make a copy of what you have recorded. Denote each word in the order you wrote it down. We may want to refer back to the original.’

‘Yes, excellency,’ Kvetka replied. She didn’t question the request, though she’d never heard it made before. The usual practice was to cross out words as their place in the sequence was determined, yet Ivor wanted her original retained for consultation.

There was something else that was unusual. Deciphering the divination was a process that could take hours, if not days. Once they were satisfied the perspicillum hadn’t drawn some daemon back from the edge of the realm, the priests would make their departure.

This time, however, the priests made no move to leave. When Kvetka glanced over to where Mahyar was standing, he had an expectant look on his face. He was waiting for something.

Waiting. Mahyar was a zealous man, pious and sincere in his faith. There was nothing he wouldn’t do if he felt it to be Sigmar’s will. Yet the supreme test of faith for him was waiting. Inactivity. Enforced idleness. As the hours crawled by he imagined the damned in the lowest underworlds, tortured by their misdeeds.

‘Patience is the noblest virtue,’ Bairam said, his eerie senses picking up on Mahyar’s mood.

‘I was born in a hut slapped together from the rubble of a hovel,’ Mahyar stated. ‘There isn’t a speck of noble blood in my veins.’

Bairam chuckled at the retort. ‘Believe then that your perseverance isn’t without purpose.’ He waved his hand vaguely to where the scholars were cobbling together the results of the ritual. ‘You know that I surrendered my sight so that I might perceive the God-King’s will clearly. You’ve witnessed the veracity of my premonitions before. I tell you, never has an omen been borne to me with such intensity as the one that compelled me to attend tonight’s ritual. A revelation of great importance is before us.’

Mahyar looked towards the wizard Gajevic and considered the words he’d screamed. ‘Perhaps it would’ve been better if it was all for nothing.’

‘Perhaps,’ Bairam conceded, ‘but would it be better to prepare for a calamity before it strikes, or sit in blissful ignorance until its force cannot be escaped? The wheel of fate turns, with or without our consent. If there is a chance, however remote, to end this cycle of despair, would that not be worth knowing? The Twinned Towns will always exist at the edge of annihilation so long as the Lady of Sorrows threatens us, so long as her spectres prey upon our people and bleed the vitality from our community.’

Agitation among the scholars drew Mahyar’s attention. He saw a few of them rush into the observatory with stacks of books. They’d been consulting a wide array of scrolls and tomes, both sacred texts brought down from Azyr by the first colonists and eldritch volumes salvaged from Belvegrod’s dim past. The Azyrites preferred to rely upon the enlightened wisdom found in their books while the Reclaimed perused the superstitious dread of their ancestors – different interpretations that could seldom be reconciled. Mahyar knew the resulting debates could last for months as each faction argued some trifling nuance that favoured their own resources.

Ivor, however, was unwilling to allow the usual deliberations. He kept referring to one set of notes as a framework upon which everything else had to be built. Mahyar was irked to find this record the hierophant put so much value on had been written down by Kvetka.

‘My friends, the arguing of details is pointless,’ Ivor declared, trying to appease the arguing factions. He held up Kvetka’s notes. ‘We understand the pattern. We know what is before us.’

‘What is before us is doom,’ one of the Azyrite scholars moaned. ‘The revelation means doom to our people. The Lady of Sorrows is coming with her legions…’

‘She has come against us before with her armies,’ Mahyar interrupted. ‘By the grace and glory of Sigmar, we’ve defied her efforts to wipe us out.’

‘It’s been twenty years since she attacked our towns,’ another scholar stated.

‘Then we’re about due to suffer her attentions again,’ Mahyar said. ‘Take courage,’ he advised the frightened scholar. ‘Courage is the best armour against the nighthaunts. We’ve beaten back the undead before. If we remain stalwart, we shall do so again.’

Kvetka stood up from her desk. She pounced on Mahyar’s last word as if it were the choicest of morsels. ‘What if there never had to be another “again”? What if we could ensure our towns need never fear the Lady of Sorrows?’

Ivor nodded as she spoke. He stepped to her side and lifted up the combined text she’d been compiling. ‘That is the revelation we have drawn from the gravesands. A way to break the malignant curse that threatens our communities. A way to fight back rather than meekly awaiting the next attack.’

Mahyar weighed the hierophant’s words. ‘How would we do this?’ he asked. ‘How would we strike against an enemy that’s already dead?’

‘By mounting an expedition against the one who calls the dead from their tombs,’ Kvetka said. ‘By moving against the Lady of Sorrows herself.’

‘Madness,’ one of the other scholars objected.

‘Necessity,’ Ivor corrected him. ‘We have a chance to fulfil prophecy. To break the endless cycle of destruction that has cursed our towns for so long. At last we can live in peace.’

‘The old texts agree,’ Kvetka said. ‘They speak of a chosen one, a hero of two realms, who will be the key to breaking the curse.’

‘Who is this hero?’ Mahyar wanted to know.

It was Ivor who answered. The old wizard tapped the notes he held. ‘There is such a hero even now in the Twinned Towns. A man of two realms who has attained such renown as to be spoken of even in your temple.’

Mahyar snapped his fingers. Instantly he knew who Ivor meant. ‘Jahangir! His father was from Westreach, but his mother was of Eastdale.’

‘One of the only men celebrated by both Azyrites and Reclaimed,’ Bairam agreed. ‘An expedition drawn from both towns could only be led by such a man. Only he can fulfil the prophecy.’

‘Yes, but to succeed he must first seek out the Veiled Oracle,’ Kvetka said. ‘Among the Reclaimed, her powers are well known of old. She is an ancient seeress who dwells in a tower several days’ march from the Sea of Tears. Only the mystic knows the secret to entering the fortress of the Lady of Sorrows.’

The wizard Gajevic gave another name to the place. Even spoken in a whisper, it crept into the ear of everyone in the observatory. ‘The crypt-court of Lady Olynder.’

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These are the terms and conditions that apply when you purchase an e-book (“e-book”) from Black Library. The parties agree that in consideration of the fee paid by you, Black Library grants you a license to use the e-book on the following terms:

* 1. Black Library grants to you a personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable, royalty-free license to use the e-book in the following ways:

o 1.1 to store the e-book on any number of electronic devices and/or storage media (including, by way of example only, personal computers, e-book readers, mobile phones, portable hard drives, USB flash drives, CDs or DVDs) which are personally owned by you;

o 1.2 to access the e-book using an appropriate electronic device and/or through any appropriate storage media; and

* 2. For the avoidance of doubt, you are ONLY licensed to use the e-book as described in paragraph 1 above. You may NOT use or store the e-book in any other way. If you do, Black Library shall be entitled to terminate this license.

* 3. Further to the general restriction at paragraph 2, Black Library shall be entitled to terminate this license in the event that you use or store the e-book (or any part of it) in any way not expressly licensed. This includes (but is by no means limited to) the following circumstances:

o 3.1 you provide the e-book to any company, individual or other legal person who does not possess a license to use or store it;

o 3.2 you make the e-book available on bit-torrent sites, or are otherwise complicit in ‘seeding’ or sharing the e-book with any company, individual or other legal person who does not possess a license to use or store it;

o 3.3 you print and distribute hard copies of the e-book to any company, individual or other legal person who does not possess a license to use or store it;

o 3.4 you attempt to reverse engineer, bypass, alter, amend, remove or otherwise make any change to any copy protection technology which may be applied to the e-book.

* 4. By purchasing an e-book, you agree for the purposes of the Consumer Protection (Distance Selling) Regulations 2000 that Black Library may commence the service (of provision of the e-book to you) prior to your ordinary cancellation period coming to an end, and that by purchasing an e-book, your cancellation rights shall end immediately upon receipt of the e-book.

* 5. You acknowledge that all copyright, trademark and other intellectual property rights in the e-book are, shall remain, the sole property of Black Library.

* 6. On termination of this license, howsoever effected, you shall immediately and permanently delete all copies of the e-book from your computers and storage media, and shall destroy all hard copies of the e-book which you have derived from the e-book.

* 7. Black Library shall be entitled to amend these terms and conditions from time to time by written notice to you.

* 8. These terms and conditions shall be governed by English law, and shall be subject only to the jurisdiction of the Courts in England and Wales.

* 9. If any part of this license is illegal, or becomes illegal as a result of any change in the law, then that part shall be deleted, and replaced with wording that is as close to the original meaning as possible without being illegal.

* 10. Any failure by Black Library to exercise its rights under this license for whatever reason shall not be in any way deemed to be a waiver of its rights, and in particular, Black Library reserves the right at all times to terminate this license in the event that you breach clause 2 or clause 3.