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The Rose of Bhaskar – Extract

A Black Library Publication

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The Rose of Bhaskar

Christopher Allen

As the first shoots of morning light pushed into Ghyran’s sky, a horse burst from the wilting verdure of the riverbank, carrying its rider towards a sprawling encampment around the ford ahead. Five Freeguild regiments were camped there, and their sentries spilled forth from between the wooden teeth of the palisade like agitated ants. They raised fusils. They fired sharp commands to halt.

The horse toppled as febrile spasms seized its flesh. Elixirs burning in its blood so it might ride all through the night now, finally, burst its heart. Sentries encircled the rider in a halo of firearms and blades as she pulled herself up unsteadily. They saw the woad god-sigils on her arms and muttered ‘Jadahaki’ to each other. Beneath her hood, sweat and tears and dirt stained sap-pale skin. Her eyes shimmered with exhausted delirium.

‘They march!’ she shouted, voice raw and cracking.

The bloody-spittled proclamation shocked the soldiers into silence.

‘Kynewulf the Exile returns, with a Ruinsworn host beneath the banner of the Pale Goat! The city of Seolfor will burn again!’

Mother,

Two weeks now since I took the Realmgate from Azyr to Ghyran and joined the Iron Rose. Grand Marshal Herrenhorne has called many Regiments to a great Host at a Crusade’s forefront, and it is a long Way to march. We walk, make Camp, and take it down again.

I have not yet seen any Glory.

This place is the Jadahaki Weald. It is very big, according to Maps, and much greener than Home, but also, fewer Mountains. The Jadahaki Empress is sworn to ruinous Gods, and so we help the Jadahaki Sigmarites against her. It is a confusing War because they are all called Jadahaki.

Mother, the Iron Rose are not what I had hoped for.

Most are indeed Reclaimed whose forebears were from lost Bhaskar, the rest from Vindicarum’s poor Districts, but all are more like Bravos, than Knights. Others call them the ‘Unwanted’. Even the Arch-Knight is a Brute, and mad.

Marshal Lucente does not let me gird him, or care for his Weapons. He sends me to pick Plants, or fetch Books. He is not the Hero I expected.

After some deliberation, Ermilios Masqueri, youthful scion of the noble Masqueris of Bhaskar, leaned down over the creased leaf of paper and underlined the word ‘mad’.

The camp was slowly waking. Freeguild soldiers stumbled out of tents to stretch and wash. A gong rang in the hands of a battle-priest, strikingly loud in the quiet of morning, and figures huddled round her for prayer. Ermilios caught the spiced scents of Chamonite cooking, and the ranker stink of horses, bodies, and ablutions combined. The air, hot and dry, promised another day’s march beneath relentless Hysh, though he had always imagined Ghyran a place of wet and damp. He wished to soak his sore feet, but Marshal Lucente had him up before the crack of dawn, digging up roots and passing message tubes to groggy officers.

He’d had to steal these few precious moments for himself, hiding behind the cooks’ tent with a gunpowder barrel for a desk.

Ermilios was the marshal’s new envoy. He’d long imagined it – being mouthpiece and trusted right hand to a noble war leader. The finest Azyrite tutors had trained him in swordplay, and he was young and strong of limb. He excelled in all the traditional pillars of Bhaskari aristocracy. Yet this Lucente had him with dirt beneath his fingernails, digging up plants. Plants! He had heard the marshal was a hero who’d saved many lives in Vindicarum when daemons breached the walls. All he had found was a thoughtful, tired man who wrote, and drew maps, and painted.

And no one seemed to care about Ermilios’ lineage at all.

Ermilios and Lucente, like many soldiers in the regiment, were descendants of the great city of Bhaskar in Chamon – the fabled City of Iron Roses from the Age of Myth. Ermilios’ forebears had fled to refuge in Azyr when ruin came to the city, preserving their precious culture for centuries after the realmgates closed. Lucente’s Bhaskari, though, were second, third, even fourth-generation Reclaimed. Their predecessors had eked out a desperate existence in the wreckage of the City of Iron Roses until it was rediscovered, when they were brought back to Vindicarum and the light of Sigmar. They spoke the old language wrong. They barely recalled any of the old customs.

Surely his shared ancestry warranted warm greeting, as between long-lost brothers – a celebration of two peoples divided, now once more rejoined. They should have wanted to learn from him.

Instead, they were simply indifferent.

Ermilios glanced down at his letter, sighing. Smears of glaucous sap and soil were uncouth marginalia to the spidery writing. He found resentment for the Iron Rose even in this. It was their fault he had to write the very lines excoriating their shortcomings. He had dreamed of serving as an envoy – and then of the chance to join long-lost cousins, no less – and they’d spoiled it, made it hollow.

His hand strayed unconsciously to one of the small bags hanging from his belt. To think, Mother had believed the Iron Rose might be worthy of the house’s greatest treasure. So far, he’d seen scant evidence for that.

Without warning, carmine droplets drizzled on the paper, snaring his gaze upon their bloody pinpricks. He stared a moment, befuddled by this fresh torment, and turned with angry words ready on his tongue for whoever had carelessly tossed meat scraps from the cook tent.

The words congealed into a strangled gulp. He was face to face with blood, and amber, and serpentine coils.

‘The marshal will need you soon, young Masqueri.’

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