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The Threshold – Extract

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The Threshold

by David Annandale

It was, at last, his season of rest.

Lord Ormand walked slowly along the Suspire Bridge. The graceful, buttressed span used to link the keep in the upper reaches of the free city of Lugol to Blindhallow Pass, a narrow, treacherous fissure in the western arm of the Stonepain Mountains. The middle of the bridge was gone now, destroyed on Ormand’s orders, part of the physical and symbolic severing of Lugol from the darkness of Shyish. The jutting arcs, forever reaching towards each other and never to touch again, had become, for Ormand, the icon of the victory that had been the goal of his entire life. The goal achieved and secured, he could lay down his arms at last. There were others who were taking up the defence of Lugol in his stead. He could rest.

He had to pause twice, leaning on his ebony cane, before he reached the stump of a column that had been placed for him a few yards away from the gap in the span. With a groan, he sat down, facing the city. From here, he had a commanding perspective of Lugol and its surroundings.

The free city was built on a narrow, steep, rocky hill that stood apart from the sudden rise of the Stonepains. Its high walls protected it from enemies approaching on the plains. Concentric rings of battlements encircled the hill, all the way to the keep that surmounted the peak. Since its founding, it had never been taken. It had been more than a year, now, since the last siege. A year since the shattering of the Suspire Bridge. And a year since Lugol’s greatest wall, one that was built of something much stronger than stone, had been completed.

Far to the east, a caravan was making its way across the barren plain towards Lugol. Trade from Arkavas, no doubt. Two days’ march away, it was Lugol’s closest neighbour. It was not a free city. Its citizens bowed the knee to the Mortarch of Blood. Merchants still travelled between the two cities. Lugol could not, and had not, cut itself off from all intercourse with the other inhabitants of Shyish. It had, though, erected a barrier that mattered between it and the rest of the realm. Lugol was not just free of the domination of Neferata. It was, Ormand believed, free like no other city in Shyish.

The fight for that freedom had consumed him. He no longer had movement in his left arm. Walking was slow and painful. He had lost his right eye. He did not think he had another year of life left in him. He did not mind. He was grateful for what he had been able to accomplish. And he was grateful to have reached, at last, his season of rest, a time for him without struggle while he still drew breath. The final sleep would not be long in coming, and until it did, he would savour the hard-earned calm.

Sitting here, by himself, in the quiet of an evening – this was a prize worth the life he had paid for it.

‘It is a pleasant evening to look upon the work of a lifetime.’

The woman’s voice, low and rich, a sepulchral ambrosia, ran a frozen claw down Ormand’s spine. He jerked around painfully.

He froze in shock. His heart beat like a war drum, and his flesh prickled cold.

Neferata, Mortarch of Blood, sat on the edge of the Stonepain section of the span. Twenty feet of empty air separated her from Ormand. From the darkness of Blindhallow Pass, something huge growled.

Neferata glanced over her shoulder. ‘Hush, Nagadron. Behave yourself and do not interrupt.’ She turned back to Ormond and smiled.

Ormand clutched his cane. He wished for a sword. He tried to stand, but his legs betrayed him.

Neferata kept smiling. ‘I wish you would not flee, Lord Ormand, and deprive us of an interesting conversation.’ She sighed. ‘If you must go, though, then you must. Or perhaps you would be more comfortable if you summoned your guards?’

Ormand hesitated, aware that his reactions implied that he doubted Lugol’s defences.

‘Do I look as if I have come here for battle?’ Neferata asked.

She did not, Ormand admitted to himself. She wore no armour, clad instead in riding clothes and an enormous wrap of blood-red silk. Its ends extended ten feet past the vampire queen, floating effortlessly in the evening breeze.

‘A battle, no,’ Ormand said. ‘I think you would be content with an assassination.’ He could not run. He could not fight her. If this was his end, he would face it without wavering. She was powerful. It was possible that she could breach Lugol’s greatest barrier. Enough to kill him, at any rate.

‘Assassinate you?’ Neferata raised her eyebrows in amusement. ‘Why would I wish to do that?’

‘Vengeance,’ said Ormand.

‘For what?’

‘For sealing Lugol away from your foul touch.’

She pretended to be hurt. ‘That would be a very petty thing for me to do.’

‘It would also be futile,’ Ormand told her. ‘My corpse will be disposed of like any other, and my death would in no way weaken the city. My succession is assured.’

‘So I have heard,’ said Neferata. ‘You have trained your daughter well. I gather that Kristane is already, in all but name, the ruler of Lugol. I congratulate you both, but you most of all, for your achievement.’ She lifted her hands towards the city. ‘Behold Lugol!’ she cried to an absent audience. ‘The city of Shyish where death is forbidden!’

‘Your mockery is a sign of impotence,’ said Ormand.

‘My mockery?’ She clicked her tongue. ‘I am justly chided, Lord Ormand. My pretence at ignorance does me no credit. I should declare things as they are. The powers of Death have no purchase in Lugol. Is that a better summation of your accomplishment?’

It was. There were no vampires in Lugol. No ghosts haunted its streets. There were no cemeteries inside the city walls. Any citizen who died was taken out to the plain and cremated there. And runic defences, a labour that had lasted throughout Ormand’s reign, warded off all necromantic arts from the city’s hill.

‘The accumulated wards of your sorcerers are powerful,’ Neferata said approvingly. ‘I am an admirer of ambition executed well.’

‘Which you have nevertheless come to destroy. I can guess your intent. You wish me to invite you into the city, and so destroy us from the inside.’

Neferata laughed. ‘Are your wards so easily bypassed? Is that all it would take? A single traitor in your midst? One citizen whose fit of pique brings down an entire city? Is this true?’

‘It is not.’

‘I am glad to hear it! And tell me, Lord Ormand, do you feel an urge to ask me to join you on your half of this broken span?’

‘I would sooner die.’

‘That too, I am glad to hear,’ Neferata said. ‘It would appear, then, that you have nothing to fear from me.’

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A Black Library Publication

First published in Great Britain in 2020.
This eBook edition published in 2020 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.
Cover illustration by Christian Byrne.

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ISBN: 978-1-80026-319-2

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