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WITH ICE AND SWORD

Graham McNeill

Late Autumn, 1000 (Gospodarin calendar)

Hope was their undoing; hope and the certainty that their gods had inflicted suffering enough to visit yet more misery upon them. They had lost so much already: their homeland, their loved ones, all their worldly possessions. Surely, they prayed, the gods must now keep them from further loss, must surely balance their grief and hardships with deliverance.

What else but hope could explain the march of weary, frostbitten survivors of Kislev’s destruction, trudging silently through this unnatural storm hammering the corpse-sown oblast? Almost two hundred starving, sickly and godforsaken souls, numbed by horror and hollowed by the carnage they had witnessed.

Doomsayers and holy men had always claimed that portents of the world’s ending were there for all to see, but whoever really believed them? Devotees of the apocalypse tore their hair and whipped themselves bloody as they screamed of oncoming doom, but life in Kislev went on as it always had: dry, wind-soured summers and hard, frozen winters.

As regular as the turning of the seasons, the northern tribes raided Kislev in what Anspracht of Nuln had dubbed the Spring Driving, a term only someone who had never lived through such times would dare coin. The leather-tough rotamasters of the high stanitsas would gather their riders to meet the northmen in battle, and Kislev’s mothers would weave mourning shrouds for their dead sons.

Such was life in Kislev.

As the sages of the steppe had it: is of no matter.

Even the terror of the Year That No One Forgets had been endured, the victories at Urszebya and Mazhorod decisive enough to beat the broken tribes back to their desolate homelands. Now it seemed those slaughters had simply been feints in preparation for the death blow.

With the first thaw, the northmen had come again.

Kurgans, Hung, Skaelings, Vargs, Baersonlings, Aeslings, Graelings, Sarls, Bjornlings and a hundred other tribes came south under a single wrathful banner.

And the End Times rode with them.

Men, beasts of the dark forest and hideous monsters surged through Kislev in numbers never before seen. They swept south, not to conquer or plunder, but to destroy.

Cursed Praag was engulfed by howling daemons and horrors undreamed as Erengrad fell to midnight reavers in wolfships who burned the western seaport to the ground. And Kislev, impregnable fastness of the Ice Queen herself, was taken by storm in a single night of terrifying bloodshed. Its towering walls were now rubble, thick with screaming forests of impaled men and women whose ruined bodies were attended by red-legged carrion-feasters as black as the smoke of the city’s doom.

Those who abandoned Kislev before the war-host reached its walls fled into a land gutted by war and bleeding in its aftermath, where mercy was forsaken and savagery the common currency. Ruined settlements burned on every horizon, their timber palisades cast down, the slitted eyes of beasts-that-walked-as-men gleaming as they feasted in the ashes.

All across Kislev, the fleshless bones of its people were stacked like cordwood as altars to Dark Gods.

And this was but the opening move in the last war.

The girl had seen perhaps six winters, seven at the most. She knelt in the stunted grass beside the body of a woman with white hair, shaking her and sobbing her name, as if that might be enough to return her to life.

Sofia had seen the woman fall, and paused beside the weeping girl. Her hand hovered over the clasp of the satchel containing her few remaining medical provisions, but it was clear no craft she possessed could return the woman to life.

Swirling mud was already blurring her outline, but no one else in their wretched column of brutalised survivors was bothering to stop. Too many had died to mourn one more. They shuffled onwards through the storm, hunched over and wrapped in thick cloaks against the rain sheeting over the open steppe.

‘You have to get up, little one,’ said Sofia, too exhausted to say much else. ‘You’ll be left behind if you don’t.’

The girl looked up. Her features were angular with Gospodar blood and her eyes were frost-white, steely with defiance. She looked at the refugees shambling through the steppe grass and shook her head, taking the dead woman’s hand.

‘She wasn’t my mother,’ said the girl. ‘She was my sister.’

‘I’m sorry, but she’s gone and you have to let her go.’

The girl shook her head again. ‘I don’t want the northmen to eat her. That’s what they do, isn’t it, eat the dead?’

‘I don’t know,’ lied Sofia.

‘She wasn’t a good sister,’ said the girl, her voice hard, but brittle. ‘She beat me and called me bad names when… But I’m still sorry she’s dead.’

‘What’s your name?’

‘Miska,’ said the girl.

‘A proud name from ancient times,’ said Sofia.

‘That’s what mamochka told me,’ said the girl. ‘What’s yours?’

‘Sofia.’

Miska nodded and said, ‘You’re the healer, aren’t you?’

‘I was a physician in Kislev, yes,’ said Sofia. ‘A good one too, but I can’t help your sister. Morr has her now. She is at peace and beyond the woes of this world. Even though she called you names, I’m sure she loved you and wouldn’t want you to die out here. She got you this far, yes?’

‘No,’ said Miska, standing and brushing wet strands of flame-red hair from her face. ‘I got her this far.’

‘Then you’re stronger than you look,’ said Sofia.

Miska’s head snapped up and Sofia saw the bleak sky of the oblast reflected in her eyes. She bared her teeth and her nostrils flared like an animal sensing danger.

‘We need to go,’ said Miska. ‘Right now.’

‘What is it?’ asked Sofia, realising that even after all she’d seen and experienced, she could still feel terror.

A bestial howl echoed through the storm.

Something predatory. Hungry.

Close.

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