Karl hoped – prayed to Sigmar – that the sound did not belong to what his imagination told him was up there.

  Wings. The huge, leathery wings of unnameable things flying over the forest, invisibly black against the starless sky. Feral abominations of the most distant North, swooping down to join the battle at the summons of the Kurgan sorcerers.

  The captive who had eaten poison berries woke up, yelling.

  He writhed and screamed out twice before the astonished Kurgan managed to react.

  They fell on him and speared him to the forest floor to shut him up.

  Silence returned, except for the beat of vast batwings.

  IV

  In the morning, at first light, the Kurgan roused them up and marched them on. It was raining again, and dismally cold and grey. The sick man they had murdered for the sake of silence was hacked out of his fetter and left in pieces under the sighing poplars.

  As they shambled south, his vacant loop of iron dragged and rattled in the middle of the file.

  V

  Karl vowed to himself he would not die that way. He would not allow these barbarians to end his life so shamefully, just because they felt they owned it.

  He could not escape. Not unless some miracle occurred. But he had the true killer. A small Empire-forged blade, enough for one kill. When the chance came, he would go down fighting, and he would take at least one filthy-souled man of the North with him.

  As he struggled along, he absently rubbed at the sore place on his right cheek. Zar Uldin’s mark. He wished he could abrade the skin away and no longer be marked as property.

  The rains fell harder, torrential, turning the track to slop. The stands of woodland off the road became indistinct, so heavy was the blurring veil of the deluge. Captives, Karl included, walked with their heads turned up and their mouths open, relishing the drink the sky provided. Karl said a benediction to Taal, the hoary god of the wilds and elements, who dwelt up there and showed his children this simple mercy.

  The silver-clad bodyguard, riding alongside them, was now truly silver-clad. The heavy rains had washed away the ritual bloodstains that had made his armour seem pink. That made him weaker, Karl thought, because he was deprived of the magical protection the blood afforded him.

  Karl decided the bodyguard of Skarkeetah would be the one. As far as Karl could make it so, the brute slaver in the glossy silver plate would be the soul Karl took to the other world with him. That ornate, studded silver armour would be red again.

  With Kurgan lifeblood.

  VI

  In the late morning of the fourth day, they reached a town. The rain had ebbed, and a washed-out sun tried to brighten the day.

  The town was raised in a wide clearing of the forest. A clutch of izbas huddled around a fine but decayed granite temple within a wall of stone and timber.

  They never learned its name.

  The Kurgan host had come like wolves, burning out most of the old, frail izbas and putting the population to the sword. Then they had occupied it, to use its wells, and plunder its larders and granaries. It had become an encampment, a supply base for their armies as they drove south through the fringes of Kislev and into Karl’s homeland.

  The place reeked of stale smoke and dung. It was teeming with Kurgan. They had pitched their round felt gers and canvas pavilions in the pastures outside, and some in the streets of the town itself. A mighty head of horse was penned in chain corrals at the edges of the temporary town, and there were strange, new forests of stored spears, their bases stuck down in the loam.

  The Kurgan whipped the captives down the track through the pastures, through the field of gers and in under the town gates. Kurgan archers manned the ramparts, their composite bows tautly strung. Sentinels with long, ox-horn trumpets stood watch over the gateway.

  Inside, there had been looting and destruction. The puddles in the muddy streets were dark and cloudy. Kislevite dead had been tossed into heaps against the inner wall. Flies were everywhere.

  They tracked up the main street, across a paved marketplace where singed stakes and jumbled ashes told of ceremonial burnings, and into a temple.

  The great granite building, dedicated to some Kislevite deity, had been ransacked and its altars desecrated. Its heavy doors and windows had been boarded up, save the main porch. Raised in stone, the temple was the closest thing the Kurgan had to a prison.

  Inside, it was dry and gloomy. Rushlights flickered. The inner space, wide and long, had been cleared, and blankets spread out on the floor. The temple smelled of aged timber, dust and sour wine.

  Their guards forced them down on the lice-ridden blankets. Iron braziers were lit. After a while, they could smell food, and their drawn bellies winced.

  Karl curled up in the blankets. By the firelight, he could see the main altar. Things – probably very holy things – had been cast down and smashed. On the wide basalt plinth stood an iron coffer. It had four feet in the shape of bird-claws, and stretcher handles so that it could be carried on the shoulders of strong men. On the side facing them, looking into the temple, was a single eye wrought in iron, its lids formed by wreathing snakes. A fire inside the coffer flickered in amber through the spaces cast into the eye. It seemed as if the staring eye was blinking.

  They were left alone for an hour or two. Then Hinn entered the temple. His footfalls on the stone flags were loud and heavy. Nine of the sturdy litter bearers followed him. They brought the anvil with them.

  Hinn bowed to the coffer, and then stood up again to remove his beaked helmet. He raised it up off his head and set it down at the foot of the altar block.

  His head was hideous.

  His face was small and fleshy, like a baby’s. He had no beard, but he had not shaved. No hair had ever broken that soft flesh. His skull was oiled smooth, it was tall and rose in a grotesque, rounded point of distorted bone. The height of his golden close-helm had been necessary to contain its abhuman shape.

  Hinn’s skull had been bound from an early age. Karl had once heard about this practice amongst the most savage Northern tribes. Tight bindings had forced his soft head into this elongated shape as it grew. His skull was almost twice the height from crown to jaw as that of a normal man, and when he turned side on, it was half the depth behind the ears from brow to nape. Bare, his skull resembled an egg-like cone, high and slender, with his infant face hanging from the front.

  Hinn turned to face them all. His expression was blank, almost idiotic.

  ‘Tchar blesses you, marked ones,’ he said, in a voice that was pitched high and far too frail to be the product of such a massive body.

  At a clap of his hands, Kurgan with spears herded the captives to the anvil, one by one. The litter bearers used a chisel and hammer to free them. They gouged several calves and broke at least one toe before the captives were all released.

  It seemed a small price to pay.

  Then the Kurgan brought food.

  VII

  The food came in a series of beaten copper pots, each one so full it had to be carried crosswise on bending poles by pairs of straining men. A steaming stew of oily fish, poached in grease and mare’s milk. A hot brown broth, thick with chunks of root vegetable and fatty gobs of mutton. Beans and pulses, cooked in boiled mutton stock. Accompanying these, wooden trenchers were piled with farls of fresh, warm unleavened bread.

  The litter bearers set the food down in the middle of the huddle of captives. All of the prisoners stared at the feast. Some were sobbing, others were openly drooling like dogs. No one dared to move.

  Hinn smiled. It was a nasty sight. ‘Eat,’ he said.

  That… that was the kindest thing Karl ever saw a Northerner do.

  The captives fell on the pots, gobbling and craving. They tore bread and used their hands, ignoring the scalds and blisters they got from dipping fingers into hot food. They ate like famished wolves, tearing into the food in a pack, burning their lips, tongues and fingertips. Some consumed so much, so fast, that they fell in faints and stupors. Others gagged and coughed.

  It was the best meal Karl Reiner Vollen had ever tasted.

  The litter bearers reappeared and tossed drinking skins into the scrum of feeding bodies. The skins were full of a sappy alcoholic drink like wine, and they drained them, holding the heavy hide bags for each other, pouring the sweet, strong drink into each other’s mouths.

  They were laughing, their faces gleaming with grease, drops of broth in their beards. Karl found von Margur and helped the blind knight to one of the pots.

  As the marked men consumed the food and drink, Hinn and the litter bearers moved around the temple, sowing seedcases into the braziers. Very soon the air was full of dry, spicy smoke. Breathing it in, the feasting captives began to howl and cry with laughter. They danced around, eyes streaming with tears, mouths wide with delight. One man laughed so hard he began to choke.

  The hot rasp of the opiate smoke became overwhelming. Hinn and the Kurgan withdrew. Coughing and stumbling, the prisoners milled around in an intoxicated daze. Some of them crawled on the floor, still laughing. Others lay back on the blankets and fell asleep, snoring loudly, their bellies over-full. Two men threw up violently, and collapsed. The copper pots rolled on their sides on the blankets, scraped empty.

  Von Margur slumped down in a bundle and began to sigh and weep. Karl, his head spinning, sat down heavily. His eyes were welling with tears, but he was still laughing hysterically. One of the marked men, a swordsman from Carroburg, staggered up to the altar and put on Hinn’s golden bird-helm. He jigged around in it, and all those still conscious laughed so hard they were in danger of rupturing themselves.

  Karl got to his feet, swaying and laughing. He had the true killer in his hand, clenched inside the folds of his dirty clothes.

  He started towards the door, but he wasn’t very good at walking any more.

  He felt so good.

  ‘No!’ von Margur growled, reaching out a hand to grab at Karl’s boot.

  ‘Get off! Get off, sir!’ Karl giggled.

  ‘No!’ von Margur said, and then snorted with laughter at the pomposity of his tone.

  ‘Let me go, sir…’ Karl said.

  ‘No… no, Karl,’ von Margur said, still sniggering. His hand was clamped around Karl’s shin. ‘Please don’t. What will I do without you?’

  Karl stopped. He didn’t have an answer to that. He sank down onto his knees.

  ‘Sir? Sir? Take the knife and hold it so I can fall onto it and escape this. Please, sir. Please.’

  Von Margur was asleep, semi-digested food leaking out of his half-turned mouth.

  Karl got to his feet. It was difficult, and took a while. Once he was upright, he was quivering. He held the true killer out in front of him like a trowel.

  Something very cold and very solid suddenly rested on his left shoulder. Karl peered down and fought to adjust his field of focus. The solid thing was shiny. A steel something.

  The blade of a pallasz.

  Hinn stood before him, one of his huge broadswords lowered horizontally across Karl’s torso.

  Karl wavered, hot and uncomfortable.

  ‘I don’t know how you came to have that pin-stick,’ Hinn said, his voice ridiculously high. ‘Here are your choices. Hand it to me and live. Keep it and die.’

  Karl thought hard. He wanted to hack at Hinn. But he was fairly sure he would be dead if he tried to move.

  Hinn kept the broadsword where it was and held out his other hand.

  ‘Give it to me, Empire.’

  Karl blinked. ‘Your voice is funny,’ he found himself saying.

  ‘Funny?’

  ‘Yes, funny. Like it’s squeaky.’

  Incensed, Hinn took the pallasz blade off Karl’s shoulder bone and raised it up.

  ‘There is another choice,’ said a soft voice.

  Skarkeetah loomed beside his bodyguard. He smiled at Karl.

  ‘It was clever of you to have kept that dirk hidden. Put it away now and I’ll let you keep it.’

  That seemed very fair.

  ‘All right,’ said Karl, and tucked the dirk away in his ragged undershirt.

  Then he sat down and fell asleep.

  VIII

  Karl woke up in the early hours when the braziers had gone out, and the temple had gone cold again. Just the after-scent of the opiate smoke and the food hung in the chilly air. All of the captives were asleep.

  The true killer had been taken from him.

  Karl cursed, but he was too tired to care.

  IX

  They all slept through most of the next day. At vespers, as the day was closing, the litter bearers came in with another meal and more wine skins.

  The prisoners were slower to consume this offering. They were tired and muzzy.

  Outside, there was an uproar: drums beating and fires glowing.

  Hinn stalked back into the temple, a broadsword drawn in each hand. At some point in the night, he had recovered his close-helm. Now it shone on his head. The bird beak. The ram’s horns.

  He looked around for a while, and then pointed the long blade in his right hand at a well-built pikeman from Stirland who had the three green cheek dots of Zar Blayda’s mark on his cheek.

  ‘Tchar chooses you,’ he said.

  Then he raised the sword in his left hand and pointed its tip at Karl.

  ‘And you.’

  X

  The Stirlander’s name was Wernoff. Karl had established this as they were bundled out of the temple into the evening.

  ‘What in Sigmar’s name do they want from us?’ Wernoff asked.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Are we to be sacrifices, Vollen? Blood sacrifices?’ Wernoff wondered in dismay.

  ‘Sigmar, great be his blessings, will protect us,’ Karl assured the pikeman.

  As soon as they were out of the temple’s doorway, they found themselves in a thick crowd of drunken, chanting Kurgan. Hinn’s men dragged Wernoff away and Karl lost sight of him.

  Hinn led Karl down through the crush of chanting bodies into the market square. The acre of paving stones was clear and empty, but rang with the sound of thousands of yelling Northers. Fires blazed around the edges of the square, casting a long, yellow glare over the paving.

  Hinn jostled Karl to the edge of the baying crowd.

  The pitch-armoured figure of Zar Blayda emerged from the far side of the multitude and walked out in the centre of the firelit market place. He stood there, drew his sword and held it up. As he brandished it, the crowd cheered and yelled.

  Then Zar Uldin, in his black furs and wolf-mask, strode out to face him. Uldin ripped out his own pallasz, and waved it aloft, to more howls and roars.

  The zars faced each other in the centre of the square, Blayda with his sword raised across his body, diagonal, Uldin with his vertical.

  Now Karl understood, to a certain extent. Single combat, an honour match, zar against zar. He watched expectantly.

  Blayda swung his massive sword. Uldin blocked it. Sparks flew from the clash. The crowd howled.

  Then they stopped. The zars bowed to each other and went back into the mob on either side of the market square.

  Karl blinked as Hinn shoved a pallasz into his hands. Then the brute handed him Drogo Hance’s true killer.

  ‘You might need this,’ said the thin, high voice from behind the beaked helm.

  Karl still didn’t understand. The crowd was baying fit to break the sky. He tucked the true killer into his belt and hefted the huge pallasz.

  Hinn suddenly shoved him out into the open. Sword in hand, he stumbled out into the empty square. The firelight danced. The Kurgan host yelled the moment they saw him.

  Wernoff emerged from the crowd at the opposite side of the square. He staggered as if he had been pushed. He had a Kurgan broadsword in his hands.

  Karl felt his soul sink. It was single combat all right. Zar Blayda versus Zar Uldin. But a duel fought by proxy, as sport. By their marked men.

  DUSHYKA

  I

  Three days on the empty steppe and they came in sight of Dushyka.

  At least, Gerlach believed it had been three days. It seemed there were no dimensions his Imperial mind could grasp in the open oblast. The land was a flat, featureless prospect to all compass points, the sky an immeasurable arch beneath which he felt no more significant than a pin stick. There was no direction except forward.

  If the men of the rota had told him it had been four days, or even five, he would not have been surprised. He moved in emptiness. In it, he became a nothing.

  As time followed the rhythmic lurch of the horse, hour after hour, he came to a sobering revelation. The oblast had not diminished him; it had simply showed him how he truly was. Against the busy landscape of the Imperial principalities, he was a young man of repute, vexillary of a demilance, no less, with ambitions to match: to win glory for Karl Franz, to achieve great deeds in battle, to be the sort of man who made real things happen. That was why the fires of Zhedevka had left him so hollow. The sense of failure had been so great. Why had he not turned back the armies of the North single-handed?

  Out on the steppe, he saw himself as fate saw him. A tiny thing, like a single blade of grass.

  He was one small man, and here the scale of the universe was revealed… well, just a part of it. His mind might reel, giddy at the thought of the whole.

  There was nothing he could have done. Nothing any man could have done. The North was a primordial torrent, in the form of flesh. He could have no more stopped it than raise up his hands and halt the giant clouds that sailed, sedate as galleons, across the oblast heaven.