‘I am content,’ Gerlach said to them in their language. ‘I am content we ride at war. Vebla just…’

  ‘What Vebla just?’ Vaja asked.

  ‘It’s the dream you had, isn’t it?’ Vitali said in Kislevite. ‘The dream we all had.’

  Gerlach nodded.

  ‘It will come when it will come,’ Vaja said sagely. He turned his hand, as if letting dust sprinkle out of it. ‘Is of no matter.’

  ‘I think,’ Gerlach said, ‘it might be of some matter.’

  II

  At Mazhorod, just before the crossing, scout riders ran back to the pulk. They had seen a great mass of the enemy coming eastwards towards them. Mazhorod would be their meeting point, their place of battle.

  The boyarin camped the great pulk in the rocky hills south-east of the crossing. From there, they could see the whole plain, and the winding river. As night fell, they were able to view the torch fires of a massive Kurgan host on the far side of the Urskoy.

  ‘Tomorrow, we fight,’ Beledni told the rota as they gathered around the spitting fire of the krug. He had been summoned with the other company officers of the pulk to a meeting with the boyarin, and now he brought the import of that audience back to his men.

  ‘They will try for the crossing, probably at dawn. The boyarin orders we take them as they come across. The river is deep. They will be vulnerable.’

  The men cheered this. The skins of koumiss passed around the circle as men toasted victory. Beledni ordered them to shave.

  Gerlach left the krug and walked out onto a jutting headland of rock. Around him, in the snowy gloom, the fires of the boyarin’s great pulk flickered in the dark.

  A few leagues away, on the other bank of the Urskoy – the river invisible now in the night – the fires of the enemy camp blazed on the plain.

  ‘You are not shaving as I ordered,’ Beledni said, appearing out of the night behind him.

  ‘I will, rotamaster. Dutifully, before I sleep.’

  ‘You have a trouble in your mind.’

  Gerlach looked at the heavy, old rotamaster. ‘You know about the dreams?’

  ‘I have had them myself.’

  ‘I find this frustrating,’ Gerlach said, gesturing down at the lights of the Kurgan host. ‘Dazh has told me I am to fight the great beast of Khaos, and that the future of great nations rests in my hands.’

  ‘Yha.’

  ‘Archaon, damned be his name, is the great beast, surely?’

  ‘Beledni rotamaster would imagine so.’

  ‘Well… he’s not down there, is he? We have to break this host of Norscya tomorrow. And even if we win–’

  ‘We will win, Vebla.’

  ‘Of course. But even then, this great effort is just a step on the way for me. How many more armies must we break before I get to face the beast? How strong do I have to be?’

  ‘Strong enough.’

  Gerlach ran his hands back over his smooth, bald head and straightened his braided topknot. ‘I hope so. It just seems I shouldn’t be doing this. I should be somewhere else, where it matters.’

  ‘This matters, Vebla. This matters. This, and then the next thing, and the next. It is a journey. And the journey is a–’

  ‘Circle. I know. But how could my journey ever turn full circle and end up where Dazh says I should be? I’ve never met Archaon. I’ve never met any beast of Khaos. I think perhaps my journey is a straight line, whatever the Kislev philosophy thinks. And this fight we are preparing for is in my way.’

  ‘You are Vebla,’ Beledni said, switching to his broken Reikspiel. ‘You nag and annoy. You worry at things. You not give up. You will find out the way your circle closes.’

  Gerlach smiled. ‘Can I tell you something, rotamaster?’ he asked.

  Beledni nodded.

  ‘When I was a young man…’ Gerlach began. ‘Last year, in fact,’ he added, making Beledni laugh. ‘I believed I could single-handedly change the whole world. I rode out of Talabheim, so full of piss and vinegar, I was going to take on the night and overthrow it, all on my own. Be a champion of the Empire. Turn back the entire Norscya hordes with one flick of my blade.’

  Gerlach looked up at the stars for a moment. ‘My time spent with you, with the rota – out on the steppe – it changed my outlook. The wide oblast made me realise how small I was. How insignificant. Just a lone, little man in a huge world. It was… humbling.’

  ‘The steppe is humbling to all,’ conceded Beledni.

  ‘Yha. And it was a long overdue lesson for a Vebla like me. Know my place. Be not so arrogant.’

  ‘Whole year has not been wasted, then?’ Beledni chuckled.

  Gerlach laughed. ‘But now, Dazh tells me I am not a little man after all. I am everything my puffed-up ego had me believe. So Dazh says.’

  ‘Dazh, he shows us things that are significant,’ Beledni nodded.

  ‘Well, I have this destiny suddenly. One I’d cast aside because it was stupid. To be the man who single-handedly saved the world. To be the man who could face the beast of Khaos. To matter – really matter – in the scheme of things. And it’s come too late, just when I realised I didn’t matter after all.’

  Beledni sat down on a rock. ‘Dazh can really be a bastard like that,’ he admitted. That made Gerlach laugh again.

  ‘Every man matters,’ Beledni said. ‘How he lives, how he dies, what he does. The way he conducts his life, the manner of his passing from it. The krug turns and we take each day as it comes to us. If Dazh says you will find your beast of Khaos, you will find it. He will turn the world so it happens.’

  ‘Will he?’

  ‘Your dream was not a prophecy to make sense of. It was Dazh, warning you what was going to happen.’

  III

  The warbands of Surtha Lenk’s host massed on the west bank of the Urskoy as dawn came. They had been seething up into a frenzy since midnight, as the shamans blessed and praised them and screeched war-prayers amongst them.

  In the weak, chilly light of dawn, the crossing seemed immeasurable. The Urskoy ran hard and frothy, glinting with broken pieces of ice. The horses would shy and refuse.

  Carnyx horns blew loudly in the half-light. Though warriors in the warbands were disquieted, the zars and Hetzars were in no doubt. Archaon had ordered this. The Lord of the End Times had sent word to Surtha Lenk, ordering him east to deny the armies of the steppe. Archaon’s eastern flank was exposed. The Lenk’s horde was the measure of its urgent defence.

  Those zars chosen by Surtha Lenk to lead the attack congregated on the foreshore of the crossing. Zar Herfil, Zar Skolt, Zar Bellicuz, Zar Narrhos, all massing horsemen, some nine hundred between them. Behind them advanced the foot troops, two thousand all told. In the feeble light, they could all see the Kislevites and the Sigmarite Imperials assembling to meet them on the other bank.

  Zar Azytzeen led his horsemen up through the thick clot of readied warriors on the west shore. They parted as he approached at the head of his horse troop. He frightened them all. He was a stark figure, his arms wrapped in trophy rings, his head encased in a spiked gold war-helmet that some said had been taken from the barrow at Chamon Dharek. Others said it had been purpose-made to fit his head by the priest-smiths at that forbidden place. Whatever the truth, it was a chilling visage. The helm, beaten of white, Scythian gold, had only one eyeslit – on the right side. The rest of the half-visor was fashioned in the bas relief shape of a snake-fringed eye, with blue jade set into its pupil.

  ‘We will make blood flow this day, Zar Azytzeen seh,’ Yuskel said, spurring his braying black and white striped horse forward. The standard of Azytzeen’s warband fluttered, upright in his thick hands.

  ‘We will that, Yuskel seh,’ said the zar.

  IV

  The carnyx blew. Surtha Lenk’s host charged forward into the water, stumbling headlong through the heavy flow. Infantry came first, lifting high their shields and berdish axes. Behind them, the first of the horsemen dared the cold, fast river.

  The great pulk waited for them, arms ready.

  Kurgan men were swept over by the freezing melt-tide, their bodies washed away down stream. Horses fell numb and followed them, their riders tumbling and swirling after them.

  But Surtha Lenk’s force persevered by dint of sheer weight. The first foot warriors scrambled up on the east bank, and ran towards the patient enemy. Shortly after, the first of the riders made it across. Zar Herfil’s band. Zar Skolt’s.

  The pulk waited until a significant mass of the enemy was across. An enemy that now had the river at its back and nowhere to run to.

  Bone horns and clarions sounded. The pulk moved forward. The Stirland pike wall formed up to meet the attackers, while Imperial archers, on both sides of the river bend, punished the enemy that had cleared the crossing with a deluge of arrows. Men fell, left and right, impaled.

  At the same time, a vast company of horse archers rode up along the bank from the south, and pelted the Kurgan struggling across the water. The effect was considerable. Hundreds of Kurgan died midstream, hailed on by a mass of Kislevite bows. Zar Herfil himself fell with an arrow through his skull, and Zar Skolt lurched off his whinnying horse, two Kislevite barbs sticking through his torso.

  The great pulk sent up a huge roar of triumph, goading the enemy. The river and the pulk had combined to inflict terrible loss on the Kurgan.

  On the western bank, Zar Azytzeen cursed aloud the names of the enemy gods, and blamed his own for their lack of support. Even his staunchest comrades blanched at this blasphemy.

  ‘Tchar! Changer of ways! Why do you forsake us so?’ Azytzeen bellowed into a dawn sky that was as blue as the eye of snakes. He took off his golden helmet so his sacred, ruined eye could glare up at the face of his god.

  Perhaps Tchar was listening to his favoured son, or perhaps great Surtha Lenk had made similar entreaties with his sorcerous power. Whatever the cause, the sky grew darker suddenly. Marbled clouds of storm weather slid across the firmament and robbed away the daylight. Snow fell, at first, then hail too, ringing off the wargear of friend and foe alike. A savage chill cut the air, and the temperature dropped away sharply.

  And the Urskoy at Mazhorod crossing froze solid.

  The Kurgan yet to deploy from the west bank hesitated in bewilderment. The water had frozen so abruptly, so unnaturally that the warriors and horsemen still midstream were locked into it, some crushed by ice, others trapped and screaming. The eager spirit of the great pulk faltered and dimmed at the abnormal spectacle.

  ‘Now! Now!’ Zar Azytzeen roared, clamping his helm back over his head. ‘Now, in the name of Archaon and Tchar!’

  Hzaer blasted his carnyx, and the sounds was enthusiastically picked up and amplified by the hornblowers of other warbands. The bulk of the Kurgan horse horde thundered forward and clattered across the thick raft of ice, their hooves splintering fragments into the air like sapphires. Behind them, the foot warriors, the spearmen and the axemen, poured forward.

  Azytzeen’s warband was first on the shore. They charged through the scattering survivors of the first wave. At the sight of him, the front line of the Stirland pike wall broke in panic. The company of horse archers led by Dmirov, son of Gaspar, brother of Antal, was closest to the Kurgan horsemen. They had been harrying the Norscya who had made it to the shore. Dmirov turned his men and rode them full tilt into the oncoming riders.

  Kislevite bows cracked and hissed, and arrows tore at the Northers. Warriors were struck from their saddles or fell with their slain or crippled warhorses.

  The Kurgan had drawn their own bows. Berlas, Lyr, Diormac… every man including the zar himself, drew and shot, not once, but again and again, loading to the cord from the clutch of spare missiles they held between the fingers of their bowhands. Black shafts hailed into the oncoming Kislevites, volley after volley.

  In seconds, dozens of them were down, rolling and flailing. By the time the two horse companies met, more of Dmirov’s men were dead than alive.

  Their arrows mostly spent, the Kurgan drew blades as they came level with the galloping steppe archers. Horses flashed past all around, but the heavy, armoured Northmen had much the better of it. Efgul took Dmirov’s head without even slowing down. Sakondor slew the archers’ banner bearer.

  Then they were coming around and into the flank of the pulk, breaking it before them.

  They were not alone. The other mounted warbands followed their Zars into the charge and drove into the facing and right-hand lines of the pulk. This sundering impact had scarcely been delivered when the Kurgan infantry followed.

  The battle, so nearly won outright in its first moments, was now pitched and locked.

  And fortune, in a manner that would please the eye of Tchar, was changing.

  V

  The rota of Yetchitch krug had been stationed on the right of the pulk, ready to sally out around the pike wall, when the river froze and the change began.

  Beledni rose in the saddle and turned to the men. ‘This is the last battle, remember! The only battle! Fight now as if it was your last stand, and it will not be so!’

  At Beledni’s fierce command, Yevni blew the charge, and the rota turned out, racing fast, lances couched. Two other rotas rose with them. It was a fine sight, a glorious sight. The gold and silver warriors, their tall wings fluttering, hammered through the snow cover with their banner tails flying from their lance tips.

  A section of Kislev partisans, foot troops raised from the oblast, had just been split wide by the warband of Zar Kreyya and a wedge of Kurgan axemen. The galloping lancers came up into them like a golden tide.

  None of foul Kreyya’s men, armed as they were with axe and pallasz, had any reach to match the Kislevite lance. Spear-shafts shivered in lancers’ hands, and they recoiled in their saddles and stirrups, as the long weapons cut into the Kurgan. Lances snapped and splintered on impact. Not a single one failed to wound or kill outright.

  In one jarring moment of collision, the five new riders of the dead were baptised in battle, and claimed the honour of their first war-kill.

  The zar’s surviving men tried to break, but they were hemmed in by the now panicking infantry axemen around them. Kurgan began to kill Kurgan, involuntarily at first, as maddened horses trampled infantry. Kreyya, in his effort to ride clear, killed footmen in his path. Some of the terrified infantry turned their axes on the horsemen in a sick desperation to stay alive.

  Most rota lances now had been dropped or broken. A few riders managed to keep hold of theirs and used them as they drove the charge home. Mitri left his, finally, through the chest of Kreyya’s hornblower.

  They took out their javelins, the shorter, throwing lances, and hurled them into the thick press. Vaja, just ahead of Gerlach, loosed his first javelin with such force it went through the shoulder armour of the fleeing zar. Kreyya screamed out, and fought to keep his warhorse upright. He managed to turn, in time to take Vaja’s second javelin between the eyes.

  The rotas had slaughtered Kreyya’s warband and the infantry around it. Yevni blew his bone horn to raise the tempo again, and Beledni swung the krug around. There was another Kurgan warband closing in ahead.

  And this one was already at full charge.

  VI

  Yuskel had sighted the rank position of the Kislevite boyarin, and yelled the fact to his zar. Roaring, Azytzeen pushed them forward. This was the kill he most wanted. The boyarin’s head would be placed at the summit of his first skull stack to watch with burned-out sockets as Chegrume gave Zar Azytzeen his first victory mark. Then it would be cased in gold and set on the warband’s standard.

  Most of all, it would win Azytzeen favour with the High Zar. Then there would be no doubting the identity of Surtha Lenk’s new favourite. He would be Hetzar Azytzeen, chief of chiefs.

  A single line of Kislevite lancers stood between him and the boyarin’s trabanten. The winged horsemen had just come through one fierce melee, and their lances and javelins were mostly spent. He would demolish them, take their heads, and cast the plucked feathers of their ridiculous wings into the hailstorm.

  VII

  At full stretch, without hesitation, the warband of Zar Azytzeen and the rota of Yetchitch krug came across the snowfield at each other, and met head on.

  VIII

  ‘Great Dazh and Sigmar preserve us all…’ Gerlach gasped as he saw the beast that rode at the head of the enemy warband. The golden, one-eyed helm was wretched enough, but some obscene blue fire seemed to glow out from it, through the gold where there was no eye-slit. A daemon-thing, a creature stalking abroad, loosed by the otherworld. Gerlach could not imagine what foul hell had spawned that warrior.

  But the blue and the gold had been shown to him by Dazh in his dreams, and he knew with utter certainty he was in the right place after all.

  IX

  The world broke, as if struck by a hammer. Kurgan warhorse and Kislevite chargers tore past each other. Confusion was all around them.

  Confusion, and death.

  Berlas loosed the last of his arrows. Mitri crashed over into the snow, his arms flung up, a black shaft slammed through his chest. Beledni rota­master left Diormac dead in his wake, with a sword blow cleft through his helm. Maksim received a wound in his thigh from Efgul’s axe blade as they swept past each other, and then met Sakondor face to face. Sakondor’s pallasz took feathers from Maksim’s wing. Maksim’s sword took Sakondor’s head off entirely.

  Gennedy, youngest of the supplicants, hurled his last javelin but missed his mark. He screamed, briefly, as Lyr’s sword felled him and his horse together.

  Fegul One-Hand closed with Ifan, and they traded sword cuts, their horses turning around each other. Both landed wounding blows, but Fegul One-Hand’s northern power broke Ifan’s guard and split him through the chest. Fegul was whooping his victory when Kvetlai, with tears of rage in his eyes, rode by and silenced him forever with his shashka.