‘I can teach you to reach beyond such limitations,’ the daemon said. ‘To harness strengths you never knew you had.’

  Silas found himself nodding slowly. A dreadful decision had been reached.

  ‘You seem to know me by my woes,’ Silas said. ‘How should I know you?’

  ‘Like all monsters,’ the daemon told him. ‘By my name and the doom that walks hand in hand with it. I am Hergustagrue.’

  ‘Silas… formerly of the Clan Sheldrac.’

  The daemon brought forth a slimy claw. In it he clutched a dribbling handful of rotten fish.

  ‘Eat, Silas,’ Hergustagrue said. ‘You shall need your strength for the trials ahead.’

  The sun rose over its reflection in the silver waters of the Glass Sea, as it came to do many times thereafter. The tides came in and out across the bejewelled beaches of Ersatz Island. Life went on. The seasons passed, and with them, returning fishing boats – first with bountiful nets of fish, then seabed traps, before finally hauling in the carcasses of speared glitterskin sharks. Seaweed turned from green to brown. Squalls came and went, and the days got shorter. The years went by unnoticed, until one morning in the long season. It was high tide, with a mirror mist coming in off the silver waters.

  Silas Sheldrac broke the surface. His sorcerer’s staff of dead coral and skull reared up out of the perfection of the shallows – waters in which the clanspeople of Ersatz Island admired themselves every day. His hood rose above the waves, and with it, his ghoulish face. His skin was waterlogged and white, like something long dead that had drifted down into the depths for shelled, spindle-limbed nightmares to pick apart. His body was bloated and his back hunched. Sea lice crawled across his pallid flesh while serpentine hagfish squirmed through it. The sorcerer’s grotesque form was covered in a cloak and ragged robes, fashioned from a mouldy black canvas sail: some remnant of a shipwreck brought in on the tide. The tattered fishing net in which he had been thrown into the Grotto still clung to his form, a reminder of his former treatment.

  As he strode up out of the shallows and onto the beach, gemstones crunched beneath his feet. He opened his mouth to utter the dread words of a sorcerous curse. Black fluid leaked from his pincer-plucked lips and a small crab scuttled from his mouth and up one nostril. Silas’ words sounded like the hiss of the surf. As he spoke them, the water about his feet started to foam and thrash with fish. Thousands and thousands of fish. The fish flipped and flopped at the water’s edge, throwing themselves up onto the beach in some kind of diseased madness. All along the island’s coastline, fish threw themselves from the water, flapping and squirming across each other’s bodies, their mouths and gills gulping for air, until they died.

  The silver mist rolling inland blackened about Silas like a besmirched mirror. Fishermen and their sons walked down the shore towards a small fleet of boats that sat beached and ready to launch. Even men such as these revelled in their simple finery. Sharkskin jerkins. Scaled boat-cloaks. Jewels glittering in their long hair. They were up at the crack of dawn, priding themselves on their work. Repairing their nets, shearing barnacles from their boats’ hulls and bringing in only the very best the sea had to offer.

  Silas did not allow the fishermen to see him. They saw only what they expected to see: dark reflections of themselves in the mirrored mist. That was, until they saw what waited for them in the surf. Their catch, already dragged from the sea and lying dead along the beach. Such a spectacle drew consternation from such simple folk, with calls for brothers, fathers and grandfathers from the village. Questions hung without answers, for no man of the Shattered Isles had seen the like before.

  With a few more damned words falling from his diseased lips, fat maggots began to writhe and wriggle between the scales of the fish, out of eyes and the mouths of the dead creatures. As Silas visited a new plague upon the island, fishermen stumbled back in revulsion.

  Stabbing his staff into the gemstone beach, the sorcerer made his way up the shoreline, cloaked in the silver vapour. As the sun rose, he saw islanders going about their business. Old women slaved at garment and sailcloth with ivory needle and thread. Wives prepared veritable breakfast banquets for their hard-working husbands. Children played games of petty supremacy between the cottages, the treatment of their peers nasty and merciless. Silas moved through the village unnoticed, looking into the open doors of cottages. Inside, the fishermen’s homes were decorated with pearl, dead coral and pretty shells. Fires roared before scrimshawed furniture of whalebone, while the plumage of colourful seabirds served as curtains and the covers for beds and tables. Jewels sat in the glass of the windows, allowing light of many colours to flood into the rooms.

  The cottages were small, merely the beachside hovels of common clansmen, but they were palaces compared to the horror Silas had called home for the last few years. The Grotto had been cold and wet. With only the crabs and Hergustagrue for company, he had dined only on the islanders’ rotting leftovers. There was little to do but listen to the great daemon speak on the strength and cankerous virtues of his Dark God and of Silas’ revenge. To learn the dread arts of summoning and sorcery. To become one with the darkness and the deep.

  ‘Mungo,’ a woman called, a comely fisherman’s wife with an armful of driftwood for the fire. ‘Wherever are you going boy, in such a hurry?’

  A young lad with a mole on his chin – one of the fisherman’s sons Silas had seen on the beach – was running up the track between the cottages. He ran past Silas, who was unseen in the silvery mist. The sorcerer’s powers drew the reflective haze to him, hiding his grotesque form but revealing to him, in its swirls and billows, the presence of others.

  ‘Pa says to run to the castle,’ the boy called back at his mother, breathless. ‘Something’s happened on the beach.’

  ‘What?’ his mother called back, but Mungo was gone. Tapping his staff along the track, Silas followed the boy.

  Above the cloud bank, Silas saw the towers of Sheldrac Castle. It was a rough sort of fortification. Not like the fine palaces he had heard about on the larger and more central kingdoms of the Shattered Isles. Ersatz Island had no need of a palace or citadel. Constructed hundreds of years before from dark coastal stone, threaded with gemstone, it barely qualified as a castle. Its walls had never had to withstand an enemy attack and no soldiers stood on its roughly hewn bridgeway. It had stood indomitable, however, before the wrath of storms and all the Glass Sea could throw at it.

  The boy Mungo crossed the bridge and pushed his way tentatively through the great doors. Silas followed him in, the mirror mist pouring in with him to fill the chambers and banqueting hall beyond with a reflective haze.

  In the great hall, the fire burned as brightly as ever. Mungo moved around the figure sat before the flames. He went to say something before thinking better of it and moving on. Silas approached the figure, the creatures crawling across his diseased flesh retracting from the heat of the fire. There Old Lundal sat. The former chieftain was but skin and bone, barely alive but for the transfixed stare of his misted eyes on the intense flames. Gone were his myriad trinkets of faith. Instead, the old man wore the heavy chain and hammer-styled medallion of Sigmar, like some kind of penance. Silas laid his fat, pallid hands on Lundal’s shoulders and leant his lips in towards the old chieftain’s ear.

  ‘Worry not, father,’ the sorcerer said. ‘It is me, Silas. The answer to unspeakable prayers. It will all be over soon.’

  ‘But my lord,’ Mungo implored, re-entering the banquet hall. Silas turned. His brother Hearn had entered the room. As tall and strapping as ever, his face was a mask of savagery. He was followed by some of the same household servants that had helped carry Silas to the Grotto.

  ‘Damn you,’ he spat at one of them, showing them the stitching on his sharkskin cloak. ‘Don’t you think to cross me. Look at it. Look at it! You dropped a stitch man. You think that good enough for Clan Sheldrac, do you? You think a man can serve his God-King thus? I should have you whipped, dog.’

  ‘My lord,’ Mungo called, the urgency evident in his voice. ‘My father sent me. There’s something you should see…’

  Hearn turned angrily on the boy. The back of his hand came around, striking Mungo savagely across the face and sending the boy to the floor in a heap. He was too shocked even to sob, and kicked away from Hearn across the polished floor.

  ‘You impudent pup,’ Hearn glowered. ‘How dare you interrupt me?’ He looked from the boy back to the servants. As he grew ever more incensed, he tore the cloak from his shoulders and threw it at one of the servants before snatching a whip from where it was coiled over a whalebone chair. ‘This isn’t worthy of my shoulders. Insult me with your efforts, will you? Well you’ll never do it again, damn your hides. I’ll flay the flesh from your own backs,’ he told them as they backed from him.

  As Mungo scrambled for the stairs, Silas followed him, the sorcerer at one with the silver mist. Making his way with difficulty up the stone steps and remembering how they had broken him as he had tumbled down them, Silas found the boy outside the chieftain’s chambers. The rooms had belonged to his mother and father once. Now they housed Rodric, his children and whatever island woman he was favouring that week.

  As Silas stood there, obscured by the reflective mist, he watched scores of children swarming about the landing. They were lean and fine-limbed, yet their eyes betrayed the glint of hunger. Not for food but for attention. They had been raised in an atmosphere of competition: their father’s love the prize. Like a pack of predators, they had sought to weed out the weakest among their number to improve their chances. Their mothers being the daughters of fishermen and island folk, they were bastards all. Rodric had been seeking perfection amongst his children, hoping that each one would be more worthy of his bloodline and the God-King than the last. They lived, however, to be made Rodric’s heir.

  As Mungo moved through their number, the eyes of the girls and boys glinted with vicious intent. They closed in on the boy, who was still clutching the side of his face, red where Hearn had struck it. Mungo stopped, his eyes wet with tears. He was unsure of himself around the mob of children. They just stared at him like a piece of meat in the offing.

  Suddenly, one of the chamber doors opened. Silas could hear the wailing of women inside, though knew not the cause. The chieftain walked out onto the landing. Rodric was bare to the waist, the extravagant length of a seal-fur cloak trailing across the polished floor behind him. His mouth was fixed in a cruel grin, showing perfect teeth. His eyes were glazed and his gaze distant, as though he were reliving terrible things that he had done.

  ‘Father!’

  The children forgot about Mungo and swarmed in on the chieftain, clamouring for his vacant attentions. Rodric seemed not to see them, striding through their number, knocking several of the youngest over. They pulled at his cloak and clawed at his muscular torso.

  ‘My lord…’ Mungo said tentatively. Silas watched from the silver swirl of the mist that was feeling its way up through the castle. Rodric reached out for the handle of a door further down the landing. As he heard the boy’s voice, he stopped. It was not the sound of his own brood, cawing as they were around him like baby birds for attention. He stared right through the boy.

  ‘My father sent me, my lord chieftain,’ Mungo told him. ‘On the beach, my lord. There are events that demand…’

  ‘…my attention,’ Rodric said, his voice a silky whisper. He smiled as though he found humour in the words.

  ‘Will you come down, to see for yourself, lord chieftain?’

  In answer to Mungo’s question, Rodric’s mad smile widened further. Almost as though he had forgotten the boy’s report and himself, the chieftain turned the handle and opened the door. From within, Silas could hear the sobbing of different women. As Rodric disappeared inside, his children turned their attention to Mungo, but he was gone, a boy-shaped hole in the silvery mist.

  Silas found him on the floor above, knocking furiously at a door upon which a hammer of Sigmar hung crooked, its metal dull and tarnished. Mungo kept looking behind him for any sign of the children. Instead, he found the landing lost in the depths of the mirrored haze. Silas watched as Mungo pushed at the door and entered the darkness of the chamber beyond.

  ‘Master Norvik,’ the boy called. The chamber beyond was thick with candle smoke. Silas followed the boy in. The rooms had been fitted out as some kind of ghastly chapel. Norvik had brought with him from Tesseraq the trappings of his God-King and decorated the chapel. It had been his hope to bring Sigmar’s word to Ersatz Island. To bring the chieftain and Clan Sheldrac into the faith before converting the rest of the islanders. This had never happened, however. The tapestries hung in tatters, and icons of the God-King lay unceremoniously against walls. Everything was buried in dirty scrolls and nameless tomes. The room smelled of old blood.

  About the chamber, there were sigils that Silas recognised. Dread shapes made up of orbs and crescents, painted onto the stone of walls, cut into rough altars and crafted in the metal of standing icons and hanging talismans. They were not symbols of Sigmar.

  Hergustagrue had told them that they were the sign of the Prince of Excess – an enemy god. The darkness that had long eaten away at his people and enslaved Silas’ family. The prideful hearts of each and every islander now beat with devotion to the long-lost god, and in some ways, always had done. It was there in the rise of the Sheldracs and the clan’s history. It had travelled with the priest Norvik from Tesseraq and the Shattered Isles. In turn, several fishermen had left the island. They set off across the ocean in their boats, in search of Slaanesh in the great silver emptiness – never to return. Meanwhile, those left behind transformed Ersatz into an island paradise, awaiting the Dark Prince’s return.

  ‘Master Norvik,’ Mungo said. He found the terrible old man, hunched over a table, scribbling madness into parchment with a barbed quill: plans for the dread deity’s return. Turning, the priest regarded the boy from the darkness of his hood.

  ‘Master Norvik,’ Mungo said. ‘There are strange happenings on the beach.’

  ‘What happenings?’ the priest said, plucking the barbed quill from his bloody fingers.

  ‘Fish throw themselves from the water to die along our shores,’ the boy told him. ‘They are diseased, my lord. Rotting at our feet and crawling with maggots.’

  The priest got down from his stool and hobbled towards Mungo. He nodded as the boy described the bizarre events on the beach. There was something in the way Norvik approached the boy, his eyes gleaming within the hood, that prompted the boy to step back, but he found the stone altar behind him. Norvik reached for a curved blade that sat in a filthy sheath on his belt. The dagger’s blade was stained red.

  ‘How long have you had that mole, boy?’ Norvik said, drawing the blade. Mungo reached for his chin. Terror crossed the boy’s features as the priest hobbled towards him.

  Like oil on water, the silvery mist dissipated to reveal the sorcerer Silas in his disgusting robes. The sudden appearance attracted Norvik’s attention. The priest was surprised to see the figure standing there with his staff, and turned the wicked blade of the sacrificial dagger on Silas. Norvik looked from the sorcerer to Mungo and then back again.

  ‘Who are you?’ Norvik asked, drawing back his hood. The priest’s parchment skin was stretched across his perfect skull. He flashed Silas file-sharpened teeth and milky eyes.

  ‘Go, boy,’ Silas said, his words like a snake sloughing off its skin. Mungo ran from the chapel.

  ‘Speak,’ the twisted priest demanded.

  ‘I am but a man,’ Silas told him. ‘Unworthy before the gaze of the gods. I am flaws long forgotten. I am something returned from nothing.’

  Norvik licked at his sharp teeth with a crescent-forked tongue. The sacrificial dagger came up with sudden violence. The priest stuck Silas with the blade. The sorcerer felt the blood-stained steel puncture his robes and slip into his diseased flesh. Norvik stabbed him again and again, expecting the robed figure to fall to the ground, clutching his stomach. Instead the blade sank into the waterlogged flesh, doing little to the diseased blubber. Silas could barely feel the presence of the knife in his gut.

  The sorcerer put his lips to Norvik’s pointed ear.

  ‘I am Silas,’ the sorcerer told him, ‘of Clan Sheldrac. And I have come home.’

  Silas grabbed Norvik by his chin with a hunchback’s strength and held him there. A stream of sorcerous corruption poured from his lips, into the priest’s ear. Norvik struggled and screamed, filling with the warping filth. Silas held the priest to him as he bubbled, blistered and wept puss. Silas left Norvik there, a steaming mound of diseased flesh.

  Climbing the steps of the castle tower, the sorcerer came to a familiar door. It had been his own, the door belonging to his former chambers. It was barred and locked. Tapping his staff against the wood, he rotted the door on its hinges. As the soggy pulp fell aside, Silas walked in. There he found Lady Teagan, sat on his bed. Her face was thin and drawn. She was a frail shadow of her former self, but her eyes still burned bright with regal defiance. As the sorcerer crossed the chamber, she moved back across the bed as far as her chains and manacles would allow. Lifting her hands she made fists, suggesting that she would lash out if Silas got too close. Unwilling to be part of the inhumanity and abuses of the castle, she had fought Norvik and the brothers to become more trouble than she was worth. She had ended up imprisoned in the tower and all but forgotten.

  ‘I have come for you,’ Silas told her. He reached out for her chains but Teagan retreated. Her nose wrinkled at his stench. She took in his disgusting form. His ragged robes. His rotten face. His hunched back.

  ‘Silas?’ she said, not quite believing what she was seeing.

  He laid his diseased hands upon her chains. At his touch, the metal links became tarnished. They rusted over before disintegrating into a red mulch on the bed. Teagan rubbed her raw wrists and backed towards the window. He reached out for her but, with fear and revulsion, she climbed into the casement. It became obvious that the lady would rather throw herself from the tower than be touched by the sorcerer’s cold, drowned flesh.