The end times, p.33
The End Times, page 33
He finally spied Alith Anar in the shadow of a waystone, calmly watching the fight with the moonbow drawn, an arrow unerringly following Malekith’s heart. Distracted, the Phoenix King could manage only a clumsy parry of Tyrion’s next attack, and to his horror Asuryath shattered from the blow.
Tyrion’s backswing caught Malekith across the breastplate, rending through the armour of midnight and slicing open his fire-ravaged chest. Hurled to his back, Malekith gasped for air, sucking in hot lungfuls, hands scrabbling in the blood and mud.
Spitting blood, he pushed himself to his feet, the remnant of Asuryath still in his hand.
‘I regret nothing!’ snarled Malekith, raising the bladeless hilt of his sword in mocking salute.
Tyrion replied with a salute of his own, cross-hilt to his chin, before raising the Widowmaker high above his head for the deathblow. As his arm extended, Tyrion turned, and right before Malekith was revealed a tear in Aenarion’s armour where Imrik’s lance had wounded the prince.
Alith had seen it also. While Morathi’s triumphant laughter echoed over the killing ground, a black shaft sped from the shadows and buried to the fletching in Tyrion’s chest. Malekith’s strength fled as he fell back, mirroring Tyrion’s fall as his last life’s blood spurted from the mortal wound.
Morathi’s laughter became a drawn-out shriek of despair, but her cries sounded distant, muffled.
Crashing to the ground face-first, Malekith barely felt his fall. There was a pain in his back, but soon all he felt was numbness. Overhead the winds of magic danced and writhed, finally freed from the vortex.
His heart fluttered and then stopped.
A lifetime and a moment later, Malekith felt himself lifted up, elevated into the sky upon Ulgu the Wind of Shadow. It wrapped about him and pierced him, passing through limb and artery, becoming part of him.
He opened his eyes, still lying on the ground, and felt different.
The winds of magic were no more. As though the sun had burned away a morning mist, their presence had been washed from the world. Inside he felt Ulgu writhe, trapped within his immortal flesh, bound to his body as it had once been bound to the waystone.
All had become still, the sounds of fighting washed away by a clear sea breeze. He heard footsteps and though there was no sensation yet in his body, he swivelled his eyes to see Alarielle picking her way through the falling waystones to hasten to the spot where Tyrion and Malekith lay. Her face was distant and unreadable, while around her the eyes of elves who had hovered on the brink of death snapped open as the Everqueen passed, their broken bones reknitting and their agonies receding.
Alarielle stooped briefly at Malekith’s side. This close, he could feel the raw Ghyran that filled her. Always she had been a queen of life, and now the bargain was made whole, the wind of magic finding home in her. The Phoenix King realised that there was an arrow in his back and though his memory was dim now recalled that Anar had loosed another shaft as he fell, but even this had not finished Malekith. The Everqueen brushed the arrow-shaft protruding from his back and the wood burst into a fine cloud of seeds. They hung in the air for a moment, gossamer against the light. Then the wind scattered them across the rock. The seeds took root wherever they landed, shoots bursting from the husks to burrow into cracks. Alarielle’s presence was all the nourishment the seeds required. Decades of growth occurred in seconds, and soon a thin but glorious glade of oaks stood at the isle’s heart.
Malekith’s fists clenched and unclenched as the strange forest unfurled about him, but he otherwise made no move. Alarielle paid him no further heed. Without a word, she knelt in the dust beside Tyrion. Malekith watched as a single tear spilled from the Everqueen’s cheek, splashing across the prince’s brow. In death, all the malice and cruelty had faded from the prince’s face, and his aspect was again that which had brought hope to his people.
The ground rumbled and a short distance from where Alarielle knelt, a waystone collapsed, showering the ground with dust and shards of stone. The rock where the vortex had once stood fell away, replaced by a seething cauldron of white water.
Malekith, at last roused, staggered to his feet. No one moved to help and as blood splashed to the wet rocks he noticed that not all of his wounds were healing. The shaft of the arrow had been transmuted by Alarielle’s touch, but the tip remained, lodged close to his heart. Every motion was agony, but Malekith was no stranger to pain. He reached out for the Widowmaker, which lay where it had fallen from Tyrion’s hands. Malekith’s Ulgu-wreathed form blurred as he moved, every motion leaving an afterimage of shadow in its wake.
It was Alarielle who first saw Malekith moving towards the icefang. She cried out in alarm and moved to block his path. Others heard the warning and started forward, but were all too late. The shadowy fingers of Malekith’s right hand closed around the Widowmaker’s hilt, and the Phoenix King gave a snort of triumph.
For a long moment, Malekith stood silhouetted against the billowing sea spray, the Widowmaker outstretched.
‘Naught but steel,’ he declared, feeling nothing of Khaine’s power remaining in the blade. ‘Just metal, nothing more.’
The Phoenix King turned and hurled the sword into the frothing waters. For a heartbeat, the Widowmaker glinted darkly. Then it was gone to the depths of the ocean. With its master’s passing, the legendary Sword of Khaine could neither command Malekith, nor offer him anything that a dozen other blades could not provide.
As the Widowmaker vanished, another great tremor struck the Isle of the Dead. Jagged spurs of rock burst from the ground, and waystones sank into the whirling waters. Stone by stone, inch by inch, the island began to slip into the sea. It was the same all across Ulthuan. For thousands of years, only the magic of the Great Vortex had kept the continent above the waves. Now, with the magic scattered, the hungry ocean laid claim to a prize long denied.
‘You have work to do. Save our people,’ Malekith told the Everqueen, sparing a brief glance for dead Tyrion. ‘He really is the very image of my father, you know.’
Malekith managed a few more paces before his injuries and weakness proved too much. He stumbled and then collapsed and his unconscious form was carried from the Isle of the Dead by the survivors of the Shadowfire Guard.
EPILOGUE
His every footstep was silent, his movements precise. He had tracked his quarry for hours, and confrontation was at last here. Silently, the hunter entered the glade, approaching the Phoenix King from behind. The hunter’s bow was slung upon his shoulder, but his hand was on his sword’s pommel.
It was pathetic really. Twice before the Phoenix King had detected the approach of Alith Anar, on the Blighted Isle and the Isle of the Dead. Malekith had become the embodiment of Ulgu, the power of shadow, but the so-called Shadow King still thought that he could sneak up on the former ruler of Nagarythe.
It was strange to Malekith that Alith had survived so long, being nearly as old as he was. Malekith had done so only through the armour of midnight and daemonic pacts, his mother, now swallowed up by the Realm of Chaos trying to prevent Teclis unleashing the power of the vortex, had sustained herself with blood-rites and sorcery, while others like Ariel had been divine embodiments, fragments of the gods on the mortal plane. Alith had spent much time with the raven heralds in his youth, devotees of Morai-heg, so perhaps he was the incarnation not of Drakira the queen of vengeance as some suspected, but of capricious fate itself.
Whatever the source of the Shadow King’s longevity, he had not matured at all, and Malekith saw him as the same broken child pretending to be a prince he had confronted and sent running into the darkness before the Sundering had destroyed Nagarythe.
He had advanced to within a dozen paces when Malekith’s voice broke the silence.
‘I have been expecting you,’ the king announced without turning. Clichéd, but Alith Anar seemed to have turned his life into a long cliché in recent years. ‘Have you come to finish what you began?’
At last Malekith turned, his gaze falling across the other.
‘I do not know,’ said Alith Anar, and there was uncertainty in his voice while suspicion vied with hope in his eyes. ‘I should kill you, avenge the horrors you have wrought…’
His words faded into the darkness.
‘And yet your sword remains sheathed,’ Malekith noted, with a faint trace of mockery.
‘As does yours,’ remarked the Shadow King.
‘Perhaps we are neither of us what we used to be.’
‘Perhaps,’ Alith conceded. ‘I wish I could believe that.’
‘Then you have come as my assassin.’
‘No, but I do come bearing a message.’
Alith Anar took a step closer, his gaze hardening as he stared up at Malekith. The Phoenix King smiled, remembering the same resolute look on the youngster’s face moments before Malekith had revealed the fact that he and the tyrannical Witch King of Nagarythe were one and the same, shattering every illusion the boy had held about the world and his former prince.
‘My arrow tip rests next to your heart, and you will never be able to remove it. The agony it causes shall suffice as my vengeance for as long as you serve our people. Fail them, and my next shot will take your life.’
‘Your threats mean nothing,’ Malekith growled.
‘Then you have nothing to fear,’ Alith Anar replied. The moon passed behind a cloud. The Shadow King departed, leaving Malekith alone with his thoughts.
Not long after Alith had left, another entered the clearing. Alarielle stopped beside her husband and held a hand to his arm.
‘It is done?’ she asked.
‘Yes, he was here just now.’
‘It is better this way. If you simply kill him, others will try to avenge him. We are one people again, the aesenar included.’
‘He thinks he has me on a leash,’ Malekith said quietly.
‘Good, it will stop him doing something rash that we would all regret.’ Alarielle slipped something into Malekith’s metal hand and turned away. ‘We will control our own destiny from now on – Morai-heg will tug the strands of fate no more.’
When she was gone Malekith opened his fingers, revealing a notched arrow head of black steel. Perhaps the illusion of fulfilling his ancient oaths of vengeance would mature Alith and make him a useful member of the court. He certainly had deadly skills, and Malekith had an empire to rebuild.
So it was that in Athel Loren the elves made their home again, dwelling in the mystical forest as they had done in the time before the Coming of Chaos. As Lileath had told Teclis, there was sanctuary to be found there, and the perils of the world were kept from them for a time.
The winds of magic unchained by Teclis found resting places in great personalities of many races, across Ulthuan and Elthin Arvan. Nagash and his dead legions still walked abroad and Archaon the self-proclaimed Everchosen of Chaos laid waste to all in his path.
Malekith and Alarielle were wed and he was crowned again as Phoenix King, and they believed the great cycle of the gods and life had started again, rebirth from death, growth from destruction, harmony from discord. Only the future would reveal whether the son of Aenarion could truly overcome so much personal bitterness and strife and become the ruler the elves needed.
Such a pity that neither Malekith nor the elves had any future, for the Rhana Dandra was the End Times and there was to be no new beginning, only more death and misery.
Lileath had lied to them. They had sanctuary, for a while, but all things fall to Chaos.
Eventually.
THE RISE OF THE HORNED RAT
Guy Haley
PROLOGUE
THE REALM OF RUIN
In the darkest of places, in the most timeless of times, the twelve Shadow Lords of Decay convened in dire assembly.
They came swiftly on foot, scurrying through the rotting refuse that choked their domain. Their high horned heads bobbed furtively, now visible, now hidden by mounded rubbish: the wealth and wisdom of myriad ages taken, gnawed, despoiled, tasted and inevitably discarded. One could find all manner of treasure buried in the stinking filth, but it meant nothing to the creatures who possessed it. It was only to be coveted for the sake of having, ruined for the sake of ruination, and quickly forgotten.
Such was the way of this young race. Scavengers, usurpers, content to squat in the desolation of better peoples, their unnatural vitality and ingenuity nought but engines for entropy. The skaven were the true children of Chaos, and this place, this foetid reek under a glowering sky, was theirs alone – a nowhere realm nibbled out of the Realm of Chaos, given shape by the spirits of the ratmen that came to dwell there. A dismal place, the Realm of Ruin, a hell its inhabitants dearly desired to remake upon the mortal world.
A verminlord is a huge creature, tall as a giant, but in the wrack of the Realm of Ruin there is no scale a mortal mind can make sense of. Thus, although the Shadow Lords walked on two feet, although their heads were capped with mighty horns – and although all possessed some obvious, uncanny power – when seen from afar they appeared small and timorous, resembling nothing so much as the lowly creatures from whom they had descended. They moved like rats and they were cautious like rats, stopping every hundred paces to lift their noses and sniff at the air with a rat’s sly mix of boldness and fear. Rats – rats cavorting in the rubbish of worlds.
In ones and threes, but never twos – for two lends itself too readily to betrayal – they came to the place of gathering. Verminhall, the great hall of the Realm of Ruin. The immortal lords of skavenkind converged upon the building. Once close, they broke into a scurrying run, when they were sure no others could see them scamper. They entered the portals of the vast edifice with unseemly haste, keen to clear the open space around its walls and the terrible things that hunted there.
A grandiose, overstated mirror to the Temple of the Horned Rat that stood in the living world, Verminhall was dominated by a tower that soared impossibly high. Sprouting from the uncertain centre of the building, thick and ugly, it disappeared into the churning purple clouds. Its top was lost to the sky, and its filth-encrusted walls flashed to the violence of emerald lightning. As with all things the children of Chaos possessed, it had doubtlessly been stolen from forgotten creatures – some race that had regarded itself as finer and worthier, only to fall in surprise to the vermintide. After all, this chain of events was set to repeat itself forever. In a sense, it already had. Time has no meaning in the Realm of Chaos.
The greater powers sneered at the Horned Rat, seeing him as one of the infinite array of petty godlings whose insignificant domains marred the purity of Chaos. They were wrong to do so. The Horned Rat was no longer some minor creature, for he had grown mighty. His children were legion. Long-fermented plans were at last coming to fruition.
If this terrible place taught any lesson at all – to those few able to survive here long enough to receive it – it would be this: one should not dismiss the offspring of the lowly.
The hour of the Horned Rat was at hand.
The daemonkind verminlords, first among the servants of the Horned Rat, were as numerous as their mortal counterparts, countless in their multitudes and ubiquitous in the culverts and gulleys of creation. But of them, only twelve were deemed truly great. The greatest of these twelve was Lord Skreech Verminking. He who had once been many, and was now one.
Causality had no meaning in the Realm of Ruin, not in any sense that a mortal would understand. But Verminking’s intention was to arrive after his peers, in order to underscore his own importance, and he always performed as to his intent.
The interior of Verminhall was a cave, a monument, a howling void, a place of life and of death, a temple, a palace – all, none and many more of these things besides. The laws of nature were openly mocked. Braziers burned backwards, green light glinting from Verminking’s multiple horns as warpstone condensed from the very air. Fumes pulled themselves into dented brass firebowls, adding second by second to the mass of the solid magic growing within them. The lump of warpstone embedded in the daemon’s empty left eye socket flared with sympathy at its brothers’ birth pangs as the verminlord passed.
There was no sense to the geometry of the great hall. Stairs went on infinitely to nowhere. Black rivers flowed along walls. Within round cages of iron, cats roasted eternally in green fire without being consumed. Windows opened in midair, looking upon places neither near nor far, but most definitely not within the bounds of the Realm of Ruin. The squeaking of a billion times a billion anguished skaven souls made a painful chittering that obliterated all other sound. Verminking moved through it as one long accustomed to visiting, taking unexpected turns and secret ways precipitately and without warning, the ultimate rat in the ultimate maze.
The other eleven great verminlords awaited their lord in the Chamber of the Shadow Council, a room that was at once endless in size and claustrophobically small. A hollow, thirteen-sided table, as wide as forever, dominated the floor. A pool of noisome liquid was at its centre, in whose oceans strange images stirred.
As they awaited their chief, the Shadow Lords of Decay bickered and schemed with one another, or sat grooming their remaining patches of fur with long tongues, content to listen to their peers, hate them, and secretly plot their undoing. All the others were present, and thus only two places were empty: Verminking’s own, the first position; and that next to his, the thirteenth. The head of the table, in a sense, this was the seat of the Horned Rat himself – a massive throne carved of warpstone, big enough for a god. The likeness of its owner glared in baleful majesty from its canopy’s apex.
It was said that the Great One could watch them from the unblinking, glowing eyes of his facsimile. Verminking suspected he watched them all the time; he was a god after all, the verminlord reasoned. Such was the burden of being the most favoured of the Horned Rat’s many children.
