He told himself not to be so foolish. These men had not come here because of the invasion. They had come because this was the wild frontier and there was always work for hired blades so close to the Chaos Wastes. Most of them were probably caravan guards or attached to the private armies of some Kislevite noble. Looking across at one haughty, well-dressed man surrounded by burly thugs, Felix felt sure that some of them were bodyguards to travelling nobles from his own land. Why were they here, he wondered? Who knew? There were always wealthy men who liked to travel and scholars and mages in search of new knowledge. Most of them came from the ruling classes. Who else had the money to pursue such interests? He tried to dismiss the idea that some of these men could be spies for the Chaos cults. He knew that it was all too likely, but he did not want to deal with the thought right now.

  Eventually, just when he had about given up, he saw the face he wanted to see. Ulrika Magdova entered the tavern, her face a mask of worry. Even so she was still beautiful. Tall, slender yet as strong as steel, her ash blonde hair cut short. Her clear blue eyes fixed on his own and she gave him a tight-lipped smile. Ignoring the leers of the mercenaries she walked straight over to him. He took her hand and pulled her to him, feeling only the slightest resistance. Not a good sign. Ulrika was one of the most unpredictable women he had ever met, hard when he expected her to be soft, soft when he thought she would be hard. He had almost given up trying to understand her, but at least, at this moment, he thought he had some idea of what troubled her.

  “Still no word?” he enquired, using as gentle a tone as he could muster.

  “None,” she said in a voice that was flat and purposefully devoid of emotion. He knew that she had been doing the rounds of the guardhouses and taverns, and various noble relatives, hoping for some word of her father. She had not seen or heard from Ivan Petrovich Straghov since they had boarded the Spirit of Grungni and headed south. It was not a good sign. Even allowing for the vast distances that separated the Marchlands from Praag, the old boyar should have been here by now. Unless something terrible had happened.

  “I am sure he is all right,” Felix said. He tried to make his tone comforting. “He is a hardy man, and he had over fifty lancers with him. He will make it through if anyone can.”

  “I know. I know. It’s just… I have heard what the outriders have been saying about the size of the Chaos army. They liken it to a plague of locusts. No force such as this has emerged from the Wastes in two centuries. This one may be even larger than the one that faced Magnus the Pious and Tzar Alexander.”

  “That will just make it easier to avoid.”

  “You don’t know my father, Felix. He is not a man to run from a fight. He may have done something foolish.” She glanced around, tight-lipped. He sat down on the nearest chair, put his arm around her waist and drew her down onto his knee.

  “I am sure he would not. Have a drink. That might help calm your nerves.”

  She gave him an angry glare. “You have been drinking too much since we got here.”

  It was the old argument. She always brought it up. Compared to most of the people they travelled with, he hardly drank at all. Of course, most of them were dwarfs, so perhaps that did not mean too much.

  “Well, I have not been drinking today,” he said. “I have been at the Gate of Gargoyles, fighting.”

  She looked at him slantwise. “I saw wounded being taken from there to the Temple of Shallya for healing. They say a thousand Chaos warriors attacked.”

  “More like twenty. Outriders. The horde has not arrived yet.” Felix raised his hand and gestured for a barmaid. The woman sauntered over and put down two jacks of ale on the table without being asked, then moved on. Felix lifted his to his lips and took a sip. It tasted sour compared to what he was used to. Goat’s water, Snorri called it. Felix suspected that he knew enough to make the comparison exact. Snorri would drink anything. •

  Ulrika lifted a jack and slugged some back herself. He would never quite get used to this. Kislevite noblewomen drank as hard as any of their menfolk. When they drank at all.

  “You were at the gate?” a man asked from the next table.

  “Yes,” Felix replied.

  “They say you could see the army of Darkness from the gate. They say it is ten thousand strong. Twice ten thousand strong.” The man was drunk and rambling.

  “It does not matter,” said a swarthy man with the drooping moustaches of a Kislevite horse soldier. “They will break against the walls of Praag as they did two hundred years ago!”

  That brought a roar of approval from the surrounding tables. This was the sort of talk men liked to hear in taverns on the night before a battle. Felix had seen too many real battles to think it would be like the books and poems he had read as a lad. On the other hand, these men looked the same, and still they talked as if they were in a story. Maybe they were just whistling in the dark. Maybe just trying to keep their spirits up. If they had seen what Felix had seen flying back from the Chaos Wastes they would not sound so cheery at this moment. He tried to push those depressing thoughts aside.

  “I don’t know,” a thin weasel-faced man said from the doorway. “My caravan just got in, and we faced beastmen and Chaos riders on the way here. They were tough. Even if they were Chaos spawn they were tough. Never seen anything that died so hard as those beastmen.”

  Felix was inclined to believe it. A glance at Ulrika told him so was she, but the warriors in the tavern wanted none of it.

  “What sort of Chaos-loving talk is that?” a huge, fat man demanded, slamming a chicken leg down on the tabletop. “Beastmen and Chaos riders die just as quick as any other living thing -if you stick two feet of good Imperial steel in them!”

  More roars of approval. More laughter. More boasts about how many of the enemy were going to die in the days to come. More talk of how they would all be heroes in the song of the siege of Praag. Felix looked around again. He could see that there were plenty who disagreed with these sentiments. Many men looked worried, and they were the sort of men who looked as if they knew there was something to be worried about. Hard-faced men, wearing well-worn armour and carrying weapons they appeared to know how to use. Felix knew that the sort of boasting he was hearing was stupid, but he did not want to contradict it. He did not want to be the one to bring the spirits of all these people down. The weasel-faced man was apparently having second thoughts too. A city soon to be under siege by the powers of Darkness was no place to be suspected of being a Chaos worshipper.

  “Aye, you’re right,” he said. “They died quick enough when me and my boys stuck steel in them.” Even so he still could not manage to get much enthusiasm into his voice. Felix looked at him sympathetically. It was obvious this man had faced beastmen before and knew what he was talking about. It was just that no one wanted to listen. By the way Ulrika was shaking her head, he could tell that she agreed with the weasel-faced man.

  “Soft southerners don’t know what they are talking about,” she muttered. “A gor would eat that fat pig like he’s gobbling down that chicken.”

  Felix smiled sourly. For him the folk of Kislev were a byword for hardiness, a people who lived in a dangerous land of constant warfare. It never occurred to him that they might look down on each other. Of course, Ulrika had grown up on the northern marches, the very boundary of human territory and Chaos. If anyone in this room knew about such things it was her. She rose smoothly from his knee. “I am going upstairs. To our room.”

  Her tone made it obvious that he was supposed to follow. Under the circumstances, given a choice between doing that and staying downstairs to listen to this chatter of war, it seemed like the sensible thing to do.

  Ivan Petrovich Straghov stared off into the distance. He was a big man and he had once been fat. The past few weeks had burned most of that off him. They had been weeks spent in the saddle, snatching sleep and meals where he could, fighting desperate battles against overwhelming numbers of beastmen, and retreating at the last second so that he could fight another day. He tried to tell himself he was harrying the flanks of the Chaos army, slowing its advance, giving its generals something to worry about to their rear. He suspected that his attacks worried that mighty force the way a flea’s bites worried a mastodon.

  He rubbed the bandage around his head. The wound itched again. He supposed he had nothing to complain about. If the beastman had been just a fraction stronger or his parry just a split second slower, his brains would have been decorating the monster’s axe. The healing salves seemed to have done their work though, and there appeared to be no infection. He felt a bit feverish sometimes, that was all.

  He glanced around at his riders. Thirty men, all veterans. He had started out with over fifty, survivors of the skaven attack on his mansion, and he had gathered over a hundred lancers more on the ride south. He had sent fifty to escort the women and wagons, heading south-west away from the main track to Praag. Hopefully that way some of his people would escape the advance of the horde. The rest he had led into battle, harrying the invaders in the time-honoured Kislevite fashion. Hit and run raids, savage night attacks, swift ambushes. His men had done well. They must have killed well over three times the number of casualties they had taken, but it was not enough. It was a drop of water in that great ocean of Chaos filth. The Wastes must be emptied, he thought. Who would have guessed so many could dwell in that pitiless land?

  Like all his people, he had studied the old records of the ancient wars against Chaos. He knew the ballads and epic poems by heart. The Deed of Magnus had spoken of an army as numberless as the blades of grass on the great northern plain. He had always thought the poets had exaggerated. Now, he suspected that perhaps they had underestimated.

  You’re getting old, he told himself, to let such thoughts fill your head when you have a horse beneath you, a lance in your hand and a foe before you. There could be no such defeatist thoughts now. Too many men depended on him. He glanced around, and saw determination on every face. He was proud. These were not men who would give up. He knew they would follow him to the gates of hell itself if he asked. They were a finely honed blade. All he needed to do was wield them well, point them in the right direction, and they would do what he asked or die trying. Most likely the latter. He pushed that thought aside.

  He was glad Ulrika was not here. He hoped she was somewhere safe now. He hoped she had delivered his warning to the Ice Queen and had sense enough to remain behind in the capital. Most likely not though. She had always been willful, just like her mother, and, if he was honest, just like him. She had most likely followed that young Felix Jaeger, and since he followed Gotrek Gurnisson that meant she had most likely marched straight into trouble again. All he could do was pray to the gods to watch over her and hope Ulric was not too busy to listen to an old man’s prayers.

  “We go south,” he said in his most determined voice. “We’ll hit these blue-furred bastards as they try to cross the Urskoy and then head on. The Ice Queen must have sounded the assembly horn by now and be heading north to Praag. We’ll meet her there and drive the Chaos worshipping scum back to the desert from which they came.”

  His men cheered raggedly, almost as if they believed his every word. Once again, he was proud of them. Like him they had seen the true size of the horde— and, like him, they must know it was invincible.

  Max Schreiber looked out from the walls of Praag into the gloom. Out there, he knew, the greatest army assembled by the forces of Darkness in two hundred years was waiting, readying itself to sweep over the lands of humanity in a tide of blood and fire. Perhaps this time, the Chaos worshippers would succeed. The gods knew how close they had come in times past, far closer than most men alive today would believe possible. Every time in the past they had been pushed back, at high cost, but every time the Chaos Wastes had advanced a little further, and had not retreated. Every time the world had become a little more corrupt, the hidden followers of Darkness a little stronger.

  Max knew about such things. He had spent most of life studying them when he had not been studying magic. He had sworn an oath to oppose the worshippers of the Ruinous Powers however he could when he had joined his secret brotherhood. At this exact moment, he was wondering whether that oath had led him to the place of his death. Looking out into the night he could see the vast cloud of dark magic hovering over that distant army. To his sorcerously trained senses, the currents of power flowing through it were evident. There were powerful mages at work out there, he knew, and they were mobilising forces that should have been too great for any mortal sorcerer to control.

  Who said they were mortal, Max thought sourly? They did not have to be. Time flowed queerly in the Wastes, and one of the most common reasons men submitted themselves to the Darkness was that they sometimes granted immortality or something close to it. And not eternal life in some distant paradise where you went after death either, but real eternal youth in the flesh, in this world. Eternal life and power. Two things many men had no qualms about giving up their souls for.

  Max knew too that they were fools. Nothing came without its price, particularly not power borrowed from the Dark Lords of Chaos. They were like money lenders who charged ruinous interest. You gave up your soul, a small intangible thing that many people truly did not believe existed, and by doing so, you gave up everything. You surrendered your life and your will to the Dark Ones. You ceased to be yourself. You ended up a mere puppet, dancing on the strings of powers far greater than yourself.

  Or so Max had been taught. He had seen nothing to make him doubt it, but if ever there was a time to want to, he thought wryly, this was it. When your choice came down to painful death or eternal damnation, it did not seem like there was much to choose between them. Certainly the priests of Sigmar and Taal and Ulric and Morr had their texts, and could tell you what waited for you beyond the grave. Still, none of them seemed too keen to leave the flesh behind either no matter what paradise they were certain awaited them. Max was not an ignorant peasant. He did not necessarily believe that the magical powers priests wielded were granted to them by the gods. He had wielded too much power himself to believe that. The temples did not like the fact their long monopoly on magic had been broken. That was why they still persecuted wizards like Max when they could.

  He shook his head, trying to dismiss his dark mood, trying to blame it on the presence of all that dark magic swirling in the distance. Here he was ready to disbelieve in the existence of the benevolent gods, yet he was all too willing to believe in the Powers of Chaos. He told himself that the gods existed and some of them aided mankind. He had best believe that, and keep his doubts to himself, or the witch hunters would come calling.

  Such men were not at all thrilled by the fact he was a mage. It was not all that long ago that wizards had been burned at the stake as followers of Chaos and forced to practice their arts in secret. And there were plenty of people in the city who were still more than willing to do a little wizard-cooking. He could tell by the way people muttered at the sight of him in his long robes and staff.

  Well, let them. In the days to come they would need his powers, and would be grateful for them whether they thought they came straight from hell or not. When a man was wounded unto death and his only hope was magic, they swiftly rethought their prejudices. Most men, anyway.

  He gave his attention back to the currents of magic. He could sense power pulsing through the stones beneath him. Dwarf work or the work of the ancient priests, it did not really matter. The spells were strong, reinforced over centuries by people who knew how to work protective enchantments. Max was grateful for that. At least the city had some protection against evil magic. The same runes guarded the inner walls and something stronger still protected the citadel.

  He doubted even a greater daemon of Chaos could pass through the spell walls surrounding Praag. Of course, he could not be absolutely certain. No mortal man really knew what the mightiest servants of the Darkness were capable of. They were strong beyond measure. Perhaps he would soon be measuring that strength. All he could do was pray that it was not the case.

  An enormous amount of mystical power and energy had gone into shielding this place, and Max wondered why. By common consent it was an accursed spot. Any folk less stubborn that the Kislevites would have abandoned it long ago. Not them. This was the Hero City, symbol of their eternal struggle with the forces of Chaos; they would never give it up as long as one citizen still breathed.

  He leaned on his staff and drew a deep breath into his lungs. The spellwalls would hold for as long as the walls themselves did. If the stones were cast down, he doubted that the magic they contained would endure. The real threat would be that. Siege engines could destroy the stonework and the spells they held would simply unravel. He wondered if the defenders around him had any idea of what horrors might ensue if that happened. Better if they did not really. There was no need to spread despair.

  Max knew that despite the desperate nature of the situation, he was really only trying to distract himself from the real problem. Ulrika. He loved her desperately and to distraction, and he knew he could not have her. She was with Felix Jaeger and that seemed to be what she wanted. Of course there were times when the two of them weren’t happy together, which gave Max some hope if the two of them split up she might turn to him for comfort. It was depressing and not a little embarrassing that his hopes were so slight, but it was really all he could pray for.

  It was ironic really. Here he was, a man privy to many of the darkest secrets of magic, a sorcerer capable of binding daemons and monsters, and he could not stop thinking about one woman. She bound him as strongly as any pentagram had ever bound a daemon, and she did not even seem aware of it. He had even confessed his infatuation to her one drunken night in Karak Kadrin, and she had ignored it, had treated him with nothing but friendliness ever since. In a way, it was humiliating.

 

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