We have another Henge Hold Scroll summation for you today, and this one is a doozy. We’ve seen some visions recently that were quite long as the final battle at the Henge Hold began in earnest. There have been moments have polarized our community (for better or worse) as they see that their favorite heroes of the Iron Kingdoms are in fact mortal (except maybe one tough old bastard).
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***
A horde of predatory creatures from beyond the boundaries of existence really does put things in perspective.
“I love you so much,” Madhammer said as the charging mob of infernals drew close.
As the cultists and beasts came within range, the Rhulic warcaster stroked the ring on his finger one last time and hurled the now-primed explosive with all his strength.
It detonated among the mob with a throaty roar, sending flesh and soil flying in wet chunks.
“Come at me, you fatherless sons!” Madhammer roared. He flipped the visor of his armor down and fired his cannon, Buster, sending another explosive into the enemy ranks as he invoked a spell to detonate in their rear guard.
Fathers, but he loved his job.
Masked cultists and blade-armed beasts hit the front line of dwarves. Creatures sprung over the front line to fall on those behind. A discord of carbines and clashing steel filled the air.
“Get low!” Madhammer bellowed. The dwarves who heard him hit the dirt.
The Grundback Blasters he controlled all surged up and fired their Hail Shot cannons. Sprays of cast-iron shot mowed through the front ranks of the infernals—and the Rhulfolk too slow to follow orders.
The Blasters’ barrage opened up enough space for Madhammer to risk another charge.
“I love you so much,” he whispered to the explosive before sending it on its way.
***
Time was not a beast that could be broken to the saddle.
Once it had been a river that buoyed her along from the moment of birth to the moment of death like a rotting leaf in the rapids. It had since lost its stubborn linearity.
But time remained stubborn. It felt like trying to fold a spider’s web. One moment, she was a girl on the beach, playing with her sister. Another moment, a soldier on the front lines. Then, an old woman, frail and feeble in a cold room.
All jumbled up, all happening at once unless she focused her attention. For her sin of breaking its yoke, it punished her with a mix of now, then, and yet-to-be, with a measure of almost-was to keep her on her toes.
Victoria Haley fought to keep her focus on the present moment, the present foe. A throng of hulking shapes, grotesquely human, with arms like scythes. She could see the scraps of time and memory bound into their forms. Fragments of spirits mirroring her fragmented self.
She cut through them, watching an infinite series of possible attacks falter, watching herself die countless times, tracing a thread of actions that led to her victory.
Haley plunged her spear into the last howling infernal’s skull when time stopped.
For a moment, the tapestry of potential futures rippled in her mind’s eye. Dozens of golden threads extended from her, each one splitting and splitting again, representing potential paths forward. Yet all seem drawn toward a single point in time and space alike.
West. Toward the Meredius, far from the current battle. Something there crushed down on all her possible futures. Stubborn old time pulled at her once again, insistent on her course.
She twisted her spear, pulled it free of the infernal corpse. “Thorn, come with me.”
Her warjack tromped near and let out an inquisitive whistle of steam.
“I’m not sure,” she said. It felt surreal to be uncertain about what the future held. “But we need to go there, now.”
Victoria Haley looked at the darkening sky to the west.
“I’m afraid we don’t have much time,” she said.
***
The mercenaries on the west flank struggled against the swarming infernal attackers. Already the field was hazy with the smoke of rifles, warjacks, and artillery.
Aurora activated the enormous gate. Along its surface, geomantic accumulators growled to life in an aura of blue light.
Flashes of arcane energy coursed at the gate’s center, sinking inward like a whirlpool. Air roared into the vortex, whipping dust along its current.
A sound came from the other side of the gate, a gentle voice like silver chimes, beckoning and alluring.
Iron Mother struggled to her feet, her machine eyes looking into the vortex with something like reverence.
“Call her, Daughter,” she whispered.
Before Aurora could respond, the vortex swelled, pulsed. A flash of light erupted from its heart.
Where the light touched, the world writhed and changed. Fine filigree of metal crawled like vines over the surface of the henge. Patches of grass on the hillside took on the gleaming color of steel, bristling like tiny knives.
The sight of the gate’s energy transfiguring a nearby living priest entranced Aurora. He screamed, the noise shifting into the sound of poorly meshed gears grinding. Without her power field, she may have suffered a similar transformation.
“Nemo,” Aurora shouted over the wind. “We can’t just send innocent people through that!”
He floated down, studying the gate with a mechanikal eye. “I agree. The goddess’ energy is potent. I will reconnoiter.”
“I should go!” she cried. “I’m still human. We’ll know if a field can protect us on the other side.”
Asphyxious cut off further debate. “Our allies fall in great number,” the former lich said. “Thy bickering shall be moot should they draw nearer.”
“Stay out of this,” Aurora shot back.
“Cyriss’ warning may be clearer on the other side,” Nemo said.
A gentle voice spoke from behind Aurora, where a moment ago no one had stood. It was a woman’s voice, tinted with a soft accent.
“Not a warning, old friend,” she said. “An invitation.”
Aurora turned to face Major Victoria Haley. The Cygnaran looked up at Nemo’s new body with soft, sad eyes.
“Where did you—?”
Haley spoke. “She’s inviting you to join her, Sebastian.”
“I accept,” Nemo said.
He floated through the vortex before Aurora could say another word.
***
Were it not for the likelihood of staggering defeat and a brutal, senseless death, Drake MacBain would have said this was one of the best damned days of his entire life.
Steelheads drove bloody wedges into infernal fodder to his left; his Nomads barreled over cultists to his right. The battlefield was a chaotic playground of thousands of deaths, big and small, and MacBain thought it could only be better if he were being paid more.
His cigar tasted like bitter leaves, and his blade, Undertaker, sang like a dirge. His goggles were so covered in blood he could no longer see out of them—he’d relegated them to headgear. Overall, he felt like a victor even in the midst of their downfall.
He was no longer sure where the gate was they’d come to protect—he could see no better via his warjacks than he could through his goggles—but he sure as hell could feel its presence. It was a cool wind on a hot summer day that became a savage winter deepfreeze.
He slashed, and body parts flew. The cultists were the most fun—he could tell when the traitorous bastards were hurt by their wails and entrails. It was harder to tell when the fanged, rippling horrors that looked like nightmarish insects suffered. He had to guess.
The Steelheads he’d brought were hacking a path to join the Searforge forces dealing a fine blow to the cultists who’d come charging down a nearby hill. Of course, that balance likely to shift soon—MacBain was pretty sure he’d seen their Rhulic warcaster take an ugly hit.
“Be seein’ ya, Madhammer,” he grunted around teeth full of cigar. “Probably sooner than expected.”
He heard the wind howl as if in agreement…and then realized it wasn’t the wind. It was the collective gasp of all the mercs and allies around him.
He turned.
“Uh-uh,” he heard himself mutter; it didn’t even sound like him. “That ain’t so.”
He stared at a towering thing with an ill-proportioned woman’s body and a head like a grotesque horseshoe. Hell, maybe it was a hat; it didn’t matter. The thing terrified him to his bowels.
He had no idea where it had come from or why there were suddenly atrocities with lobster-like claws and slanted fangs like meat-eating fish around it. They were just there—from wherever your nightmares went when you woke up, he supposed.
He cleared his throat.
“But I ain’t sleeping, you bitch,” he called out. His voice was strong with a tone his men would say brooked no dissention.
Just the same, the bone-white woman—Zaateroth, he would learn her name before the end—dissented by turning toward him.
They moved like kites in storms, unpredictable, erratic, yet terrifyingly focused in hunger. There were so many, they blocked the horizon and then the sky above. The shrieks of those dying around him were distant and meaningless—it was their last stand, after all.
His very soul quivered and threatened to flee, as if there were anywhere for it to go.
“Stay here till this is finished, you chickenshit,” he said to it as the horrors closed in, and he raised Undertaker.
***
Nemo emerged into a void both marvelous and terrifying.
He hung in a midnight realm, crushing in its emptiness. Since his early childhood, he had looked up into the night sky and wondered at the distant stars. Now he drifted in their domain.
There were no words he knew to describe the silent expanse. Before him lay not a goddess or a world, but a whorl of shining light. They formed a frozen swirl of sparkling luminescence, a dense cloud of blinding brilliance.
Cyriss was not among the heavens, not a body upon the velvet dome of night.
She was more. So much more.
The aura of Cyriss washed over him, cradling him in her insubstantial arms. At her touch, he understood that the machine blight to emerge from the gate was merely a miscalculation of her power, recalibrated now for the delicate beings she invited.
Nemo’s unliving eye drank in radiant star fields and the delicate filigree of nebulae. Dark places that devoured the light, blacker than the black of the void. He imagined worlds among this milky river of stars, hanging like motes of dust in a sunbeam.
Cyriss spoke to him then, not with words but through a perfect language, mathematical and musical in rapturous counterpoint. Nemo’s soul despaired. His soul sang. If he still had living eyes he would have wept.
Come, the goddess begged. Be with me. Be among me.
Make me your home.
***
Roget d’Vyaros felt young again.
He knew he had Infernal Master Zaateroth, the Weaver of Shadows, to thank for this feeling of exultation.
But she did nothing to earn it, he thought. This is all mine.
As soon as she brought him to the final battlefield, Roget led his cult members away from her, driving them into the refugees and those who thought to protect them. Steelheads fell before him, and Roget drank of their decimation like a vampire.
One of his cultists shouted to him that Orin Midwinter was conquering the field as well. Roget bristled for a moment—there wasn’t enough harvest to feed them all, and he would likely have to consider Midwinter’s fall before this was over.
Steelheads grunted and died. Rhulic soldiers gasped their final prayers. Trollkin and human blood spilled in gallons. He even caught a glimpse of a Crucible Guard theater commander, if the insignia spoke truthfully, as the man was torn to pieces.
It was, Roget decided, a good day to be alive.
He drove his dagger into the face of a mercenary woman, pleased by how she flailed with both hands to pull it out again, but she fell away from him, taking his weapon with her. As he bent to unsheathe it from her skull, he had one more moment of surprise and pleasure.
It stank of death and tasted like a corpse, but as Roget d’Vyaros stood tall again and clenched the blood-soaked cigar he had discovered in the mud between his teeth, he thought again:
This is all mine.
***
They had been given souls and chose to spend them like this? With squandered potential drowned by petty ambitions and a desire to satisfy imperfect masters?
Zaateroth would have pitied them, if it were worth the effort.
Their spirits shed living prisons and danced like embers caught in the updraft of a bonfire.
The Tyrant of the Unhallowed did not let them go to waste as the mortals had done.
She snagged these wayward spirits, dividing and molding them into new shapes. Then she directed them into the fray, one wave after another, wearing down their opponents.
These souls were tarnished and feeble things, but Zaateroth was a master sculptor. She could transform a single one into several lesser beings, and from the joined scraps coax other, more powerful, entities into existence.
To her south, the marked souls ground deeper into the enemy’s defenses. She advanced on the north, drawn to the light of a few remarkable souls scattered among them. She could taste doubt and fear, points where she could apply pressure to bend them to her will.
Part of her infinite intellect drifted through the motions of battle, guiding her horrors and whispering orders in her lieutenants’ minds. The rest was devoted to picking out those who were vulnerable to her manipulations.
Across the battlefield, she bargained terms with dozens at once, making deals and counter-deals faster than human thought. Fewer agreed than she might have hoped, but they would suffice.
***
At least he wouldn’t die old and aching in some bed. The thought gave Captain Amador Damiano small comfort as he cried for order among his crumbling Steelhead lines.
“Ask for glory, and fate shall provide an opportunity to seize it!” he called out, though no one seemed to be listening. Halberdiers and riflemen started to give ground, their once stately regiments turning into disgusting routs.
Damiano thrust his sword at the foul thing that had appeared to the east, graceful, alien, and abhorrent. “By my side, brothers and sisters!”
He pressed on, guiding Glory through muscle and sinew. Though attacks weakened his power field, battered his gleaming armor, he drove forward through the enemy. At his back, Rocinante threshed through the horde.
He grew close to the infernal master. As one, he and Rocinante lifted their arms, Damiano holding a pistol, the warjack aiming its cannon. Their shots were a heartbeat apart.
As the smoke cleared, he saw he had failed. The master stood tall, gestured at him with a dismissive flick of the wrist. Many horrible things converged around him and loyal Rocinante.
“I should have brought a horse,” he said. “The best stories always have a hero meet his ending from the saddle.”
The horrors descended on Damiano.
It was neither glorious nor quick.
***
The gold-clad fool dispatched with, Zaateroth finalized her pact.
Across the battlefield, the few dozen who saw the futility of fighting against her turned on their allies. It was not their strength of arms she desired, though. It was the mark now upon their souls.
Omodamos would arrive soon. He would desire more horrors to command.
***
A murder of crows heralded their appearance in battle.
The warhost of Umbrey appeared on the eastern horizon to the crackling laughter of birds. The Old Witch had shortened their way.
Great Prince Vladimir Tzepesci rode at the head of their battle line, his faithful companion Drago by his side. Before them, the land sloped below into a tangled field of bodies and mires of bloody soil. The infernals swarmed the defenders in clouds like angry hornets.
Vlad wheeled to face his cavalry, good men and women of Umbrey all. Khadoran red and Protectorate white mingled together. Though the heraldry of different nations adorned them, they were as one.
“Once the world trembled at the horselords’ approach,” Vlad called to them. “In steppe and valley, all knew to fear our fury.”
He pointed to the raging battle with his spear.
“This foe is not of our world! It has not known the might of Karpathan steed or Umbrean resolve. Let us teach them what all in the Iron Kingdoms know!” Vsada whinnied and pawed the air. “Let our hoofbeat be the drums of war! Let their dying screams be our battle cry!”
The warriors of old Umbrey raised their weapons, bellowing back in answer.
“Today is a black day,” he shouted, “a day we will make run red! By your blood and mine, we will emerge victorious or die in glory!”
Vlad wheeled back towards the infernal masses. He couched his horselord’s spear and led the charge.
***
“Wait—”
Orin Midwinter’s staff impacted the man’s skull, cutting the plea short. His hand throbbed, fingers numb, from the sharp jolt.
The fight around him was less of a battle than it was a bloody brawl. Bodies crashed together, went down into the churned soil. It was a gouging, spitting, bleeding, dying mob. His robes were drenched with sweat and blood, hanging heavy and sticking to his flesh.
Orin howled to be heard above the fighting, calling to the many congregations he directed. “Let their wounded fall! Press on!”
The cultists who heard him clambered off of broken bodies and staggered to their feet, rendered like drunks by the slick ground and their own injuries.
They drew steadily closer to Henge Hold. But as the numbers of their foes dwindled, as they tightened the noose around them, those who remained fought back with greater fervor. Irate, Midwinter hurled baleful flames at someone… friend or enemy? It was impossible to tell.
The souls he snatched were invigorating, but not enough to dull his many aches. A Steelhead bullet ground against a rib where it had stuck in his flesh. His fingers throbbed from gripping his staff. Midwinter’s scowl deepened.
The battle was in their favor, but uncertainty gnawed at him.
It was almost a relief when the thunder of hooves sounded from the rear. His dreadful suspicion was confirmed as hundreds of heavy horse bearing armored riders bore down on them.
To the cultists nearest him, Orin gave the order. “Fall back to the masters, regroup. Regroup!”
***
“God’s sake, I think they’re on our side,” Marshal Gearhart mumbled. He flapped his hand in the general direction of where he expected Mr. Clogg to be, letting his aid put a fresh weapon in it.
“Sir?” Clogg sniffed. If he asked anything else, it was drowned by the report of the warcaster’s weapon firing.
“The riders to the east. Did you think I was talking about the bloody infernalists?” Gearhart said, lining up a shot at the tall figure commanding the enemies.
Gearhart fired.
It was a kill shot.
The awful bugger didn’t die.
“Dammit, Clogg. Give me the big gun!”
Clogg responded with another dribbling sniff. “That was the ‘big gun,’ sir.”
Gearhart scowled at the weapon in his hands. So it was.
“Right,” Gearhart said. “Get some bombs to our best rocketman. The one who dropped a Conquest back in Llael. Captain Evie something.”
“It was a Victor, sir.”
Gearhart turned on his porter. “I don’t give a good damn if it was two trolls in an overcoat! Hurry up and do it before things get worse!”
Clogg moved to fulfill his request as the northern sky grew dim. A creeping blackness rolled in, a dark fog of ink. Another immense master advanced on Henge Hold, accompanied by a small mob of cultists.
“Things have gotten worse,” Clogg mumbled, then hastily added, “sir.”
***
Sheer momentum carried the Umbreans forward over the bodies of the wounded. Hooves slipped on gore and churned earth. Riders fell beneath the weight of dying horrors or were stalled by the shoals of dead enemies that massed before them.
The Great Prince and Vsada were swift and skilled, weaving through the press of bodies and across the broken ground. The two moved as one, the horse stamping down creatures that the prince skewered with his spear.
Drago struggled to keep up, charging forward with the surges of a derailed train. The venerable warjack scattered bodies like chaff in its frenzy to stay by Vlad’s side, hacking a corridor through the enemies with its axes.
He flowed through the bodies, riding the river of carnage to his destination. Past feeble traitors to humanity and nightmarish figures of waxy flesh, a spire of muscle and bone stood tall. She orchestrated the infernals and wove death with foul magic.
Vlad spurred Vsada, his spear guided at her heart.
Hurdling over the first line of her cultists and thundering through the second, the Great Prince of Umbrey plunged his spear through the infernal’s spine. Ichor sprayed from the rupture on the other side, sizzling where it touched the ground.
She shrieked in wretched pain as smoke boiled out of her wound. The infernal twisted to face Vlad, snapping the haft of his spear, turned her featureless face upon him, backhanded him with trailing fingers.
His flesh withered under the age of countless years at her touch.
The infernal spoke, her buzzing voice blending into the speech of Umbrey. “You missed your mark, mortal.” Her wound was already sealing. “It will cost you your soul.”
Vlad slid from his saddle, sending Vsada away as he drew his sword.
“My soul is spoken for,” he said.
As the dark champion of Umbrey slashed at the infernal master, an old and furious warjack screamed with the noise of steam and grinding gears.
Drago joined the fight.
***
Aurora could wait for Nemo’s return no longer; as far as she was concerned, passing through the gate was as foolish as stepping off a dark ledge with the promise it was a short drop. A promise from someone you barely trusted. Or, as it turned out, even knew.
“He’s gone,” she said to no one in particular, though she knew Major Haley was listening. A crush of refugees—some arriving on tiny hovering ships as if they sailed a raft in a maelstrom—had closed in around them. “He’s not coming back.”
“There remains a future on the other side,” Haley breathed, close to her now. “The time is now.”
“You’re worse than that hermit,” Aurora said.
Haley was not deterred. “Trust. Have faith.”
“In what? In him? You? Them?”
The pleading around them had reached a crescendo. Hands that had never touched a sword begged her.
“I suppose,” she whispered, “it’s better to die with slim hope than with none.”
Haley nodded as if to scripture.
“Don’t agree,” Aurora said. “It makes me feel worse.”
She directed the nearest vessel, manned by wide-eyed young man with desperately old eyes, toward the gate, assuring him over and over as he reached behind him for his even younger wife’s hand. Their craft vanished, and when neither screamed, others surged to join them.
The vessels steered near and glided gracelessly toward the gate, the protective fields around them shimmering as if hesitant. Aurora had to say little else—they fled the killing fields for the unknown like souls beckoned to a light. No one even asked if they would live.
It was just as well they didn’t. Aurora didn’t like to lie, and Haley probably wouldn’t.
***
They flee. They escape. They live.
No words, but this message spread among the infernals and their masters, inducing a frenzied fit in a wave. Horrors shrieked as souls slipped through the gate beyond reach, and those souls still near paid dearly for those departed.
They crushed, shattered, and shredded those they could, but still others crawled through the gate. The infernals howled and roared, gnashing teeth and snapping claws. Sheer terror held some back. But too few. Even those with nothing left to live for were trying to do so.
Then the air rippled with heat, and fires incinerated the tall grasses that had been crushed by the first refugees and then bloodstained by the next ones. Bodies too close when he passed were shredded as a dark shape descended from the north.
He had come for the end.
Those who knelt before his towering form cowered and died. Those who stood their ground died. Omodamos, called by some the Black Gate, by others the Bringer of Sorrow, only brought death at the gate this day.
With a baleful eye, he took in the entirety of the battlefield, yet another eye met his across the dead and the dying. It did not bloody itself blind to avoid his stare. It held fast, and Omodamos heard its master whisper even from afar.
“Come for me,” Asphyxious hissed.
***
The pulse of their engines clawed the sky as they crossed the mountains east of Ramarck. She could feel the hum of arcane energy screaming through the deckplates.
“Message from the Cloudpiercer, ma’am,” the signal officer said.
“What does the old cyclops want now?” Kommandant Kratikoff asked. She almost regretted the system of signal flags Irusk had devised.
“Short message, ma’am. ‘Didn’t you used to be fast? Stop.’”
Sorscha’s dour expression hardened. “Stoke the fires. Tell him Vygor’s Hammer will meet him at Henge Hold.”
***
Vlad rolled away from a bilious stream one of the infernal beasts spewed at him. He pressed his attack, opening wounds on the master’s flesh like black-lipped mouths. Drago’s axes flashed and hewed one of her arms free.
The master’s expression had turned from arrogance, to anger, to desperation as they battled. She clearly expected his strength to fail.
So did he.
The eastern flank faltered under the weight of his cavalry charge and was congregating at the foot of the henge. The gate within flashed as refugees escaped the infernals’ grasp.
The master bellowed. Vlad’s skull split from the noise. Like an avalanche it rolled over him, driving him to his knees.
But it drove her down as well.
Not the master.
The roar came from two vessels, large as watchtowers. Lightning wreathed one; the other was built like a gun-studded anvil.
***
“Drop off our passenger,” Sorscha ordered. Below her, the mechanism of the bomb bay ground open.
Karchev the Terrible fell to the earth, a blacksmith’s hammer landing upon a stubborn bit of iron.
Old familiar smells of blood, coal, and blasting powder filled his nostrils. Karchev rose from the crater of his impact to look down on the field of struggling soldiers. Their eyes rose to meet his, trailing up the armor of his colossal frame.
“It is good to be killing again,” Kharchev said and laid into the foe with his oversized axe.
***
“Get us closer to the gate,” Magnus said. The airframe’s pilots obeyed, causing the vessel to drift over the battle below. “If you have a clear vector, tell the stormsmiths to hit them with everything they have.”
The bridge crew called affirmative.
Looking out the front window, Magnus saw throngs of refugees around the gate in Henge Hold. There were dozens of vessels crowded around it. Far too few for those gathered.
“Bring us in, fast and low, to the gate,” he ordered.
“Sir, that brings us directly over the enemy,” a young pilot said.
“Good. Get the storm chambers hot and fry anything down there uglier than me.”
***
It was an unexpected relief but a welcome one. On a tide of lightning, the Cygnaran sky ship flew at the gate, disgorging trollkin and trenchers to aid the defense. A hobbling, scarred Magnus emerged and shouted to the refugees, ordering them aboard.
It could not contain them all, but Tristan Durant saw Nadira and dozens of Menite faithful board the ship.
He smiled, knowing they would be safe.
***
The arrival of the ships only served to agitate the infernals swarming the henge like a disease. They climbed atop one another, straining to reach the Cygnaran ship’s hull as it descended toward the gate.
Once the first horror found its grip, the rest easily followed.
They breached the hull and climbed the gunwales, rending steel and penetrating the ship’s inner workings. Lamenters scattered among the decks, piercing victims with their savage forelegs and flinging them out into the air.
Acid from below and spells singing through shriekers from above devastated the craft and its people. The ship tipped as horros clawed their way into the engines, the consumption of souls replaced by wholesale slaughter.
Beneath the decimation, one soldier ran as if to join the carnage, his armor bloodied by those he’d once called fellow countrymen. Their bodies fell all around him in pieces from the ship above as he positioned himself below it, welcoming its descent.
When the ship came down in a fiery explosion, Omodamos returned the sliver of his attention he’d focused on it to the gate itself and the foe who waited there. Souls could be lost from the ship but not from the gate.
Zaateroth battled a mortal opponent but spared part of her mind to communicate.
Runewood is escaping us, she conveyed to him.
A second explosion from the destroyed Cygnaran ship punctuated her declaration, as if Runewood mocked her from beneath its crushing finality.
The gate, Omodamos conveyed and moved toward Asphyxious again.
***
It would cost her personally, perhaps more than she had ever imagined paying, but to Haley, it would have cost more not to try.
She watched the Cygnaran ship Cloudpiercer plummeting from the sky, its surface moving with infernals like maggots on a corpse.
Yet the threads were there—as they always were. She had learned to eschew certain phrases that had been part of her vernacular once, but one came to her now just the same: There is still time.
There is ALWAYS time, she amended.
Pulling the thread tightly might snap it, but she could twist it enough to go back and right the Cloudpiercer and slow its descent, adjusting it to prevent it from toppling sideways down the henge’s hill if it shouldn’t stop in time.
It remained under assault, but it could still move—and it did, skimming the earth’s surface as it redirected itself toward the gate once more.
She closed her eyes, which only strengthened the lights she could see, and reached out for the echoes she knew were there.
She knew their names if not their faces. It was easy to welcome Amador Damiano—he was so recently struck down, he even recognized this field of battle. More difficult was Hierarch Severius and his predecessor, Voyle, whose faces were hidden behind masks. Still, they came.
Most difficult was among the last of hundreds whose echoes she found. This was a face she knew intimately—the black facial hair.
The eyepatch.
The sneer.
An echo out of time, Vinter Raelthorne joined the others that had made the Iron Kingdoms what they were as if he’d expected to assume this role all along. Under less dire circumstances, Haley would have allowed her resentment to boil over.
Instead, she welcomed him to the battlefield.
He seemed to scan the combatants, as if perhaps looking for Asheth Magnus to deliver payback for Vinter’s death, but then he joined the myriad other echoes she had sought and found for the final battle.
As she turned to lead this newfound force against the infernals all around the gate, she secretly hoped that the former king’s soul would be one of the noble sacrifices about to come.
From the south came a new force, one she was mildly surprised to see. The enormous gatorman at its head, flanked by two pale-skinned Nyss witches well known to her, was a strange sight, as were the green-and-gold-armored troops and surreal stone constructs with them.
All forces become equal in fear and death, she thought, and then, If we all live, this will be a historic day, indeed.
Maybe even the end of wars instead of days.
More death followed this final thought.
***
Beneath the Cygnaran ship, one soldier ran toward it, his armor bloodied by those he’d once called fellow countrymen. He could sense his escape from torment at hand as he positioned himself below it, welcoming its descent.
He closed his eyes to welcome the end, his lip curled in defiance and his mind filled with hatred for his infernal masters. The mistakes he’d made were about to be rectified, he knew.
I win, Runewood thought, hoping they were listening.
The air turbulence shook him and threatened to knock him from his feet. He opened his eyes and stared up into the underside of the ship as it passed overhead. It steadied itself, its bow aimed at the glowing gate.
He watched his salvation sailing away.
“Son of a—” he wept aloud.
And then he felt Zaateroth calling to him.
Head held high, his emotions contained, he had no choice but to obey.
***
“Is that the royal consort?” Kommander Harkevich asked.
The entire bridge crew of Vygor’s Hammer went quiet. Sorscha snatched a spyglass and looked where he was pointing.
“He’s beaten one of the masters,” she said.
“Gunnery crew, put a full spread down around him. Make sure nothing reaches him,” Harkevich barked. They relayed his orders through brass speaking horns into the depths of the vessel.
***
The humbled master crawled away, holding its lacerated hand up in defense.
Vlad stalked forward as the ripple of Khadoran guns turned the world into fire around them.
“Stay your hand,” she hissed, “and I can offer you anything you desire. Power, fortune…”
He could feel her gaze on him like a film of gritty oil. She probed his heart, his spirit.
“… love.”
Vlad raised his sword. “You offer water to a drowning man.”
Zaateroth smiled, an ugly gash revealing loathsome teeth and gesturing skyward. “She’s here, you know. Watching us. Watching the father of her child.”
The great prince’s step faltered. “You need better lies,” he said.
The master chuckled. “So, the old one never told you. Took and hid the child away, plundered the vault of your memories. I can help you reclaim it.”
Uncertainty. He could feel it gnaw at him, opening a chink that the master’s black tendrils explored to widen the fracture. She summoned images of him, of the child and its mother. The battle faded in his eyes, replaced utterly by the vision.
Vlad barely noticed as Zaateroth wrapped a withering hand around his throat.
***
Sorscha’s heart turned to ice as the great prince fell.
She could summon no words. Cold radiated from her until the crew’s breath smoked, until frost hung from the tips of their hair.
When she spoke at last, her voice was that of an ice goddess. It carried the unstoppable weight of a glacier.
“Destroy that thing.”
***
A murder of crows whirled above Zaateroth. Their thousand voices called to her with mocking croaks. More came, impossibly more, to blacken the sky.
As one they dove at her, a tornado of black wings. They hit and spread across the battlefield, battering horrors and cultists in their passage.
In their place, a motley army of nightmares stood, a cackling old woman atop a rattling machine at their heart.
Zaateroth prepared to meet this new foe, siphoning souls to close her wounds, when a new dawn broke to the north. A legion of fiery-winged warriors descended on the Black Gate’s army, led by a radiant woman with a blinding soul, a silent shadow of a man by her side.
Accompanying them were chanting hordes of faithful mortals, singing praises to their creator god.
Zaateroth felt something unfamiliar.
She felt afraid.
***
“Poor child,” Zevanna said, looking down to where her flock gathered over Vlad’s body. “You knew this day vould come. Be happy. Your bloodline still flows.”
With that she cast her eyes to the gate, and a refugee vessel slipping through it. Somewhere amid its passengers, a young stowaway, unknown to all, traveled beyond the infernals’ reach.
***
Omodamos felt reality ripple, shift. These were expected tactics. His greater interest was the one who now fled across the battlefield. The one who would die a second time.
“You cannot escape,” he breathed to the former lich lord. The distance between them closed swiftly.
Asphyxious turned suddenly and set his stance. He shot a glance at the gate and then back at the infernal master called the Black Gate. “Thou misunderstand. ’Tis not I who would escape.”
“Yet you flee,” Omodamos said, swatting troublesome mortals out of his way.
The Black Gate allowed their dying spirits to fuel him. He spun his flails at speeds that cracked the air.
Shouting to be heard, Asphyxious called, “I merely await my reinforcement!”
Omodamos made to attack the lich when the shadows turned against him, holding him fast.
The Witch Deneghra revealed herself and joined Asphyxious. Together, they charged.
***
Aurora caught herself laughing as a ridiculous thought crossed her mind.
I am now the child of two machines.
Beneath the shifting glow of the gate, she lashed out at a trio of hideous floating horrors with tentacles that died easily.
Were their choices my future?
She felt her gaze pulled to the gate, the escape, the promise. The future.
It was far, far too late to consider it any other action.
***
Axis, the Harmonic Enforcer, shifted his blows from one hammer to the next, from Action to Reaction, but the substantial amount of gore that covered both of them could not distract him from his belief that an enormous moment of portent was upon them.
Action. Reaction. Cause and effect. The goddess brought him here, in this moment, to see her will evoked on Caen. He would not falter, could not fall, unless she deemed it necessary.
Axis spotted the gore-covered leader of the cultists, Midwinter. He began carving a bloody path to the man through the bodies.
***
Sunder felt lighter than Karchev could ever recall it feeling before. The massive axe felt more like a kitchen cleaver in his grip, as it inevitably did when his addiction to battle took him over. He spun, infernal pulp spraying from him, as a human rider approached.
He wore befouled emblems marking him an Illuminated One. Karchev didn’t know him personally, but he could still kill him impersonally.
Karchev stoked his boiler and trampled forth, pulverizing combatants in his path. Bullets rang off his hull as he waded through the storm.
“You stand in the way of destiny,” the rider cried.
Karchev raised his axe high. “You stand on broken ground.”
He brought the weapon down with all his strength, striking the earth hard enough to split it like a rotten log. Horse and rider tumbled into the breach.
***
She moved between the spatters of blood from both infernals and those resisting them, and none stained her white attire. The blood soaked the ground but left the Harbinger immaculate.
She felt the blessing of Menoth all around her. And she brought her faith to this place where gods were changing the world.
The warm radiance of her archon companions felt like the sun on her cheeks. Like morning’s dawn banishing the cold and dark, they blazed their way through the tangle of bodies.
She proceeded to the gate with mixed intentions but the conviction of a god defying irrelevance.
***
Marshal General Baldwin Gearhart would have preferred attacking the Khadorans around him than the rabid monstrosities tearing apart the world.
But today, they had torn apart more than that.
He knelt in the blood of his manservant Clogg and stifled the gasp in his chest.
“See here, Clogg,” he said hoarsely, “if you defy me on this dying business, I fear I’ll have to fire you.”
The older man, eyes flickering, reached up for Gearhart’s hand. “Perhaps I must tender my resignation, sir.”
“Foolish Cedric,” Gearhart whispered.
***
Barnabas ripped a scythe-like appendage from the nearest horror, used it to pierce its lopsided owner, and then flicked his tongue across the limb’s edge.
“Tastes like pygs!” he bellowed, the gate forgotten. Everything he could want was right here.
Saeryn turned back at the gator’s shout. The Lord of Blood and his most devout congregants needed little encouragement to rip apart their enemies. The few spawn she and Rhyas controlled required additional goading.
Yet the infernal enemy seemed to favor the gatormen, as if detesting something about the spawn.
How interesting.
She could not justify why she liked this insight.
But she did.
***
Ashlynn could not help scanning the refugees for Marie Aguillon and Vayne di Brascio as they made their way toward the gate. She didn’t really expect to see them. She was charged with protecting the queen; they were charged with protecting the people. The odds favored her.
“We are almost there, my Queen,” she whispered to Kaetlyn. The pulsing lights ahead beckoned them to a new world beyond this life.
“I am only Kaetlyn now,” the queen wept.
“You will still be a queen on the other side,” Ashlynn promised. She told herself she believed this.
***
The corpses of horrors were stacked and slung like fish dumped from a giant net. The soil was slick with their blue blood; some of the bodies pulsed with fading life still. Their stench carried to the furthest combatants, and all avoided it if they could.
One stack moved.
His body was ruined, his skin flayed everywhere it was exposed. He raised his hands with twisted and broken fingers to explore his face. One cheek was peeled to raw muscle, but he passed his fingertips over the hole indifferently. He pressed them against his tattered lips.
“Dammit,” Drake MacBain growled. “Where the hell is my cigar?”
***
Omodamos’ grip on his flails tightened. The abhorrent silver-clad thing assailing him and its witch companion were pesky flies that bit and left lingering stings.
He prepared to summon up a fresh horror from one of the souls Zaateroth had marked. Let it put this battle to an end.
Yet the Black Gate discovered he could not.
Something was girding the scattered souls on the battlefield from him. He could not wring their essence from them. With one flail, he forced his opponents back and looked for the source.
A young woman, her soul as delectable as a fine meal, accompanied by a winged host. This was the source of his frustration.
Ah, to craft from that soul would be a pleasure.
Omodamos turned away from the irritating foe to pursue his new quarry. Mortal servants and horrors flooded to fill the gap of his passage.
The Black Gate had not traveled far when a loud voice called out.
“We aren’t done with you,” Karchev the Terrible heaved. Blood coated every inch of him, dripped from his axe in sheets.
The infernal master moved to intercept the man, drawing upon his own essence for strength.
He would enjoy this appetizer before his feast.
***
The first ships appeared to Nemo as shooting stars.
Emerging from the gate, their protective fields glowed brilliant blue against the void. Each appeared with a corona of chromatic mist that trailed them like tails.
More came, each flitting past him. He was in the eye of a storm, lines of color and light describing infinite arcs to Cyriss.
Wishing the distant travelers safe passage, Nemo flexed his mechanical strength to return to Caen.
There was still much to be done.
He returned to a scene of chaos. The ring of Henge Hold pressed tight with refugees. Mere yards beyond the huddled mob, infernals and the people of Immoren struggled in desperate battle.
It was close enough for the blood to spatter up on his hull.
“I hope you’re on our side,” a familiar voice grumbled.
Nemo turned to face a grim soldier. Magnus. He wore a Cygnaran uniform, its clean lines a strange pair for his weathered face.
“You look different, Asheth,” he said.
Magnus fired his scattergun into the wall of horrors. “Morrow’s dangling… Nemo? So the hell do you.”
“There is time for you to escape,” Nemo said, “if you go now.”
The warcaster gave him a sardonic grin.
“I’ve spent my whole life fighting for Cygnar,” Magnus said. “I’m not about to leave before the curtain call.”
***
Haley was fading.
Her reinforcements had spread the infernals’ attention, but they were still closing.
Already weak from calling forth so many echoes, she drew on what little strength remained. Her body stuttered, barely able to remain.
Time was stubborn, true, but so was she. Haley wrapped her fists in the weave of it, wrenching pieces apart. Around her, refugee vessels stuttered, doubled. Like pieces of a broken mirror, they reflected across each other.
As she flickered between the present moment and other infinite possibilities, she saw her actions had consequences. Reflections of Caen, manifold reflections, showed her many futures.
She was not in them.
“Keep them back,” she said to the other warcasters, her voice carrying over the battlefield. Axis, Aurora, Asphyxious, each fought on.
Three A names, she thought, as she felt herself sinking into very the flow of time. How odd.
Refugees stampeded onto the colorless ships she summoned. Keeping these reflections in the present moment was like holding up a warjack. Her body and spirit flagged with the effort.
She’d earned the wrath of time. She’d drawn the attention of the masters.
Though it must have cost them dearly, the two masters allowed themselves to be struck down. Hosts of horrors collapsed. Cultist souls burned up.
They manifested again, closer this time.
At the cost of so many souls, they died and appeared again.
Closer still. The infernal masters were coming for her.
Haley put her faith in her companions.
She faded deeper into the pull of time.
***
The skies rumbled as if a storm threatened. Even the infernalists taking the battlefield paused from their killing to look up in surprise.
A lance of light shot from the gathering clouds like a bolt of lightning, like a falling sword. Soldiers, cultists, and horrors shielded their eyes against its glare.
Among them, only a few knew what the archons were before they arrived.
They came like giants on wings of silver and royal purple, in armor glowing with their creed. The Thamarites in the battle below were not surprised to see their angelic saviors alongside those of their goddess’ brother, but the Morrowans caught their breath in disbelief.
Some cheered, some prayed. Some expected instant salvation while others recognized the renewed strength they could feel in their limbs because hope had finally arrived.
Some, however, could not believe their eyes.
Irusk had felt like he’d arrived late to a buffet—it seemed many of the best kills had already been taken, and those that remained were too far afield or otherwise engaged for him to chase down.
Then, once Ashlynn and her queen bolted for the gate and Brisbane had pursued his own targets, Irusk had needed to decide how to proceed.
Ultimately, he’d settled for quantity over quality.
Now he pulled one leg free, then the next, from the pile of dead cultists that rose as high as his hips. He watched the archons fall from the sky, his lip curled back when he recognized the one in the front.
“Why,” he sneered in disgust, “are we never really rid of you?”
Asheth Magnus was so close to the gate that he wasn’t sure at first what he was seeing. Then he broke out in a grin as he opened fire at the nearest clawed horrors.
“Welcome home, old boy,” he grunted as the archons joined the battle.
Infernals quickly fell upon the archon that wore the face of Coleman Stryker.
They died just as quickly.
***
“Kommander Harkevich,” she said in a measured voice, “you have control of Vygor’s Hammer. Inform the mechaniks to stoke Beast’s boiler. Bring me down to the fighting before you all freeze to death.”
Kommandant Sorscha left the command bridge. Her tread left a trail of cold so deep that the thick hull plating crackled.
The kommander watched her go, dread growing, feeling that a great doom had been unleashed on the world.
***
It had been a hard row to hoe, the road from Caspia to Henge Hold. Her sword gave her more than enough power to deal with the horrors she encountered along the way, given that she had felled a gate with it, but she still found it difficult.
Perhaps she no longer wanted to go. Perhaps the futility of it all was finally settling on her. Perhaps her mother’s incessant questioning of her motives was exhausting.
Or perhaps she was just weary of the Witchfire.
She was also surprised to find she missed Harlan Versh and even more surprised to find she regretted that she’d left him to his fate in Caspia. She wished she hadn’t, but it couldn’t be undone now.
And besides…this would make it worth her while.
Lexaria, the voice of her mother, whispered from the sword. Do you intend to destroy the infernal masters and their brethren…or the gate everyone is using to escape?
Be silent, Alexia answered. She took in the sprawling bloodbath of chaos spread before her.
She was still thinking of the proper answer as she moved to join the battle.
Either way, she said to her mother, you’re about to receive guests.
She ignored her mother’s response as she reached the first combatants.
***
This was not what she was promised.
Zaateroth struggled to keep her feet and looked on the sea of violence. Walls of corpses were impromptu cover for pockets of mortal gunners. Blood and sweat sprayed into the air.
The defenders appeared at every edge of the field surrounding the henge, a motley band of different culture and ancestry blended in battle. Demigods, a few, attempted to stall her and Omodamos’ approach to the time-witch.
The old one to whom she offered clemency commanded her machine-steed to kick one of Zaateroth’s own horrors at her like a cannonball. The old witch She was laughing.
Laughing at her.
Enough, Zaateroth conveyed to the other master.
Omodamos was locked in battle with a trio of winged avatars but spared part of his mind to respond.
Are you certain?
She let the memory of a high priest drive its punching dagger through her body. She shed the form like a snake shedding its skin, appearing behind the apparition, a few lengths closer to her target.
I tire of their heroics, she communicated.
Zaateroth allowed the greater portion of her mind to sink away from the mortal realm, feeling Omodamos do the same. Both continued the battle on pure instinct, letting their intellects touch a far darker place.
Why are you here?
The Magnate Tritorium was not used to being bothered.
Their gaze was like myriad blades peeling back every layer of her being. They did not wait for her to answer the query, preferring to extract the information in their own way. A painful way.
You are weakened. You come seeking our aid.
Zaateroth did not answer. The leaders of her infernal order would draw their own conclusions.
She is failing, the primus thought.
She has failed, thought the secundus.
She desires our intervention, tertius thought, sickly amused by the prospect.
The Magnate convened for a moment. In the space of that moment, Zaateroth knew they considered and discarded infinite punishments and debts for her, each one tailored to humiliate and debilitate her utterly.
She and Omodamos awaited their fate.
We have decided, they declared as one.
We will assist you but require a benefaction in return. This gate. It intrigues us. It could make our traversal between worlds…simple.
See that we acquire it, they thought, burning the deed into her mind with an unbreakable contract. In return, they invested in her a measure of the reserve of souls kept ready for just such a need.
With it, they gave her the reins of their chosen protector. The great leveler. The consumer of all things.
The guardian of the Well of Souls.
I won’t disappoint you, she vowed.
But you already have, they responded before banishing her from their presence.
Her focus returned to the battle. She was reinvigorated and more furious than ever.
***
He heaved off the weight of his crippled horse. In the fall, both its forelegs had snapped like old broomsticks.
Valin Hauke looked up from the fissure. Corpses hanging over the rim dripped blood onto his face. He grunted, picking his way up the ragged earthen walls.
As he did, a low sound emanated from the shadows beneath him, drowning the shrill cries of his mount.
Hauke looked back and saw a liquid blackness slowly filling the pit.
It moved like a living thing, extending thin tendrils that sought out the horse, entangled it, and dragged it into the waiting dark.
The creature stopped shrieking, at least.
His body was close to giving out by the time he reached the top of the crevasse he’d been spilled into by the Khadoran warcaster. He marveled that the man was now nowhere near.
Next time, make sure you finish what you start, he thought, scanning the battlefield.
The machine-man was roaring, threshing his way to where Omodamos stood. Hauke could hardly make out his bellowed cry.
“You do not escape so easily.”
In the distance, he recognized Orin Midwinter, braced for battle. And while he did not recognize the metallic thing that stomped its way past him toward Midwinter, he did recognize it as a follower of Cyriss.
Its hammers did it no good when it did not know Valin Hauke was directly behind it.
As he stabbed it in the back, his sword burst out the other side, and he imagined the metallic thing’s soul hanging off its tip.
Midwinter raised his staff in a salute.
Idiot, Hauke thought.
He advanced on the Khadoran warcaster.
***
While halfway across the continent infernals and refugees congregated on Henge Hold, Lord Arbiter Hexeris took a moment to appreciate his surroundings.
Most skorne kept their emotions on a short leash, but Hexeris found his current companions had mastered the skill far better.
For all the passion they displayed, the soulless Iosans may as well have been ancestral guardians.
The lord, Ghyrrshyld, was another matter entirely.
“They are birthing beds.”
The flat voice startled him. Hexeris had been studying high furniture built in rows along the wall.
“You were a…midwife?” he asked, struggling to find the word.
“Something like that. Your Shyr is improving.”
The lord arbiter changed the subject. The thought of this elf overseeing births unsettled even him. “How fares the void master?”
“Patiently. Follow me.”
They traveled through the bowels of the building. It felt funereal, like the tunnels of a vast mausoleum. Along the way, Hexeris noted what could only be holding pens, like those for captured slaves. He noticed fingernail scratches outside the doors with keen interest.
Their journey ended at the largest underground vault, which Ghyrrshyld described as his “former workshop.”
It made him think of a paingiver and extoller sharing a space. He could all but taste the pain and fear soaked into the stones.
A circle of soulless Iosans stood guard in this chamber, surrounding an elaborate cage with twelve interlocking faces. Too short for the master to stand, too narrow for it to sprawl, the thing had chosen to wait for them with legs folded beneath it.
“Update us,” Ghyrrshyld instructed. The one called Nayl spoke up.
“It has been asking to speak with you,” Nayl said.
***
Agathon passed the time by reviewing their contracts. They had drawn upon a number of them to summon a force to these lands, but many still remained. They prioritized individuals to seek out once they were free.
They’d made no gains with the current watchdogs. These creatures were empty vessels, of no worth to them. It was difficult to even see them without intense focus. The lack of a soul made them fade into the background, duller than an insect crawling across the wall.
But these two, they were something else. Agathon studied the form and history of their unusual souls. Writ across them were many deeds, far darker than those to which the master had become accustomed.
One pulsed from within, an essence that strained the limits of its container. The other… the other had calcified spirits clinging to it. Flies stuck in honey, worn like jewelry on a queen’s throat.
Agathon spared a portion of themselves to communicate, devoting the rest of their mind to probing the arcane prison.
“Pain does not work on us,” they said, looking for a reaction.
“We do not intend to use it,” Ghyrrshyld replied.
“I can offer you—”
“You will offer me silence,” the elf cut off Agathon’s statement.
The master watched intently as this elf collected an object and gave it to one of the soulless.
“Begin at the lowest setting,” Ghyrrshyld instructed, “and gradually increase until I say otherwise.”
The one called Nayl approached the cage.
“What is this supposed to do?” asked the bejeweled one.
“Test for vulnerability to arcantrik force,” Ghyrrshyld said.
“And if it doesn’t work?”
“Then, Lord Arbiter, we shall try things your way.” Ghyrrshyld moved to a bench and prepared a writing instrument. “You may begin.”
***
Empress Ayn Vanar sat alone in her court, unescorted, unattended.
Vulnerable.
With her hands in her lap, her head bowed, she seemed lost in thought.
Or so thought the only blood-covered assassin who had made it this far.
***
When Stasikov Palace was quiet, as it often was in the middle of the night, Ayn Vanar imagined she could hear the battles against the invading infernals in the distant south where so many had fled.
Now that the Khadoran borders were closed, she imagined this less often.
The latest Greylord report from Henge Hold was incomplete and distracting—she could no longer tell where her people were, though she knew Vlad would keep them in line. Desertion would remain unheard of in the Khadoran Army; execution would be the ongoing response.
She was weary, yet her mind would not let her rest. One thought, both gleeful and so far-fetched as to seem ridiculous, nagged at her like hunger.
When this invasion is quelled, western Immoren will be just one kingdom: Khador.
With I, its empress, at its head.
Yet before that could be accomplished, there were still challenges within her borders that needed to be dealt with. She just needed a name, and then the purge could begin.
She looked up as a shape erupted from the whispering shadows.
She thought, Now I will—
***
They came as a small force, just twelve of the Pale Guard, with former kovnik Kess in command. He was older than the others, hair grayed by experience, so when they finally breached the palace under cover of the night, he let them have the fun of killing the guards.
They took no casualties. Great Princess Regna Gravnoy would be pleased.
Kess, however, felt no pleasure. Killing their own countrymen was unavoidable in ensuring the White Queen’s rulership once the infernals had taken their bounty of souls and left the land to recover.
But he vowed it would not result in civil war. He could control that outcome by being the one who personally assassinated the empress while her champion Tzepesci was too far from home to save her and divide the nation.
She was alone.
But Kess was wrong.
They had been given details about what to expect once within the palace’s walls—guard rotations, heavily traveled corridors, routinely locked doors—but no one warned them about what they ultimately encountered en route to the empress.
He shouldn’t even have been alive.
The terrifying, nightmarish rumors were a far cry from the flesh-and-bone reality that fell upon them in a dimly lit hallway—the rumors were tame by comparison.
The Butcher had been unleashed upon them.
Kess had admired the legend from afar, but in person, he felt little more than sheer terror. Two of his men were dead before Kess even knew they were under attack.
The Butcher’s face was a mangled mess, a red, rabid froth on his lips.
And he snarled like a wild animal.
As the Butcher raised his axe, Kess caught sight of half a head—severed at the mouth—hurl away. Next to him, a decapitated assassin took two steps, hands raised to where his tongue now wriggled as the top of his head.
Someone screamed. Kess thought it might be himself.
The Butcher whipped his axe around in a smooth semi-circle, and Kess could see an arc of blood in the air as if it were a solid surface. Two more troops fell, their corpses flopping over one another as if being stacked.
The others were responding, but none as fast as Kess. The kovnik knew they all would die in this battle, one at a time, and the only way to reach the empress was to let the living fodder give the Butcher pause.
This was what Kess told himself as he escaped the slaughter.
He was covered in the blood of his countrymen. As the sounds of the battle faded, he reoriented himself, recognizing how close he was, and let the death ahead of him overshadow the deaths behind him. When he slipped into the room’s shadows, the empress was alone.
One stroke of his blade, and it would be over.
“Treason becomes patriotism,” he hissed to himself.
He made no other sound as he leapt from the shadows and fell upon the empress, his sword raised, a murder weapon to an historical treasure.
***
She thought, Now I will know.
When the shadows whispered “treason,” she knew what was about to happen.
Raising the pistol concealed in her lap, she shot the assassin in the face at point-blank range.
She enjoyed his look of surprise as his features exploded in death.
By the time Orsus arrived, fresh from killing the assassin’s compatriots, she had already resumed her composure.
“It’s that upstart who calls herself a queen,” she said to the Butcher, indicating the white ribbon on the dead assassin’s belt. “Her little cultist here.”
When the Butcher stared at her as if he were still in the battle elsewhere, she said softly, “Great Princess Regna Gravnoy. I want you to find all her people who might be lurking in the palace.”
She looked down at the dead assassin. “I want to send a clear message to her.”
***
He had a dying thought: kovnik to infernal.
And his soul fled the palace.
He had a debt to repay.