Bride of Khaine Read online

  The sorceress’s voice was playful, and she circled the Herald as she spoke. He was still gripped by the spell that had pulled him to his knees, so he could not watch her as she passed behind him. He focused his mind and drew in a deep breath, trying to fight the magic that kept him helpless.

  ‘No, but you are one of her playthings,’ he said.

  ‘You have a way with words.’ The sorceress smiled lasciviously. ‘Yes, I am Morathi’s, I suppose, in the same way that you are Hellebron’s.’

  ‘I belong to Khaine, as does my queen,’ replied Tullaris evenly. ‘I serve her in her role as the head of the cult.’

  ‘And that is all?’ teased the sorceress. ‘Interesting. And perhaps that will make the offer I bear all the more… powerful.’

  ‘There is nothing your mistress can offer that would interest me. Leave now, witch, unless you want to feel the kiss of the First Draich.’

  ‘Oh, how intimidating,’ she mocked. She moved closer and cupped his chin with her free hand, studying him as a slave buyer studies a potential purchase. ‘I’m sure that you would enjoy sheathing your weapon in me, Executioner. But you really must hear what I offer. Lady Morathi, Queen of Ghrond and the mortal reincarnation of holy Hekarti, wishes to forge an alliance with the Cult of Khaine.’

  I pull myself to my feet, ignoring the pain that runs up my arm from the broken wrist. Whoever – or whatever – killed Iulianeth is here. I hear breathing. I try to run, but my wretched body betrays me once again, pain and stiffness forcing me to stumble along, my good hand clutching at an unnaturally cold wall for support. I must reach the Cauldron. I must be strong.

  I decide to take the most direct route, dangerous as it takes me out of my private palace complex and into the main concourse that runs through the greater palace to the public throne room. It is the culmination of a great road that runs from the outer gates of the city. Those who wish an audience with me must walk from there to here, at Har Ganeth’s heart. The symbolism is obvious, but no less powerful for that.

  I know that the area has been the site of skirmishes between my forces and the invaders, but I must take the risk of being attacked. It has become a certainty that something is stalking me anyway. I can feel it. I wonder why they don’t strike when I am alone and vulnerable. Is it to make me feel fear? To try and stop my weakened heart through sheer terror? If so, it is foolish. For seven millennia, I have served Khaine, and ruled Har Ganeth for six. Fear has been burned from me. I am simply furious.

  ‘Face me,’ I whisper. Even if my voice could rise above that, I would not let it, not when I am trying to escape a pursuer. ‘Or do you fear me, even though I am but a wizened crone?’

  My taunt brings a response. Around me, the shadows laugh.

  ‘Hekarti? What vanity has the queen of lies fallen into now?’

  Tullaris was incredulous. The Mistress of Magic was one of the greatest of the elf pantheon. For Morathi to claim her mantle was an act of supreme arrogance. Only Malekith himself had ever dared to anoint himself the manifestation of a god, Khaine himself. And that had been a lie. Tullaris knew that for a fact, for the god had told him so.

  ‘She is Hekarti,’ said the sorceress. ‘Everything is changing, Tullaris. The gods walk the earth once more. Khaine and Asuryan will clash again, and the world will tremble. But the mythic cycles need not repeat, Tullaris. Khaine can best the phoenix. If he has the correct host, someone strong enough. Someone with a connection to Him…’

  Tullaris turned this over in his mind. The implications were troubling, but the possibilities were undeniably enticing.

  ‘What is your offer, witch?’ he asked.

  She turned away. ‘My mistress would have you take Hellebron’s place at the head of the cult. You will be anointed as Khaine and unite with Hekarti. Murder and magic will rule Naggaroth together.’

  ‘Malekith may have something to say about that.’

  ‘He will be dealt with,’ she said with a dismissive wave. ‘Plans are already in motion. Even now, the lord of Hag Graef is planning Malekith’s death.’

  ‘Darkblade?’ snorted Tullaris. ‘He will fail.’

  ‘Do not underestimate Malus Darkblade. There is more to him than is visible to the eye.’

  ‘Regardless, your offer is intriguing. You need me only to kill Hellebron?’

  ‘No. That is also being taken care of. We need you only to take her place.’

  ‘That was all I needed to know,’ said Tullaris, rising up and grabbing the sorceress by the throat.

  I hurry as best I can, and eventually reach the main concourse. To my surprise, the great thoroughfare is empty. For weeks, the Chaos worshippers have been attacking it, drawn to the Shrine of Khaine, driven by their blood-soaked deity to try to defile the holy structure and install one of their champions on my throne.

  The wide pathway is littered with bodies: elf, human and beastman. I drag my aching body around the corpses. Until now, I have stuck to the shadows, but there is no way to cross the street and not step into the light of the moons, one large and pale, the other small and casting a green glow across everything.

  The shrine is within sight, a great edifice of crimson marble. In my haste to reach it, I fail to watch where I am going and I trip, stumble, fall. This time I do not make the mistake of putting out an arm and I land on the rotting corpse of one of my witch elves. Another weakling, to fall beneath the blade of a human or filthy halfbreed animal. Flies burst upwards and maggots writhe away from me.

  And in front of me, the shadows coalesce into a figure. Female, young, clad in the colours of Ghrond.

  ‘Of course,’ I croak as I pull myself to my knees. ‘One of Morathi’s whelps. She is taking advantage of this situation to end our feud, then.’

  It is a good plan. I wish I had thought of it first.

  The sorceress kneels in front of me and pulls a short knife from her belt. It is inscribed with runes that dance along the blade. She looks me in the eye.

  ‘Everything is changing, and Morathi needs you disposed of. Your enmity no longer amuses her. She did bid me deliver a message before this knife slips into your heart, queen of hags.’

  ‘Oh, please just kill me and spare me her witless prattlings,’ I say.

  Enraged, she punches me and knocks me sprawling. I reach out to push myself back up and my hand touches something cold. Something metal. Khaine has delivered me once more.

  ‘A great change is coming.’ The sorceress yammers on. ‘My mistress has seen it. Darkness is rising and the gods walk. Khaine will be made manifest and it will be Morathi, not Hellebron, who stands at his side.’ She grips the ritual dagger in both hands and plunges it downwards.

  I roll, though it causes agony to course through my body, and stab upwards with the long knife that my witch elf once carried. I am rewarded with a pained scream. She slashes out wildly and cuts my leg, a long and deep gash. I stab again and blood splatters my face. I swallow and taste it, feel the power in it. I am invigorated and I surge upwards. The pain leaves me and a red mist descends. For a moment, I consider what some murmur, that Khaine and the bloody god the northerners worship are one and the same. I dismiss the thought as unworthy. We are not howling savages seeking skulls and gore. Though to see me now, you would not know it.

  When the bloodlust lifts, I am atop a ruined mess that was once a sorceress.

  I briefly regret that I did not have time to consecrate her death to Khaine.

  The strength passes, and I fall. One-armed, blood streaming from a leg that is rapidly numbing around the cut – the knife was poisoned, I assume – I begin to pull myself towards my apotheosis.

  Morathi’s sorceress started to gesture with her free hand, but Tullaris broke her wrist. Her yelp of pain cut off as he squeezed her neck even tighter.

  ‘You have sent assassins?’ he growled.

  She nodded frantically, and he slackened his grip.

  ‘We are three,’ she rasped. ‘Morathi’s Drakirites. I was sent to you. My sisters will be a
lready with the Hag–’

  A loud crack cut off the sorceress’s words as Tullaris snapped her neck. He let the body drop to the ground. Around him, the shadows receded. A howl split the night, followed closely by another. Both came from the direction of Hellebron’s palace.

  ‘Drakirites,’ he murmured. ‘How theatrical.’ It was just like Morathi to name assassins after the goddess of revenge, grandiose and ridiculous. The threat they posed was quite real though. Right now, two of them stalked Hellebron in the darkness of her half-abandoned palace, and only Tullaris knew it.

  His murder of her emissary wouldn’t change Morathi’s offer. All he had to do was let the witch’s sisters strike and he would be on the road to becoming one of the most powerful elves in Naggaroth. He looked up once again at the tower that split the sky and asked Khaine for guidance.

  Finally, I have reached my master’s shrine. Normally, I would revel in the architecture that gives glory to Khaine, great statues of him and murals showing his deeds from the Wars of the Gods. But now I am weak. I am dying. I look behind me and see a trail of my own blood stretching back to the butchered corpse of the assassin. So much blood. My arm and hip blaze with agony and I can barely feel my legs. A further painstaking effort brings me to the Cauldron.

  I roll over and look up at it, and beyond to the great vaulted ceiling, decorated with paintings of Tullaris’s Executioners and my witch elves. My gaze is drawn to the statue of Khaine that surmounts the Cauldron of Blood. It shows my lord clutching a dagger in one mighty hand and a heart in the other. It may as well be my heart that he carries, ready to plunge the weapon in. My death is certain now. Will he welcome me to his side, I wonder? Or will my weakness, allowing myself to be killed by a simple sorceress, ensure that I am forever damned?

  I try to pull myself up the steps that lead to the Cauldron. I cannot. I try again. I will die trying. I will not give up. I laugh bitterly.

  ‘Seven thousand years, Seven thousand years in your service, and it comes to this? I die bleeding my last on the floor of your shrine, inches from salvation?’

  I close my eyes. When I open them again, it is fully dark around me. Did I fall asleep? No, with the blood I have lost, had I succumbed to unconsciousness, I would not have awakened. What then?

  The shadows move and I understand. They coalesce, whirling into a elven form. Another assassin. Of course, Morathi would not just send one. She looks exactly the same as the other. I would think she had returned to life, were she not a lump of ruined meat a hundred feet away.

  ‘I am without weapon,’ I whisper. ‘Without hope. I am at your mercy. Not that I expect any.’

  ‘Would you show any, were our situations reversed?’ Her voice is soft.

  ‘No,’ I confess. ‘You would be dead already, or in much pain.’

  ‘Well, be glad I am not you, Hellebron. I am not going to kill you. I must deliver a message. You need to live. You need to thwart Morathi’s plans. She is mad, she–’

  She is cut off, metaphorically and literally, as her head parts from her shoulders and rolls out of my line of vision. Her body stands for a second, then falls to the side and reveals the form of an Executioner, draich raised. But this is not any draich, and not any Executioner.

  ‘Tullaris,’ I say weakly. ‘The Cauldron…’

  He says nothing. He doesn’t move. He gazes down at me, the First Draich still raised. Slowly, he pulls off his skull-helm and in his eyes is a murder-gleam. I have seen it there many times, but never has it been directed towards me.

  For the first time in a long time, I know fear. And for the first time ever, I acknowledge that I need Tullaris Dreadbringer. That I love him. It is my greatest weakness. To love another, to need them, is to make yourself vulnerable to them. And I am now more vulnerable than I have ever been.

  For a long moment we remain like that, and I am sure that I am going to die at the hands of my champion. My… love. Then the moment is over. He drops his weapon and kneels. He lifts me, and I sink into his arms, and allow myself to drift into unconsciousness. The last thing I feel is my body being immersed in the blood of Khaine’s great Cauldron.

  Tullaris watched Hellebron step out of the Cauldron of Blood. Her smooth, alabaster-pale flesh was as unmarked and perfect as the day Tullaris had first seen her, the day Khaine had first spoken to him and he had shed blood for the first time. In the wake of his divinely inspired acts of murder, she had named him her champion, and then she had taken him to her bed. The sight of her took his breath away as much as it had that night millennia ago.

  Of course, even when her prevailing aspect was that of Morai-Heg, he still adored her as much as he feared her. But now, when she was freshly renewed, she was a goddess. Morathi could lay claim to being Hekarti as much as she liked. To Tullaris, Hellebron was Atharti, the Lady of Desire, made flesh.

  She walked slowly, languorously, down the steps towards him, crimson liquid dripping from her and pooling on the flagstones, flowing into cracks as it had this night every year for six millennia.

  Tullaris had a sudden uneasy premonition that it would never do so again.

  Hellebron stopped a hand’s breadth from him and looked up, triumph and lust mingling in her eyes.

  ‘My champion,’ she breathed. ‘So many pleasures for us to experience together again.’

  ‘Yes, my lady,’ he replied, breathing in the scent of her body mixed with the iron tang of blood. ‘And first among them, to kill by your side again. To watch you lick blood from the First Draich.’

  She laughed, and it sent a chill down the Executioner’s spine.

  ‘Oh yes, my love. That and so much more. But first…’ She moved quicker than even Tullaris’s eye could follow, reaching to his belt and pulling his dagger from its sheath. In an instant, it was held to his throat. ‘What did they offer you, Tullaris? What did they offer you to kill me?’

  ‘My lady?’

  She pressed the knife harder against his throat. He felt it break the skin, blood welling up and running down the edge of the blade.

  ‘We have always been honest with one another, Tullaris. For all our many faults, we have always been honest. Don’t change that now.’

  ‘They offered me the cult, my queen. And a place at Morathi’s side, ruling over Naggaroth.’

  She flashed him a feral grin and brought the dagger to her mouth, delicately licking the fluid from it.

  ‘And yet I live. I was at your mercy and you spared me.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why?’

  He looked into her eyes and what he saw there was the most terrifying thing he had ever seen. Confusion.

  ‘I did what my conscience told me to do, my queen.’

  ‘Your… conscience.’ She said the word as if it were foreign and unfamiliar. ‘Tullaris, I find myself at a loss. For six thousand years, you have stood by my side, and never did I expect to discover such a weakness in you.’

  ‘Weakness?’

  ‘You spared me, when you could have had power and influence beyond any druchii’s dreams. That is weakness. It is sickening.’

  She turned away.

  ‘My lady–’

  ‘She was trying to tell me something.’ Hellebron knelt beside the third Drakirite’s severed head. ‘I would know what that was.’ She lifted the head and sauntered over the Cauldron, where she submerged it beneath the bubbling blood. After a few whispered incantations, she pulled it out.

  And it screamed.

  Gripping the head by the hair, Hellebron slapped it hard. It spun in a lazy arc, and teeth fell to the ground. It quieted, and its eyes focused on the Hag Queen.

  ‘What… What is happening?’ it squealed. ‘Pain. So much pain!’

  ‘And that pain is but a fraction of what I can make you feel,’ said Hellebron. ‘I will pull your spirit back from Ereth Khial’s clutches and inflict such tortures upon you that you cannot imagine them. Tell me what you were going to do and you might be spared that.’

  ‘I… I am a traitor to
Morathi,’ the head said. ‘I came to warn you. She has seen what is to come, and the part you will play. She would see you dead before you can foul her plans. But her plans must fail, or we will all be doomed.’

  ‘Speak clearly, wretch,’ growled the Hag Queen.

  ‘The Rhana Dandra approaches. Doom is at hand, and gods walk the world once more.’

  ‘The one I killed in the streets said the same,’ said Tullaris.

  ‘Dreadbringer!’ The head tried to turn, to face him. Hellebron tilted it in his direction. It was decaying rapidly, flesh sloughing from a skull that looked pitted and worn. ‘You will play a role, Herald of Khaine. You will bring him into the world, though you will not live to see him.’ She paused. ‘When the Blade of Darkness is broken by what lies within, you will fall to the would-be king, and the Lord of Murder will rise anew.’

  ‘I am to die in Khaine’s service?’

  ‘That matters not,’ interrupted Hellebron. ‘What else, sorceress?’

  ‘The Witch King will burn and be no more, and the druchii with him. And you, Queen of Hags, you will be Bride of Khaine no longer. You will become Khorne’s mistress.’

  It laughed, and the motion made the last of its flesh loosen and slip from the bone. The skull chattered for a moment before Hellebron shrieked in anger and flung it against the side of the Cauldron, where it shattered. She turned back to Tullaris.

  ‘Nonsense,’ she snapped. ‘A fantasy of Morathi’s design.’

  Tullaris did not reply. He remembered the Drakirite he had killed in the streets. Her eyes had shone with the light of fanaticism, the fervour of a true believer. The skull’s last words haunted him. Could Hellebron really fall to the Ruinous Powers? Could her lust for murder be turned to darker purposes? He tried to dismiss the thought.

  ‘The Rhana Dandra,’ Hellebron spat dismissively. ‘Ancient legend and nothing more. Come, Tullaris. I have been idle too long. It is time that these barbarians discovered the true majesty of the God of Murder.’

  She turned back to him and in her eyes was the same look as the Drakirite. It was familiar, and welcome, and filled Tullaris with a potent mix of emotions. But beneath the look was something else. Something he had never seen in her before. It looked like disdain, and it made him want to prove himself, to show her that he was not weak. He gripped the First Draich tightly and swung it in a figure of eight.