The End Times | With Ice and Sword

Hope was their undoing; hope and the certainty that their gods had inflicted suffering enough to visit yet more misery upon them. They had lost so much already: their homeland, their loved ones, all their worldly possessions. Surely, they prayed, the gods must now keep them from further loss, must surely balance their grief and hardships with deliverance.

What else but hope could explain the march of weary, frostbitten survivors of Kislev’s destruction, trudging silently through this unnatural storm hammering the corpse-sown oblast? Almost two hundred starving, sickly and godforsaken souls, numbed by horror and hollowed by the carnage they had witnessed.

Doomsayers and holy men had always claimed that portents of the world’s ending were there for all to see, but whoever really believed them? Devotees of the apocalypse tore their hair and whipped themselves bloody as they screamed of oncoming doom, but life in Kislev went on as it always had: dry, wind-soured summers and hard, frozen winters.

As regular as the turning of the seasons, the northern tribes raided Kislev in what Anspracht of Nuln had dubbed the Spring Driving, a term only someone who had never lived through such times would dare coin. The leather-tough rotamasters of the high stanitsas would gather their riders to meet the northmen in battle, and Kislev’s mothers would weave mourning shrouds for their dead sons.

Such was life in Kislev.

As the sages of the steppe had it: is of no matter.

Even the terror of the Year That No One Forgets had been endured, the victories at Urszebya and Mazhorod decisive enough to beat the broken tribes back to their desolate homelands. Now it seemed those slaughters had simply been feints in preparation for the death blow.

With the first thaw, the northmen had come again.

Kurgans, Hung, Skaelings, Vargs, Baersonlings, Aeslings, Graelings, Sarls, Bjornlings and a hundred other tribes came south under a single wrathful banner.

And the End Times rode with them.

Men, beasts of the dark forest and hideous monsters surged through Kislev in numbers never before seen. They swept south, not to conquer or plunder, but to destroy.

Cursed Praag was engulfed by howling daemons and horrors undreamed as Erengrad fell to midnight reavers in wolfships who burned the western seaport to the ground. And Kislev, impregnable fastness of the Ice Queen herself, was taken by storm in a single night of terrifying bloodshed. Its towering walls were now rubble, thick with screaming forests of impaled men and women whose ruined bodies were attended by red-legged carrion-feasters as black as the smoke of the city’s doom.

Those who abandoned Kislev before the war-host reached its walls fled into a land gutted by war and bleeding in its aftermath, where mercy was forsaken and savagery the common currency. Ruined settlements burned on every horizon, their timber palisades cast down, the slitted eyes of beasts-that-walked-as-men gleaming as they feasted in the ashes.

All across Kislev, the fleshless bones of its people were stacked like cordwood as altars to Dark Gods.

And this was but the opening move in the last war.

The girl had seen perhaps six winters, seven at the most. She knelt in the stunted grass beside the body of a woman with white hair, shaking her and sobbing her name, as if that might be enough to return her to life.

Sofia had seen the woman fall, and paused beside the weeping girl. Her hand hovered over the clasp of the satchel containing her few remaining medical provisions, but it was clear no craft she possessed could return the woman to life.

Swirling mud was already blurring her outline, but no one else in their wretched column of brutalised survivors was bothering to stop. Too many had died to mourn one more. They shuffled onwards through the storm, hunched over and wrapped in thick cloaks against the rain sheeting over the open steppe.

‘You have to get up, little one,’ said Sofia, too exhausted to say much else. ‘You’ll be left behind if you don’t.’

The girl looked up. Her features were angular with Gospodar blood and her eyes were frost-white, steely with defiance. She looked at the refugees shambling through the steppe grass and shook her head, taking the dead woman’s hand.

‘She wasn’t my mother,’ said the girl. ‘She was my sister.’

‘I’m sorry, but she’s gone and you have to let her go.’

The girl shook her head again. ‘I don’t want the northmen to eat her. That’s what they do, isn’t it, eat the dead?’

‘I don’t know,’ lied Sofia.

‘She wasn’t a good sister,’ said the girl, her voice hard, but brittle. ‘She beat me and called me bad names when… But I’m still sorry she’s dead.’

‘What’s your name?’

‘Miska,’ said the girl.

‘A proud name from ancient times,’ said Sofia.

‘That’s what mamochka told me,’ said the girl. ‘What’s yours?’

‘Sofia.’

Miska nodded and said, ‘You’re the healer, aren’t you?’

‘I was a physician in Kislev, yes,’ said Sofia. ‘A good one too, but I can’t help your sister. Morr has her now. She is at peace and beyond the woes of this world. Even though she called you names, I’m sure she loved you and wouldn’t want you to die out here. She got you this far, yes?’

‘No,’ said Miska, standing and brushing wet strands of flame-red hair from her face. ‘I got her this far.’

‘Then you’re stronger than you look,’ said Sofia.

Miska’s head snapped up and Sofia saw the bleak sky of the oblast reflected in her eyes. She bared her teeth and her nostrils flared like an animal sensing danger.

‘We need to go,’ said Miska. ‘Right now.’

‘What is it?’ asked Sofia, realising that even after all she’d seen and experienced, she could still feel terror.

A bestial howl echoed through the storm.

Something predatory. Hungry.

Close.

They huddled together, crying and clutching one another in fear as the howling came again. Bovine grunts and bellowing roars echoed back and forth, like a wolf pack on the hunt.

Sofia knew these were no wolves.

She and Miska hurried through the rain to rejoin their group. Instinct made them form a circle. Some dropped to their knees in the mud, praying to Ursun, others to Tor, perhaps hoping for a lightning bolt to strike the beasts from the heavens. She heard the names of a dozen gods she knew, half again as many whose names were unknown to her.

But most people simply clutched one another, praying only to die in the arms of a loved one. A defiant few shouted and railed at the unseen beasts, waving woodcutters’ axes and makeshift spears at the hammering rain and the blurred shapes moving within it. Sofia caught glimpses of horns, glints of rusted armour and enormous weapons with notched blades. Heavy hoofbeats and scraping paws circled them. Snuffling snorts and bellows-breath.

‘What are they?’ asked Miska, clutching tight to Sofia’s heavy skirt.

Sofia put a hand around her shoulder, feeling the youngster’s terror. Miska was seasoned beyond her years, but she was still a child… A child doomed to die before her time.

‘Don’t look at them, little one,’ she said, pulling Miska tight to her, pressing the girl’s tearful face into the rain-stiffened fabric of her dress. What good would it do her to see the blood and horror to come?

A monster with the snarling face of a bear charged from the black rain. A slashing paw ripped the arm and head from a kneeling man. Fangs snapped shut and bit him in half. Goat-headed horrors bounded in its wake, braying howls like war-shouts. Muddy pools bloomed red. People screamed and scattered like frightened sheep.

Kaspar had spoken of how large groups would be quickly destroyed if their formation was broken. He’d been boasting of the Empire’s state troops, warriors who trained every day in the employ of an elector count, but these were terrified men and women who knew nothing of war save how to die.

‘Stay together,’ she yelled, already knowing it was hopeless. ‘We’re stronger together!’

Her words fell on deaf ears as brutish shapes, red of tooth and claw, roared from the storm. Nightmarish monsters from children’s tales given horrifying, gory life: wild killers with slavering jaws and flesh-tearing claws.

Hideously deformed, yet recognisably human, they hunted in packs. Sofia wept to see a mother and child borne to the ground and savaged with snapping bites. A man and his wife were ripped apart by frenzied beasts with distended lupine skulls and bone-bladed hands. A group of sinewy, red-skinned creatures with chittering cries and spiteful hearts finished the wounded with flint daggers or stout clubs pierced by iron-tipped tusks.

The monsters bellowed as they killed, frenzied predators given free rein on a defenceless herd of prey-meat. More slaughters went unseen, mercifully hidden by the rain. The screams still carried on the wind, agonised and piteous. Sofia sank to her knees, holding Miska pressed tight to her breast as the monsters feasted. The girl sobbed, and Sofia felt her own mother’s words rising within her, a lullaby from the northern oblast:

Her words faltered as a shadow fell across her, a towering beast with curling horns and a frothed maw of broken teeth. Bow-legged and with an umber pelt of matted fur, its blood-blistered flesh was raw with runic weals and war-scars. She heard the hoof-beats of more monsters closing for the kill. Miska tried to look up, but Sofia kept her hand firm against the girl’s hair.

‘No, little one,’ she sobbed. ‘Don’t look.’

Sofia met the beast’s maddened gaze. She had faced evil in the eyes of men before, and at least this creature wore its monstrous nature on the outside.

‘Tor strike you dead!’ she yelled as its arm swept down.

Hot blood sprayed her as the sharpened tip of a lance exploded from the monster’s chest. Its bellow of pain was deafening as the impact hoisted it into the air. The beast thrashed like a hooked fish before the shaft of the lance snapped. The wounded monster crashed to the ground as a mighty warhorse trampled it into the mud before it could rise.

A knight in burnished plate slid from the horse’s back, casting aside the broken lance and drawing a long broad-bladed sword from a saddle-sheath. His armour was dented and the black pelt of an exotic animal hung limp across one shoulder.

A knight of the Empire, one of the Knights Panther.

Something in his bearing struck Sofia as familiar, but she hadn’t time to process the thought as the wounded beast struggled to its hind legs. It plucked the broken lance shaft from its chest, but the knight was already upon it.

The sword cut the wet air, slicing down in a brutally efficient arc. The blade buried itself a handspan into the meat of the beast’s neck. Blood jetted as the warrior cranked the blade to open the wound. Nor did the knight allow the creature any hope of recovery. He dragged his sword clear and spun on his heel to take a two-handed grip on the weapon. The monstrous creature bellowed as the knight hammered the edge against its exposed throat.

Once again the blade bit deep, and the beast’s roaring ended abruptly as its head toppled from its neck in a fountain of blood. The knight kicked the headless carcass in the chest and lifted his sword skyward as it fell.

‘Fight me!’ he yelled. ‘In Sigmar’s name, fight me!’

The pack hunters heard him and Sofia heard them abandon their slaughters to turn on the lone knight. He backed away from the dead monster, placing himself in front of Sofia and Miska. Once again Sofia was struck by the familiarity of his movements, the ease of his martial bearing.

The beasts loped towards him, more than a dozen blood-slathered man-eaters. A dozen more followed, chests heaving with rabid hunger. The knight’s steed, a broad-chested destrier with a sorrel coat lathered in sweat beneath a torn caparison of blue and gold, circled around to his side.

‘Are you hurt?’ asked the knight in clipped Reikspiel, his voice muffled by the heavy rain and the buckled steel of his helm’s visor.

Sofia shook her head. ‘No.’

‘Good,’ said the knight. ‘Don’t move and it will remain so.’

Seeing they had the advantage, the monsters charged in a mass of blood-matted fur and fury. The knight stepped to meet them with a roar of fury and a wide sweep of his blade. Its edge cut like no other weapon Sofia had seen, but a lifetime tending the wounds of Kislev’s sons had taught her just how devastating such blades could be.

The knight’s sword hewed the beasts with the ease of a woodsman splitting cordwood. He fought with the fluid economy of a warrior born to bloodshed, seasoned by countless campaigns and a lifetime of war. His horse bellowed and kicked around him, churning the mud bloody as it lashed out with powerful limbs. It circled its master, stoving in ribs and cracking skulls with every blow of its iron-shod hooves.

At least ten beasts were dead already, their entrails heaped in a gory circle at the knight’s feet. But even so skilled a warrior could not fight so many alone and live. A hulking beast with a bear’s width eventually bore the knight to the ground as it died, and in the fractional pause of his blade, the rest were upon him.

He rolled and pushed himself onto one knee as a wolf-headed beast bit down on his vambrace. The metal bent and the knight stifled a cry of pain. He slammed his gauntlet against the side of its skull until the bone cracked and it fell with a gurgling whimper. Another snapped for his gorget. The knight seized it by the jaw and stabbed his sword’s pommel spike into its eye. The beast howled and threw itself away from him.

‘Behind you!’ screamed Sofia, and the knight spun his sword with a glittering flourish, reversing the blade and ramming it upwards beneath his right armpit. The charging creature was scaled and horned, with more limbs than any natural creature ought to possess. It defied any easy description, but died just the same as it spitted itself on the knight’s sword.

He surged to his feet and Sofia saw they were surrounded.

A ring of slavering beasts, thirty at least, and the brief ember of hope in her breast was snuffed out. The smaller beasts lurked behind the biggest creatures, and their grunting, hooting barks were filled with monstrous appetite.

Sofia felt the thunder of hooves pounding the sodden earth.

And a skirling shriek echoed over the steppe in time with a host of whooping yells, the sound as wild and unfettered as any heart in Kislev. Her heart soared, recognising the sound at the same time as the riders charged from the storm.

In they swept on steeds painted with mud and coloured dye, winged lancers riding high with rain-slick cloaks streaming like crimson gonfalon. Braided topknots and drooping moustaches were glorious as they rode the beasts down with kopia lances lowered. Feathered wing-racks bent at their backs, shrieking in the wind of their charge.

The circle of monsters broke apart, two dozen skewered in the first crashing impact of pennoned lances through mutant flesh. The rest fled into the storm and the painted riders gave bitter yells as they pursued, slashing their curved szabla back to split braying skulls. Winged lancers had once laughed as they killed, but few in Kislev laughed now.

The knight lowered his sword as the lancers rode the last of the beasts down, stabbing the blade into the red mud at his feet. Sofia let out a shuddering breath, and Miska looked up at the lone knight with wonderment.

A giant Gospodar warrior on a towering horse in the black and silver of Tor broke away from the main body of riders to rein in his mount before the knight. He sheathed a heavy straight-bladed sword, an enormous six-foot pallasz, across his fur-cloaked shoulders.

Sofia had seen none his equal. Even Pavel Leforto – Olric rest his uncouth soul – had not been proportioned as copiously.

‘Levubiytsa!’ yelled the man, climbing from his horse with surprising grace and planting hands like forge-hammers on the Knight Panther’s shoulders. ‘I think you try get yourself killed, yha? You should wait for rest of us, eh?’

‘You are correct, Tey-Muraz rotamaster,’ said the knight, and his accent was that of the Empire’s greatest city. ‘Yes, I should have waited, but look. There she is…’

The knight nodded in Sofia and Miska’s direction, and the giant turned to face them. His long moustache was braided with silver cords, and his glowering, wind-burned features opened with understanding.

‘So it seem at least one god still listen to prayers, my friend,’ he said, smoothing out his long hauberk of riveted iron scales and pulling his fur-lined greatcoat across his enormous girth.

‘You are Sofia Valencik?’ he asked in her mother tongue.

She nodded. ‘Yes, but how could you possibly know that?’

‘Because I told him,’ said the knight, removing his helm.

Sofia’s heart lurched at the sight of his face, thinner than she remembered and framed by hair that was now silver. It was a face she had last seen twisted in grief as he told her how Ambassador Kaspar von Velten had died at Urszebya.

‘By the gods,’ she said. ‘Kurt Bremen. How can you be here?’

‘Because I came back for you,’ he said.

They left the dead to the steppe, even the fallen riders.

By rights each horse ought to have been loosed into the steppe with its rider enshrouded on its back, free to chase Dazh’s fire until there was no more earth to ride.

But the lancers could not sacrifice even a single horse to a steppe burial, and after yelling the names of the dead into the wind and pouring koumiss on the ground, the riders turned their mounts westwards.

The fifty-two survivors of the attack were hoisted onto the backs of the lancers’ horses and Sofia and Miska rode on the back of Kurt’s enormous gelding.

Ten miles through the rain, they entered a fog-shrouded cleft in the earth, a steep-sided gully invisible from more than a few dozen yards away. The temperature plummeted within the dark walls of the canyon, and dripping daggers of ice hung from outflung crags of black rock.

At its base, the canyon floor widened, and Sofia saw scores of hide tents pitched in a rough circle around a grand pavilion of shimmering silver. Sheltered fires burned low in the mouths of caves, the smoke already dissipated by the time it climbed to the steppe. At least a thousand dispossessed warriors squatted around the fires, a dozen rota or more. Most were wounded, and all had the haunted look of men who could not yet believe their land was no more.

Sofia knew that look well. She wore it herself, etched into the lines of her handsome features and the grey in her hair.

They rose from the fires to greet the returning warriors, clapping the necks of their mounts and shouting the names of the dead as they heard them. The newly arrived riders dismounted and led their horses away, loosening their girths and grabbing handfuls of rough gorse to wipe the glossy sweat from their animals’ flanks.

A rider’s first duty was to his horse, and it was a duty every rider of Kislev took seriously.

The survivors of the beasts’ attack were directed to a series of fires, over which cook-pots of black iron bubbled with hot food. Priests and wounded men helped them with wooden bowls and what few blankets could be spared.

Sofia held back a sob that this was what the northmen had done to Kislev – pitiful survivors eking out their last existence in the ruins of their murdered homeland.

Kurt took care to dismount, and helped Sofia and Miska from the back of his horse. At least seventeen hands, it dwarfed the lighter mounts of the Kislevite riders. Its chest was wide, and the twin-tailed comet and hammer brand on its rump told her it had come from the Emperor’s own stables.

‘I call him Pavel,’ said Kurt, seeing her admiration for the gelding. ‘A stubborn beast, but loyal, and I’d wager he could match any steed of Bretonnia for speed. And he fights harder than any mount I’ve known.’

‘He’d have liked that,’ said Sofia, thinking back to the last time she’d seen Pavel Leforto and the harsh words between them. Pavel had been a crude and obnoxious drunkard, a man too passionately in love with his vices to be entirely trustworthy, but he had a heart as big as an ocean, and not a day passed that Sofia didn’t miss him.

Like Kaspar, Pavel had fallen to the blade of a Kurgan war leader named Aelfric Cyenwulf at the great battle fought in the shadow of Ursun’s Teeth. Kurt Bremen had slain Cyenwulf and the Ice Queen’s powerful magic had destroyed the Kurgan army. The people of Kislev celebrated the great victory, believing the armies of the north would not come south for years after such a bloody rebuttal.

How wrong they had been.

Kurt led Sofia and Miska to a low-burning fire where a slender young man sat cross-legged with his head hung low over his chest. He snored softly, swaying in his sleep with an open book in his lap and a quill still held in his fingers.

‘Master Tsarev, look who I found,’ said Kurt, with a gentle shake of the young man’s shoulder.

‘Ryurik?’ said Sofia, dropping to her knees and wrapping her arms around him. He awoke with a start and his bleary, exhausted eyes couldn’t at first comprehend that what they were seeing was true.

‘Sofia? Gods alive, is it really you?’ he said, looking up at Kurt. ‘Morskoi’s tears, Kurt, you found her!’

Ryurik Tsarev had travelled to the city of Kislev from Erengrad in the wake of the Year That No One Forgets with dreams of becoming great a recounter of history. He sought veterans of Mazhorord and Urszebya, of Praag and Voltsara, Chernozavtra and Bolgasgrad. He had hoped to craft a great work to rival that of Friederich ‘Old’ Weirde of Altdorf, Gottimer, Ocveld the Elder or even the great Anspracht of Nuln himself.

Ryurik arrived at a time when all men wanted to do was forget war, to escape the bloodshed they had endured and the terrors they yet suffered. No one would talk to him, and the little money he had saved from his time as keeper of shipping manifests in Erengrad soon dried up.

Sofia had met Ryurik within the forsaken walls of the Lubjanko, a grim edifice built by Tzar Alexis to care for those wounded in the Great War Against Chaos. The building had long since fallen from that noble purpose, becoming instead a nightmarish gaol where the wretched, the mad and the crippled went to die.

Ruryik had ventured within the Lubjanko’s grim walls a few times, hoping to secure testimony from a man who claimed to have seen Surtha Lenk die. It had been a ruse, and the man overpowered the young writer, leaving him chained to a wall before walking away with new clothes and a stolen identity.

The Lubjanko’s uncaring warders ignored Ruryik’s protestations of his true identity and sealed him in with the madmen. Four months later, upon being called to the Lubjanko to care for a birthing lunatic, Sofia had come upon the young scribe, imploring her to heed his words. Sofia was well used to the cunning of the Lubjanko’s denizens, but something in the earnest nature of the lad’s desperation rang true.

She swiftly discovered the truth of Ryurik’s tale and had him released to her care. As he convalesced, she learned of his ambitions to write, and put him to work in cataloguing her healing methods, the ingredients and mixes of her poultices and instructional procedures for physicians.

Ryurik would not compose a historical work, but an authoritative medical text, and soon became an indispensable asset to Sofia and her practising of medicine within the city.

‘How did you get here, Ryurik?’ asked Sofia, incredulous. ‘And you, Kurt? I never expected to see either of you again.’

Kurt removed his sword belt and propped the weapon against the walls of the cave. Ryurik rose and began unbuckling the straps and hooks holding the knight’s armour in place.

‘I came to Kislev to find you,’ said Kurt. ‘When we received word of the Starovoiora pulk’s defeat, I rode from Middenheim and came north to Kislev.’

‘You crossed the Auric Bastion? Why?’ asked Sofia as Miska knelt beside the fire to warm her hands. The flames danced in her grey eyes.

‘Because Kaspar would have wanted me to,’ said Kurt, nodding towards the smooth blue stone wrapped in a web of silver wire that hung on a thin chain around her neck.

Sofia’s hand closed on the pendant as a wave of memory all but overwhelmed her. She’d given it to Kaspar and asked him to keep it next to his heart in the coming battle. Kurt had later returned it to her, together with Kaspar’s final words.

‘I understand, but how did you find me?’

‘I arrived at Kislev’s gates just before the Zar’s hordes invaded the city,’ explained Kurt, shrugging off his mail shirt and undoing the corded ties of his undershirt. ‘I found your home, together with Master Tsarev here, who told me you’d travelled into the western oblast to return home. For the price of a retelling of Urszebya and my campaigns in Araby, I was able to secure his services as a guide to the Valencik Stanitsa.’

‘It’s gone, Mistress Sofia,’ said Ryurik. ‘We reached it a week ago, but the northmen had already burned it and killed everyone within.’

‘I know,’ she said, sitting down by the fire and letting the exhaustion and fear of the last weeks pour out of her. ‘I mean, I didn’t know, we hadn’t reached it yet, but I knew. How could it be otherwise?’

Kurt knelt beside her and put a hand on her shoulder.

‘I’m sorry, Sofia,’ he said.

‘Kislev is no more, is it, Kurt?’ asked Sofia.

Kurt nodded, his face etched with pain. He didn’t truly understand Kislev, not like its people did, but he had come to love the land of the steppe and had shed blood in its defence.

‘And the Empire?’ said Sofia. ‘It rallies? The Emperor’s armies will defeat the northmen, won’t they?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Kurt. ‘I really don’t know.’

The herd’s bigger beasts called him No-Horn-Turnskin as an insult, but when the Chaos moon had shone upon the herdstone, it had told him his true name that night in a dream: Khar-zagor. Which in the squealing brays of the ungors meant Beast-cunning.

It was a name aptly-earned as he lay on his pale-furred belly overlooking the hidden valley and the armoured men filling it. More riders than he had ever seen, even when he had hunted as a young man and watched the rotas ride madly from the log walls of his stanitsa. He saw many tents, many horses and many weapons. An army. Nothing to trouble the warhosts of the gods or the even the beast herds, but an army nonetheless. Perhaps the last army left in Kislev.

Kislev.

That was what men called this land, what he had once called it, but a charnel house was unworthy of a name. The cities of shaped stone and felled timber were aflame, its people meat for the herdfeasts.

Driven from his home by his family when he could no longer disguise his developing pelt and budding horns, Khar-zagor had found a place in the great herd of the Lightning Crags: distant peaks where monsters from the beginning of the world were said to slumber until the time of its ending was at hand.

The mountains had toppled as the earth cracked open and scaled titans, more powerful than dragons and taller than giants, climbed from lava-spewing crevasses. A hurricane of dark winds had blown in from the Northern Wastes to herald their rebirth and the gods’ decree that the world was at an end.

Khar-zagor would watch it burn.

The tribal host of chosen warriors marched south under the bale-banner of the gods’ last and greatest champion, leaving the beasts to pick the earth’s carcass clean.

Khar-zagor’s intimate knowledge of the huntsmen’s secret paths made him invaluable as a scout and tracker, and he had led the Outcast’s ravager packs to every last group of scrawny survivors. This was the sixth such group Khar-zagor had tracked, and Ungrol Four-horn had assured him of the gods’ blessing for the meat he found for the herds.

He’d caught the riders’ scent moments before they charged with their wing-banners screaming and their glittering lances dipped. He’d fled into the storm and left the gors to die. What good could he have done with his looted recurve bow and serrated gutting knife?

Lying motionless in the mud, he’d heard the riders speak of their war-leader, the mighty she-champion the Outcast forever sought, and when they had left, Khar-zagor dug himself from concealment. He’d gorged himself on the glut of warm meat before following their overladen horses through the oblast to this hidden place, leaving a spoor trail of urine even a wine-sodden centigor could follow.

The smoke from below carried the smell of roasting meat, and the desire to feast was almost overwhelming, but he fought down the hunger in his belly. The Outcast was always railing against his fate and seeking a way to return to his former glory, and what better way was there to earn the eye of the gods than to slay the enemy’s war-leader?

The beastherd outnumbered this army many times over, and Ungrol Four-horn would be sure to offer Khar-zagor first cut of the meat. His mouth filled with hot saliva at the thought of flesh clawed from the bone.

He stiffened as he caught an unknown scent.

Another beast.

One whose noble heart pounded with ancient blood.

An old and awesomely powerful predator.

Prey-fear surged in Khar-zagor’s limbs, and he scrambled from the edge of the hidden gully, fleeing back to his herd in terror.

Sofia hurried through the campsite, her meagre bag of medical supplies clutched tight to her chest. Kurt walked with her, as did Ryurik, already scrawling in his book.

‘Perhaps you will get to pen that historical epic after all,’ said Sofia.

Ryurik smiled weakly. ‘Let’s just hope there’s someone left to read it.’

Boyarin Wrodzik looked back in annoyance, but said nothing as he led them through the campsite towards the shimmering tent of silver at its heart. His lancer’s coat and finely cut tunic of emerald silk had once been richly ornamented, but had long since succumbed to the ravages of the steppe. One of the legendary Gryphon Legion, Wrodzik had spent years fighting for various elector counts in the Empire until the threat of Aelfric Cyenwulf had drawn him back to Kislev. In the wake of the Year That No One Forgets, Wrodzik renounced his duty to Emmanuelle of Nuln and swore to remain at the Tzarina’s side.

He had arrived at Kurt’s fire only a moment before, barking that he and his healer woman must come with him. Now.

A krug of weary kossars surrounded the tent at the camp’s centre, each man swathed in furs and bearing a recurved bow of horn at his back. Their axes were enormous hewing weapons, too heavy for most men to even lift, never mind swing in battle for hours at a time. Many bore hastily bandaged wounds that ought to have seen them carted off to a field hospital, but the grim set of their moustachioed faces told Sofia they would sooner cut their own throats than forsake this duty.

A shimmer of hoarfrost clung to the silken fabric of the tent, like morning mist at the last instant of its dissolution. The kossars nodded to Wrodzik and pulled back the thickly-furred opening of the tent. Sofia shivered as frigid air sighed from within, together with the sharp tang of fruit on the verge of going bad.

Inside, a diverse group awaited: armoured boyarin, steely-eyed kossars, black-cheeked strelsi, bow-legged lancers and bare-chested warriors with curved daggers sheathed in folds of flesh cut in their flat bellies. Nor were women excluded, for Kislev was, above all others, a land where prowess had the final say in deciding whose counsel was worth heeding. At least three of those closest to the centre of the tent were armed hearth-maidens.

They all looked up as Wrodzik led Sofia, Kurt and Ryurik within, and she felt the weight of their last hopes settle upon her. Hope for what, she didn’t yet know, but she intuitively understood that much now depended on her. Like the kossars encircling the tent, these warriors were blooded and drained by utter defeat.

‘Why am I here?’ she asked, as Wrodzik gestured for her to approach.

‘You are a healer, yes?’

Sofia nodded.

‘So heal.’

‘Heal who?’ said Sofia. ‘You all need a healer’s hand.’

‘Me,’ said a feminine and regal voice from the centre of the warriors’ circle. ‘They want you to heal me.’

Sofia moved closer as the warriors parted and her lips opened in shock when she saw the speaker: a woman with cut-glass features of aloof majesty and alabaster skin threaded with branching black veins. Hair the colour of a waning moon spilled over her shoulders like drifts of melting snow.

‘Tzarina Katarin!’ said Ryurik, almost dropping his book.

The Ice Queen of Kislev sat on a simple camp chair, holding a glittering sword of unbreakable ice before her. The tip of its sapphire blade was driven into the earth, and she rested her hands across its silver hilt. Sofia imagined the Tzarina’s grip on the sword was the only thing keeping her upright.

The Ice Queen’s sky-blue dress was torn, but remained a fantastical enchantment wrought from ice and velvet, silk and frost. Hung with glittering mother-of-pearl and woven from winter itself, it suggested fleeting vulnerability and eternal strength at the same time.

‘Oh, my queen,’ said Sofia, tears spilling down her cheeks. ‘What have they done to you?’

The herd laired in a fire-gutted human settlement that had died in a long night of howling madness and feasting. Smoke still curled from the blackened timbers of the ataman’s hall as Khar-zagor scrambled up the inner slope of its defensive ditch and over the splintered timbers of its outer palisade.

Khar-zagor kept his gaze on the dark earth.

He did not like to look up.

The sky of Kislev was too vast and too empty. He craved canopies of dark, clawing branches, the rustle of wind-struck leaves and the darkness of wild, overgrown places. Out here on the oblast, the sky merged with the wide horizon, where distant steppe fires razed the wild grasses and the land withered beneath the hooves of the gods’ children.

Leather-winged harpies circled overhead, hungry to scavenge the bones piled before the new herdstone. Ungrol Four-horn’s hunt-beasts squealed as they perched on tumbled ruins and loosed crooked shafts into the cold air. The scavenger beasts were too high to be troubled by their poorly aimed shafts, but the harpies screeched in frustration at the taunts of the beasts below. Khar-zagor ignored them, skirting the many snorting, heaving piles of bull-horned gors made sluggish with this latest feast of flesh.

The bigger beasts gathered at the centre of the stanitsa, around a carved menhir the one-eyed giant had ripped from the cliffs over Urszebya. Cairns of skulls and the bones of men, women and children sucked dry of marrow and licked clean of meat surrounded it. Ancient human script had been cut into the towering, fang-like megalith, but smeared faeces and daubed runes of power obscured most of it.

Curled around the menhir’s base was a monstrous figure the herd knew as Bale-eye. Three times the height of even the largest minotaur, its rune-scarred flesh was a mottled patchwork of ever-shifting hues and runic brands. The insane giant’s single, sorcerous eye was shut and its horns gouged troughs in the earth as ropes of drool formed acrid puddles around its bovine head.

Khar-zagor had found Ungrol Four-horn defecating in the bowl of a shrine to the household spirits within the remains of a stone-walled grain store. Fire had destroyed its roof timbers, and the smell of roasted harvest grains mixed with beast excrement was a heady mix of territoriality and hate.

‘Where meat? Where ravager pack?’ demanded Ungrol Four-horn with one of its two shaggy, horn-crowned heads. The second head drooled over his shoulder, chewing the mangy hair like rotten cud.

‘Meat gone. Pack dead,’ answered Khar-zagor.

Four-horn cocked his head to the side, the splintered horns bound to his distended skulls gouging the matted fur of its twin. The second head bleated in anger, but the speaking head paid it no mind.

‘Dead? How dead?’

‘Humans. Fast riders with screaming wings kill pack with horse spears.’

Four-horn quickly grasped the seriousness of his words. Both heads nodded, and Khar-zagor saw that the strapped horns seemed less bound to him than grown into his flesh.

‘Come,’ said Ungrol Four-horn, loping in the direction of the ataman’s hall. ‘We tell Outcast of fast riders. You know their scent?’

Khar-zagor nodded, keeping behind Four-horn. ‘Followed it. Found human lair. Found she-champion that leads them.’

Ungrol Four-horn gave a bray of bitter laughter.

‘Outcast be pleased if you right.’

‘Khar-zagor never wrong. Was her.’

The ungor bobbed its heads up and down. ‘Better be not wrong. Outcast kill you if you wrong.’

Khar-zagor shrugged as words tumbled from his throat, words he had last spoken as a man.

‘Is of no matter,’ he said.

Together they ventured into the ruins of the ataman’s hall, where a single warrior armoured in brazen plates of darkest cobalt knelt before an altar wrought in bone and rock. A short cloak of raven feathers hung from one spiked shoulder guard; stiffened skin flayed from the backs of mothers yet to birth draped the other. A pallasz taller than either of the ungors was slung across the warrior’s back.

Khar-zagor spat a mouthful of bloody phlegm. Just being near the blade made him sick, as though it was killing him just by looking at it.

‘Why do you disturb my devotions to Tchar?’ asked the Outcast, rising to his feet and turning to face the cringing ungors. His bulk was enormous, the equal of Magok the Stone Horn, and the burning eyes beneath his raven-winged helm were a hard, empty blue.

Ungrol Four-horn’s heads bowed so low they scraped the scorched floor of the hall. He licked traces of curdled fat from the flagstones.

‘Ravager pack dead,’ he grunted. ‘Human riders with wings and with spears kill them.’

‘Lancers? This far west?’ said the warrior. ‘That seems unlikely. We killed the last of the lancers at Praag.’

‘Khar-zagor say so and Khar-zagor never wrong.’

The warrior turned his pitiless gaze on Khar-zagor. ‘You truly saw winged lancers?’

Khar-zagor nodded, his mouth dry and his belly aflame with fear. The gods were watching through the Outcast’s eyes, and though the human wallowed in disgrace with the beasts, his dominance could not be challenged.

‘Does it speak?’ asked the Outcast.

Ungrol Four-horn butted him with his nearest head, and Khar-zagor squealed in pain as the sharpened iron tip of the horn sliced open his arm.

‘Tell what told me,’ ordered Four-horn.

‘Saw she-champion too,’ said Khar-zagor.

‘The Ice Queen?’ snapped the Outcast. ‘You saw her? She lives? You are sure of this?’

‘Khar-zagor never wrong,’ he said.

‘How far from here?’

‘Half a day run for beasts,’ said Khar-zagor.

The Outcast threw back his head and laughed, his clawed gauntlets bunching to fists. ‘Tchar sends me a mighty gift! Sound the horns and rouse your beasts to war, I’ll have the cold bitch’s head on a horn by nightfall!’

The warrior’s excitement made Khar-zagor bold.

‘Why you so need to make she-champion dead?’ he asked.

‘Because many years ago, I killed her father,’ said the warrior once known as Hetzar Feydaj. ‘And while the last of the Tzar’s line yet lives, his white daemon will never rest until it kills me.’

Morrslieb hung low on the horizon, its outline crisp in the cold, cloudless night. Katarin felt its malign influence deep in her bones, like an oncoming sickness no amount of sweet tisane could keep at bay. She stood alone at the opening of the gully, letting the soft emptiness of the night enfold her.

She heard the muffled curses of her kossar guards as they hacked at the wall of ice she’d raised behind her. Nightfall had brought a craving for solitude, not the company of armed men. Queen or not, Wrodzik, Tey-Muraz and Urska Pysanka would berate her for such wilful behaviour.

She closed her eyes and listened to the wind howl over the steppe, a mournful sound freighted with all the pain and fear benighting her realm.

‘So many dead,’ whispered Katarin, turning her gaze southwards. ‘So many yet to die.’

Katarin’s thoughts turned to the last remnants of her people below, clinging to life in the face of utter extinction. She wished she had hope that those who’d fled south at the first signs of the tribal warhosts still lived. Perhaps they had crossed the enchanted barrier the Empire’s wizards had wrought. Perhaps a tiny enclave of Kislev’s people yet lived beyond its borders, but she doubted it.

The Emperor’s soldiers would allow nothing to enter their lands. Karl Franz was a man unafraid of hard decisions, and if the choice was to risk the Empire or let Kislev’s people die, then it was no choice at all.

Katarin wanted to feel anger toward the Emperor. Kislev’s sons had fought and died for centuries to keep the northern reaches of the Empire safe, but had geography reversed their roles, she knew she would do the same.

Like a gangrenous limb cut away to save the body, her realm had been forsaken. This fog-bound gully might very well be the last scrap of land that could rightfully be called Kislev.

Tears spilled down her cheeks.

‘Kislev is land, and land is Kislev,’ she whispered.

Until now, she’d thought that was what made her strong.

Her land was no more. Fell powers corrupted the steppe and its cities were corpse-choked abattoirs ruled by daemons.

Katarin thought of her childhood around the enormous hearth-fire in the Bokha Palace, where her father and his boyarin had spun fiery tales of Kislev’s legendary bogatyr. These brave warriors from ancient times were said to slumber in forgotten tombs until the land needed them once more.

She had been thrilled to tales of Magda Raizin, Dobrynya of the Axe, Kudeyar the Cursed, Vadim the Bold, Babette the Bloody and a hundred others. In every story, the hero would rise to fight alongside their people in the last great battle, finally laying to rest the evil that threatened the world.

The killing fields of Starovoiora, Praag and Kalyazin, of Erengrad and Kislev, were bloody testament to the conspicuousness of the absence of those heroes now.

When legends of the past failed to rise, her people had turned to the gods for deliverance. They prayed for Ursun to bestride the world and rend the northmen with his mighty claws, for Tor to cleave the heavens with his axe and rain down lightning, for Dhaz to send forth his eternal fires.

But the gods were not listening.

‘Where are you, Ursun?’ she cried, sinking to her knees in despair. ‘And Sigmar, where are you? I saw your comet, the twin-tailed herald of your return, so where are you, damn you? Why do you all forsake us?’

Katarin rose to her feet, looking to the uncaring stars with the purest hate at their indifference. What did they care that her land was lost and her people dead? Would they weep at her passing? In a thousand years, would anyone even remember there had once been a land called Kislev, where a proud and noble people had lived and loved, fought and died?

She wondered what it might be like to just walk away, to lose herself in the darkness and let the night take her. Death would take her people one way or another, whether she stood with them or not.

‘Is of no matter,’ she said, taking a single faltering step, then another.

‘Why are you out here on your own?’ asked a small voice.

Katarin spun and drew Fearfrost, reaching inside for what little magic remained to her, but stilled the ice as she saw only a young girl with hair the colour of embers.

‘I could ask you the same thing,’ said Katarin, lowering her glimmering blade and looking over the girl’s shoulder to the wall of ice blocking the gully. ‘How did you get here?’

The girl shrugged, as if that was answer enough.

‘You came in with Mistress Valencik. You are her daughter?’

The girl said, ‘My name is Miska.’

‘The first khan-queen.’

Miska smiled. ‘That’s what my mamochka said, but you didn’t answer my question.’

‘What question?’

‘Why you’re out here on your own.’

No easy answer presented itself.

‘I find the quiet of the darkness comforting,’ said Katarin, all too aware of how ridiculous that sounded. Darkness in the Old World was a time to fear more than any other.

‘So do I,’ said Miska, coming forward and taking her hand.

Tears pricked Katarin’s eyes at the comfort she took in the innocent compassion of a child and the realisation of how close she had come to abandoning all she held dear.

‘It’s like all the sadness and pain in the world isn’t there, as if it never happened,’ continued Miska. ‘But it did happen, and when the sun rises it’s going to be worse than it was yesterday.’

‘I know,’ said Katarin as a wave of guilt surged hot in her chest. ‘And it’s all my fault. I was entrusted with Kislev’s protection and I failed.’

‘I think you only fail if you don’t try,’ said Miska. ‘Whether we live or die is of no matter.’

Katarin knelt beside Miska and ran a hand through her wild hair. The girl was clearly of Gospodar ancestry, and her eyes matched her own. She wore a silver chain with a blue stone wrapped in silver wire around her neck. Katarin saw something of herself in Miska’s steely determination.

‘That’s a pretty pendant,’ said Katarin, lifting the stone and rubbing her thumb across its smooth surface.

‘Mistress Valencik wanted me to have it,’ said Miska.

Katarin sensed something unsaid in the girl’s answer.

‘Then you are very lucky indeed,’ said Katarin. ‘This is an elven cynath jewel. I wonder how Sofia came to own it.’

‘I don’t know.’ Miska smiled, and its warmth was a ray of sunlight after a storm, a breath of life when hope failed.

Katarin took a deep breath, letting the frozen chill that lay at the heart of Kislev fill her lungs and spread through her flesh.

‘I think you and I should go back,’ she said.

‘Will your warriors be angry you came up here alone?’ asked Miska, nodding towards the wall of ice being steadily demolished by kossar axes.

‘I expect so,’ said Katarin, ‘but they love me and they will forgive me.’

Morning brought an end to the unseasonal rains and the sun dried the earth hard, making it ideal terrain for the Kislevite horses. Though nothing else had changed, this fact alone lifted the spirits of the Tzarina’s riders.

Sofia was exhausted. After doing what little she could to restore the Ice Queen, she and Ryurik had spent the night passing through the camp. She tended injured warriors until her supplies ran out while he recorded the words of those who would not live to see the dawn.

Miska was asleep by the smouldering remains of the fire by the time they returned, but she stirred as Kurt threw his heavy saddle onto the gelding’s back.

‘Gather your things,’ said Kurt, bending to tighten the girth before hanging his scabbard from the horn. ‘We are leaving.’

‘Where are we going?’ asked Ryurik.

‘West,’ said Kurt. ‘To Erengrad.’

Once again Sofia and Miska rode with Kurt on Pavel’s enormous back. Sunlight lifted the human spirit like little else, and she heard faint hopes that Dhaz now favoured them.

They rode in the lancer krug surrounding the Tzarina, who had decreed – for reasons known only to herself – that Miska was now an honorary hearth-maiden. This pleased the young girl immensely, and her proud smile illuminated all who saw it.

The Tzarina’s frost-sheened horse had died in battle before the walls of Kislev, and she now rode a roan mare that was slowly becoming dappled grey. Sofia had no doubt it would be purest white by the time they reached the coast.

Just over a thousand men, women and children followed the course of the Lynsk as it flowed westwards. Fell stormclouds pursued them as they rode into the sunset for five days. The hope that sunlight had brought turned slowly to shadow as each dawn brought more vistas of utter devastation, a land brutalised beyond endurance: burned villages where carrion birds circled in flocks thicker than any had seen, roads lined by corpses impaled on barbed lances.

Howling steppe wolves picked at the bodies of those who had fled the destruction of their homes, bold where once they would have feared the dwelling places of men.

Worst of all were the many hideous flesh-totems the northmen had left in their wake, idols to Dark Gods wrought from corpses threaded into the wiry branches of black trees that grew where no tree should grow. Lifeless limbs writhed with piteous motion and fleshless skulls muttered dark curses on any who came near. Hung with brazen icons of the northmen’s gods, the blood-nourished trees squirmed in the earth and men’s hearts despaired at the sight of these grotesque obelisks.

Ryurik spent the journey filling his book with soldiers’ memories and the deeds of their forefathers. A wealth of oral tradition unknown to anyone beyond Kislev’s borders was laid down in his book of living history.

‘They understand it’s the only way anyone will ever know of them,’ said Miska one night when Ryurik marvelled at the newfound willingness of the warriors to speak to him.

The dawn of the sixth day brought ocean scent from the Sea of Claws and gave Sofia hope they might reach Erengrad without attack. As the light faded on another day’s ride, they made camp in the rising haunches of Kislev’s coastal marches, finding shelter in a soaring ice-canyon of a great waterfall.

Hateful winds surged from the Northern Wastes, but the Tzarina’s warriors kept them at bay in a krug around a towering bonfire that burned with a wild and exuberant light.

Sofia sat next to Kurt, with Miska dozing across her lap. Beside her, Ryurik scribbled noteworthy turns of phrase and deeds in his book, a book that was rapidly filling with all manner of colourful tales of Kislev’s last days.

Across the fire, the Tzarina listened to the boyarin swap easy banter, good-natured insults and ludicrously exaggerated boasts with an indulgent smile.

‘I should not put much stock in these tales, Master Tsarev,’ said the Tzarina. ‘Perhaps one word in ten will be truth.’

‘Still better than most history books,’ roared Wrodzik.

‘You can read?’ demanded Tey-Muraz. ‘Next you’ll be telling me your horse can play the tambor.’

‘I read about as well as you ride,’ admitted Wrodzik.

‘Then you are a scholar worthy of Athanasius himself.’

‘Who?’ asked Wrodzik, and the krug laughed as the koumiss passed around the fire.

The laughter faded and Tey-Muraz asked, ‘Norvard by noon?’

Heads nodded around the fire.

‘Norvard?’ said Kurt, leaning towards Sofia. ‘I thought we were heading to Erengrad?’

‘Norvard is the Ungol name for Erengrad, before Tzarina Shoika and her Gospodars captured it and renamed it.’

‘Midmorning if the ground stays dry and there’s good grass left on the hills,’ said Urska Pysanka, one of the hearth-maidens Sofia had met in the Tzarina’s tent.

Urska had not been born a warrior, but when Kyazak raiders had attacked the Kalviskis stanitsa five years earlier, she had rallied its widows, mothers and daughters to fight back. When the men returned from the pulks at the onset of winter, they found their women with swords, clad in armour and bearing grisly war-trophies. And when the tribes came south the following year, they stayed away from the Kalviskis stanitsa.

Urska Pysanka still wore a shrivelled pouch around her neck that had once belonged to the Kyazak war-chief.

‘Urska Seed-taker has the truth of it,’ agreed Boyarin Wrodzik, passing the koumiss onwards. ‘That horse of Tey-Muraz needs all the grass it can eat to carry him further. Yha, you should swap mounts with levubiytsa and spare it more misery.’

‘Pah!’ sneered Tey-Muraz. ‘Ride a soft-bellied Empire steed? I’d sooner walk.’

‘My horse is glad you think so,’ said Kurt.

‘Thank your Sigmar we need you in saddle, levubiytsa!’ said Urska with a savage elbow to Kurt’s ribs. ‘That fat horse of yours be in my pot by now if not.’

‘Eat a grain-fed horse?’ spat Wrodzik, pounding a massive fist against his chest. ‘Such fare’s taste is too thin. Give me grass-fed meat. More blood in it to make a man strong.’

‘Then you must have eaten a whole herd of long-horns,’ shouted Tey-Muraz.

Wrodzik leaned over the fire and said, ‘Aye, and every time I bed your wife she feeds me another from your herd.’

Tey-Muraz bellowed with laughter and kicked a burning branch from the fire. It landed in a flurry of sparks on Wrodzik’s lap, who leapt into the air and hurled it away with windmilling arms. It bounced through a krug around another fire, and a pair of bare-chested warriors leapt to their feet, hurling a string of curses.

‘Your mothers know you speak this way?’ yelled Wrodzik to the Ungol riders, standing to make an obscene gesture with his groin and both hands.

‘I never expected to see this again,’ said Sofia.

‘See what?’ asked Kurt, as the boyarin began a furiously vulgar argument with the neighbouring krug.

‘This,’ said Sofia. ‘We’ve seen so much misery I thought it would be impossible for these men to know mirth again.’

‘It’s because you’re all mad,’ said Kurt. ‘Why else would you live here?’

‘This is our home,’ snapped Ryurik, before correcting himself. ‘This was our home.’

‘No, Ryurik, you were right the first time,’ said Sofia, and the argument with the other krug ceased instantly as her voice echoed throughout the canyon. ‘This is our home, and it always will be, no matter what comes to pass. That is what those from other lands will never understand about us. When you live every day in the shadow of death, every moment of life stolen from from its jaws is sweeter than honey. When all you have can be taken away in a heartbeat, every breath is precious, every laugh a gift, every moment of love a miracle.’

‘If that is so, then why are you all possessed of insane cheer or consumed by grim fatalism?’ said Kurt, putting his hands up to show he intended no insult.

Sofia looked at the boyarin to answer Kurt’s question, and it was left to Tey-Muraz to give the only possible reply.

The rotamaster shrugged and said, ‘This is Kislev.’

Feydaj rode a night-scaled steed with nuggets of garnet fire for eyes. Its skin rippled like the tar pools of Troll Country and its breath was straight from the Fly Lord’s crevice.

He alone rode, for the forest beasts needed no steeds. The horned packs of disgusting, furred flesh ran the steppe with a feverish hunger for mortal meat. As great a host as it had become, it galled Feydaj to be the master of such creatures.

Once he had been hetzar to a warhost whose bloody rampages were known and feared across the wasteland. The utter rout of that host on the banks of the Lynsk at the hands of Tzar Boris the Red had all but ended Feydaj’s rise to power.

The Everchosen was wrathfully unforgiving of failure.

But he was not stupid or wasteful.

Dozens of tribes were bloodsworn to the hetzar’s sword, and word had reached the Everchosen that Feydaj had cut the Tzar from his monstrous bear at the battle’s end. Such things had currency, and to execute Feydaj would have caused more problems than it would have solved.

His life was spared, but he could not entirely escape punishment. The Everchosen threw him to the beasts and Hetzar Feydaj became the Outcast, earning the name Ghur-Tartail among the tribesmen.

They traversed a landscape blessed by the touch of the Dark Gods, following the unmistakable trail of the Ice Queen and her riders. The wretched turnskin beast claimed to have seen around a thousand riders. That it had once been human gave the account some credence. Feydaj wouldn’t have trusted one born a beast to know such numbers.

Dark clouds rolled overhead like pyre smoke, bearing ash and ice from the Changing Lands. Even if the Everchosen’s warriors were defeated, the southlands would never be the same. Sheets of polluted rain turned the steppe to foetid black mud, but it slowed them not at all. The howls and brays of the beasts were roared into the unending storms, and with each moonrise, their ranks were swelled by yet more.

There were packs of bull-headed minotaurs, stamping herds of horn-blowing centigors and monsters so blessed by the changing power of the gods that they could be likened to no beast known by man. Word of the Ice Queen was spreading through the steppe, and drew the beasts like fresh-killed meat. Her frigid sorcery had slain legions of their kind, and they were hungry for her death.

Each night the beastherds gathered to brawl and feast around the craggy menhir borne by the cyclopean Bale-eye. They burned the weakest members of the herd as offerings to the lurid glow of the dark moon. By nightfall of the sixth day, less than two days’ march from the coast, Feydaj rode at the head of more than ten thousand beasts.

Nor were such malformed creatures the only servants of the gods to heed their guttural cries. Though Feydaj never saw them, he felt towering presences growing within the dark stormclouds, things of immense power that waited for their prey to reveal itself before ripping a path into the earthly realm. He felt them as a fire behind the eyes, a sourness in his belly and unrest within his flesh.

The eyes of the gods had turned this way and they sent their most powerful servants to bear witness. Victory would earn their favour and a return to the forefront of this war.

He did not dare think of the consequences of failure.

The sun had just reached its zenith when Erengrad came into sight. Weeks had passed since reavers had burned the city, yet a pall of shadow still hung over it like a shroud. Despite reaching Kislev’s western coast, Sofia felt a cold sliver of dread enter her heart.

The Tzarina’s column of riders followed the road towards what had once been the city’s eastern gate, but was now a smashed breach in a toppled barbican. High walls of salt-pitted stone curled around the headland and the first scouts to approach the city thought its walls still defended.

Riding closer, they saw only the dead standing sentinel over Erengrad, a legion of corpses impaled on long spears and lifted high to better see their homeland’s destruction. Thousands more lay in fly-blown drifts, filling the ditch at the wall’s base.

‘The city died hard,’ said Kurt with a shiver that had little to do with the thunderstorm at their back, blowing in against the wind from the ocean.

‘That supposed to make us feel better, levubiytsa?’ said Tey-Muraz, his brow thunderous.

Kurt met his unflinching gaze. ‘It means they fought to the bitter end, that even when all hope was lost they did not surrender. So, yes, it ought to make you feel better that your countrymen fought with such bravery.’

Tey-Muraz nodded curtly and Sofia saw tears in his eyes.

‘You think Elena Yevschenko lives?’ asked Wrodzik.

Tey-Muraz wiped his eyes and shook his head. ‘She’s dead.’

‘You know this how?’ asked Urska Pysanka.

‘Because she was my cousin and she was a fighter,’ said Tey-Muraz, waving to the broken city walls. ‘Levubiytsa is right, even one-armed, Elena would have fought for her city. And so she will be dead.’

The others nodded at Tey-Muraz’s logic.

Sofia held tight to Miska, who dozed with her face pressed to Kurt’s back. With the city in sight, a strange mood overtook the riders, as though a long-dreaded fate had finally arrived and found to be less fearful than had been imagined.

The Tzarina was first to enter the city, her mount now entirely frost white and shedding motes of ice with every step. Its eyes were pearlescent, and its mane had grown long with streamers of ice. Urska Pysanka and Wrodzik flanked the queen, with Tey-Muraz and Kurt forming the wings of a ‘V’ behind her.

The rest of the Tzarina’s pulk rode with their lances dipped, silent as they took in the devastation around them.

Sofia thought she had prepared herself for what lay within Erengrad. A lifetime spent healing young men and women ripped apart by war had shown her just what horrors men were capable of wreaking upon one another. She had tended the wounded and the insane in the melded warrens of Praag’s twisted streets. She had pulled survivors from the ruins of burning stanitsas in the northern oblast.

But nothing had prepared her for the sack of Erengrad.

The reavers from the sea hadn’t just captured the city, they had defiled and tortured it before putting it to the flames. The ruins of the High City were thick with corpses, the flesh of men, women and children used as playthings then left as scraps for black-winged corpse-eaters.

She heard Ryurik vomit from the back of his horse, weeping at the sight of what the northmen had done. The men of Kislev, proud warriors all, fared little better, their faces wet with tears at the sight of their kinsmen’s fate.

Everywhere Sofia looked, she saw some new horror, some fresh atrocity to turn the stomach and blacken her heart. The mutilated bodies of men and boys had been nailed to charred roof beams and used as archery targets, and heaps of torn dresses spoke to the terrible fate of Erengrad’s women. Sofia sobbed as she saw tiny bones in the ashes of cook-fires, turning Miska’s head away when she looked up.

‘No, little one,’ she said through her tears. ‘You don’t want to see this.’

‘I don’t want to,’ agreed Miska. ‘But I have to. Kislev is my country and these are my people. I want to see what they’ve done to them.’

Sofia nodded and took her hand from Miska’s head. She looked around her, at the hanging bodies, the feasting ravens and the ravaged shell of the city. Once again, Sofia saw the girl’s core of strength and marvelled at the ability of the young to endure. She felt Miska’s thin body shake, and her grip was like a steel trap.

‘They’ll pay for this,’ she said, and cold tears streamed down her delicate features. ‘Won’t they?’

‘They will, child,’ said the Tzarina, reining her horse in beside Kurt’s towering mount. ‘Count on it.’

‘Why would they do this?’ said Kurt. ‘It makes no sense.’

‘War seldom does, sir knight,’ answered the Tzarina.

‘To my eternal regret, the horrors of war are well known to me, Queen Katarin,’ said Kurt, ‘but only a fool burns so valuable a prize as a port. The enemy could raise hundreds of ships and send his fleets south to ravage the coasts of the Empire and Bretonnia.’

‘The northmen don’t make good sailors,’ said Wrodzik.

‘I know coastal towns in the Empire that would dispute that claim, Master Wrodzik.’

‘Yha, they can sail, levubiytsa,’ said Tey-Muraz, spitting on the broken remains of a tribal shield, ‘but they don’t like boats. A northman likes to walk to war.’

‘It makes perfect sense when you understand that the northmen do not make war for the same reasons as us,’ said the Tzarina. ‘They do not fight for survival or gold, for land or their children’s futures. They do not march south because some distant lord in his castle owns their lands or to right a host of ancient grievances.’

‘Then why do they fight?’ asked Miska.

‘They fight because they are men possessed of a terrible idea that their gods require it of them,’ said the Tzarina, and her eyes glittered with fearful ice. ‘What makes them so dangerous is that they truly believe in the things they say they believe; that they are the chosen warriors of an ancient power whose sole purpose is to destroy any who oppose it. Such men cannot be reasoned with, for their every belief is enslaved to the idea that the destruction of our world is their sacred duty.’

‘How can we hope to defeat such a foe?’ asked Ryurik.

‘We fight them,’ said the Tzarina, drawing her winter-hued blade. ‘With ice and sword, we fight.’

The Tzarina led her riders deeper into Erengrad, following the High City’s widest streets. So thorough was the destruction that it became impossible to tell where one building ended and its neighbour began. Stone and timber lay smashed together, and burned scraps of fabric flapped in the ruins like obscene flags.

Onwards they rode, past the pale ruins of once-graceful structures surely too wondrous to have been shaped by any craft of men. Fine-boned skeletons, ethereal even in death, were crucified upon elegant representations of strange, otherworldly gods. Even amid all the horror vying for her tears, the sight of such violated beauty touched Sofia deeply.

‘The elven quarter,’ said Ryurik, similarly afflicted at such inhumanly exquisite artifice cast down without care. He pointed to a burned hall of golden heartwood, now blackened by smoke and flame. A slow blizzard of silken pages drifted in ashen flakes from its gutted shell.

‘I was… friendly with their keeper of books, Nyathria Eshenera, and before the new outer walls were finished, she allowed me to see their collection. It was the most beautiful place I ever saw. She told me some of the books were over three thousand years old, and that one was said to have been written by Bel-Korhadris, the Scholar King himself.’ Ryurik shook his head. ‘And they burned it all.’

‘The elves fought for Norvard too,’ said Tey-Muraz, seeing hundreds of snapped shafts and bloodied arrowheads in the street beyond the shattered walls of the compound.

‘Man or elf,’ said Wrodzik. ‘Makes no difference to a northman. They care not whose blood they spill.’

Beyond the carnage of the High City, they rode to where the city opened up and the land dipped sharply towards the ocean.

The remains of Erengrad’s Low City filled the bay like driftwood, and the ocean was frothed with fatty runoff from pyres raised on the shore. Sofia’s first thought was a memory of a faded tapestry she’d seen in Kislev’s Imperial embassy. Kaspar had told her it was the work of van der Plancken and depicted the comet’s destruction of Mordheim.

To the south, the temple of Dhaz smouldered, as though its eternal flame might yet still be lit, and across the Lynsk, the Temple of Tor remained untouched atop its solitary peak. Barely visible past Tor’s hill, the shattered remains of a glassy tower of ice lay fallen in the ruins.

‘Frosthome,’ said the Tzarina, icy tears glistening on her pale cheeks.

The harbour was almost entirely gone, but the great dwarf-built bridge linking the city’s north and south remained intact. Ram-ships with beaked iron prows had smashed against its immense stone piers, but the craft of the mountain folk was beyond their power to destroy. Half-sunk trading vessels listed in the ruins of the harbour, and scores of broken hulls jutted from the surface. Torn sails held in place by fraying rigging streamed from splintered masts and forlorn flags snapped in the cold winds.

‘Sigmar’s blood,’ cried Kurt. ‘Look!’

Amid the wreckage of so many ocean-going vessels, it took Sofia a moment to identify the reason for Kurt’s oath.

An Imperial mercantile galleon, its decks bustling with activity, was moored to the bridge. It flew a flag of vivid scarlet and blue, emblazoned with a griffon rampant bearing a golden hammer.

The flag of Altdorf.

A line of smoking flint-lock handguns lowered as the pulk’s vanguard approached the high barricade built around the end of the bridge. Constructed from the abundance of wreckage strewn around the Low City, the barricade was like something thrown up in the midst of a riot.

A tall, wolf-lean man in gaudy doublet and hose climbed into an embrasure formed between a portion of smashed decking and a series of lashed walkways. A tricorn hat with an ostrich feather was pulled down tight over his ears and he carried a meticulously crafted three-barelled wheel-lock pistol. Kurt noticed each hammer striker was a miniature Ghal-maraz.

‘Halt!’ cried the man in sharply accented Reikspiel. ‘Come no closer or we will shoot.’

‘You shoot us, Empire man?’ shouted Tey-Muraz. ‘You blind?’

‘Walk that horse any further and you’ll find out just how good our eyes are.’

Tey-Muraz turned to Kurt, a perplexed look on his open face.

‘What is the matter with him? Why does he point gun at me?’

‘A ragged troop of winged lancers probably don’t look much different from marauding northmen,’ said Kurt.

The boyars took offence at this, but before they could do anything too rash, too Kislevite, Kurt jabbed his spur’s into Pavel’s flank. A dozen powder-dusted muzzles followed him as he picked a path through the debris towards the barricade.

He was acutely aware of how easily those lead balls could punch through his breastplate. Such weapons were transforming war, and the days of armoured knights on the charge were numbered. Even were half these weapons to misfire, more than enough remained to shred him.

‘I am Kurt Bremen of the Knights Panther,’ he shouted up to the man with the elaborate pistol. ‘To whom am I speaking?’

The man peered at him, eyeing him suspiciously before saying, ‘Ulrecht Zwitzer, captain of the Trinovante.’

‘Well met, Captain Zwitzer,’ said Kurt. ‘I never thought to see a vessel of the Empire this far north again.’

‘You say you’re Knights Panther?’ said Zwitzer. ‘How do I know you didn’t just peel that armour from a dead knight?’

Kurt’s temper frayed at the man’s tone, but he held it in check. Given Erengrad’s devastation and the unlikelihood of meeting a Knight Panther, Zwitzer’s suspicion was forgiveable.

‘That pistol,’ said Kurt. ‘Was it by any chance fashioned by Master Viedler on the Koenigplatz? The Grand Master of my order commissioned a twin-barrelled version from the irascible old gunsmith. And since we were to fight in the service of Graf Boris of Middenheim, he ordered one hammer to be wrought as a hammer, the other as a leaping wolf.’

‘Aye,’ said Zwitzer. ‘It’s Master Viedler’s work, sure enough. And if you’ve met the old rogue, then you’ll know how what became of his little finger, yes?’

Kurt grinned. ‘He told people it was bitten off by a rat and later turned up in one of Godrun the Pieman’s savouries.’

‘Aye, that’s what he told folk,’ agreed Zwitzer, ‘but what really happened to it?’

‘His wife shot it off with one of his own pistols after she caught him dipping his ramrod into the Widow Braufeltz,’ said Kurt, remembering the Altdorf Town Crier gleefully printing the sordid details of the affair.

Zwitzer laughed and lowered the hammers of his pistol.

‘Lower your weapons, lads,’ said Zwitzer. ‘This one’s Altdorf born and bred.’

Kurt let out a relieved breath as the handguns were withdrawn and Zwitzer put up his pistol. He cocked his ostrich-feathered hat and said, ‘So what in Sigmar’s name brings a Knight Panther to Erengrad when all with any sense are already in the south?’

‘I could ask you the same question,’ replied Kurt.

‘I asked first,’ said Zwitzer. ‘And I have handgunners.’

Kurt twisted in the saddle as the winged lancers walked their horses to the side and the Ice Queen rode her snow-white steed into view. Sofia walked beside her and Miska sat in the saddle before the Tzarina.

Zwitzer’s face fell open in a picture of comic surprise.

‘Ghal-maraz strike me sideways,’ said Zwitzer. ‘It’s you. I didn’t dare hope it could be true…’

The captain climbed over the barricade and scrambled down the slope of smashed timber. He removed his hat and tucked it under his arm before marching briskly towards the Ice Queen.

‘Your majesty,’ said Zwitzer, bowing deeply and sweeping his feathered hat in an elaborate flourish.

The Tzarina dismounted and looked up at the Trinovante.

‘Captain Zwitzer,’ she said. ‘You are a most welcome sight, and please do not think me ungrateful when I ask what exactly brought you to Kislev? To Erengrad?’

‘You did, my lady,’ said Zwitzer.

‘I did?’

‘I saw you in my dreams,’ said Zwitzer with the heartfelt wonder of a man who wakes to see his nighttime flights of fantasy are not delusions at all, but reality.

‘You dreamed of me?’ said the Ice Queen.

‘Every night for two months,’ said Zwitzer. ‘I saw your face and heard your voice calling me here. Thought I was going mad. To even consider coming north when every other captain worth his salt was sailing as far south as he dared. I had to pay every scurvy knave on the Trinovante every coin I had just to get them to come with me.’

Before the Tzarina could respond, the rain that had dogged their course for days finally broke. It fell suddenly and hard from onrushing thunderclouds bloated with titanic shadows. One minute the day was dry and still, the next a hammering black rain beat the wharf’s stones and churned the ocean.

A chorus of ululating warhorns brayed from the city walls, drawing every gaze upwards. Moments later the horns were answered by howls of bloodlust torn from the rabid maws of ten thousand beasts as they poured into the High City.

‘Men of Kislev!’ yelled the Tzarina. ‘To arms!’

A dozen lancers vaulted from their mounts, bending their backs to helping the Trinovante’s crew demolish the barricade and clear a path to the ship. Wreckage was shoved into the sea as frightened men and women ran to its gangway.

Sofia and Ryurik pulled a protesting Miska between them as sailors sawed through the sodden ropes securing the galleon to the bridge’s rune-carved mooring rings. Sofia had no idea how much time was necessary to ready a ship this big to sail, but prayed to all the gods to grant them enough.

‘Let me go!’ cried Miska, squirming and fighting them every step of the way. ‘I need to go to her!’

‘No, little one,’ said Sofia. ‘We need to get aboard!’

‘Please!’ begged the girl, her eyes brimming with tears. ‘Please, you don’t understand…’

Sofia looked over her shoulder, and the breath caught in her chest at the host swarming from the city above: an unending horde of flesh-hungry beasts and monsters.

‘Faster,’ she said. ‘Go faster.’

No sooner had she spoken than Ryurik slipped on the rain-slick stone and lost his grip on Miska. Small as the youngster was, her struggles dragged Sofia down too. Nimble as an oblast fox, the girl was up and running a heartbeat later.

‘Miska!’ cried Sofia. ‘Gods, no!’

The girl sprinted back towards the assembling lancers. Few people tried stop her, too afraid for their own lives to care if this youngster wanted to choose her own ending.

Sofia picked herself up and ran after her.

‘Sofia!’ cried Ryurik, turning to come after her.

She didn’t answer him and ran after Miska, losing sight of the girl in the rain as a barging krug of winged lancers rode past. The warriors thrust their lances to the sky and yelled words of praise to Tor and Dhaz and Ursun.

‘Miska!’ she cried, turning in a circle. ‘Gods, please! Miska! Please, come back to me. We have to go!’

A vast horse reared up before her, a sorrel gelding bearing an armoured warrior upon its back.

‘Sofia? What are you doing?’ demanded Kurt. ‘You need to get on the Trinovante.’

‘I can’t find Miska,’ she said. ‘She ran away.’

‘What? Why?’

‘I don’t know!’ snapped Sofia. ‘Miska!’

Then she saw the girl, thin arms wrapped around the Tzarina’s neck as she wept into her shoulder. Sofia’s heart broke to see such sorrow, feeling a splinter lodge in her own heart as she realised what the Ice Queen must be telling Miska.

Tzarina Katarin looked up and met Sofia’s gaze, and her eyes were filled with icy tears. Sofia forged a path towards the Ice Queen, who tilted Miska’s head back and lifted a blue pendant hung around her neck.

Sofia recognised the silver chain and wire-wrapped stone. How could she not? It was hers. Why was Miska wearing it? The Tzarina kissed the blue stone and smiled, whispering in the young girl’s ear.

‘My queen,’ began Sofia. ‘I…’

‘Katarin,’ said the Tzarina, gently prising the sobbing girl from her neck. ‘No more titles.’

She passed Miska to Sofia, who held her tight as Wrodzik, Tey-Muraz and Urska Pysanka rode up. Their faces were more alive and their eyes wilder than Sofia had yet seen them.

The Ice Queen nodded and mounted her frost-white steed.

She looked to Sofia and her grief at this parting was almost too much to bear. ‘Promise me you will keep that little one safe.’

‘I will,’ sobbed Sofia as the queen nodded and turned her horse. Tey-Muraz yelled an ancient Ungol war-shout before circling Sofia with his teeth bared and topknot unbound.

He hammered a fist against his chest and said, ‘Be sure Master Tsarev tells a grand tale of our ending.’

Sofia nodded, her throat too choked to speak.

‘Yha!’ shouted Tey-Muraz and the lancers followed the icy beacon of the Tzarina’s glittering sword. Their wild whoops, glorious laughter and shrieking wing banners dared the wind and rain to drown them out.

Kislev’s last warriors rode across the river towards the rocky peak bearing Tor’s temple at its summit.

What better place was there to meet the gods?

‘Where in Sigmar’s name are they going?’ cried Kurt, watching the Tzarina’s warriors ride over the bridge. ‘The ship is leaving and we need to be on it.’

Sofia held Miska tight and swallowed her tears as she ran towards the Trinovante. She didn’t look back, didn’t trust herself to speak.

‘Sofia, what’s going on?’ asked Kurt, easily catching up to her on his horse. ‘The Trinovante is leaving! The Tzarina needs to get aboard.’

‘She’s not going to the Empire,’ said Sofia, between sobs.

‘What? Where else is there to go?’

‘She’s not going anywhere,’ said Sofia, finally reaching the gangway. Captain Zwitzer and Ryurik were waiting at the gunwale, urging them to board. Lines of handgunners stood on the foredeck and the crack of their black powder weapons made Sofia flinch. Miska sobbed and held tighter at the gunfire.

‘She’s staying?’ said Kurt. ‘Why?’

‘Because she must,’ said Sofia.

‘I don’t understand.’

‘And you never will, Empire man!’ snapped Sofia, unwilling to even look at him.

‘Kurt, Sofia!’ cried Ryurik. ‘Quickly! Get aboard!’

The gangway stretched out before her, but she couldn’t place her foot on it. To flee Erengrad would be admitting her homeland was gone, that all she loved of Kislev was dead.

‘I can’t do it,’ said Sofia.

Miska lifted her head from Sofia’s shoulder, her face now that of a frightened child with the palest grey eyes.

‘You promised you’d keep me safe,’ she said and Sofia’s resolve hardened in the face that simple truth.

‘You’re right, little one,’ she said. ‘I did. And I will.’

Sofia climbed the gangway, each step feeling like a betrayal, until she reached the Trinovante’s deck. Ryurik’s arms enfolded her as Kurt followed her aboard, leading Pavel by the reins.

Zwitzer’s men kicked the gangway into the sea and the ship’s sails boomed as the ropes holding them to the bridge were cut. The ship lurched from the wharf as packs of frenzied beasts hurled themselves into the ocean in a futile attempt to catch the departing vessel.

Kurt strode to the opposite side of the ship, looking up towards Tor’s high temple. Sofia saw him struggle with grief and the horror of what was to come.

‘They are all going to die,’ he said, watching the tide of beasts surround the peak upon which the Tzarina’s warriors prepared for one last, glorious charge. ‘And for what? There was never a fight here to win!’

‘Because she’ll die if she leaves,’ said Sofia.

‘Die? There isn’t a wound on her.’

Sofia shook her head.

‘Your Emperor is elected,’ she said. ‘He is a man, chosen by other men. That is not Kislev’s way. Here, the land chooses who will rule. The land has chosen her and so she must stay.’

‘That makes no sense. Kislev is gone.’

‘She knows that,’ said Sofia. ‘And yet she stays.’

‘But the Empire endures,’ said Kurt. ‘Imagine the boost to morale had the Ice Queen stepped onto the Altdorf docks! Think of the hope such news might have brought. And with her power allied to the Supreme Patriarch’s, the Auric Bastion would have endured for a thousand years.’

‘All you say is true,’ said Sofia, knowing Kurt would never understand what abandoning Kislev would have done to its queen. ‘But it does not change anything.’

Kurt’s head sank to his chest. ‘Then all hope is gone.’

‘No,’ said Miska, holding fast to a wire-wrapped pendant of glittering frost-blue. ‘Not all hope.’

Katarin watched the Trinovante clear the wreckage choking the harbour, and let out a mist of breath that froze the rain. That at least some of her people would live beyond her own death was a comfort.

Tey-Muraz drank from a skin of koumiss, watching the thousands of grunting beasts massing at the base of the hill. Beneath the walnut of his skin, the Ungol horseman was ashen at the sight of so many beasts.

Katarin felt the monsters’ hate and returned it tenfold.

She looked down at her fingers, the skin pale to the point of translucency. The magic was still within her, but Kislev was all but dead. And as the land died, so she weakened.

She saw Tey-Muraz looking at her and said, ‘I think I might need some of that.’

Tey-Muraz grinned, exposing yellowed teeth, and tossed the skin to her. She drank a mouthful, letting the milky spirit core a burning line down her gullet.

‘From my own herd,’ said Tey-Muraz proudly.

‘You have any more?’ asked Wrodzik as Katarin passed it to Urska Pysanka. ‘I don’t want to my face death sober.’

‘That’s the last one,’ said Tey-Muraz sadly. ‘The last one there will ever be in the world.’

Wrodzik spat a mouthful of brackish rainwater.

‘Ach, is of no matter.’

Urska Pysanka said, ‘Yha, you never faced life sober, so why be any different with death?’

‘What son of Kislev ever fought sober?’ demanded Wrodzik, draining the last of the koumiss and dropping the skin to the waterlogged earth.

‘None of mine,’ said Tey-Muraz, his voice choked with emotion. ‘All six were lost at Starovoiora. They died bravely and drunk as Tileans.’

‘Two of my sons fell at Mazhorod,’ said Urska, her jaw set tight. ‘Another at Chernozavtra.’

‘No daughters?’ asked Katarin.

‘Just one,’ said Urska, and a tear rolled down her cheek, quickly lost in the rain. ‘Praag took her while I nursed her in swaddling clothes.’

‘Erzbeta never bore me sons,’ said Wrodzik. ‘It saddened us, but our daughters filled my life with joy. They married well and bore me many grandchildren.’

‘Do they yet live?’ asked Katarin.

Wrodzik shrugged. ‘I do not know. Their stanitsas were overrun in the Year That No One Forgets. I know what the northmen do to the women they capture, and though all the gods curse me, I hope Morr took them swiftly.’

They nodded in agreement and Katarin felt her love for these brave warriors fill her. Not one of the thousand riders upon this hill had even thought of boarding the Empire ship. Such was their devotion that the thought never occurred to them.

Against impossible odds, they remained at her side.

She could imagine no greater love.

‘Tey-Muraz. Wrodzik. Urska. You are my bogatyr, my faithful knights,’ said Katarin, feeling the frozen chill of Kislev’s magic swell within her body. ‘And when men speak of this battle in all the centuries to come, you will be its greatest heroes, Kislev’s mightiest warriors who will return when the land’s needs is greatest.’

They wept at her words, honoured and humbled to be so beloved. The icy soul of Kislev surged in her veins as she stood tall in the saddle and called out to her warriors.

‘You all know I bore no heirs,’ said Katarin, her voice carrying to every man and woman who stood with her at Tor’s high temple. ‘But I have all my sons and daughters here with me today. On this rain-soaked hill, we are all one people, one land. Today we fight for Kislev! Today we fight for her lost sons and daughters, for her proud mothers and fathers!’

The warriors cheered, thrusting swords and lances to the benighted sky, yelling their defiance to the beasts below.

Katarin thought of the oft-repeated sentiment, words that had been spoken since the first khan-queen of the Gospodars had crossed the mountains.

Kislev is land, and land is Kislev.

Only now did she realise how wrong that was.

‘Kislev is people, and people are Kislev.’

Tey-Muraz repeated the mantra. Wrodzik joined him, then Urska Pysanka. They bellowed it until the rotas took up their shout, and Erengrad echoed to the sound of this new war-cry.

‘Kislev is people, and people are Kislev!’

Jagged bolts of lightning exploded above the stricken tower, forking from the clouds to strike the ruined city. More followed in bursts of zig-zagging purple that sent roaring flames curling into the ever-darkening sky.

‘Maybe Tor favours us?’ said Tey-muraz.

Deafening thunder boomed like the mockery of insane gods and the day was plunged into darkness. Fractures of void-black night tore the sky with the sound of ripping cloth, and the earth shook to the impact of bloody hammers on brazen anvils.

Things moved within the darkness: titanic, impossible things with wet meat bodies. They cloaked themselves in shadow, but Katarin’s seer-sight saw bloody crimson armour, eyes that watched worlds end and deadly weapons forged from purest rage. The grave-reek of rancid flesh and burning fur filled the air, like the remains of a plague pyre left too long in the sun.

‘The Lords of Ruin,’ she whispered.

Katarin bent double as searing agony exploded within her belly, as though invisible hands were ripping at her womb.

‘My queen!’ cried Urska.

Katarin pulled herself upright and let out a hissing breath straight from winter’s white heart. The magic of her homeland filled her more than it ever had, a cold so intense it turned the ground beneath her steed to solid ice.

The beasts roared as a single rider on a dark horse moved to the head of this host of beasts and daemons. He carried a rippling banner, its sigil that of a clawed hand tearing down an icy crown, the banner of her father’s killer.

‘Feydaj,’ said Wrodzik, his hands balling to fists. A towering brute of a creature with ruddy skin and a single, unblinking eye lumbered into sight alongside the hetzar. An enormous menhir was lashed to its back, a tapered stone encrusted with ancient sigils.

‘Ursun’s teeth!’ the Ice Queen said.

‘Yha, it’s a big bastard, right so,’ agreed Wrodzik.

‘No. That stone it’s carrying,’ said Katarin. ‘It is one of the stones from Urszebya.’

The roaring of beasts grew louder at the sight of the hetzar and the giant beast. They bellowed their blood-challenge, baring their chests, stamping their hooves and thrusting their horns.

And that challenge was answered.

A thunderous roar echoed from the summit of Tor’s hill.

It came from within the abandoned tower.

Lancers wheeled their terrified mounts away from its arched entrance as something enormously ancient and powerful lumbered from within. Its shoulders rolled with vast muscles, its thick fur pale as winter’s first ice. Its body was enormous, easily the biggest creature anyone gathered on the hill had ever seen, with fangs like tusks and claws like ebon daggers.

‘It can’t be…’ said Wrodzik.

The enormous white bear stood on its hind legs and roared again. The monsters below quailed before its raw power.

Katarin’s heart leapt to see her father’s bear once again.

‘Urskin,’ she said.

They charged from Tor’s hill, a thousand warriors with lances lowered and wing banners shrieking. They rode into history, following their radiant queen and the great white bear of her father.

The ground shook to the hoofbeats of their painted steeds as the soul of Kislev rose up alongside its people.

The dark winds blowing from the north were snuffed out.

The rains turned to snow.

And a blizzard of unimaginable ferocity swept over the walls of Erengrad. The High City froze solid as the Ice Queen’s magic gave the winter spirits of the steppe piercing form and fury. Sleeting blades of razor-edged hail tore through the forest beasts as Kislev’s doomed lancers smashed into their midst.

A rolling crash of swords and splintering lances burst upon the followers of the Dark Gods as the Ice Queen and Urskin cut a path through the snowstorm towards Hetzar Feydaj.

The blizzard engulfed Erengrad and the swirling darkness.

It rages still.