The wind off the Sea of Claws carried ice and the stink of rotting whale carcass from the flensing yards below. Skarvik stood at the cliff's edge, boots planted in frozen mud, and looked down at the Broken Eye's hold: longhouses squatting in the fjord's shadow, smoke threading from their roofs into a sky the color of old iron. Beyond the hold, the sea churned grey and white against black rocks. Behind him, three shamans crouched around a fire pit that should have been blue with Chaosflame and was instead just fire. Orange. Common. The flames of a world where nothing answered when you called.
Grukh was bleeding from the nose again. The oldest of the three, his skull tattooed with spiraling eye-patterns that had once glowed when the Winds ran strong, now just ink on weathered skin. He'd cut his palm for the fourth time, feeding the fire blood that sizzled and spat and produced nothing. No visions. No whispers. No shifting patterns in the smoke that a trained eye could read as the Changer's will.
"It's the same." Grukh wiped his nose on his wrist, smearing red across the tattoos. "Fragments. Faces I don't recognize. Colors with no shape. Then nothing."
"You said that an hour ago," said Dalla, the youngest, her fingers still twitching from whatever partial connection she'd managed before it collapsed. A third eye blinked wetly from her left temple, Tzeentch's gift from her initiation, and it wept clear fluid the way it always did when the Realm of Chaos refused her its power. "You've said it every day for six months."
"Because it has been the same every day for six months."
"Then why do we keep cutting ourselves open for a god who won't speak?"
Grukh's bloodied hand curled into a fist. "Careful."
"She's not wrong." The third shaman, Halvdan, sat back on his haunches and stared into the ordinary fire with the hollow expression of a man who had built his life on a foundation that had gone quiet. His voice was flat. Exhausted. "The Varg killed their entire seer-circle last month. Opened their throats on the standing stones and waited for a sign. Nothing came. The Baersonlings burned three villages looking for someone to blame. The Skaelings have split into four factions, each one claiming a different god abandoned them first."
"And the Broken Eye sits here." Dalla's third eye swiveled toward Skarvik's back. "Sits and waits. While every other tribe tears itself apart."
Skarvik did not turn from the cliff's edge. The wind pulled at his braids, raven feathers snapping against the small carved bones threaded through white-blond hair. His left pauldron shifted, the living metal cycling from dull bronze to something close to verdigris, slow as breathing. Below, in the hold, eight hundred warriors ate and drank and sharpened weapons and waited for their Jarl to tell them what the silence meant. They had been waiting for six months. They would wait six more if he told them to, because Skarvik had never been wrong, and the Broken Eye did not panic.
The shamans' argument guttered out. The fire crackled. Ordinary wood. Ordinary heat.
Three pairs of eyes found his back. Waiting.
Skarvik turned.
His remaining eye, pale grey, moved across the three of them without hurry. The scarred socket where his left eye had been stayed dark. No blue glow. Not for months. He registered that absence the way he registered the cold: as a fact that changed nothing about what needed to be done.
"How many tribes have lost their seers?"
Grukh blinked. "What?"
"Seers. Shamans. Sorcerers. How many tribes have killed theirs or lost them to madness since the silence began?"
Halvdan answered. "Most. The Varg, the Baersonlings, the southern Skaelings. The Aeslings drowned their witch in the fjord. Throgg's shamans went mad and he ate them." A pause. "We're among the last with a functioning seer-circle. If you call this functioning."
"I do." Skarvik crossed to the fire pit and lowered himself to one knee. The heat touched his scarred face, and the geometric patterns on his right arm caught the firelight, the ritual scarification standing out white against wind-darkened skin. "The Changer does not explain. He reveals. And he reveals only to those with eyes to see."
Dalla's third eye blinked. "He reveals nothing. That is the problem, Jarl."
"No." Skarvik's gaze fixed on her. Steady. Absolute. The look of a man for whom the concept of doubt had been amputated as cleanly as his missing eye. "The nothing is the revelation. You are reading the fire wrong. All of you."
Silence from the shamans. The wind howled through the fjord below.
"Tzeentch is the god of change." He spoke the way he always spoke of his god: calm, certain, with the faint patience of a man explaining sunrise to someone who had only ever lived underground. "Six months ago, the Realm of Chaos went dead for three heartbeats. Every sorcerer in Norsca lost their connection. Every daemon on the material plane flickered. Every ward, every binding, every pact built on Chaos energy stuttered like a heart skipping its beat."
He held up three fingers. Folded them down, one by one.
"Three heartbeats. That is not an attack. An attack would sever the connection and leave it severed. This was a flinch. The Realm of Chaos recoiled from something, and for three heartbeats, the gods themselves lost their grip on the world."
Grukh's bloodied hand had gone still. Halvdan's hollow expression sharpened. Dalla's third eye had stopped weeping.
"What makes a god flinch?" Dalla's voice had dropped. Not fear. The beginning of something else.
Skarvik smiled. The smile was worse than anything he could have said.
"That is the right question." He stood. The pauldron rippled, catching the firelight, shifting to a blue so deep it was almost black. "Every tribe in Norsca heard the silence and called it abandonment. They panicked. They killed their seers. They turned on each other. They did what frightened men do." His gaze swept the three shamans. "The Broken Eye did not panic. The Broken Eye waited. And now we are the largest warband left standing on the western coast, with three living shamans and eight hundred warriors who still believe."
He let that settle. Let them do the arithmetic.
"The silence is not punishment. The silence is Tzeentch clearing the board. Burning away the weak. Every dead seer, every shattered warband, every tribe that broke itself apart in fear... they were never worthy of what comes next."
"And what comes next?" Halvdan. The flat voice had an edge now.
Skarvik looked south. Past the fire, past the cliff, past the churning sea, toward the distant continent where the Empire's soft cities squatted behind their walls and their wards and their eight Colleges of tame magic.
"Something in the south made the Chaos Gods flinch. Something so large that the rules of magic themselves bent around it. The Realm of Chaos has not recovered. The Winds still flux. Daemons still refuse summons. That is not a wound that heals in six months. That is a new thing in the world."
He turned back to his shamans.
"I intend to find out what."
The mead hall stank of smoke and seal fat and the sour breath of men who had been drinking since noon. Whale-oil lamps hung from the crossbeams on iron chains, their flames guttering in the draft that pushed through gaps in the timber walls. The long table ran the hall's length, scarred black from decades of axes driven into its surface during arguments, its wood stained with old blood and older mead. Skulls lined the rafters. Some human, some not. Trophies from thirty years of raiding, each one a story Skarvik's warriors could recite from memory.
Eight lieutenants sat along the table's flanks, four to a side. Hard men, every one. Scarred, mutated, weather-cracked. Bjarn Splitjaw had a mouth that opened too wide, the hinges of his jaw reshaped by Tzeentch's touch into something that could bite through a shield rim. Kettil the Red wore his skin's color-shifting like a cloak, his flesh cycling from pale to rust to deep blue in slow tides that matched his breathing. The others bore their marks with the casual indifference of men who had stopped noticing what was strange about their own bodies years ago.
Skarvik stood at the table's head. His crystal staff leaned against the wall behind him. He'd brought the axe instead, laid flat on the table before him, the blackened iron catching lamplight. The pauldron had gone still. Not shifting. Not cycling. Waiting.
"Six months of silence from the gods." He let the words land without preamble. "Six months of traders still crossing the Sea of Claws because gold doesn't care who prays to what. Six months of my contacts in Marienburg and the Wasteland ports sending back every scrap of rumor that moved through the southern taverns."
He reached beneath the table and produced a leather satchel, salt-stained and travel-worn. Drew from it a sheaf of parchments, some written in the crude Reikspiel his traders had learned, others in the cipher his southern contacts used. He did not distribute them. He laid them in a stack beside his axe and rested his scarred hand on top.
"The night the Realm of Chaos went quiet, a man arrived in the Empire. He and his woman. From a great glass case, they say. He calls himself Lord Peverell. The Empire's Emperor has given him a title, quarters in the palace at Altdorf, and the full cooperation of their wizard colleges." Skarvik's gaze moved down one side of the table and up the other. "All eight of them."
Bjarn's jaw worked. "All eight."
"All eight. The Supreme Patriarch himself works with Peverell directly. The Gold College, the Death College, the Fire College. Every one of them opened their doors to this man within weeks of his arrival."
"Southerners open doors to anyone with enough coin," said Kettil. The color-shifting across his jaw had quickened, blues chasing reds.
"Not these doors." Skarvik's hand pressed flat against the parchments. "Three months after his arrival, the Colleges' vault bindings failed. Something old broke free. A Greater Daemon of Khorne that had been caged beneath their Amber College for two hundred years."
Silence. The lieutenants knew what a Greater Daemon was. Several had seen one, at distance, during the last great gathering. None had fought one and lived.
"The daemon was blessed. Not by Khorne alone." Skarvik paused. Let the next words carry their full weight. "By all five."
Bjarn's chair creaked. "Five. The Rat too?"
"The Rat too. Five gods poured their favor into a single Bloodthirster and set it loose in the heart of the Empire's capital."
"And?"
"Peverell killed it."
The lamps guttered. Wind through the wall gaps. Nobody spoke.
"Not banished," Skarvik continued. "Killed. A true death. The daemon is gone from the Realm of Chaos. Gone from existence. The way our daemons have been gone since the silence started, the ones that were walking the mortal world when the three heartbeats hit. They didn't return to the gods. They stopped."
He pulled a second parchment from the stack. Held it up, though the cipher meant nothing to most of the men at the table.
"Before that, a Strigoi Ghoul King marched on the city of Nuln with its horde. Thousands of the dead, walking. Peverell unmade them. Every one. The king included. My contact in Nuln says the undead didn't fall. They sighed. Like something heavy had been lifted off them. And then they were bones."
He set the parchment down. Drew another.
"He brought dead soldiers back to life. Not as the dead walk in Sylvania. True life. Breathing, bleeding, thinking men who had been corpses. Twenty-three of them, after the daemon battle."
Another parchment.
"The Empire's death wizards, their Amethyst College. Decades of damage in their bodies from channeling the Death Wind. Scarring. Corruption. The slow rot that eats every sorcerer who touches the Realm of Chaos too long." He swept the table. Every man here knew that rot. Grukh's nosebleeds. Halvdan's tremors. The price of power. "Peverell healed it. All of it. As if it had never been there."
He laid the last parchment down and stepped back from the table.
The hall was quiet. The whale-oil flames hissed. Somewhere outside, a dog barked at the wind.
Skarvik let the information sit. Watched it settle into eight faces like water soaking into frozen ground. Bjarn's jaw had gone slack, hanging open wider than a human mouth should. Kettil's skin had stopped cycling, stuck on a grey so pale it looked like ash. Two of the younger lieutenants exchanged a glance that said more than words could.
Tormund broke the silence. Oldest of the eight after Bjarn, a heavyset man whose left arm ended in three fingers fused into a single broad digit, Tzeentch's gift from a raid on Kislev fifteen years back. His voice came out hoarse.
"What manner of creature does all that?"
"That," Skarvik said, "is what we are going to find out."
A chair scraped. Ulf, youngest of the lieutenants, a man who had earned his seat by killing a Chaos troll alone at nineteen and who had never learned when to keep his mouth shut. His face was tight. Not with fear. With the particular expression of a man doing arithmetic and not liking the sum.
"You want to go near this thing." Not a question. "A thing that kills Greater Daemons blessed by five gods. That unmakes the dead with a look. That heals what the Realm of Chaos itself breaks." He leaned forward, both hands flat on the scarred wood. "Why would we go anywhere near it?"
The hall held its breath. Eight lieutenants, and not one of them would have phrased it that bluntly, but not one of them disagreed with the question.
Skarvik found Ulf. Held him. The scar tissue around the empty socket tightened, the faintest contraction, as if the absent eye were trying to focus.
"Tell me, Ulf." His voice carried no heat. No edge. The calm of absolute certainty. "Did Archaon become Everchosen by avoiding danger?"
Ulf's mouth closed.
"The thing in Altdorf made our gods scream." Skarvik's hand found his axe, lifted it from the table, let the weight of it settle into his grip. "Think about what that means. Now think about what killing it would mean."
He looked at each of them in turn. Bjarn. Kettil. Tormund. Ulf. The rest. Eight men who had followed him through storms and sieges and silences because he had never been wrong.
"Archaon sits on his throne and waits for the world to end." The axe swung down, bit into the table with a crack that silenced the wind. "I will go and end a piece of it myself."
The cheer that followed the axe-strike was still rolling through the hall when the door at the far end banged open.
Hild Ironwolf filled the frame the way she filled every space she entered: completely. Shorter than any man at the table by a head, wider across the shoulders than half of them, with a face that looked like it had been carved from the same cliff Skarvik had been standing on and then hit with a hammer for good measure. Her shield hung across her back, round and iron-bossed, scarred from more fights than most of the lieutenants had years. She wore her hair shorn to stubble on the left side, long and braided on the right, the asymmetry a mirror of the axe-wound scar that ran from her left temple to the corner of her mouth and pulled her lip into a permanent sneer.
She'd heard enough. The set of her shoulders said so.
"Trader gossip."
Two words. Dropped into the hall's enthusiasm like stones into a puddle. The cheering died. Hild crossed to the table, planted both fists on its surface, and looked at the stack of parchments beside Skarvik's axe the way she looked at rotten meat.
"You're building a war on trader gossip, Jarl. Drunks in Marienburg taverns telling stories to men who pay in silver for anything that sounds impressive." Her scarred lip curled. "Half of those contacts sell the same rumors to the Baersonlings. The other half make them up."
Skarvik settled on her. He did not remove the axe from the table.
"Go on."
"We don't know what Peverell is. We don't know what he can do when a proper warhost hits him, not cultists stumbling out of tunnels, not some rotting Strigoi dragging its corpse-army north. A warhost. Shields locked. Axes swinging. Daemons at the flanks." She straightened, arms crossing over her chest, the shield on her back shifting with the motion. "Traders say he killed a Bloodthirster. Traders also say the fish in the Sea of Claws have been swimming backwards since midsummer. I need more than stories before I march eight hundred of my people south to die."
The hall was quiet. The lieutenants looked between Hild and Skarvik the way men look between a cliff and the sea, waiting to see which one the wave broke against.
Skarvik pulled the axe free from the table. Set it down, flat, beside the parchments. Folded his scarred arms.
"You're right."
Hild's eyes narrowed. She'd been ready for the smile. Agreement caught her off guard.
"Every word," Skarvik continued. "The information is secondhand. The sources are unreliable. We do not know what Peverell is, what he can do, or whether a single thing in those reports would survive contact with a real fight." He held her gaze, steady, unblinking. "That is exactly why we need to test him."
"And when the test kills three thousand Norscans?"
She said it flat. No drama. The voice of a woman who had counted the dead after every raid for fifteen years and could do the arithmetic faster than any shaman.
Skarvik's head tilted. A fraction.
"Then the Changer learns what Peverell can do. And the sacrifice serves the design."
The quiet that followed had weight. Bjarn's mouth had closed. Kettil's skin had gone grey again. Tormund's fused fingers drummed once against the table and stopped.
Hild stared at him. Long. The scar on her lip whitened as her jaw worked.
"I liked your plans better when survival was part of them."
"Survival is part of this one." Skarvik unfolded his arms. Leaned forward, both hands flat on the table, mirroring the posture Hild had used moments ago. "We are not marching to Altdorf's gates. I am ambitious, Hild. Not stupid."
He let that land. Watched her jaw loosen by a degree.
"We hit Marienburg."
Bjarn grunted. Kettil's skin flushed red, then blue, cycling fast. Hild's expression didn't change, but her weight shifted forward onto her toes. Listening now. Not arguing.
"The richest port in the Old World. Gateway to the Empire's western trade. Every merchant house, every guild, every noble with gold invested in Wasteland shipping... all of it sitting behind walls that haven't seen a proper siege in a generation." Skarvik's gaze moved across the table, touching each lieutenant, then returned to Hild. "We siege Marienburg, and the Empire has no choice. They respond. They send soldiers, wizards, knights. And they send Peverell, because if they don't, they lose the port that funds half their war machine."
He straightened.
"Peverell comes to us. On ground we choose. At a time we choose. We see what he is. We see what he does. And we are standing behind walls and siege lines when we see it, not charging across an open field at Altdorf's gates like the Baersonlings would."
Hild's arms uncrossed. Her hand found the edge of the table, fingers wrapping around the wood, and she stood there for a long moment with her head down, running the campaign in her mind. Skarvik could see it. The sea crossing. The coastal approach. The siege logistics. The fallback positions, because Hild always planned the retreat before she planned the attack, and that was why she was still alive.
"Marienburg's got a fleet," she said. Testing. Not objecting.
"Which will be in harbor when we hit the coast. Ships don't help when the enemy is already at the walls."
"And when Peverell arrives?"
"Then we learn. One way or the other."
Her lip twitched. Not a smile. Close.
"That I can work with."
Skarvik nodded. The pauldron rippled, cycling through a blue so deep it swallowed the lamplight. Around the table, the lieutenants stirred. Bjarn cracked his knuckles, the sound like breaking kindling. Kettil's skin settled into a steady, warm red. Ulf, who had asked the question that started all of this, leaned back in his chair with the expression of a man who had been given an answer he didn't like but couldn't fault.
Skarvik's hand rested on the axe. Beyond the hall's walls, beyond the hold, beyond the churning grey sea: Marienburg. The Empire. Peverell.
And beyond Peverell, still sitting on his black throne in the Wastes with his daemon sword and his crown and his three-eyed steed, the Everchosen himself. The man whose title Skarvik intended to take. Whose skull he intended to add to the rafters.
He could not do that dead. And his tribesmen could not cheer a corpse.
One thing at a time.
"Bjarn, Kettil. Send riders to the Skaeling remnants and the coastal Varg. Tell them the Broken Eye marches south and there is plunder enough for any tribe with the spine to follow." He picked up the axe. Settled it across his shoulder. "Hild, start loading the longships. We sail in three weeks."
Skarvik woke with the shieldmaiden's leg thrown across his hip and her breath hot against his neck. Sigrid. Or Svala. One of Tormund's cousins, the one with the scar across her collarbone and thighs that could crack a man's ribs. He lay still for a moment, listening to the wind outside the longhouse, the creak of timber, the distant crash of surf against the fjord's black rocks. Her body was warm and solid against his, smelling of sweat and woodsmoke and the seal-fat she worked into her hair.
He lifted her leg off him and swung his feet to the cold floor. She stirred. Didn't wake. Good. He pulled his trousers on, then the boots, then the fur-lined jerkin. Left the armor. Left the axe. Where he was going, iron wouldn't help.
She'd bear him strong sons, Changer willing. The Broken Eye needed heirs with good blood, and hers was good. Three raids survived before her twentieth winter. A sword-arm that had opened a Kislevite cavalryman from throat to belt at Erengrad. If the Changer willed it, the sons would come. If not, the fucking had been worth the effort regardless.
He stepped into the pre-dawn dark and climbed.
The path above the hold was not a path. A goat track worn into the cliff face by decades of Skarvik's boots and, before him, the boots of the shaman who had first carved what waited at the top. Ice glazed the stone. His fingers found holds by memory, the route so familiar his body moved without his mind's involvement. Below, the hold slept. Smoke from banked fires. A dog's bark, cut short. The longships rocking at their moorings, dark shapes on darker water.
The cave opened in the cliff face like a wound that refused to heal.
He ducked through the entrance, shoulders brushing stone on both sides, and the temperature dropped. Not the cold of winter. Deeper. The cold of a place where the boundary between the mortal world and the Realm of Chaos had been deliberately thinned, where blood spilled in ritual had soaked into rock and frozen there, not because of temperature but because the blood itself had been claimed by forces that did not obey the rules of ice and thaw.
The binding circle filled the cave's floor.
Carved into living granite with a chisel made from a daemon's tooth, the circle was twelve feet across. Tzeentchian sigils ran its circumference, each one cut deep enough to hold the frozen blood that filled them: dark, almost black, gleaming faintly in the cave's lightless interior. The blood never thawed. Three years since the ritual, and it remained as it had been the night Skarvik had opened his wrists and his shamans' wrists and poured their lives into the stone to bind a god's lieutenant to a mortal's will.
The air tasted of copper and ozone. Faint. Constant. The aftertaste of a pact that had cost two shamans their sanity and a third his life, and had given Skarvik the single most dangerous weapon any Norscan warlord had held in a generation.
He did not light a torch. His remaining eye adjusted to the dark, and the sigils provided their own illumination: a faint blue phosphorescence that pulsed with a rhythm that matched no heartbeat. Not his. Not human. The rhythm of a consciousness that existed in the Realm of Chaos, bound to this circle by chains of blood and will and the incomprehensible mathematics of Tzeentchian sorcery.
Skarvik knelt at the circle's edge. Placed his scarred palm flat on the stone, fingers touching the outermost sigil. The cold bit into his skin. He let it.
He checked the binding the way a sailor checks his rigging: line by line, knot by knot. Each sigil intact. Each channel of blood unbroken. The containment geometry holding its shape despite the constant, grinding pressure of the thing it contained trying to find a weakness, a crack, a single flaw in the architecture that would allow it to slip free without fulfilling its obligation.
No flaws. The binding held.
One manifestation. One battle. The full power of a Lord of Change, a Greater Daemon of Tzeentch, unleashed at Skarvik's command and compelled to fight until the battle's conclusion. One use. Irrevocable. The most expensive weapon in Norsca, and Skarvik had been carrying it for three years without spending it, because nothing he had encountered in three years of raiding and scheming had been worth the price.
Until now.
He sat back on his haunches. Let his hand fall from the sigil. The blue glow pulsed, steady, patient, the daemon behind it aware of his presence the way a chained wolf is aware of the hand that feeds it.
"Azha'khar."
The name fell into the cave's silence and was absorbed by stone and blood. No response. There would be none. The Lord of Change existed in the Realm of Chaos, tethered to this circle by the binding but not present in it. Speaking to the empty air was speaking to an absence, a vacancy shaped like a Greater Daemon, a hole in reality where something vast and terrible would pour through when the binding was finally invoked.
Skarvik spoke anyway.
"I found what I've been saving you for."
The sigils pulsed. Blue. Steady. A bound daemon listening, or the residual magic of a three-year-old ritual cycling through its patterns. No way to know which. Skarvik chose to believe the former, because belief was the only currency that mattered in the Changer's economy.
"There is a being in the Empire. In their capital. It calls itself Peverell." He shifted his weight, settling into the cold stone, his voice carrying the same calm certainty he brought to war councils and prayer alike. "Six months ago, it arrived, and five gods screamed. The Great Four and the Rat lost their grip on the mortal world for three heartbeats. Every daemon walking the Old World flickered like a candle in a gale. Your kindred in the Realm of Chaos... I wonder how many of them simply stopped."
He paused. Let the silence hold.
"It killed a Bloodthirster in Altdorf. Not banished. Killed. True death. A Greater Daemon blessed by all five, and Peverell unmade it the way I'd crush an insect." His scarred hand curled against his thigh. "It heals what Chaos breaks. It raises the dead to true life. It makes the Winds of Magic run clean, as if the corruption your masters wove into the world had never existed."
The sigils pulsed. Blue. Then, for the span of a single heartbeat, red.
Skarvik fixed on the circle. The red faded. Blue returned. But it had been there. A flicker of something that was not the binding's normal rhythm, not the passive glow of contained power cycling through its patterns. A reaction. The daemon, wherever it coiled in the Realm of Chaos, had heard. And what it heard had produced a response that bled through the binding's containment like heat through thin iron.
Red. The color of rage. The color of Khorne, yes, but also the color of threat perceived, of territory challenged, of a predator recognizing another predator's scent in its hunting ground.
Azha'khar hated Peverell. Or feared him. With a Lord of Change, the distinction was academic.
"We agree on the target," Skarvik murmured.
He leaned forward. Both hands on the stone now, flanking the outermost sigil, his face close enough to the blood that his breath should have fogged in the cold but didn't, because the cold here was not the kind that responded to warmth.
"Can you imagine what killing that being would mean? For both of us?"
The cave was silent. The sigils pulsed their steady blue. No red this time. The daemon could not answer a mortal's question through frozen blood and carved stone.
Skarvik talked anyway.
"Every champion in the Wastes would kneel. Every tribe from the Sea of Claws to the Chaos Gate would speak our names in the same breath as Archaon's. The Everchosen killed nations. We would have killed the thing that made nations' gods flinch." His voice dropped. Not to a whisper. To the register he used when speaking of Tzeentch's design, the tone that carried absolute conviction the way a river carries stones: without effort, without choice. "Archaon would be irrelevant. His crown, his sword, his daemon steed. All of it. Ornaments on a lesser ambition."
He stood. His knees cracked. The cold had stiffened his joints, and the scarification on his right arm ached the way it always did in the presence of concentrated Chaos energy, the geometric patterns pulling at his skin as if the prophecies written there were trying to rearrange themselves.
"Three weeks. We sail in three weeks. South, across the Sea of Claws, to Marienburg. The Empire will send Peverell to stop us, because they have no other choice." He brushed frost from his palms. "When he comes, I will call you. And you will have your battle."
He turned toward the cave's entrance. The pre-dawn grey leaked through the narrow opening, a thin blade of light cutting across the stone floor. Behind him, the binding circle glowed in its steady rhythm, blue and patient, a weapon waiting to be fired.
Skarvik ducked through the entrance and straightened on the cliff face. The wind hit him, ice and salt and the stink of the flensing yards far below. The hold was stirring. Smoke thickened from the longhouse chimneys. A woman's voice carried up from the shore, sharp, ordering someone to check the longships' caulking.
He started down the goat track.
Behind him, in the cave, the binding circle pulsed.
Blue. Then red. Then blue again.
The frozen shore spread below the hold like a scar of white against the black fjord water, ice thick enough to hold the weight of fourteen hundred bodies and the violence they carried with them. Skarvik stood on the granite outcrop above the shoreline, the wind snapping his braids against his shoulders, and looked down at what six months of patience had built.
Eight hundred Broken Eye. His core. Seasoned raiders in furs and plate, axes across their backs, shields slung low. They stood in loose ranks the way Norscans stood for anything: close enough to hear, spread enough to swing. Behind them and between them, the newcomers. Marauder bands from shattered tribes, men who had drifted to the Broken Eye's hold over the months of silence because Skarvik's was the only fire still burning on the western coast. Chaos-touched wanderers with too many fingers or skin that rippled like water. A knot of Skaeling survivors, forty strong, their old chieftain dead by his own warriors' hands when the visions stopped. Varg outcasts who had walked south along the coast rather than starve in their ruined hold.
And the beastmen. Three packs of them, clustered at the shore's edge where the ice met black rock, keeping their distance from the human warriors the way wolves keep distance from a campfire. Gors, mostly. Hunched, horned shapes with matted fur and yellow eyes, their breath steaming in thick plumes. A pair of Bestigors towered above the rest, their horns curved and heavy, branded with Chaos sigils that had gone dark months ago. They stank of wet hide and old blood. The Norscans gave them space. The beastmen gave the Norscans teeth.
Fourteen hundred. Not the three thousand he'd promised Hild. Not yet. But enough to fill the shore, enough to make the ice groan under their weight, enough that when Skarvik looked down from his rock he saw a host, not a warband.
Bjarn stood to his left, below the outcrop, his jaw working as he scanned the assembled mass. Hild stood to his right, shield on her back, arms crossed, her lip pulled into its permanent sneer. Between them and behind, the other lieutenants fanned out along the shore's edge, positioned where the crowd could see them. Grukh, Dalla, and Halvdan crouched behind the rock with the crystal staff and a fire pit already laid with kindling, blood, and bone.
Skarvik let the silence build. Fourteen hundred faces turned upward. Breath steaming. Weapons catching the grey light. The surf crashed against the fjord's black rocks, and the wind carried the stink of the flensing yards, and the sky pressed down like a lid of hammered steel.
He spoke.
"Six months you've waited." His voice carried the way it always carried, pitched for open ground, for the space between longships and the roar of surf. Not shouting. Projecting. The voice of a man who expected the wind itself to shut up and listen. "Six months you've sharpened your axes and eaten my food and fucked my hold's women and asked each other when the Jarl would move."
Laughter. Rough. The kind that comes from men who know they're being called out and don't mind because the man doing it has earned the right.
"I'll tell you when." He let the laughter die. "Now."
The word hit the shore like a fist hitting a table. The laughter cut. Fourteen hundred pairs of eyes locked on the rock.
"South. Across the Sea of Claws. To the richest city in the world."
He paused. Let the word richest do its work. Watched it move through the crowd the way fire moves through dry grass, face to face, row to row. The Skaeling remnants straightened. The Varg outcasts leaned forward. Even the beastmen stirred, horned heads lifting, nostrils flaring at something they could smell on the word even if they couldn't parse its meaning.
"Marienburg." He let the name land. "The golden sow of the south. Every guild, every merchant prince, every fat lord with his vaults stuffed with coin and his cellars stuffed with wine. Their harbor holds more wealth than every tribe in Norsca has raided in a hundred years. Their warehouses burst with silk, with steel, with spices that cost more than a man's weight in silver."
He swept the shore. Found the hungry faces. Found the calculating ones. Found the ones who were already spending gold they hadn't taken yet.
"Their walls were built to keep out tax collectors and trade rivals. Not us. Not Norscans with iron in their hands and the gods at their backs." His lip curled. "The south is fat and distracted. Their Emperor plays politics in his palace. Their wizards argue with each other over whose magic is prettiest. Their soldiers drill in courtyards and have never seen a shield wall coming at them across frozen ground."
A growl rolled through the crowd. Low. Building.
"Gold for every man who marches. Slaves for every man who fights. Weapons, armor, horses. And women." He let the word hang. "Wide-hipped southern women who've never held anything heavier than a wine cup. Women who'll bear strong sons for the Broken Eye. Sons who'll grow up knowing their fathers took the richest city in the world and made it kneel."
The growl became a roar. Axes rose. Shields hammered against thighs. The beastmen threw back their horned heads and brayed, a sound like tearing metal that cut through the human voices and added its own savage harmony. The ice beneath fourteen hundred stamping feet groaned and cracked.
Skarvik let them roar.
They didn't need to know about Peverell. Didn't need to know about the three heartbeats or the gods' silence or the thing in Altdorf that had made five divine powers flinch. They didn't need to know that Marienburg was bait, not prize. That the real quarry was something no Norscan had ever hunted, something that might kill every last one of them.
They needed gold. They needed glory. They needed the simple, ancient arithmetic of Norscan warfare: go south, take what you want, come home rich or don't come home at all.
Skarvik gave them that. The rest was his burden. His and the Changer's, and the Changer had never asked his instruments to understand the design. Only to move when moved.
"More tribes join us on the march!" He raised his voice above the roar, not fighting it, riding it. "The coastal Varg. The Skaeling remnants. Beastmen packs from the deep forests. By the time we reach the Wasteland, we will be three thousand. Four. An army. Not a raiding party. An army that will make the south remember why their grandmothers taught them to fear the north!"
The roar doubled. The ice cracked in a line that ran from the shore's edge to the waterline. Axes hammered against shields in a rhythm that matched no drum, that came from the collective pulse of fourteen hundred hearts beating toward violence.
Skarvik raised his axe.
The blackened iron caught the grey light. The pauldron surged, cycling from its resting bronze through deep blue to a blue so bright it burned, brighter than it had been in months, brighter than it had any right to be with the Realm of Chaos still stuttering and the Winds still in flux. The scarification on his right arm blazed white against his skin, the patterns pulling taut, rearranging, and for one breath the scarred socket flared with blue fire.
Tzeentch's attention. Faint. Flickering. But there.
The roar faltered. Not from fear. From recognition. Fourteen hundred servants of Chaos who had spent six months in silence, who had watched their shamans bleed for nothing and their daemon-pacts go cold, who had begun to wonder in the dark hours whether the gods had truly abandoned them... and now the Jarl's dead eye was burning blue, and the Winds tasted of change, and the old power was stirring again.
Skarvik slammed the axe into the frozen ground.
The blade bit through ice and stone and kept going, driven by more than muscle, driven by the crystal staff's power channeled through the scarification on his arm and the pauldron and three years of hoarded faith in a god who rewarded patience with devastation. Blue fire erupted from the impact point, racing outward in lines that followed no natural fracture, carving Tzeentchian sigils into the ice itself, each one flaring bright enough to cast shadows in the grey morning light.
The sigils connected. Formed a circle. The circle opened.
Reality split.
The fissure was not wide. Not the yawning portal Skarvik had envisioned, the great wound in the world that would pour forth a tide of daemons sufficient to drown a city. The Realm of Chaos was still damaged, still recoiling from whatever Peverell had done to it six months ago, and the connection that formed was thin, unstable, a crack in a wall rather than a gate thrown wide. Blue-white light bled from the opening, and the air above the ice shimmered with heat that had no source, and the stink of ozone and something older, something that smelled like burning mathematics, rolled across the shore.
Daemons poured through.
Pink Horrors first. Tumbling, cackling, their bodies splitting and reforming as they crossed the threshold between the Realm of Chaos and the mortal world. Gibbering faces on impossible anatomy, limbs that branched and multiplied, colors that hurt to look at directly. They spilled onto the ice in a flood of shrieking, laughing madness, their feet leaving scorch marks on the frozen surface.
Flamers followed. Taller, stranger, their bodies columns of living Chaosfire that moved with a dancer's grace and left trails of blue flame on the ice behind them. They made no sound except the constant, low roar of their own burning.
Screamers glided through last, flat and fast, their ray-like bodies cutting through the air above the fissure with the speed of diving hawks. They screamed. The sound was not a sound. It was a frequency that bypassed ears and struck directly at the part of the brain that processed fear, and even hardened Norscans flinched as the Screamers banked and circled overhead.
Hundreds. Not thousands.
Skarvik counted as they came. A hundred Pink Horrors. Perhaps a hundred and twenty. Thirty Flamers. A dozen Screamers. The fissure was already narrowing, the connection thinning as whatever damage Peverell had done continued to resist the summoning. He pushed harder, pouring will and blood-magic into the sigils, and the crack held for another ten seconds, another twenty, another handful of daemons tumbling through before the ice beneath the circle cracked and the sigils guttered and the fissure sealed itself with a sound like a door slamming in an empty house.
Not enough. Not nearly enough. He'd wanted a thousand. Had planned for blood sacrifices along the march to fuel additional summonings, to tear wider holes in a reality already weakened by six months of instability. Had expected the Realm of Chaos to answer his call the way it had answered every Norscan sorcerer's call for millennia, with the eager, overwhelming generosity of gods who wanted nothing more than to pour their servants into the mortal world.
Instead: hundreds. A fraction of what he'd planned. The Realm of Chaos giving what it could through a connection that was still bruised, still bearing the mark of whatever had hit it six months ago.
But the shore had gone silent.
Fourteen hundred mortals and a hundred and fifty daemons of Tzeentch stood on the frozen ice, and the silence was not disappointment. It was awe. Because no one in Norsca had summoned anything from the Realm of Chaos in six months. Not the Varg before they killed their seers. Not the Baersonlings before they tore themselves apart. Not a single sorcerer, shaman, or cultist on the entire western coast had managed to drag so much as a single Blue Horror through the veil since the night the gods went quiet.
And Skarvik had just pulled a hundred and fifty through in broad daylight.
The Pink Horrors capered across the ice, their cackling laughter rising into the sky. The Flamers burned in their slow, terrible dance. The Screamers wheeled overhead, their cries cutting through the cold air. And the Norscans stared at them with the wide, raw eyes of men who had been starving and had just been shown a feast.
A Bestigor threw back its horned head and bellowed. The sound was enormous, rolling across the shore and bouncing off the cliff face. Other beastmen joined it, braying and stamping, their hooves cracking the ice. The Norscans followed. Not a roar this time. A chant. Low and rhythmic, building from the back ranks, spreading forward, the ancient cadence of a war-hymn that predated the tribes themselves, that belonged to the land and the ice and the dark gods who had shaped both.
Skarvik stood on his rock, axe in hand, blue fire still guttering along its edge. The socket blazed. The pauldron had gone still, locked in a blue so deep it looked like a piece of the night sky had been nailed to his shoulder.
Hild's voice cut through the chant. Close. Just below the rock, pitched for his ears alone.
"Not enough daemons."
"No." He didn't look down at her. "But more than anyone else has managed. We'll make more along the march. Blood opens doors. We'll have plenty of blood."
"Whose?"
"Lesser tribes first. Then prisoners. Then Marienburg's garrison, if we get that far." He pulled the axe from the shattered ice. The blue fire died. The sigils faded. "The Realm of Chaos is wounded, Hild. Not dead. Every sacrifice widens the crack. By the time we reach the Wasteland, I'll have my thousand."
She stared at him. Long.
"And if you don't?"
"Then fourteen hundred Norscans and a hundred daemons hit Marienburg's walls, and we find out if merchant princes can fight." The smile. "Either way, the south learns we're coming. Either way, Peverell hears about it. And either way, we get our answer."
Hild turned away. Looked at the shore. At the chanting mass of warriors and daemons and beastmen, all of them pointed south, all of them hungry, all of them believing in a man who had just done the impossible in a world where the impossible had become the only currency that mattered.
"BLOOD FOR THE CHANGER!" Bjarn's voice erupted from the crowd, his jaw splitting around the words. "BLOOD FOR THE CHANGER OF WAYS!"
The chant caught. Spread. Became a thunder that shook loose ice from the cliff face above the hold. Daemons and mortals and beastmen, all of them screaming the same words into the sky, and the sky pressed down and the sea churned and the longships rocked at their moorings as if the water itself could feel what was coming.
Skarvik stood above them all and let the sound wash over him. His gaze found the south. Past the shore. Past the sea. Past the horizon where the Empire's soft cities waited behind their walls.
I'm coming for you, Peverell. And I'm bringing the gods' answer with me.
The chant rolled on. The daemons burned. The ice cracked beneath the weight of war.
The crowd broke apart like ice calving from a glacier. Warriors drifted toward the longhouses and the mead stores, their voices carrying the rough music of men who had been given permission to believe again. The daemons moved among them. Pink Horrors capered between knots of Norscans, their gibbering laughter drawing some men closer and sending others sideways with hands on axe-hafts. A Flamer drifted past a cluster of Varg outcasts, its column of living Chaosfire throwing blue shadows across their scarred faces, and one of them reached toward it with a hand already marked by too many fingers. Bargaining. The old commerce of Norsca: blood and service for power and mutation, the economy that had sustained the tribes since before memory.
Skarvik left them to it. Pacts made in the shadow of a summoning were Tzeentch's to oversee, not his.
He climbed.
The cliff above the hold was empty this time. No shamans. No fire pit. Just the wind and the granite and the sky pressing down on the sea below. He stood where he'd stood that morning, boots in frozen mud, and looked south. The horizon was a grey line where water met cloud, featureless, giving nothing back.
Boots on the goat track behind him. Heavy. Deliberate. The particular rhythm of someone carrying a shield on their back and not caring who heard them coming.
"Thought I'd find you up here."
Hild pulled herself onto the ledge and stood, breathing hard from the climb, her scarred face flushed from the cold. She didn't look at the view. She looked at him.
Skarvik waited. Hild didn't climb cliffs for small talk.
"I have a question, Jarl. And I want the real answer, not the one you give the lads down there."
"Ask."
She planted her feet. Crossed her arms. The shield on her back caught the wind and she shifted her weight to compensate, a motion so practiced it was invisible.
"Do you believe it? Any of it?" Her scar pulled tight. "The Changer guiding your hand. The silence being a test. The plan too vast for lesser minds." She spat the last words back at him with the accuracy of someone who had heard them too many times. "Or are you a clever man who learned that faith moves armies better than gold?"
The wind filled the silence between them. Below, the chanting had dissolved into the ordinary sounds of a warband preparing to march: hammers on iron, wood on wood, the barking of dogs and the bellowing of beastmen.
Skarvik did not smile.
That was what surprised her. He could see it in the way her weight shifted, the fractional widening of her eyes. She'd braced for the deflection, for the Jarl who never doubted. She'd expected the mask.
He gave her the face underneath it.
"I don't know."
Three words. They hung in the frozen air between them, and Hild's arms loosened by a degree.
"Some nights I hear him," Skarvik said. His gaze stayed on the horizon, not on her. The socket was dark. Cold. "In the fire. In the pattern of ravens over the hold. In the way a battle turns on a single mistake that should have been mine but falls on the enemy instead. Those nights I am certain. Absolutely certain, the way you are certain of gravity."
He paused. The wind snapped a raven feather loose from his braid. It tumbled past the cliff's edge and vanished.
"Other nights there is nothing. The fire is fire. The ravens are birds. The battle turned because I read the ground better than the other bastard." His scarred hand found the haft of his axe where it hung at his hip. Not gripping. Resting. "Those nights I am a man who talks to stone and frozen blood and hears only his own voice coming back."
Hild said nothing. Waiting.
"But here is what I know." He turned to face her. Full on. One pale eye and one dark socket, both fixed on the woman who had kept his warriors alive for fifteen years and never once lied to him about the cost. "It does not matter."
Her jaw worked. "It matters to me."
"Then let me give you what matters. If the Changer guides my hand, then we march toward a purpose so vast that three thousand dead Norscans are a rounding error in a design that spans eternity. Our lives buy passage into a story the gods themselves are telling."
He held up one finger.
"If I am a man." A second finger. "Then I am a man with eight hundred veterans, a hundred and fifty daemons, a Lord of Change bound to my will, and a target sitting in the Empire's capital that every power in the world wants tested." He lowered his hand. "A man with that much leverage does not need a god's permission to change the shape of the world."
The wind howled between them. A Screamer banked overhead, its cry cutting through the air, and both of them ignored it with the practiced indifference of people who had lived too long near daemons to flinch.
"Either way, Marienburg burns. Either way, we learn what Peverell is made of. Either way, the Broken Eye writes its name into the saga that comes after this silence. Whether the hand holding the pen is divine or mortal changes nothing about the ink."
Hild stared at him. Long. The wind pulled at her braids, the long side whipping across her shoulder, the stubbled side catching frost.
"I would have preferred a straight answer."
"Straight answers are Khorne's business."
Her lip twitched. Not amusement. Recognition. The acknowledgment of a woman who had asked for honesty and received it, just not in the shape she wanted.
"Three weeks," she said. Turned. Started down the goat track, her shield scraping against the cliff face, her boots finding holds with the sureness of long practice. She didn't look back.
Skarvik stayed.
The cliff. The wind. The grey line where sea met sky. Somewhere beyond that line, beyond the churning water and the Wasteland's marshy coast and the Empire's green fields, the thing that had silenced his gods was standing in a room full of wizards. Teaching them. Healing their scars. Showing them what magic looked like before the corruption, before the Chaos Gods had woven their fingerprints into the world's foundations. Mending what was broken. Restoring what was lost. Doing the quiet, patient work of a man who had no idea that fourteen hundred warriors and a hundred daemons were sharpening their axes on a frozen shore, pointed at him like a spear.
The pauldron cycled. Bronze to blue. Blue to black. Black to bronze again.
He watched the south and let the wind take everything else.