Towards A Brighter Future 34

The fourth month of the war began with rain that ate through canvas in an hour.

Mortarion walked the forward trench at the hour before Barbarus's grey excuse for dawn, boots sinking into mud that had claimed better footwear than his. The trench network stretched across the valley in jagged lines, dug by eleven thousand hands into soil the surviving overlords had cursed metre by metre. His soldiers stood watch at intervals of ten paces, breath-cloths sealed, lances propped on firing steps carved from the sludge, and every one of them straightened when the Pale King's shadow passed.

The war had changed shape after the eastern passes. The three surviving overlords had learned the lesson their five dead peers taught, and the lesson was simple. Open battle against two Primarchs meant death within the hour. So they had gone to ground. Trench rings around their keeps, three deep, and between the lines a killing belt where the earth itself rotted anything that touched it. Boots dissolved in a day. Skin blistered on contact. A lance dropped in the mud came apart at the seams by morning.

Darek waited at the junction of the third and fourth firing bays, his field glass hanging dead around his neck. The lenses had clouded over two weeks ago and no amount of cleaning restored them. Something in the air out here corrupted glass.

"Sector report," Mortarion rasped.

"Quiet since midnight. Two probes on the left flank around the third hour. Corpse-beasts, small ones, four-limbed. Torva's watch burned them at the wire." Darek pulled his cloth down to speak, and Mortarion marked the new grey in his stubble, the deepening yellow at the edges of his eyes. "One of them was wearing Jorel's face."

"Jorel died at the eastern passes."

"His body did." Darek's voice came out flat, scraped clean of everything a man needed to scrape away to keep functioning. "They're digging up our graves, Mortarion. Whatever's stitching these things together, it's using our dead for parts."

Mortarion's hand closed on the trench wall. Mud squeezed between his fingers, and beneath the mud he felt the wrongness in the soil, a vibration below hearing, like the mountain's marrow had soured. He had grown up steeped in Necare's sorcery. He knew its taste the way a man knows the smell of his own home. This was different. Heavier. Older. Sorcery that Vashek and Kreth had wielded like children playing with a parent's blade, and something farther down the mountain now gripped the hilt properly.

"We hold the advantage," he said. "Numbers. Weapons. Momentum. They're bleeding three men for every one of ours, and their conscript pens are empty. Another month and the western keep starves."

"The men know the arithmetic. I recite it to them every morning like scripture." Darek looked down the trench line, at the hunched shapes on the firing steps. "But winning slowly against rot is its own kind of misery. A man can charge a wall. He can't charge mud that eats his feet. Every day out here takes something the medics can't put back."

"Then tell me what to give them instead."

"An ending." Darek met his eyes. "They watched you and your brother kill five witch-kings in an afternoon. Now they've spent nine weeks watching the ground digest their boots. They're asking why the golden giant doesn't just crack the keeps open."

"Because the keeps aren't the problem anymore." Aurelian's voice arrived before his shadow did.

He came down the communication trench with his shoulders hunched to fit, armour caked to the waist in grey filth, and behind him walked two Aegis Guard carrying a sealed sample crate between them. His face had lost its easy warmth somewhere in the last three weeks. What remained was focus with grief pressed underneath it.

"Cortana finished the deep survey an hour ago," Aurelian said. "I wanted you to hear it before the war council."

"Say it here." Mortarion gestured at Darek. "He carries the men. He hears what I hear."

Aurelian set his palm flat against the trench wall, the same gesture Mortarion had made minutes before. Golden light seeped from his fingers into the mud, and the mud recoiled from it, curling back like a slug from salt.

"The decay sorcery isn't coming from the three overlords. They're conduits. Channels. The actual source is beneath the mountain, deep, below even the fissures Vorath opened at the passes." He pulled his hand back and the light died. "Something down there is feeding them. Pouring power up through their pacts faster than they could ever generate it themselves. That's why the killing belts regenerate overnight no matter how much ground we purge. We're not fighting three witch-kings. We're fighting three faucets."

Darek's jaw worked. "Then we shut off the faucets. Kill the three and the flow stops."

"The flow finds new mouths." Aurelian shook his head. "Kill these three and whatever's below simply offers the pact to someone else. A surviving guard-captain. A desperate village elder. Anyone broken enough to say yes."

"Necare," Mortarion said.

Both of them looked at him.

"He's already drinking from it." Mortarion's voice came out level, each word weighed and paid for. "I've felt the sorcery change. The taste of it. When I was a child he wielded power like a scalpel. Precise. Personal. What's soaking this valley is a flood, and floods need a reservoir. He found the thing beneath the mountain long before these three did. He's been sipping from it for centuries and calling it inheritance." His fingers found the leather book at his belt without his ordering them to. "He offered it to me once. In a cup. He called it a pact."

"You refused," Aurelian said.

"I refused. I didn't understand what I was refusing. I thought it was his power in that cup." Mortarion looked up toward the summit, invisible behind nine kilometres of poisoned cloud. "It was never his."

The wind moved down the trench line, carrying the smell of the killing belt, sweet rot laced with copper. Somewhere on the left flank a corpse-beast shrieked at the wire and a lance answered it, one sharp discharge, then nothing.

"So the summit was never just Necare," Darek said slowly. "It's a door. And he's been standing on it."

"Standing on it. Guarding it. Feeding it." Aurelian's hands flexed at his sides. "Cortana's projections give us six to eight weeks before the three remaining conduits burn out from the volume they're channeling. When they die, the power has to go somewhere. Either it finds new pacts...."

"Or it goes home to Necare, all of it, at once." Mortarion finished the thought because it had been living in his chest for days, waiting for someone else to say the first half. "And then the climb becomes something no arithmetic survives."

"Then we don't give it six weeks." Aurelian turned to face him fully. "We break the three conduits simultaneously. One assault, three keeps, one night. Your army takes the western keep. My Aegis Guard takes the southern. You and I take the northern together, because that one's the strongest and I'm done letting you carry the heaviest weight alone."

"And after?"

"After, we climb." Aurelian said it the way other men said good morning. "Before whatever's below finishes moving into your father's house."

"He is not my father."

"No." Aurelian's hand landed on his shoulder, and the warmth of it sank through mud-caked plate into the old scarred muscle beneath. "He's the man who found you. There's a difference in the finding and the raising, and you spent your whole life proving it. Fathers don't put their sons in cups."

Darek pulled his breath-cloth back up. Above the stained fabric his yellowed eyes had changed. The flatness was gone. Something with edges had replaced it.

"One night," he said. "Three keeps. I'll have the assault companies picked by sundown. The men will want this, Mortarion. Give them a wall to charge and they'll forget the mud ever existed."

He moved off down the trench, and his stride had lengthened, and at the fourth firing bay he stopped to speak to a soldier, and the soldier straightened, and the word passed to the next bay before Darek reached it.

Mortarion watched the news travel the line like current through wire.

"Three days to plan it," he rasped.

"Three days," Aurelian agreed. His eyes lifted toward the hidden summit, and the warmth in them hardened. "And then we go and knock on the door."

The corpse-beast dens fell first.

Aurelian's hunters went into them at dawn, twelve teams in sealed monster-bone armour that shrugged off the killing belt's rot, and the sounds that came out of the tunnels for the next four hours kept Mortarion's soldiers glued to the trench parapets. Shrieks. The wet percussion of blades meeting stitched flesh. Then fire, rolling out of the den mouths in orange sheets that burned clean, without the greasy black smoke Barbarus fires always made.

Mortarion stood at the wire with Darek and watched a hunter drag the last carcass into the open. The thing wore four faces, none of them matching, all of them harvested from graves his people had dug with their own hands.

"Burn it whole," Mortarion rasped. "Nothing goes back in the ground until my brother's people cleanse the soil beneath it."

The hunter saluted with a fist to her breastplate and set to work. Darek pulled his breath-cloth down and spat into the mud.

"Nine dens in one morning. We spent three weeks on the first two, and we lost forty men doing it."

"Their armour breathes for them. Ours dissolves." Mortarion turned down the line toward the captured second trench, where a wedge of Aegis Guard advanced behind weapons that spat white fire. Where the fire touched, the mud stopped moving. The subsonic wrongness in the soil, the vibration he had felt in his teeth for nine weeks, simply ceased along a widening front. "Watch that. The ground behind them stays dead. Honestly dead. Yesterday's purged sections haven't regenerated."

"I noticed at the fourth hour and didn't trust it." Darek raised his ruined field glass out of habit, grimaced at the clouded lenses, and let it drop. "I keep waiting for the arithmetic to turn on us again."

"It won't. The conduits are spending faster than the well below can pour."

They found Aurelian at the medical station behind the third line, where the Palicoes had raised a pavilion of sealed white fabric that stayed white no matter what the air did to it. Forty wounded lay on cots inside. Rot-touched men, the ones whose skin had gone grey-green at the edges of old cuts, the ones Barbarus medicine marked for slow death and a burned corpse. Aurelian knelt beside each cot in turn, one palm flat on each chest, and golden light sank through skin and drove the grey out.

Lyra worked beside him, white fur stark against the stained bandages she peeled away, chirping instructions to the other Palicoes in her lilting battle-tongue. She looked up as Mortarion ducked through the pavilion flap.

"Your soldiers are terrible patients," she informed him. "This one tried to leave twice with his liver still knitting. I sat on him."

The soldier in question, a boy from the Ashfall villages who could not have been twenty, stared at the ceiling with his ears burning red above his breath-cloth.

"Then sit on him again," Mortarion said. The boy's eyes widened. Down the row of cots, someone laughed, a short rusty sound, and it spread from cot to cot like the men had forgotten how and were remembering together.

Aurelian finished with the last patient and rose, rolling his shoulders. The light around his hands guttered out. Grey exhaustion sat in the corners of his eyes, faint, the sort a Primarch could carry for weeks before it meant anything.

"Sixty-one today," he said. "Every one of them would have died by winter under the old arithmetic."

"You do this daily. It's draining you."

"It's spending me, and I have deep pockets." Aurelian pulled the pavilion flap aside and gestured Mortarion out into the falling dusk. "Come. Council. I have numbers you'll want to hear, and Cortana threatened to recite them herself if I got them wrong."

The command bunker had been a coalition strongpoint two weeks ago. Now maps covered its stone table, and Cortana stood at the head of them with a slate in one hand, raven hair pulled back, her skin faintly luminous in the lamplight. Hesra and Darek took the near side. Mortarion stood. He still refused chairs in captured overlord positions, and nobody argued with the habit anymore.

"Short version," Cortana said, "because I know this room's tolerance for briefings. The western keep's killing belt is dead soil for four hundred metres. Regeneration stopped fifty-one hours ago and hasn't resumed. The conduit inside is burning himself hollow trying to hold his wards. At current decay rates, his defenses collapse within six days."

"The other two?" Darek asked.

"The southern conduit is rationing. Smart of him, and useless. He buys himself three weeks, maybe four. The northern one...." She tapped the slate against the map. "He's drinking deeper instead of slower. His output doubled in the last ten days. He'll be the strongest thing on this mountain besides Necare when we hit him, and then he'll be dead, because he's spending flesh he doesn't have."

"So the first keep falls within the week," Aurelian said, "and the war below the cloud line is finished within the month. All of it. Every keep, every conduit, every metre of poisoned trench." He looked at Mortarion across the maps. "Your assessment?"

"I confirm it." Mortarion's rasp filled the bunker. "The pattern holds. The soldiers we're capturing now break their bindings when the Aegis Guard purges the ground under them. Some of them wake up weeping. The conduits are losing their grip on their own armies." He set both palms flat on the table's edge. "But there is a number missing from your slate."

Cortana raised an eyebrow. "I'd love to hear which one."

"Necare's."

The lamplight flickered. Hesra's hands tightened around each other on the tabletop.

"Four months of open war," Mortarion continued. "Six conduit overlords dead. His entire coalition dismantled tier by tier, and the well beneath his mountain being drained by his own desperate vassals. And he has not moved. Not a patrol. Not a probe. Not a whisper of sorcery reaching down from the summit." His fingers pressed white against the stone. "When I was young, I read his silence as pride. A master watching his weapon perform. That reading is dead. Pride does not sit still while its foundation is torn out from under it."

"Then what does?" Darek asked.

"Nothing does. That's the point." Mortarion looked up, and the red of his eyes caught the lamp. "I keep asking myself what a creature like Necare does when patience finally fails him. He raised me for centuries of planning. He has never once, in all the years I knew him, allowed a threat to mature. And we have matured into the largest threat this mountain has ever produced."

Aurelian's jaw worked. "You think he's not waiting at all. You think he's building."

"I think he stopped watching us months ago and started preparing for something. The three conduits, their pacts, their burnout, all of it might be exactly what he wants. Every drop they drink thins the barrier between the well and the surface." Mortarion straightened. "We have been racing to break the door down before the thing below moves into his house. What if he's holding the door open?"

Nobody spoke. The lamp hissed on its wick, and outside the bunker a sentry's boots sucked through mud on his rounds.

"Then the timeline stands," Aurelian said finally, and his voice had lost every trace of the pavilion's warmth. "First keep in six days. All three within the month. And then we climb, before whatever he's inviting finishes arriving."

"And if it's already arrived?" Hesra asked quietly.

Mortarion pulled the leather book from his belt and set it on the map, over the summit, over Necare's keep, a small dark weight covering the highest peak on Barbarus.

"Then it learns what everything on this mountain has learned," he rasped. "The names in this book are owed a debt. And I have never once failed to collect."

The western keep fell on the sixth day, exactly as Cortana had promised, and the conduit inside it died before Mortarion's soldiers reached his sanctum. They found him fused to his own ward-throne, hollowed out like a wasp-eaten fruit, the sorcery he had drunk too deeply consuming him from the marrow outward. His army broke its bindings the moment his heart stopped, and eight hundred conscripts woke weeping in the mud with no memory of the last four months.

The southern keep held for eleven days more. Its master rationed his borrowed power to the end, and the end came anyway, Aegis Guard breaching wedges cutting through his gates while Mortarion's assault companies swarmed the walls under covering lance-fire. The conduit died on Darek's lance, screaming a name in a language that made the stones sweat, and the killing belts around both keeps went honestly dead within the hour.

The third warlord did not wait to be third. Scouts brought the word at dawn: his keep stood empty, gates hanging open, garrison abandoned to their bindings. The conduit himself had fled up the mountain with forty of his household, climbing through air that thickened toward lethality with every hundred metres, climbing toward the highest peak.

Mortarion stood in the ruin of the southern keep and listened to the slave pens come open.

The sounds were the same as always. Weeping. Names called into the smoke. A child's voice rising thin and cracked, then breaking off as arms found it. Below the shattered inner wall, Hesra moved through the freed families with her ledger and her runners, sorting the strong from the sick, assigning escorts for the march down to the safe valleys. Her voice carried up to him in fragments, iron wrapped in patience.

Darek climbed the rubble to stand beside him. His breath-cloth hung loose around his neck, an extravagance he allowed himself only in captured keeps where Aurelian's people had already purged the air.

"Six hundred and twelve out of the pens," he said. "Two hundred children. The medics say most will live, now that the Palicoes are working through them." He looked down at Hesra directing the columns. "The families are calling it the last winter. Hesra's runners spread the phrase and it took root in a day."

"The last winter."

"Every child on this mountain knows the count now. Nine overlords dead. One left." Darek's jaw shifted. "They're already talking about spring, Mortarion. About planting in soil that stays clean. I've never heard my people plan past a season before."

"Then don't let them plan past the summit." Mortarion's rasp came out harder than he intended. "Necare still sits on his peak, and until his heart stops, every seed on Barbarus grows on borrowed permission."

Hesra reached them before Darek could answer, ledger under her arm, grey hair escaping its ties. "The first column marches within the hour. I need the second tier road cleared of wreckage before the carts...." She stopped. Her eyes had gone past both of them, up the slope, to where two figures descended from the landing field.

Aurelian came down the broken causeway with Cortana beside him, and neither of them was smiling. Cortana carried her slate in one hand and picked her way across the rubble in armoured boots, raven hair pulled back, her skin catching the corpse-light with its faint inner glow. She stepped over a fallen ward-pillar without breaking stride and planted herself at the edge of their circle.

"You'll want to hear this standing up," she said. "Orbital surveillance finished tracking your runaway warlord twenty minutes ago. Vorlath and his forty made the high approaches faster than anything on two legs should manage. And when they reached Necare's keep...." She turned the slate and held it out.

Mortarion took it. The image showed the highest peak from orbit, resolved through nine kilometres of toxic cloud by sensors he did not pretend to understand. Necare's keep sat black against the snow, the black stone he had grown up inside, the towers he knew by touch in the dark. And the gates stood open.

His fingers tightened on the slate's edge until the housing creaked.

"He never opens the gates," Mortarion rasped. "Not for supplicants. Not for tribute. Not for me, the day I left. He made me climb the outer wall as a child because doors were for equals, and Necare has no equals." He handed the slate back. "How long have they stood open?"

"They opened four hours before Vorlath arrived." Cortana's sapphire eyes held his. "He knew the man was coming before the man knew he was fleeing. And here's the part that keeps my threat models unhappy. The keep's thermal signature has been climbing for nine days. Something inside is burning fuel, or power, or both, at rates I'd expect from a foundry."

"He's preparing a welcome," Darek said. "Reinforcements. Forty household troops and a warlord who's still drinking from the well. That's the strongest garrison Necare's had in centuries."

"No." The word left Mortarion flat and certain.

They all looked at him. Aurelian said nothing. His warm eyes had gone still, watching his brother's face the way a man watches a fuse.

"You're thinking like soldiers." Mortarion turned toward the peaks, invisible above the overcast, and the old cold settled behind his sternum where the warmth usually lived. "Necare has never in his existence shared his keep. Not with allies. Not with rivals. Not with the heir he built from the ground up. When Vashek came to treat with him sixty years ago, Necare made him kneel in the killing air outside the walls until his wards failed, and then negotiated with what was left." He drew one slow deliberate breath. "He does not open his gates for company. He opens them for deliveries."

Hesra's ledger sagged in her grip. "Deliveries of what?"

"Vorlath has been drinking from the well beneath the mountain for four months. The power is threaded through his flesh now, through his blood, through the pact carved into whatever remains of his soul. His forty household troops carry the same taint." Mortarion's cracked lips pulled back from his teeth. "You told me the conduits were faucets, brother. Kill them and the power looks for new mouths. Necare is not gathering allies behind those walls."

"Say it," Aurelian said quietly.

"They think they're climbing to a fortress. Necare thinks a cookpot just delivered its own ingredients." The rasp scraped out of him, each word paid for. "He will take the well's power out of Vorlath the way a butcher takes marrow from a bone. Forty-one vessels, all of them soaked in the deep's gift, all of them walking through his gates voluntarily. Whatever he has been building inside that keep for nine days, it eats them. And when it finishes eating, the thing that walks out will wear Necare's face over something the well sent up to live in it."

The last contested valley opened below the assault line at mid-morning, a bowl of shattered basalt where Vorlath's rearguard had dug themselves into the coalition's old supply bunkers. Darek counted the enemy positions through the haze while his companies filed into the jump-off trenches: nine bunkers cut into the far slope, connected by communication ditches, green smoke seeping from two of the vents in lazy coils.

"Two hundred defenders, maybe two-fifty," said the hunter beside him. Squad Leader Renna of the Third Hunting Cadre stood a head shorter than Darek and carried a greatsword longer than she was tall across her back like it weighed nothing. Her monster-bone armour was the deep blue-black of some creature Darek had never seen and never wanted to. "Vorlath left his sickest ones behind. The binding's eating them faster without him nearby to regulate the flow."

"Then they'll fight like the ones at the southern keep. Frothing. No surrender in them."

"No surrender in them," Renna agreed. She rolled her shoulders and the greatsword's harness creaked. "Which means we don't waste breath offering. Your call on the approach, Darek. This is your mountain."

Darek pulled his field glass up out of habit, cursed the clouded lenses, and let it drop. "The ridge line north of the bunkers. Whoever holds it looks straight down into their communication ditches. If they retreat along those ditches to regroup higher up, the ridge cuts them off."

"So take it."

"My people take it. Two companies, lances forward." He pointed at the bunker complex. "Those firing slits will chew us apart on open ground, though. Every one of those positions has to die before my companies cross the bowl."

Renna's grin showed through the visor of her helm. "Nine bunkers. I have twelve hunters."

"That arithmetic favours the bunkers."

"That arithmetic has never met my hunters." She turned and whistled, two sharp notes, and her squad rose out of the jump-off trench in a rattle of oversized steel. Hammers. Switch axes. A lance-and-shield pairing that looked like a walking fortress gate. "One condition, Darek. The green smoke coming off those two vents on the left. Keep your people out of it. It's not the binding sorcery. It's a nerve agent Vorlath's alchemists cooked from the well's runoff, and your rebreathers won't stop it."

"Ours won't. Yours will?"

"Ours filters worse things at home for breakfast." She hefted the greatsword off her back one-handed, and Darek's stomach performed the small flip it always did when the hunters made their weapons look light. "Give us the count of two hundred, then send your companies for the ridge. The bunkers will be busy."

"Two hundred. Agreed."

The twelve hunters went down the slope at a run, and the bunkers opened fire, and Darek started counting.

By forty, the first bunker had stopped shooting. Renna's greatsword had opened its firing slit into a doorway and gone in through the gap. By ninety, three more had gone dark, one of them because a hunter with a hammer had simply caved the roof in from above and dropped through the hole. The bound defenders poured out of the communication ditches to swarm the intruders, frothing, screaming in voices that belonged to no one, and the hunters met them in the open with blades longer than a grown man swung in arcs that cleared five metres at a stroke.

"Companies forward!" Darek bellowed at the count of two hundred exactly. "The ridge! Move!"

His people went over the trench lip and across the bowl at a dead run, lances up, and not one bunker fired on them because not one bunker had a living crew left to fire. Darek ran with the second company and watched a hunter named Bharen, the one with the switch axe, transform his weapon mid-swing from axe to blade and back, carving a wedge through thirty bound soldiers who had massed to block the ditch junction. The rebels behind Darek saw it too.

"BHAREN!" someone roared from the first company. "BHAREN! BHAREN!"

The chant spread. Barbaran voices, harsh through breath-cloths, shouting the names of Aurion hunters they had shared trenches with for four months. Renna's name went up when her greatsword took a bunker door off its hinges. A boy from the Ashfall companies screamed himself hoarse for a lance-and-shield hunter called Odrik, who had once carried that same boy two kilometres to a medical pavilion with a corpse-beast still chewing on his shield.

Darek reached the ridge line with the second company and found it undefended. The rearguard's fallback route lay below them, exposed, and the bound soldiers trying to retreat along it died in the crossfire of two hundred corrosive lances firing down from prepared elevation.

"Left flank!" Darek shouted down the line. "The green smoke's drifting toward the fourth ditch! Nobody pursues into it, I don't care what's running through it! Let the hunters have that ground!"

"Understood!" Torva's voice came back from the flank. "Passing the word!"

The hunters had the ground. Darek watched Renna's squad walk into the green coils like men strolling through morning mist, and the screaming that came out of the smoke afterward belonged entirely to the enemy.

It was over in fifty-three minutes. Darek timed it because Hesra would want the number for her ledger, and because some part of him refused to believe it without a count. Two hundred and forty enemy dead. Nine bunkers cleared. The rearguard erased before it could regroup and dig into the higher passes, exactly as ordered.

He walked the ridge afterward, taking the casualty reports company by company, and the reports came back the same way nine times running.

"None dead, Commander. Four wounded, all walking."

"None dead. One lance team took shrapnel, the Palicoes already have them."

"None dead."

Darek stood at the ridge's north end and let the last report settle in his chest like a hot meal after a long march. None dead. An assault on nine fortified bunkers against two hundred and forty bound fanatics, and his people would light no pyres tonight.

Renna climbed the ridge to him with her greatsword sheathed and something dark and wrong drying on her armour. She pulled her helm off. Sweat plastered her hair flat and her grin had teeth in it.

"Your ridge companies moved well," she said. "Fastest crossing I've seen your people make. Two months ago that same run took twice as long and cost you a dozen."

"Two months ago we still thought the bunkers might shoot back at us." Darek shook his head slowly. "You cleared nine positions with twelve hunters, Renna. My whole life, storming a single bunker meant filling it with our dead until the defenders ran out of ammunition."

"Your whole life you had pipes and desperation." She clapped his shoulder, and even through her restraint he rocked on his heels. "Now you have lances, discipline, and us. Different arithmetic."

"The men are chanting your names down there. Bharen. Odrik. Yours."

"I heard." Her grin softened at the edges. "Bharen's insufferable about it already. He's asking your Ashfall boys to teach him the pronunciation so he knows exactly what he's being called."

Darek looked down into the bowl, where his fighters and her hunters moved together through the cleared positions, dragging bodies to the burn pits, sharing water skins, a Barbaran veteran laughing at something Odrik mimed with his shield. Two years ago his people had fought overlord patrols with sharpened pipes and lost four for every soldier they killed. Now they held a ridge above a broken enemy without a single name for tonight's book, cheering warriors from beyond the sky.

Then suddenly the ground shook.

The tremor came up through Darek's boots first, a deep grinding shudder that ran the length of the ridge and set loose scree rattling down the slope. Below, in the centre of the bowl, the mud between the fourth and fifth bunkers heaved upward in a slow blister thirty metres across.

"Renna." Darek's voice came out tight. "The ground."

"I see it." She had her helm back on before he finished speaking, greatsword clearing its harness in one pull. "Everyone off the low ground! OFF THE LOW GROUND NOW!"

The blister burst.

Rotted earth sprayed outward in a fan of black filth, and the thing beneath it dragged itself into the grey daylight one limb at a time. Darek's mind refused the shape of it for a full three seconds. The core of the body had been a mountain predator once, one of the great six-legged carrion stalkers that haunted the highest scree fields, but its dead flesh had been opened and packed and stitched with the bodies of soldiers. Dozens of them. Arms jutted from its flanks at wrong angles. Faces studded its hide like blisters, mouths working, and Darek recognized two of them from his own third company, men buried with honours nine weeks ago.

The thing stood taller than a keep gate. It turned its fused skull toward the nearest bunker, where a lance team had sheltered from the eruption, and swung one grafted limb.

The bunker ceased to exist. Stone, roof timbers, the firing step, all of it hammered flat into the mud in a single stroke, and the concussion rolled up the ridge and slapped Darek's chest like an open hand.

"Torva's team!" he shouted. "Were they in that...."

"They cleared it an hour ago! It was empty!" Renna was already moving down the slope. "Stagger pattern! Bharen, Odrik, you're first rotation! Legs, take the legs, cycle out on my count!"

"Lances, with me!" Darek bellowed at his companies, and his voice cracked on the second word and he did not care. "Firing line on the ridge shelf! Flanks only, keep its eyes off the hunters!"

His people moved. Four months ago they would have run, and he would have run with them, and no one on Barbarus would have blamed a soul. Now two hundred lances dropped onto the shelf in ragged order and opened up, and the bolts converged on the beast's stitched flanks in streams of corrosive fire.

The fire sank into the dead flesh and vanished. No burning. No screaming. The hide drank the bolts the way the killing belt drank boots.

"It's eating the lance fire!" Torva shouted from the flank. "Darek, we're doing nothing to it!"

"You're doing exactly what I need!" Renna's voice carried up from the bowl, sharp through her helm's amplifier. "Keep its attention! It turns toward whatever hurts its pride, and your lances sting even if they don't cut! HOLD THE FIRE ON ITS FLANKS!"

"You heard her!" Darek dropped to one knee beside a lance team whose youngest member had gone grey above his breath-cloth. "Sting it, boy. That's all she's asking. You've stung bigger things than your own fear before."

The boy's hands steadied on the lance. The stream resumed.

Below, the hunters hit the beast in rotation.

Darek had watched them fight for four months and he still had no proper words for it. Bharen went in first, switch axe in its heavy cleaving form, and took a hand-deep wedge out of the beast's foremost leg before the counterswing came. He rolled under the grafted limb, the axe collapsing into its blade form mid-roll, and was gone before the strike landed. Odrik came in from the opposite side as the beast turned, lance punching into the same wound, widening it, shield catching a flailing stitched arm and shedding the blow. Then he was out and a third hunter was in, and a fourth, each one striking the legs and cycling clear while the beast's fused skull swung between targets it could never quite catch.

"It's like watching wolves take an ox," Torva said, sliding into cover beside Darek. "Except the wolves are laughing."

"They're not laughing. Listen to Renna's count. That's arithmetic down there, timed to the heartbeat." Darek marked the beast's movement, the deepening limp in its foremost leg. "Left flank, shift fire forward! It's favouring the wounded leg, make it turn into the weakness!"

The lances shifted. The beast turned, dragging the ruined limb, and its head came around low, and one of the dead faces on its neck opened its mouth and screamed in a voice Darek knew.

"That's Jorel," the young lancer whispered. "That's Jorel's voice, commander, that's...."

"That's a puppet wearing his throat." Darek gripped the boy's shoulder hard enough to bruise. "Jorel died at the eastern passes with his lance in his hands. Whatever's screaming down there stole his voice and we are going to take it back. Fire."

The boy fired. His whole team fired. The scream cut off under the barrage.

"Second rotation!" Renna called. "Legs are carved! Someone get me the head!"

"On it, nya!"

The voice came from above the fight, and Darek's eye tracked it to the ruin of the collapsed bunker, where a small white shape was already sprinting up the rubble. Lyra. He had seen the Palico healer at the pavilions a hundred times, stitching wounds with those clever paws, sitting on patients who tried to leave early. She ran the broken stone like it was a staircase built for her, blade out, silver markings flashing.

"Renna, that's the medic!" Darek was on his feet without deciding to stand. "That's the medic, someone pull her back!"

"Nobody pulls Lyra anywhere," Renna said. "Watch."

Lyra hit the high point of the rubble at a full sprint and left it without slowing. The leap carried her over the beast's swinging limb, over the reaching stitched arms, and she turned in the air with her whole body behind the blade, a single spinning stroke that caught the beast at the seam where the predator's neck met its grafted skull.

The head came off.

It came off clean, along the stitching, and it fell separately from the body, and Lyra landed on the far side in a crouch with her blade already flicking dark ichor from its edge.

The headless bulk staggered. One step. Two. It listed toward the shelf where six of Darek's wounded lay behind a spoil bank, four thousand kilos of dead meat about to fall on men who could not move.

"Odrik, the wounded....!"

The hammer got there first. Bharen's squadmate, the one with the weapon the size of a cellar door, met the falling bulk mid-collapse and swung upward through it, and the beast's body stopped falling toward the wounded because it was travelling sideways instead, and then it was flat, hammered into the mud in a spray of black filth that reached the third trench.

Nothing in the bowl moved after that except the rain.

Darek walked down the slope on legs that had opinions about the journey. Lyra sat on a chunk of bunker roof, cleaning her blade with a scrap of cloth, unhurried, as if she had beheaded something between patients and expected to be back at the pavilion by the next bell.

"You," Darek said. "You're the one who sat on my Ashfall boy while his liver knitted."

"He was a bad patient." She looked up at him, blue eyes bright over the bloodied blade. "That thing was a worse one. Some cases you can't save, nya. You just make the ending quick."

Renna pulled her helm off beside him, grinning through the muck spattered across her face. "Told you nobody pulls Lyra anywhere."

Darek looked at the flattened bulk, at the severed head lying in the mud with Jorel's stolen face gone slack and finally quiet, at the small white cat polishing her sword.

"Renna." He shook his head slowly. "I've fought on this mountain my whole life. And no one down in the valleys is ever going to believe me."

"Then don't tell them," Lyra said, sheathing the blade. "Show them. Necare's keep will have worse than this waiting, and your people should know what quick endings look like before we climb."

Necare received them in the deep hall, nine levels below his keep's foundations, where the black stone predated his own centuries and the air lay so cold and thin that even overlord biology laboured to draw breath from it. He had lit nothing. His guests brought their own light, the sick green glow of ward-lamps carried by Vorlath's household troops, and Necare watched the three witch-kings descend the last stair with the mild attention of a host counting place settings.

"Your soldiers may rest in the upper galleries," he said. "My servants have prepared quarters. Food. Warmth. They have climbed far."

Vorlath waved his forty through the archway without looking at them. They filed past in silence, and Necare inclined his head to the steward waiting in the shadows, and the steward led them away into the dark, and none of the three witch-kings watched them go.

Forty vessels, walking to the vats on their own feet. The Grandfather appreciates a gift that delivers itself.

"You keep a cold house, Necare." Vorlath's voice had thinned in the months since the pact. His flesh hung loose on him now, spent, a candle burned from both ends. "No fires. No wards on your gates. You left them standing open like a lowland brothel."

"I knew you were coming. Doors are a courtesy between equals."

"Equals." Ghulle laughed, a wet sound behind his breath-grille. He was the youngest of the three, barely four centuries, and he had drunk shallower from the well than Vorlath and it showed in the strength still in his frame. "You've never had equals. That's the complaint we climbed here to make."

"Then make it."

Vorlath stepped forward into the centre of the hall. His boots rang on stone worn smooth by ages, and his black eyes fixed on Necare with the resentment of a man who had rehearsed this speech through nine kilometres of killing air.

"Six of us are dead. My keep burns. Ghulle's keep burns. Threx crawled out of his through a drainage sluice with nothing but his skin. The boy you raised and the golden thing from the sky have unmade three centuries of order in four months, and through all of it you sat on this peak and watched." He thrust one wasted finger at the floor. "You found the well first. You've been drinking from it since before my grandsire swore his first oath. Whatever pact you hold with the things beneath this mountain, you will share it now, tonight, with all of us, or we will take it."

"Take it." Necare turned the words over the way a jeweler turns a flawed stone. "With what? The three of you together couldn't ward a village gate. You've spent yourselves hollow. I can hear your hearts labouring from here, Vorlath. Both of them."

"Then help us refill." Threx spoke for the first time, and his voice shook. He stood nearest the stair, and he had kept his back to it, and Necare noted this and forgave it, because Threx had always been the cleverest of the lesser lords and cleverness on Barbarus expressed itself as fear. "The boy is coming up the mountain, Necare. Not next season. Now. He killed Vorath with his own hands. If we don't stand together...."

"We will stand together. On that point, at least, we are in complete agreement." Necare moved to the wall, where seven braziers of black iron hung in a wide circle around the hall, ancient fixtures the three had taken for decoration. He lifted a taper from the first. "Everything I hold will be shared tonight. Every drop. I give you my word."

Vorlath's eyes narrowed. "Just like that? After centuries of hoarding?"

"Circumstances have changed." Necare touched the taper to the first brazier and a flame the colour of old bile caught and held. He walked the circle slowly, lighting each in turn, and his voice stayed mild as milk. "You are correct that I have watched. I watched the boy break his leash. I watched him burn my coalition one keep at a time. I watched a warship descend through air that should have boiled its crew, and I watched two sons of the same impossible father execute five of our kind in an afternoon."

"Then you understand the need."

"Better than you could ever grasp it." The fourth brazier caught. The fifth. "I raised that boy for a reason, three hundred years of planning, Vorlath. He was my inheritance made flesh. Every road I built led through him, and he has closed them all, one refusal at a time."

You did this, boy. Remember that, when the mountain begins to rot beneath you. I offered you a cup. You could have drunk and inherited and none of this would have been necessary. You and your brother from the stars have left me no other road but the deepest one.

The sixth brazier caught. Smoke rose from all of them now, thick and greasy and yellow-green, and Ghulle's head turned to track it, and his breath-grille clicked twice.

"The smoke," he said. "The wind in this hall pulls toward the stair. The smoke is moving against it."

"Yes," Necare said, and lit the seventh.

Ghulle looked down. The ward-lamps his troops had carried were gone with the troops, but the brazier-light had strengthened, and it fell now across the floor the three of them stood upon, and it picked out what the darkness had hidden. Carvings. Channels cut into the black stone, deep and old and recently cleaned of the dust of ages, spiralling inward from the hall's edge toward its centre. Three great circles, interlocked, and within their lines a script that squirmed at the edge of vision, and clustered along every channel the small repeated shapes of flies.

"Necare." Ghulle's voice climbed. "What are these symbols? What is this floor?"

"An altar. The oldest on Barbarus. I found it when I was younger than Threx, and I have spent nine days waking it." Necare set down the taper and folded his hands. "You asked what pact I hold with the things beneath the mountain. There is no pact beneath the mountain. There never was. The well you have all been sipping from is a finger, and the hand it belongs to lives in a garden on the far side of the sky, and He has a grandfather's patience and a grandfather's appetite."

Threx was already running for the stair. Vorlath had frozen, and his black eyes had gone wide, and his mouth worked without sound.

"He requires a gift before He extends His full blessing," Necare continued. "The texts are specific. Festering ambition, freely gathered under one roof. Three witch-kings who reached for power beyond them and failed, who climbed to a rival's door demanding to be fed. You will do perfectly. You delivered yourselves."

"You mad old...." Vorlath's hands came up, dragging at the dregs of the well, green fire sputtering weakly around his fingers. "The boy will kill you! Whatever you buy with our deaths, he will climb this mountain and....!"

"He was always going to climb. Now something will be waiting that even his brother cannot burn away."

Necare raised both arms, and the words came up out of him in the cadence the deep texts demanded, heavy and slow, each syllable set down like a stone in a grave.

"Ghulos vhurga, nurgh vhurga sept. Ghulos morva, nurgh morva sept. Grandfather of the Garden, taker of the third gift, I open the door and name Thee. Nurgh-leth."

Threx reached the stair and found no stair. Where the steps had been, the stone had softened, sagging, sweating a fluid the colour of drowned flesh. The seven braziers roared to twice their height. And the floor, all three great circles of it, opened like a wound.

There was no falling. The stone simply parted along its carved channels and what lay beneath was warm and wet and glad, and it took the three witch-kings the way a mouth takes a sacrament, and their screaming lasted exactly as long as something below wanted to savour it.

Necare stood at the wound's edge as the buzzing rose. His hands, he noticed, had stopped trembling for the first time in four months.

"Come up, then," he said to the darkness below, and to the boy far beneath the clouds. "The house is ready for guests. Come, oh fellow son of he of life and rot."

The wound in the floor exhaled.

What rose through it came in stages, because no single glance could hold it. A hand first, wider than a cart, its knuckles split and weeping. Then the arm, green-grey and glistening, muscled beneath sagging flesh like rot given ambition. Then the head crested the wound's lip, horned and vast, and the smile beneath the horns showed teeth like leaning tombstones, and the belly that followed had split along its own girth so that ropes of grey intestine swung free with each heave of the climb. The stench arrived with it. Sweetness and gangrene and turned earth, thick enough that even Necare's augmented lungs spasmed once before adjusting.

The three warlords were still dying. Necare could hear them. Their bodies had gone into the wound whole and their voices came back up shredded, Vorlath's scream stretched thin as wire, Ghulle's wet laughter inverted into sobbing, Threx simply repeating a word that might have been a name until the syllables dissolved into the buzzing. The buzzing was flies. The hall filled with them, fat and iridescent, crawling across the seven braziers, across the carved channels, across the backs of Necare's folded hands.

He knelt.

The gesture cost him. He had made others kneel for six hundred years, and his knees met the black stone now with the stiffness of joints that had forgotten the posture existed. He bowed his head and kept his voice level, because the texts were explicit that the Grandfather's servants respected neither grovelling nor pride, only the precision of a bargain properly struck.

"Great one. I have prepared the gift and spoken the naming." The words came out steady. His hands, folded on his thigh, stayed still through an act of will. "The terms of the pact are these. The golden giant who descended from the sky dies. The boy Mortarion, my heir, is returned to my keeping, broken to obedience if breaking is required. In exchange I hold this mountain in the Grandfather's name until my flesh fails, and I have arranged my flesh to fail slowly."

The Great Unclean One did not look at him.

Its massive head had tilted back, horns scraping furrows in the ceiling nine metres up, and its yellow eyes fixed on the stone above as though the rock were glass and the war below the cloud line lay spread beneath its gaze like a feast on a table. Its belly heaved. A sound built in it, deep and wet, rolling up through the split gut and out of the tombstone smile.

It was laughing.

"Ohhhh." The voice filled the hall the way floodwater fills a cellar, patient and total. "Ohhh, there you are. There you are, little gardener's shears. All this time. All this searching."

"Great one." Necare lifted his head a fraction. "The terms...."

"Kairos pulled the tapestry apart thread by thread." The daemon spoke over him without effort, without acknowledgment, the way a man speaks over a dripping tap. "The Blood God's hounds ran every scent trail in the Sea of Souls until their paws bled. The Dark Prince turned every mirror in every palace looking for the face that kept slipping out of frame. Four gods, little sorcerer. Four gods tore the warp apart hunting the one who cuts the threads, and here he sits." The laughter came again, shaking dust from the ceiling. "Hiding on a blessed little ball of poison. On Grandfather's garden plot. Oh, the others will be so very cross."

Necare's folded hands tightened. Something in the exchange had begun to slide, the way a keep's foundation slides, invisibly at first.

"The golden one. You know him."

"Know him." The yellow eyes rolled down at last and found Necare kneeling among the flies, and their attention settled on him with the pressure of a thumb on an insect. "The Red One's champion was to drown a galaxy in blood, and this thing unmade him with a surgeon's knife and a kind word. The Dark King's haunted son was to be despair's own herald, and now the boy plants gardens under a clean sky. Two threads cut. Two feasts cancelled. And your grey heir was……is to be ours, little sorcerer. Grandfather has loved that boy since before your world had a name. Every plague he shrugged off was a courtship gift."

"Then our interests align." Necare rose from his knees, slowly, keeping his hands open and visible. "Kill the giant. Return the boy to the mountain's keeping. That is all I ask, and the naming was spoken correctly, and the gift was given whole. Three witch-kings soaked in the deep well's power, delivered under my roof by my hand. The pact binds."

"The pact binds." The daemon's smile widened until the flesh at its corners split and wept. "Yes. Accepted. Sealed. Grandfather thanks you for the meal, little sorcerer, truly. Festering ambition has such a distinctive flavour, like a boil that has waited years to be lanced."

Relief loosened Necare's shoulders by a degree.

"But your terms." The daemon's bulk shifted, and the stone groaned under it, and the wound in the floor pulsed wider. "Mmm. No. The terms are declined."

The relief died where it stood. "The texts state the summoner sets the terms. The naming was flawless. I spent nine days...."

"The texts were written for men calling up servants." The word rolled out of the split belly with something close to tenderness. "Little pox-sprites. Chattel of the Garden, bound to fetch and carry. You read your naming beautifully, sorcerer, every syllable. But the door you opened, Grandfather was already leaning against it from the other side. He has been leaning against this mountain since your ancestors first drank from His well and called it inheritance. You did not summon a servant. You held the door for a herald."

Necare's hands, he noticed distantly, had begun to tremble again. Both of them. Worse than they had in four months.

"Then what," he said, and his voice came out smaller than it had in six centuries, "did I buy?"

"A place in the choir." The Great Unclean One raised one vast weeping arm toward the ceiling, toward the surface, toward the war and the boy and the golden thread-cutter nine kilometres below the clouds. "The thread-cutter comes to climb your mountain, and Grandfather means to be here when he arrives, all of Him that fits through the door. You wanted your heir returned. He will return, little sorcerer. He will climb straight to us. You have arranged everything perfectly and understood none of it, and that is the oldest joke in the Garden, and it never stops being funny."

I have made a mistake.

The thought arrived plainly, without ornament, the first honest thing to pass through Necare's mind in a hundred years. His augmented hearts laboured in his chest. Around him the black stone of the deep hall had begun to sweat, beads of grey moisture rising through rock that had stood dry since before his birth, and where the moisture touched the carved channels, small pale flowers pushed up through solid basalt and opened and rotted in the same breath.

"Sing, little sorcerer," the herald said kindly. "The pact binds you too."

Nine kilometres below, in the command bunker above the last cleared valley, Mortarion woke from a sleep he had never agreed to enter with both hearts hammering and the taste of turned meat in his mouth.

Aurelian was already on his feet at the map table, and the warmth had drained out of his eyes, and Cortana's slate was shrieking a tone Mortarion had never heard it make.

"The summit," Cortana said. Her voice had shed every trace of its usual dryness. "Thermal bloom, biological signatures where there was bare rock, and the well's output just went vertical. Something came through."

Mortarion reached for his scythe. Outside the bunker, faint and high and impossibly distant, the snow on the peaks had begun to turn green.

"He opened the door," Mortarion rasped. "We climb at dawn."