At that, the enemy warlord laughed out loud. ‘I care nothing for you, death-lord,’ he said, loosing the hound’s collar, ‘but you stand between me and my prey, and thus your time draws to its close.’
The hell-hound pounced, leaping for the Cryptborn’s throat. Ionus swatted it aside with a blast from his reliquary, but by then the warlord had swept into contact. Khul brought his axe down, aiming to shatter Ionus’s pauldron, but the Cryptborn shrank back, blocking the strike with the reliquary’s staff.
The impact was crushing, forcing him down to his knees. Ionus pushed back, but his strength ran from him like water from a broken jar.
‘Should you live, be sure to seek me out when all is over,’ whispered Khul, pressing down savagely. ‘There is room in my ranks for one such as you.’
Then he suddenly released the pressure. Ionus tried to rise, to slam his staff into the warlord’s chest, but the movement had only been made in order to clear space for another strike. Khul, snapping his arms around, swept his axe crossways, catching the rising Ionus square in the throat. The blade clanged into the Cryptborn’s gorget, and he was ripped from his feet and thrown through the air. As he tumbled through the dust, his vision going black and his senses deserting him, Ionus loosed a final flurry of storm-spirits, aiming to suck the life from the warlord just as he had done with his lesser warriors.
Grizzlemaw, though, was in their path. The daemon-hound snatched the spirits from the air, and ripped them from reality with a shake of his neck.
Ionus felt their deaths as an icy spike through his heart, and his last strength gave out. His golden helm struck the ground, and his hands slipped free of the reliquary’s staff.
Khul walked towards him idly, hoisting the axe high and preparing to use it, when a lone voice cut through the battling warriors around them.
‘No further.’
Khul turned, and a broad smile creased across his bony jawline. Grizzlemaw growled and raised its hackles, but the warlord merely prepared himself, bracing the axe across his body and planting his feet firmly for the onslaught.
‘Then all is accomplished,’ he said, his deep voice resonant with pleasure. ‘You face me at last, and thus my final trophy finds its home.’
Setting eyes on Khul at last, Vandus felt a surge of old emotions. His dracoth roared, desperate to strike, and the daemon-hound did likewise. In every direction, Liberators, Retributors and blood warriors remained locked in mortal combat, a sweep of violence that ran from the Gate’s edge to the mouth of the valley beyond. Everything was in motion, everything was poised.
And yet he could not move. The warlord of Chaos stood before him, just as he had been in the other age. He had grown in stature since then, and there were more skulls hanging from his iron belt, but the crimson helm and the black-toothed mouth were the same, as was the crackling axe-blade at his side that had laid whole kingdoms low.
For the first time since setting foot in this land, Vandus felt his twin lives truly blur. He was the Lord-Celestant, bringer of Sigmar’s wrath. He was the chief of the Direbrands, doomed to die before the blades of the Goretide.
Khul fixed him with his dark eyes and amusement twitched across his exposed mouth.
‘The one who ran,’ he said. ‘That is what they named you, in the later years. They cursed that name even as I killed them.’
Those words hit home. Vandus remembered how it had been — the howl of anguish, the pleading to be sent back. Every soul he had pledged to protect had died that night, bereft of the warhammer that would have been wielded in their defence.
‘This realm is now taken from you,’ Vandus said, holding the dracoth back, loath to launch the attack that he had been created to make. ‘The Gate is secured. You have no purpose here but to die at my hand.’
Khul remained smiling, and flickers of blood-red fire raced across the edge of his axe-blade. ‘No purpose? You are my purpose, Direbrand. You are the culmination of my great quest, and when your age-bleached bones are placed atop the pyre of Khorne, then all these realms will be mine.’
The voice was so terrifyingly familiar. Vandus remembered the raw fear, how he had forced himself to fight through it. All mortals were subject to that fear — Khul was a creature of a maddened pantheon, a mere cipher for their limitless malice. The stuff of Chaos leaked out from his every pore, and though he was already less than a man, it would take but a fraction more power to make him far greater than a daemon.
‘The God-King foresaw this day,’ replied Vandus. His voice was as steady as his weapon-arm, but it belied the turmoil within — he spoke to remind himself as much as he did to challenge his old adversary. ‘You laughed then, but your defeat was already ordained.’
‘Laughed?’ roared Khul, outraged. ‘Gods of Ruin, boy, I was enraged! I laid a dozen kingdoms in ashes and still my thirst was not slaked.’ But he was laughing truly now, his eyes shining with a raw exuberance. ‘If I had known that you would return, that the only one of my enemies who had ever escaped me would come back to me, I would have spared them so much pain.’ He fixed Vandus with a sardonic look, utterly unafraid, drenched in the strutting confidence he had always displayed before the kill. ‘They died because you left them, Direbrand. That is the truth of it, and you know it in whatever heart your God-King has given you.’
Boy. That was what the warlord had called him, just before the lightning had come. In truth he must have been little more than a child then, bearing weapons forged from crude metal and defending collections of hovels barely capable of standing in a gale. Now he was the first of the Legions of Azyr, gifted power beyond mortal reckoning, and still the word ‘boy’ cut him to his soul.
Vandus. Vendell.
That was enough.
He released his hold over the dracoth, and took up his warhammer as the creature powered into the charge. At the same moment, the daemon-hound pounced, joined by its master in the race to combat. Khul leapt high, striving to reach Vandus and launching a great circuit of his axe. Vandus parried, and the two weapons clanged from one another, sending a shockwave blazing out from the impact.
As the two warriors spun apart, the dracoth took on the daemon-hound, and together the two beasts fell into a snarling, snapping brawl. Khul swept back in close, thrusting his blade at Vandus’s body, and this time the collision nearly wrenched Heldensen from his grip.
‘Your gifts have not made you stronger,’ said Khul, mockingly. ‘You were weak then, you are weaker now.’
Vandus swung the hammerhead across, generating huge momentum, but the blow rebounded from Khul’s counter-strike and the fires along its ensorcelled length guttered out. Calanax was holding its own against Grizzlemaw, but nothing seemed to harm the Lord of Khorne. They traded more swipes, denting and cracking the armour they both wore, and neither broke through to give the decisive wound. The wider battle raged about them, though no warrior dared to intervene in their lords’ duel, locked as they were in deadly struggles of their own.
Khul changed tack then, falling back by a stride’s length. The dracoth sensed the retreat and thrust after him, trying to seize him by the neck. Grizzlemaw leapt for the creature’s scaled shoulder and lodged fast, driving its yellow teeth into the flesh. The dracoth reared, wrenching himself from the daemon-hound’s grip, giving Khul his opening as Vandus struggled to control his mount — the warlord’s axe found a way through, biting deep along Vandus’s armoured thigh, and the Lord-Celestant cried aloud.
The blood warriors in earshot roared with scorn as they heard the sound, and the Liberators felt a shard of doubt enter their souls. The duel had become the locus around which the entire battle revolved — with no breakthrough from either army, it had come down to the survival of the lords that led them.