‘Follow,’ ordered Sleikh, loping out into the night.
Rakh darted after him, as did all the others, and the hunt resumed again.
Aqshy, the realm was called, though none but the most powerful of its denizens would ever have known that. Here, on the Brimstone Peninsula, the bones of the land were forged in fire, and under its rocky mantle ancient furnaces boiled and churned. Before the ages of ruin it had been teeming with life, lent vigour by the magical currents coursing over its mountains and gorges.
Those years were forgotten now, scraped clean from history by the ceaseless procession of damned armies. The cities of the realm were gone, the kingdoms were gone, overrun and turned into sucking quagmires of spilled ichor. New citadels took their place — temples to violence, clad in bronze and bound in brass, housing thrones of iron around which the blood boiled in runnels. The killing continued even when all possible dreams of conquest had been satiated, goaded on by the whims of cruel gods. The number of the dead had been incalculable, but in truth they had been the fortunate ones, for they had not lived to see what reality was capable of being turned into.
All that remained in Aqshy were the Lords of Ruin — mortal champions of the Pantheon, striding across the earth they had despoiled in the hope of finding something fresh to kill. With the demise of any true resistance, they turned on their own kind, launching swollen hordes at one another in a perpetual orgy of slaughter. The only ones who could survive for long in such a crucible were the Gifted — those blessed with the trappings of daemonic power or possessors of fell weapons. Dark magic swirled and simmered across the bone-strewn wastelands, fuelling the cycle of murder further, provoking the feuds that kept the anvils ringing and the forges blazing.
For the less exalted, all that remained was a kind of half-life, forever clinging to the edge of oblivion. Children were still born, and so the progeny of mankind lingered, but they were never more than prey, slaves or fodder, predated on by the chosen of the victorious Dark Gods. To stay alive for more than two decades was considered fortunate, to make it to three was exceptional. After that, the rigours of life in hell were too destructive. There were no scholars, no princes, no wizards and no priests — just a desperate, scrabbling, grasping fight to draw one more breath, gain one more heartbeat and see one more blighted sunrise before the tides of killing caught up.
Kalja’s tribe, for all the stories they told themselves, were no different to the thousands whose light had endured for a brief time before being stamped out. They ran with desperation but with no hope. Only the manner of death remained an ambition — to meet annihilation cleanly, with little agony; that was the prize.
Kalja pushed the pace, feeling her breathing grow ragged but knowing that a single slip now would end it. Svan kept up with her, the rest straggling behind, stumbling as the land became lumpen and twisted around them.
From the wider Brimstone Peninsula, they had reached the southern edges of the Igneus Delta and the earth was breaking beneath their feet. Fissures opened up, some clogged and dry, others glowing from the exposed fires below. Plumes of sulphurous steam roiled across the crusted landscape, breaking into slivers across the thorny clusters of iron-limbed plants.
It was hard to make any progress in that terrain — they would stumble down a wide gully only to see it end in a rubble-strewn cliff, or they would race across flattened plates before finding themselves surrounded by pools of boiling lava. Everything stank, and the heat dragged at them, making it a torture just to breathe.
‘This place will kill us quicker than they will,’ gasped Renek, limping badly from a gash on his left thigh — the thorn-clusters were vicious.
‘Pray that you are right,’ muttered Kalja, charging onwards, not allowing the weak to slow her. It was just possible the bloodreavers would settle for the stragglers that night, so it paid to keep to the front of the herd.
They reached a long, twisting defile. The further they went, the higher the banks on either side reared up. Soon the edges were too steep to climb easily, and lined with more thorns, and so the only course was to keep going down to the defile’s end and hope that it was not just another blocked route.
As they went, they heard the thud-thud of footfalls behind them. The narrow gorge amplified the sounds of the pursuers, reminding the tribe just how meagre the gap between hunter and hunted had become. Silently, grimly, the fugitives kept their heads down, trying to ignore the burning in their lungs, and kept going.
Kalja was the first to reach the valley’s end. Its two walls narrowed into a slender gorge, and for a moment she thought they would come together completely. In the end, they remained apart by little more than the width of a man’s waist, revealing a tiny gap through which she could push herself.
She squeezed between the two sides, feeling the hot stone snag at her ragged clothes. The cleft ran for more than twenty yards, and with every step the rock underfoot grew hotter and more oily. Soon Kalja was enclosed in almost complete darkness, and the press of solid rock around her made her want to scream.
Then, abruptly, the passage opened out again. She emerged onto a narrow shelf of rock, and the red sky arched away above her, mottled with gravid cloudbanks and scored with lines of lightning.
She pressed her back to the cliff-face behind her and looked out. The rest of her tribe pushed their way free of the cleft’s mouth and lined up along the shelf.
A broken scree-slope fell away before them, dropping steeply down to the edge of a plain. Obsidian-black terrain stretched off beyond that, marked by sinewy trails of fire and barred by the rolling fumes of sulphur-geysers. In the far north, the darkening horizon was studded with mountainous piles of skulls, blackened by flame. In between the pyramids of bone stood the remains of ancient ramparts, all shattered, standing like ribcages against the turbulent skies. Iron scaffolds studded the ruins, some still bearing broken skeletons on their spiked wheels, and rusting gibbets swung in a growing storm-wind.
The stonework ran for miles, scarring the land as far as the eye could see. Once, the place must have been vast, a whole empire of great buildings. Amid the few edifices that remained, one stood out, derelict, isolated among the wreckage at its feet.
Two massive piers of stone thrust up out of the magma-scored earth, buttressed by statues in the shape of men bending under the burden. Pillars twisted atop those piers, each one carved with runes and bearing more images — dragons, serpents, icons of comets and twisting astrological symbols. The pillars combined into two enormous flanks of a single arch, which terminated in a keystone some three hundred feet above the level of the plain. Winding stone stairs ran up either side of the curves, twisting in and out of old turrets and watchtowers. Black-veined ivy cascaded down its flanks, cracking the stone and exposing glowing threads of magma within, but still the bulk of the structure remained intact, dwarfing all else, resplendent even in its degradation.
Kalja stared at it. An entire army, thousands strong, could have marched beneath that archway, and yet it led nowhere. No road had been built across the blasted delta, and the void under the keystone’s curve gaped emptily, revealing more ruins on the far side.
The others picked their way down the slope towards the plain. Kalja snapped out of her reverie and followed them down. Less than thirty of them had made it, though if those at the rear had been taken, it might buy the rest of them a little more time.
‘What is it?’ whispered Kalja as they hurried down towards the arch’s sweeping shadow.
‘I care not,’ said Svan, not even looking up at it. ‘It cannot hide us, it cannot save us. Stop staring.’