Chains of crackling energy lashed out from him, ensnaring the jailer-spirit. Some of it raced along the creature’s own chains, setting the rusty links alight with cobalt flame. The light swelled about him, washing away the shadows and momentarily driving back the dead. Helios felt his staff grow hot as he struck again and again, until it punched through the creature and struck the floor. The jailer-spirit gave an ear-splitting screech as celestial lightning ripsawed through it.
Helios released his stormstaff an instant before it splintered, consumed by the energies racing through it. The explosion hurled him backwards into a pillar. The stone cracked, and he tumbled to the floor. As his staff broke apart, so too did the jailer-spirit, which burned with a purifying radiance. Its chains melted into molten slag. Helios heard the imprisoned souls sing out as they were freed, and lightning speared upwards from the burning links, shattering the great dome above and casting a rain of glass down onto the spirits below.
As the reverberations faded, Helios rose to his feet, bits of glass sliding from him. He tried to take in a breath, and his ribs creaked painfully. His neck and shoulders ached, where he’d struck the pillar. His armour was scorched and dented by the fury of the tempest he’d unleashed. Besides the pain, he felt wrung out – empty. But satisfied. A final bit of good, before the end. Not enough, never enough, but some.
‘You will pay for that,’ Thaum said, in the silence that followed. He emerged slowly through the gathering ranks of the dead, sword-tip carving black trails in the stones at his feet. ‘Your soul will scream in agony, before you are remade in the image of he whom you defy.’
‘To speak and act are one and the same. Nothing will prevent me from doing as I have said.’ Helios swept his tempest blade up, and gripped the hilt with both hands. ‘Can the same be said of you?’ He drew the blade back and readied himself. ‘Come. Let us see.’
Thaum roared, mouth distending abnormally, and charged. Helios stepped forwards.
When the moment came around at last, he was ready.
Chapter twenty-one
Descent
Thunder rumbled above.
Balthas paused, listening. Helios had done as promised. He had bought them time enough, and now Juddsson and his warriors were leading Fosko, Obol and the others to the halls of the Riven Clans. Whether there was safety there or not, Balthas could not say. Regardless, the mortals were well out of what came next.
‘Helios has returned to the stars,’ Miska said, from beside him. He looked at her and reached up to ruffle Quicksilver’s feathery mane.
‘He held them longer than I calculated.’
‘He did not return to Azyr alone. Can you feel it?’
Balthas nodded. The aether seemed lighter somehow. As if a burden had been lifted from the realm. He looked around. The tunnel sloped sharply downwards and was narrow enough that the Stormcasts could only move through it three abreast. The shadows were pushed back by the flickering glow of their staves, and the glimmer of corposant that clung to the arms and armour of the warriors following in their wake.
Built by duardin engineers, the tunnel was dry and sturdy, with heavy bracers of stone holding the crushing earth at bay. It twisted and turned back in on itself in ways that made sense only to the duardin, but always going down. Several times they came to crossways, and had to wait for Elya to come back and lead them into the correct passage. Smaller tunnels split off from the main, at intervals, but most had been sealed recently – bricked up or otherwise blocked off, and marked with runes of protection and warding.
Despite those runes, even here there were spirits. Balthas could see the dutiful echoes of long-dead duardin, working as they had in life, shoring up the stone and smoothing the floors. He’d read, once, that the duardin afterlife was very much just a continuation of life – the reward for a life of honour and hard labour was to live that life over, forever.
There was a pleasing sensibility to that. Then, Balthas could look forward to much the same – an eternity of war, waged beneath the stars. If he were lucky. He thought of Pharus and flinched away from the implication.
‘The child has vanished again,’ Miska said. Elya ranged far ahead of them, moving more quickly than the column of Stormcasts she led into the underworld.
‘Can you see any cats?’
‘A few.’ Eyes gleamed in the dark, the creatures crouched in nooks and crannies, or slunk along the bracers. The soft pad of cat-feet, beneath the grinding tread of the Anvils of the Heldenhammer.
‘Then she is close.’ Balthas was confident that the girl was leading them in the right direction. There was something about the child – an ineffable quality that bemused and intrigued him. The story he’d told her had just been a story. One more folktale culled from his decades of study. That did not mean it wasn’t the truth.
The mortals of the realms worshipped many gods, some old, some new, some real, some false. Who was to say that there hadn’t been a god of cats, who did as cats often do and slunk into some small crack in the universe to wait out catastrophe?
Quicksilver grunted, and Balthas glanced back to see Calys making her way towards him, the gryph-hound, Grip, padding in her wake. She had been bringing up the rear, after having sent the rest of her cohort with the mortals. He knew what she wanted, even before she spoke. ‘We’re close,’ she said. ‘I can feel the vibration in the stones.’
‘Good. Any signs of pursuit?’
‘Not yet. We’ll know as soon as it happens. Juddsson and Fosko left a surprise for them – they hid their remaining stores of powder and silver shot in the reliquary, ready to explode if the passage is opened.’
Balthas grunted. ‘That will do little to deter them.’
Miska turned. ‘Perhaps we should consider doing the same ourselves. A few warriors might hold this passage, for a time.’
‘But not long enough to do any good. Besides which, they won’t come this way. Pharus knows the secret route, hidden in the reliquary. He will attempt to force that one.’
‘Then why are we here, rather than there?’ Calys said.
‘To get ahead of them, if possible. There are reinforcements below. Lord-Relictor Dathus, and those forces under his command. If we can join our forces to theirs, while Pharus is still trying to find his way through his own labyrinth, we might stand a chance of bringing him to open battle.’ He looked at her. ‘Without him, without a central, driving will, the nighthaunts will scatter.’ He looked up. ‘The battle for the city will continue. But the horde which follows us will take no further part in it… and the Ten Thousand Tombs will remain sealed.’
‘And you will get to face him head on, once more,’ Miska said.
Before Balthas could reply, a cat yowled. He looked up and spotted the same scar-lipped feline that seemed to shadow Elya wherever she went. He looked ahead and saw the child seated atop a bracer, waiting on them. ‘It’s here,’ she said, as she dropped to the ground, light as one of her four-legged companions.
‘Where?’ Balthas looked past her. The tunnel continued on, its end swallowed in darkness. He wondered if it were a false seeming of some sort.
‘Here.’ She pointed down, at a rusty, iron grate set into the floor. Balthas had noticed many such grates since their descent, set every few thousand paces. Presumably these were to prevent flooding, in the case of the Glass Mere’s rise. What marked this one as different, he couldn’t say.
‘Why this one? Why not the others?’
Elya looked up at him. ‘Got to go this way, otherwise you can’t follow me.’ She looked down, into the dark. ‘You’re too big to go down the other ones.’
‘How long will it take?’