‘Seven thousand years, Seven thousand years in your service, and it comes to this? I die bleeding my last on the floor of your shrine, inches from salvation?’
I close my eyes. When I open them again, it is fully dark around me. Did I fall asleep? No, with the blood I have lost, had I succumbed to unconsciousness, I would not have awakened. What then?
The shadows move and I understand. They coalesce, whirling into a elven form. Another assassin. Of course, Morathi would not just send one. She looks exactly the same as the other. I would think she had returned to life, were she not a lump of ruined meat a hundred feet away.
‘I am without weapon,’ I whisper. ‘Without hope. I am at your mercy. Not that I expect any.’
‘Would you show any, were our situations reversed?’ Her voice is soft.
‘No,’ I confess. ‘You would be dead already, or in much pain.’
‘Well, be glad I am not you, Hellebron. I am not going to kill you. I must deliver a message. You need to live. You need to thwart Morathi’s plans. She is mad, she–’
She is cut off, metaphorically and literally, as her head parts from her shoulders and rolls out of my line of vision. Her body stands for a second, then falls to the side and reveals the form of an Executioner, draich raised. But this is not any draich, and not any Executioner.
‘Tullaris,’ I say weakly. ‘The Cauldron…’
He says nothing. He doesn’t move. He gazes down at me, the First Draich still raised. Slowly, he pulls off his skull-helm and in his eyes is a murder-gleam. I have seen it there many times, but never has it been directed towards me.
For the first time in a long time, I know fear. And for the first time ever, I acknowledge that I need Tullaris Dreadbringer. That I love him. It is my greatest weakness. To love another, to need them, is to make yourself vulnerable to them. And I am now more vulnerable than I have ever been.
For a long moment we remain like that, and I am sure that I am going to die at the hands of my champion. My… love. Then the moment is over. He drops his weapon and kneels. He lifts me, and I sink into his arms, and allow myself to drift into unconsciousness. The last thing I feel is my body being immersed in the blood of Khaine’s great Cauldron.
Tullaris watched Hellebron step out of the Cauldron of Blood. Her smooth, alabaster-pale flesh was as unmarked and perfect as the day Tullaris had first seen her, the day Khaine had first spoken to him and he had shed blood for the first time. In the wake of his divinely inspired acts of murder, she had named him her champion, and then she had taken him to her bed. The sight of her took his breath away as much as it had that night millennia ago.
Of course, even when her prevailing aspect was that of Morai-Heg, he still adored her as much as he feared her. But now, when she was freshly renewed, she was a goddess. Morathi could lay claim to being Hekarti as much as she liked. To Tullaris, Hellebron was Atharti, the Lady of Desire, made flesh.
She walked slowly, languorously, down the steps towards him, crimson liquid dripping from her and pooling on the flagstones, flowing into cracks as it had this night every year for six millennia.
Tullaris had a sudden uneasy premonition that it would never do so again.
Hellebron stopped a hand’s breadth from him and looked up, triumph and lust mingling in her eyes.
‘My champion,’ she breathed. ‘So many pleasures for us to experience together again.’
‘Yes, my lady,’ he replied, breathing in the scent of her body mixed with the iron tang of blood. ‘And first among them, to kill by your side again. To watch you lick blood from the First Draich.’
She laughed, and it sent a chill down the Executioner’s spine.
‘Oh yes, my love. That and so much more. But first…’ She moved quicker than even Tullaris’s eye could follow, reaching to his belt and pulling his dagger from its sheath. In an instant, it was held to his throat. ‘What did they offer you, Tullaris? What did they offer you to kill me?’
‘My lady?’
She pressed the knife harder against his throat. He felt it break the skin, blood welling up and running down the edge of the blade.
‘We have always been honest with one another, Tullaris. For all our many faults, we have always been honest. Don’t change that now.’
‘They offered me the cult, my queen. And a place at Morathi’s side, ruling over Naggaroth.’
She flashed him a feral grin and brought the dagger to her mouth, delicately licking the fluid from it.
‘And yet I live. I was at your mercy and you spared me.’
‘Yes.’
‘Why?’
He looked into her eyes and what he saw there was the most terrifying thing he had ever seen. Confusion.
‘I did what my conscience told me to do, my queen.’
‘Your… conscience.’ She said the word as if it were foreign and unfamiliar. ‘Tullaris, I find myself at a loss. For six thousand years, you have stood by my side, and never did I expect to discover such a weakness in you.’
‘Weakness?’
‘You spared me, when you could have had power and influence beyond any druchii’s dreams. That is weakness. It is sickening.’
She turned away.
‘My lady–’
‘She was trying to tell me something.’ Hellebron knelt beside the third Drakirite’s severed head. ‘I would know what that was.’ She lifted the head and sauntered over the Cauldron, where she submerged it beneath the bubbling blood. After a few whispered incantations, she pulled it out.
And it screamed.
Gripping the head by the hair, Hellebron slapped it hard. It spun in a lazy arc, and teeth fell to the ground. It quieted, and its eyes focused on the Hag Queen.
‘What… What is happening?’ it squealed. ‘Pain. So much pain!’
‘And that pain is but a fraction of what I can make you feel,’ said Hellebron. ‘I will pull your spirit back from Ereth Khial’s clutches and inflict such tortures upon you that you cannot imagine them. Tell me what you were going to do and you might be spared that.’
‘I… I am a traitor to Morathi,’ the head said. ‘I came to warn you. She has seen what is to come, and the part you will play. She would see you dead before you can foul her plans. But her plans must fail, or we will all be doomed.’
‘Speak clearly, wretch,’ growled the Hag Queen.
‘The Rhana Dandra approaches. Doom is at hand, and gods walk the world once more.’
‘The one I killed in the streets said the same,’ said Tullaris.
‘Dreadbringer!’ The head tried to turn, to face him. Hellebron tilted it in his direction. It was decaying rapidly, flesh sloughing from a skull that looked pitted and worn. ‘You will play a role, Herald of Khaine. You will bring him into the world, though you will not live to see him.’ She paused. ‘When the Blade of Darkness is broken by what lies within, you will fall to the would-be king, and the Lord of Murder will rise anew.’
‘I am to die in Khaine’s service?’
‘That matters not,’ interrupted Hellebron. ‘What else, sorceress?’
‘The Witch King will burn and be no more, and the druchii with him. And you, Queen of Hags, you will be Bride of Khaine no longer. You will become Khorne’s mistress.’
It laughed, and the motion made the last of its flesh loosen and slip from the bone. The skull chattered for a moment before Hellebron shrieked in anger and flung it against the side of the Cauldron, where it shattered. She turned back to Tullaris.
‘Nonsense,’ she snapped. ‘A fantasy of Morathi’s design.’