‘All is lost, then,’ she said.
‘No, you were right – the Emperor is master. While he remains lost, we cannot stand. I go to find him.’
Margrit’s expression brightened into an almost childlike hope. ‘You know where he is?’
‘He is coming, sister. The stars foretell it, and the elements gather to witness it.’ Martak had no idea whether this was true. All he had to go on were his dreams, which had been getting more vivid with every sleepless night. He had dismissed them for too long, and knew now that he should have listened to the whispered voices much earlier. ‘It will not be easy, but yours will be the harder road. I can give you no promise the Reiksmarshal will act. I would stay, if I could, but...’ He struggled for the words. ‘This is not my place.’
Margrit nodded, accepting what he told her. ‘Then you can give me no sign.’
Martak racked his mind for something that would appeal to her. ‘When the hour is darkest,’ he said, hoping he sounded vaguely plausible, ‘look to the heavens above the Imperial Palace. Look for the sign of Sigmar reborn.’ It was poor stuff, this deception and fakery, but it was all he had. ‘In advance of that, endure, sister. Endure for as long as you are able.’
Margrit looked satisfied, and Martak found himself marvelling once again at her quiet resolve. Given the tiniest sliver of hope, she would hold fast to her station until the very ending of the world. If the Empire deserved any kind of salvation, it was for the ones like her – the faithful, the decent, the selfless.
‘Do not be long gone, Patriarch,’ Margrit said. ‘I liked the colleges better with a wolf at the helm.’
Martak laughed, and bowed at the compliment. He would have been happy betting that Gelt had never walked the streets in the shadow of the temple. ‘Go with Shallya, sister,’ he said, and lifted his hands from the Globe. Margrit’s image rippled into nothing, and the runes on the sphere faded back to blank bronze.
Back in the realm of the senses, Martak looked about him. His chamber looked as if an animal had got in and destroyed everything in its frantic efforts to escape again. Perhaps that was not so far from the truth.
He walked over to the heavy oak door and pulled it open. The corridor outside was empty, and he had to walk through two more antechambers before he found an official. The servant, wearing a crimson tunic marked with the sign of the griffon, looked startled to see the Supreme Patriarch back on the prowl.
‘My lord?’ he asked, shrinking from Martak’s malodorous presence.
‘Send this to the Reiksmarshal’s office immediately,’ said Martak, handing over the ink-stained letter. ‘Ensure that it is placed before him at the first occasion – he will want to read it.’
The servant handled the letter nervously, as if it might be a mortar primed to go off in his hands. ‘Very well, my lord. Where shall I tell him he may find you?’
Martak snorted. ‘Find me? He’ll have trouble.’ He looked around him. The corridors and chambers of the Palace were still mostly a mystery to him, a vast web of tunnels and spirals and shafts and towers. ‘But you can help me with one small thing.’
The servant looked up expectantly. Martak smiled darkly, already enjoying the thought of what he was going to do.
‘Tell me,’ he said, ‘what is the quickest path to the Imperial Menagerie?’
THIRTEEN
The wind was bitter and never-ending, driving down from the high peaks with the shrieks of fell voices echoing in its wake. The skies had turned from a screen of blank grey into a churned mass of violent thunderheads, surging and boiling as if some immeasurably vast pair of hands was tearing the heavens apart.
As Leoncoeur rode up to the head of the pass, wrapped in his cloak, the deluge drummed on the rocks around him. Rivulets poured down from the rising land ahead, slushing and bubbling as the torrent picked up pace, and the stony track up to the entrance to Axebite Pass was now little more than a stream of gushing water.
Ahead of the Bretonnian column reared the mighty peaks of the Grey Mountains, piled up into the tortured sky in ranked visions of granite-headed immensity. To Leoncoeur’s left soared the double-headed summit of Talareaux, called Graugeleitet by the Imperials. To his right was the colossal bulk of Findumonde, which the Empire dwellers called Iceheart. Both summits were lost in the haze of storms.
Gales were always strong in the passes, but those during this passage had been unreasonably ferocious. Baggage wains and valuable warhorses had been washed away on the precipitous pathways, and at times every footfall had been treacherous. Progress had slowed to a grim crawl. Each night, Leoncoeur had sat sullenly around the campfires with his lieutenants, noting the growing gap between where they were and where they wanted to be.
Still, they had persevered. The highlands had slowly fallen behind, replaced by the jagged, hard country of the mountains proper. The last of the pasture disappeared, replaced by a stone-land of sheer, hard-edged severity. The rain stung like ice, and the wind whipped it into wicked eddies, creeping into every fold of fabric and armour-joint.
The raw enthusiasm of the crusade was hard to sustain in such conditions. Battered by the ferocity of the elements, the knights kept their dripping heads low, saying little. The hundreds of peasant workers in the baggage train suffered worse, their coarse woollen garments offering little protection, and many succumbed during the frozen nights, left behind in scratched, shallow graves by the roadside.
As the head of the pass loomed before them at last, Leoncoeur called a halt. He peered ahead towards the high entrance. Slushy snow lay in grey-white drifts higher up, draped across the striated shoulders of the mountains. The winding road ahead was overlooked by near-vertical cliffs of broken-edged stone, narrowing near the summit to a gap of less than thirty feet across.
His eyes narrowed. He sniffed. It was near-impossible to sense much in the shifting gales, but something registered. Something he felt he ought to recognise.
Jhared drew alongside him. Of all of them, the flame-haired knight had retained his humours the best, but even he looked windswept and rain-soaked. ‘Why are we halting, lord?’ he asked, shivering as the driving sleet bounced from him.
‘Can you hear it?’ asked Leoncoeur, inclining his head a little.
Jhared listened, then shook his head.
Leoncoeur was about to speak again, when a hard, massed roar suddenly broke out from up ahead.
Every knight in the entourage knew that sound – it had been engraved on their minds from their earliest days. The ancestral enemies of the Bretonnians could be purged, burned and driven back a thousand times, but they would always come back.
‘To arms!’ cried Leoncoeur, drawing his sword in a spray of rain.
The column’s vanguard formed up immediately, kicking their horses into a line and drawing weapons. Each knight carried a heavy-bladed broadsword, and they threw back their cloaks to expose moisture-slick breastplates marked with the livery of their houses.
Before the knights could charge, the gorge before them filled with what looked like a rolling tide of earth and rubble. It was accompanied by throaty bellows of challenge, rising quickly to a deafening crescendo that ripped through the scything curtains of sleet.
‘Charge!’ roared Leoncoeur, digging his spurs into his steed’s flanks.
With a hoarse battle-cry, the Bretonnian vanguard surged along the throat of the gorge, picking up speed rapidly despite the treacherous footing. Accelerating to the gallop, ten horses abreast, they thundered towards the landslide hurtling towards them.
Except that it was no landslide. A host of green-skinned monsters had burst from cover, their red eyes blazing with fury. The rubble that came with them was flung from their backs as they emerged from the ambush, and stones the size of fists thunked and rolled about them. There must have been hundreds of orcs before them, all jostling and tearing down the funnel of the gorge, sliding on the slippery rock and trampling their own kind like cattle on a stampede.