The bloodletters responded, coming for him like flies to spoiled meat. He spun, parried and thrust, using their numbers and his speed to his advantage. As he fought, he heard again the sound of Tyrion’s blade striking home, and the soft whisper of Eldyra’s essence fading. Again and again, he saw it, heard it, felt it, and his rage grew.
He knew why she had done it. Indeed, he was surprised she hadn’t done it herself. But he did not understand, and he cursed himself for a fool. If he had not taken her into the grove, then she would have lived. Unhappily, perhaps, but she would not have tossed away her life to no purpose. That, in the end, he could not forgive.
Fool, he thought, you had the power to make a difference. The power to set your world right, and instead you threw it away and for what – honour? Disgust? Fear? Mannfred should have known better than to allow his servants to turn Eldyra and give her their dark gift. Elves were too fragile, at their core. Too enamoured of their life as it was, to see the glory in becoming something else. Like the dwarfs, they were stagnant, trapped in themselves.
Thinking of Mannfred, he wondered where his student had fled to. He had set the Drakenhof Templars on his trail, but Mannfred had eluded them all. Now he was loose in the world, doing who knew what. I wish you well, boy. May you at last have learned something from your mistakes.
Vlad bent backwards with serpentine ease, avoiding the sweep of a black blade. He righted himself and drove his sword home, impaling the daemon. It folded over his arm, clawing at him weakly. He shoved it aside with a disdainful sniff.
He heard the screech of metal on metal and turned to see another of his former protégés, Balthasar Gelt, fighting side by side with Lileath. They had joined their magics, unleashing a molten storm of metal on the pack of flesh hounds bounding towards them. Several of the creatures were torn apart by the storm, but still more made it through, the brass collars about their necks glowing white hot. One of the slavering hounds leapt for the former goddess, jaws wide. Its pounce knocked her sprawling, and Gelt was too distracted to lend aid.
Vlad was at her side in an instant. He snatched the daemon from the air and dashed it down. As it struggled to right itself, he thrust his blade through its throat. He tore the sword free and spun, slashing a second hound in two in a single motion. As one the remaining hounds bayed and loped towards him, ignoring Gelt and the elf-woman, as Vlad had hoped.
He dispatched them efficiently and quickly, moving among them like a bolt of dark lightning. Wherever he struck, a flesh hound fell dead. When the last sank down with a querulous whine, he stepped back, and helped Lileath to her feet.
‘You… saved me,’ she said.
‘One does what one can, in these trying times,’ Vlad said. He inclined his head to Gelt. ‘And are we not allies? Sworn to defend one another, against a common foe?’
‘And what about your master?’ Gelt said. The wizard swung his staff out in an arc and the air was filled with glittering shards of silver, which plucked a bevy of bloodletters off their feet and sent them crashing down some distance away. Vlad turned.
Nagash stood alone, at the heart of a writhing amethyst vortex, surrounded by heaps and piles of withered, steaming daemon corpses. Fragments of broken bone and torn flesh swirled about him, dancing upon the unnatural winds he had called into being. The air about him was thick with wailing spirits, and at his merest gesture, daemons fell.
‘Nagash needs no aid,’ Vlad said, with a shrug.
‘No,’ Lileath murmured. She looked pale, and Vlad could smell the fear on both her and Gelt. Even his fellow Incarnates, it seemed, were not immune to the horror that was the Undying King. ‘Nor is he alone in that.’ She looked up. Vlad followed her gaze.
Above them, Malekith’s black dragon twisted through the air, breathing dark, poisonous fumes wherever daemons clustered. And where the dragon’s shadow touched, blackfire constructs in the shape of Malekith himself rose to howl across the glade, immolating any creature which stood against them.
Then the air was stirred by thunder and heat, and Vlad could taste the coppery tang of blood in his throat as roaring shapes, larger than any bloodletter, dropped towards the glade from above, crashing down like the fists of Khorne himself. Vlad was nearly knocked from his feet by the force of their arrival. Lileath fell with a cry, and Gelt was only able to remain standing thanks to the support of his staff. ‘Bloodthirsters,’ the wizard said, as Vlad hauled Lileath to her feet once more. The wizard whistled sharply, and the sound was answered by a shrill whinny as his pegasus darted through the upper reaches of the glade.
‘More than that,’ Lileath hissed. ‘It is the Blood Hunt – bloodthirsters of the Third Host.’
‘You say that as if I should care,’ Vlad said. ‘One daemon is much the same as another.’
‘The same could be said of vampires,’ Lileath said.
Vlad looked at her. He smiled. ‘I stand corrected. I– Look out!’ He caught hold of her and jerked her aside as Caradryan’s firebird crashed down into the glade, its body entangled in the whip of one of the bloodthirsters. The Incarnate of Fire was hurled from the saddle, and skidded through the carnage.
‘One side,’ Gelt said. The wizard caught hold of his pegasus’s mane and hauled himself into the saddle as the animal galloped past Vlad and Lileath. With a snap of its great wings, the pegasus thrust itself into the air and hurtled towards the fallen Incarnate, even as daemons pressed close about him. Vlad was tempted to join Gelt in his rescue attempt, but there were enemies aplenty, closer to hand.
Besides which, it was clear enough to him that Gelt had matters under control. The wizard cast chains of gold and air about the bloodthirsters as they descended on his fellow Incarnate, and held them back through sheer force of will. Caradryan rose to his feet, halberd in hand, and flames rose with him, reaching out to incinerate the roaring daemons where they struggled against Gelt’s magics.
Vlad stepped back as a bloodletter lunged for him. The creatures reminded him of the more feral of his kind, all brute instinct and no skill or finesse. Back to back with Lileath, his sword reaped a deadly toll on the bloodletters that careened towards him without an ounce of self-preservation between them. Lileath thrust out her hand and bolts of cold moonlight speared forth, causing daemonic flesh to smoulder and sear where it touched.
‘Well struck, my lady,’ Vlad laughed. ‘We might win the day yet!’
‘We are outmatched, brother,’ Teclis said, as he caught a daemon’s blade on his staff and forced it aside. As the creature staggered, off balance, he drove his sword into its side and angled the blade to catch its foul heart. The creature came apart like a fire-blackened log as he pulled his sword free. His arm ached from the force of the blow, and sweat stung his eyes. ‘There are too many of them,’ he panted. He couldn’t catch his breath.
‘And what would you have me do? I’m killing them as fast as I can,’ Tyrion snapped. He beheaded a bloodletter with a swipe of his sword and turned, pressing two fingers to his mouth. He whistled sharply.
‘Calling for your steed, then? Planning to leave us so soon?’ Malekith growled. ‘I never thought you a coward, whatever else you were.’ Shadow tendrils lanced from the Eternity King’s form and speared a pack of howling flesh hounds as they loped up the dais.
‘No – he’s right,’ Teclis said, forcing himself to stand up straight. ‘There are few of us, and many of them. We must keep moving and spread out, unless we wish to be overwhelmed. Make them divide their forces, and draw them to the strongest Incarnates. We will destroy them piecemeal.’