Ryurik Tsarev had travelled to the city of Kislev from Erengrad in the wake of the Year That No One Forgets with dreams of becoming great a recounter of history. He sought veterans of Mazhorord and Urszebya, of Praag and Voltsara, Chernozavtra and Bolgasgrad. He had hoped to craft a great work to rival that of Friederich ‘Old’ Weirde of Altdorf, Gottimer, Ocveld the Elder or even the great Anspracht of Nuln himself.
Ryurik arrived at a time when all men wanted to do was forget war, to escape the bloodshed they had endured and the terrors they yet suffered. No one would talk to him, and the little money he had saved from his time as keeper of shipping manifests in Erengrad soon dried up.
Sofia had met Ryurik within the forsaken walls of the Lubjanko, a grim edifice built by Tzar Alexis to care for those wounded in the Great War Against Chaos. The building had long since fallen from that noble purpose, becoming instead a nightmarish gaol where the wretched, the mad and the crippled went to die.
Ruryik had ventured within the Lubjanko’s grim walls a few times, hoping to secure testimony from a man who claimed to have seen Surtha Lenk die. It had been a ruse, and the man overpowered the young writer, leaving him chained to a wall before walking away with new clothes and a stolen identity.
The Lubjanko’s uncaring warders ignored Ruryik’s protestations of his true identity and sealed him in with the madmen. Four months later, upon being called to the Lubjanko to care for a birthing lunatic, Sofia had come upon the young scribe, imploring her to heed his words. Sofia was well used to the cunning of the Lubjanko’s denizens, but something in the earnest nature of the lad’s desperation rang true.
She swiftly discovered the truth of Ryurik’s tale and had him released to her care. As he convalesced, she learned of his ambitions to write, and put him to work in cataloguing her healing methods, the ingredients and mixes of her poultices and instructional procedures for physicians.
Ryurik would not compose a historical work, but an authoritative medical text, and soon became an indispensable asset to Sofia and her practising of medicine within the city.
‘How did you get here, Ryurik?’ asked Sofia, incredulous. ‘And you, Kurt? I never expected to see either of you again.’
Kurt removed his sword belt and propped the weapon against the walls of the cave. Ryurik rose and began unbuckling the straps and hooks holding the knight’s armour in place.
‘I came to Kislev to find you,’ said Kurt. ‘When we received word of the Starovoiora pulk’s defeat, I rode from Middenheim and came north to Kislev.’
‘You crossed the Auric Bastion? Why?’ asked Sofia as Miska knelt beside the fire to warm her hands. The flames danced in her grey eyes.
‘Because Kaspar would have wanted me to,’ said Kurt, nodding towards the smooth blue stone wrapped in a web of silver wire that hung on a thin chain around her neck.
Sofia’s hand closed on the pendant as a wave of memory all but overwhelmed her. She’d given it to Kaspar and asked him to keep it next to his heart in the coming battle. Kurt had later returned it to her, together with Kaspar’s final words.
‘I understand, but how did you find me?’
‘I arrived at Kislev’s gates just before the Zar’s hordes invaded the city,’ explained Kurt, shrugging off his mail shirt and undoing the corded ties of his undershirt. ‘I found your home, together with Master Tsarev here, who told me you’d travelled into the western oblast to return home. For the price of a retelling of Urszebya and my campaigns in Araby, I was able to secure his services as a guide to the Valencik Stanitsa.’
‘It’s gone, Mistress Sofia,’ said Ryurik. ‘We reached it a week ago, but the northmen had already burned it and killed everyone within.’
‘I know,’ she said, sitting down by the fire and letting the exhaustion and fear of the last weeks pour out of her. ‘I mean, I didn’t know, we hadn’t reached it yet, but I knew. How could it be otherwise?’
Kurt knelt beside her and put a hand on her shoulder.
‘I’m sorry, Sofia,’ he said.
‘Kislev is no more, is it, Kurt?’ asked Sofia.
Kurt nodded, his face etched with pain. He didn’t truly understand Kislev, not like its people did, but he had come to love the land of the steppe and had shed blood in its defence.
‘And the Empire?’ said Sofia. ‘It rallies? The Emperor’s armies will defeat the northmen, won’t they?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Kurt. ‘I really don’t know.’
The herd’s bigger beasts called him No-Horn-Turnskin as an insult, but when the Chaos moon had shone upon the herdstone, it had told him his true name that night in a dream: Khar-zagor. Which in the squealing brays of the ungors meant Beast-cunning.
It was a name aptly-earned as he lay on his pale-furred belly overlooking the hidden valley and the armoured men filling it. More riders than he had ever seen, even when he had hunted as a young man and watched the rotas ride madly from the log walls of his stanitsa. He saw many tents, many horses and many weapons. An army. Nothing to trouble the warhosts of the gods or the even the beast herds, but an army nonetheless. Perhaps the last army left in Kislev.
Kislev.
That was what men called this land, what he had once called it, but a charnel house was unworthy of a name. The cities of shaped stone and felled timber were aflame, its people meat for the herdfeasts.
Driven from his home by his family when he could no longer disguise his developing pelt and budding horns, Khar-zagor had found a place in the great herd of the Lightning Crags: distant peaks where monsters from the beginning of the world were said to slumber until the time of its ending was at hand.
The mountains had toppled as the earth cracked open and scaled titans, more powerful than dragons and taller than giants, climbed from lava-spewing crevasses. A hurricane of dark winds had blown in from the Northern Wastes to herald their rebirth and the gods’ decree that the world was at an end.
Khar-zagor would watch it burn.
The tribal host of chosen warriors marched south under the bale-banner of the gods’ last and greatest champion, leaving the beasts to pick the earth’s carcass clean.
Khar-zagor’s intimate knowledge of the huntsmen’s secret paths made him invaluable as a scout and tracker, and he had led the Outcast’s ravager packs to every last group of scrawny survivors. This was the sixth such group Khar-zagor had tracked, and Ungrol Four-horn had assured him of the gods’ blessing for the meat he found for the herds.
He’d caught the riders’ scent moments before they charged with their wing-banners screaming and their glittering lances dipped. He’d fled into the storm and left the gors to die. What good could he have done with his looted recurve bow and serrated gutting knife?
Lying motionless in the mud, he’d heard the riders speak of their war-leader, the mighty she-champion the Outcast forever sought, and when they had left, Khar-zagor dug himself from concealment. He’d gorged himself on the glut of warm meat before following their overladen horses through the oblast to this hidden place, leaving a spoor trail of urine even a wine-sodden centigor could follow.
The smoke from below carried the smell of roasting meat, and the desire to feast was almost overwhelming, but he fought down the hunger in his belly. The Outcast was always railing against his fate and seeking a way to return to his former glory, and what better way was there to earn the eye of the gods than to slay the enemy’s war-leader?
The beastherd outnumbered this army many times over, and Ungrol Four-horn would be sure to offer Khar-zagor first cut of the meat. His mouth filled with hot saliva at the thought of flesh clawed from the bone.