‘Thank your Sigmar we need you in saddle, levubiytsa!’ said Urska with a savage elbow to Kurt’s ribs. ‘That fat horse of yours be in my pot by now if not.’
‘Eat a grain-fed horse?’ spat Wrodzik, pounding a massive fist against his chest. ‘Such fare’s taste is too thin. Give me grass-fed meat. More blood in it to make a man strong.’
‘Then you must have eaten a whole herd of long-horns,’ shouted Tey-Muraz.
Wrodzik leaned over the fire and said, ‘Aye, and every time I bed your wife she feeds me another from your herd.’
Tey-Muraz bellowed with laughter and kicked a burning branch from the fire. It landed in a flurry of sparks on Wrodzik’s lap, who leapt into the air and hurled it away with windmilling arms. It bounced through a krug around another fire, and a pair of bare-chested warriors leapt to their feet, hurling a string of curses.
‘Your mothers know you speak this way?’ yelled Wrodzik to the Ungol riders, standing to make an obscene gesture with his groin and both hands.
‘I never expected to see this again,’ said Sofia.
‘See what?’ asked Kurt, as the boyarin began a furiously vulgar argument with the neighbouring krug.
‘This,’ said Sofia. ‘We’ve seen so much misery I thought it would be impossible for these men to know mirth again.’
‘It’s because you’re all mad,’ said Kurt. ‘Why else would you live here?’
‘This is our home,’ snapped Ryurik, before correcting himself. ‘This was our home.’
‘No, Ryurik, you were right the first time,’ said Sofia, and the argument with the other krug ceased instantly as her voice echoed throughout the canyon. ‘This is our home, and it always will be, no matter what comes to pass. That is what those from other lands will never understand about us. When you live every day in the shadow of death, every moment of life stolen from from its jaws is sweeter than honey. When all you have can be taken away in a heartbeat, every breath is precious, every laugh a gift, every moment of love a miracle.’
‘If that is so, then why are you all possessed of insane cheer or consumed by grim fatalism?’ said Kurt, putting his hands up to show he intended no insult.
Sofia looked at the boyarin to answer Kurt’s question, and it was left to Tey-Muraz to give the only possible reply.
The rotamaster shrugged and said, ‘This is Kislev.’
Feydaj rode a night-scaled steed with nuggets of garnet fire for eyes. Its skin rippled like the tar pools of Troll Country and its breath was straight from the Fly Lord’s crevice.
He alone rode, for the forest beasts needed no steeds. The horned packs of disgusting, furred flesh ran the steppe with a feverish hunger for mortal meat. As great a host as it had become, it galled Feydaj to be the master of such creatures.
Once he had been hetzar to a warhost whose bloody rampages were known and feared across the wasteland. The utter rout of that host on the banks of the Lynsk at the hands of Tzar Boris the Red had all but ended Feydaj’s rise to power.
The Everchosen was wrathfully unforgiving of failure.
But he was not stupid or wasteful.
Dozens of tribes were bloodsworn to the hetzar’s sword, and word had reached the Everchosen that Feydaj had cut the Tzar from his monstrous bear at the battle’s end. Such things had currency, and to execute Feydaj would have caused more problems than it would have solved.
His life was spared, but he could not entirely escape punishment. The Everchosen threw him to the beasts and Hetzar Feydaj became the Outcast, earning the name Ghur-Tartail among the tribesmen.
They traversed a landscape blessed by the touch of the Dark Gods, following the unmistakable trail of the Ice Queen and her riders. The wretched turnskin beast claimed to have seen around a thousand riders. That it had once been human gave the account some credence. Feydaj wouldn’t have trusted one born a beast to know such numbers.
Dark clouds rolled overhead like pyre smoke, bearing ash and ice from the Changing Lands. Even if the Everchosen’s warriors were defeated, the southlands would never be the same. Sheets of polluted rain turned the steppe to foetid black mud, but it slowed them not at all. The howls and brays of the beasts were roared into the unending storms, and with each moonrise, their ranks were swelled by yet more.
There were packs of bull-headed minotaurs, stamping herds of horn-blowing centigors and monsters so blessed by the changing power of the gods that they could be likened to no beast known by man. Word of the Ice Queen was spreading through the steppe, and drew the beasts like fresh-killed meat. Her frigid sorcery had slain legions of their kind, and they were hungry for her death.
Each night the beastherds gathered to brawl and feast around the craggy menhir borne by the cyclopean Bale-eye. They burned the weakest members of the herd as offerings to the lurid glow of the dark moon. By nightfall of the sixth day, less than two days’ march from the coast, Feydaj rode at the head of more than ten thousand beasts.
Nor were such malformed creatures the only servants of the gods to heed their guttural cries. Though Feydaj never saw them, he felt towering presences growing within the dark stormclouds, things of immense power that waited for their prey to reveal itself before ripping a path into the earthly realm. He felt them as a fire behind the eyes, a sourness in his belly and unrest within his flesh.
The eyes of the gods had turned this way and they sent their most powerful servants to bear witness. Victory would earn their favour and a return to the forefront of this war.
He did not dare think of the consequences of failure.
The sun had just reached its zenith when Erengrad came into sight. Weeks had passed since reavers had burned the city, yet a pall of shadow still hung over it like a shroud. Despite reaching Kislev’s western coast, Sofia felt a cold sliver of dread enter her heart.
The Tzarina’s column of riders followed the road towards what had once been the city’s eastern gate, but was now a smashed breach in a toppled barbican. High walls of salt-pitted stone curled around the headland and the first scouts to approach the city thought its walls still defended.
Riding closer, they saw only the dead standing sentinel over Erengrad, a legion of corpses impaled on long spears and lifted high to better see their homeland’s destruction. Thousands more lay in fly-blown drifts, filling the ditch at the wall’s base.
‘The city died hard,’ said Kurt with a shiver that had little to do with the thunderstorm at their back, blowing in against the wind from the ocean.
‘That supposed to make us feel better, levubiytsa?’ said Tey-Muraz, his brow thunderous.
Kurt met his unflinching gaze. ‘It means they fought to the bitter end, that even when all hope was lost they did not surrender. So, yes, it ought to make you feel better that your countrymen fought with such bravery.’
Tey-Muraz nodded curtly and Sofia saw tears in his eyes.
‘You think Elena Yevschenko lives?’ asked Wrodzik.
Tey-Muraz wiped his eyes and shook his head. ‘She’s dead.’
‘You know this how?’ asked Urska Pysanka.
‘Because she was my cousin and she was a fighter,’ said Tey-Muraz, waving to the broken city walls. ‘Levubiytsa is right, even one-armed, Elena would have fought for her city. And so she will be dead.’
The others nodded at Tey-Muraz’s logic.
Sofia held tight to Miska, who dozed with her face pressed to Kurt’s back. With the city in sight, a strange mood overtook the riders, as though a long-dreaded fate had finally arrived and found to be less fearful than had been imagined.
The Tzarina was first to enter the city, her mount now entirely frost white and shedding motes of ice with every step. Its eyes were pearlescent, and its mane had grown long with streamers of ice. Urska Pysanka and Wrodzik flanked the queen, with Tey-Muraz and Kurt forming the wings of a ‘V’ behind her.