‘Liberator-Prime?’ one of the other Stormcasts said. ‘Shall we accompany you?’
For a moment, Calys imagined a cohort of Stormcasts, tromping through an embattled city to deliver a child back to her father. She shook her head, smiling slightly. ‘No. Stay here. Hold position and continue repairing the defences. I will see her safely home.’ She paused, searching for a rationalisation they would understand. That she understood. ‘It is my duty to evacuate those who need it.’ She looked down at Elya. ‘Come, little sister. It is past time for all children to be asleep.’ She would find Tamacus and the others, and see to beginning the evacuation.
Elya looked up at her. ‘They say Elder Bones takes you when you die. Did he get Pharus?’
Calys felt a chill at the girl’s words. Elder Bones was the name some in Glymmsforge used for Nagash. ‘No,’ she said hurriedly. ‘No, he didn’t.’
And she hoped and prayed that it was so.
In the darkness of Shyish, Nagash looked upon his works and found them good. He stood, rising to his full height, shards of shadeglass falling from his shoulders. He heard the Ruinous Powers howling in fury as a cataclysm not of their making rippled out across the Mortal Realms. He drew some small satisfaction from their impotent rage, even as his own frustration boiled over.
‘It was imperfectly done,’ he intoned. He looked down. Arkhan the Black met his gaze. The Mortarch held an orruk skull in his hand. They stood in the ruins of Nagashizzar, among heaps and mounds of smouldering greenskin bones. Deathrattle work gangs numbering in the thousands laboured in silence to clear the avenues and rebuild what had been destroyed. Arkhan tossed the skull over his shoulder.
‘I have always been of a mind that success should be judged only on its occurrence,’ he said, his voice a hollow imitation of his master’s. ‘That it was done is enough, surely.’
‘Perhaps.’ Nagash looked up. His mind was measureless, a cosmic instrument of many parts. At any one time only small slivers of his true consciousness were active – facets of himself, moulded to conduct particular errands, while the bulk of his attentions were bent to more important matters.
Idly, his awareness passed across these lesser selves, following the amethyst threads that connected them all back to him. He listened as Bal-Nagash, the Black Child, soothed the final moments of a plague-touched mother and her infant, singing to them in a high, sweet voice. He watched as Nagash-Morr, the Reaper-King, manifested upon a battlefield in some forgotten corner of Shyish, wielding scythe-blade in defence of the living and the dead alike. There were darker aspects as well. Things of broken fury and madness, who reaped a steady toll of souls for his eternal legions.
All were him. All were one, whatever their name. Like Arkhan, they spoke with Nagash’s voice and acted on his design. And like Arkhan, they would grow stronger, thanks to the completion of his design. They – and he – would wax in might, until the realms bent beneath their weight. Until even the farthest stars dimmed and far worlds went silent.
He gazed at the sky and saw that it was filled with souls. A thousand – a million – more, innumerable, all spinning, falling, screaming. A flood of souls, descending together in an unceasing tide, drawn down by an irresistible force: him. No longer would they resist his call. No longer would other realms take what Shyish was owed.
To mortals, the changes he had enacted would be all but imperceptible. Their minds were not capable of processing such a dramatic metaphysical shift without help. Some would have an inkling of what had occurred. But they would not know for certain.
To Nagash, however, the change was obvious. Where once the realm had stretched like an endless field of wheat, awaiting the scythe, now it was a whirlpool. A maelstrom of lands and lives, stretching down, down to Nagashizzar and the Black Pyramid. An abyss deeper than time, where even death might die.
‘Look, Arkhan… A void is gnawing at the sky. An absence – an unlight. The circle of time is broken all out of joint, and the sun has become as a black tunnel. The sky becomes an inverted mockery of itself – a shadeglass reflection.’ Nagash reached upwards, as if to touch the sun. ‘I have made it so. I have willed it. This realm is mine. It is me. Sigmar might be the stars, but I am the darkness that stretches between them. All things recede into me, as motes of light dwindle in the black.’ He looked down at Arkhan. ‘I have come into my inheritance at last.’
‘You have cracked open the skies, master. Not just here. The other gods–’
‘There are no other gods before me, my servant. Merely falsehoods, masquerading as divinity. Life, destruction, light, shadow… What are these things but preludes to the inevitable? I am become the totality of existence. And I will cast my light upon all these realms.’ He lowered his hand. ‘I have bent the world, my servant, and made it a shape more to my liking.’
‘You have made it a nadir,’ Arkhan said softly. The Mortarch looked around in what might have been wonder, or perhaps awe. ‘We are truly the lowest point of the Mortal Realms now. The bottom of a well of bones.’
‘Yes.’
Nagash thrust aside a shattered pillar with less effort than a man might have used to swat a fly. He felt swollen – bloated – with the energies he’d called up. They would fade, in time, but for the moment, he was supreme. It was just as well that the Howlers in the Wastes had fled back to their own realms. He might have been tempted to match his newfound strength against theirs in a battle that surely would have compounded the cataclysm.
‘Was this destruction what you intended, my lord?’
‘No. The transformation was to have been silent. The false gods would have been none the wiser, if my formulas had not been altered by the presence of intruders. Now, as you said, they will see and know what I have done.’
‘Given what has been unleashed I should hope so. Otherwise they are blind.’
Nagash looked down at his Mortarch. ‘Humour?’
Arkhan looked up. ‘It seemed appropriate, given the situation.’
Nagash studied him for a moment. ‘Very well.’ He looked up. ‘The outer wave of the cataclysm will have reached even the outermost edge of Azyr by now. Sigmar will know what I have done.’
‘You sound pleased.’
‘I am. Despite my earlier intentions, I find that I wish him to know. I want the betrayer to see that I am at last supreme, in my realm. He is a fleck of starlight, an echo of thunder, but I am Shyish itself. I am death, and death’s shadow. All things come to me eventually. Even gods.’ He turned, staring across the wastes. ‘But for now, I will be content in retaking my realm at last. The squatters will be driven from the temples, and the last underworlds bound to my will.’
‘They will try to stop you.’
‘Let them. Let Sigmar himself come and meet me in battle once more.’ Nagash snatched up a block of shadeglass and tore it in two. He cast the pieces aside. ‘I will break him. I will snuff the stars themselves, if I wish. The God-King will not stand against me.’
‘It is not Sigmar that concerns me, my lord.’
Nagash drew himself to his full height. ‘Sigmar is the only concern. The Ruinous Powers are but vermin, clustered at the threshold of my realm. I will deal with them as and when they choose to pit their wiles against mine. But Sigmar…’ Nagash touched his skull. He remembered things, sometimes. Events that had not happened, or rather, had happened to another him, in another turn of the universal wheel.
In his mind’s eye, he saw a flash of gold and felt the impact – a hammer, wielded by one who was not yet a god, but would be. He felt his skull shiver to fragments and his spirit fly free, seeking escape from the reverberations of that terrible blow. He heard a voice then. The same voice he had heard at the dawn of the Age of Myth, when he had been freed from his mountain-cairn. A hand, blazing like the heart of a star, had plucked him from his cage of eternal night. The one who had freed him, fought beside him… betrayed him.