The Curse of the Phoenix Crown

by C. L. Werner

  His fellow asur thought so too. They’d urged him to strike back, to carry the fight back to the dwarfs, to reclaim the crown whatever the cost. However suicidal the effort, reclaiming the crown of the Phoenix Kings was worthy of the effort.

  Thoriol had almost laughed at that. The Phoenix Crown was naught but a symbol, the symbol of the ten kingdoms and Ulthuan. What good was the symbol if what it represented were brought to ruin?

  The prince turned from his last view of Tor Alessi and faced the emissary who had journeyed from Lothern to bring tidings to Caledor that his kingdom was under attack. Not the far-flung colonies of the wilderness but the homeland itself.

  When the galley from Ulthuan encountered refugee ships fleeing out to sea, when it found Tor Alessi being evacuated, the vessel had brought about and flown the pennant of Caledor’s steward. The hulking troop ship Thoriol had embarked upon came about and rendezvoused with the galley, taking aboard the messenger from Lothern. The prince was surprised to find that the king’s steward had come in person. Lord Caradryel of House Reveniol.

  ‘Can we return in time?’ Thoriol asked the steward, not for the first time.

  Caradryel’s face was grim. ‘I don’t know,’ he confessed. ‘There are certainly more optimistic ways to describe the situation, courtly words I could employ to downplay the catastrophe, but I respect you too much for such games. Besides, there isn’t time for the usual courtesies.’

  ‘Malekith.’ Thoriol hissed the name, his fingers digging into his palms. It had been centuries since the usurper had dared threaten the shores of Ulthuan. The menace posed by him and his druchii traitors had seemed a dwindling one, as they faded from a renegade nation to small cabals of pirates and marauders. The asur had hounded them ever deeper into the wilds of Naggaroth, a land of such malignant hostility that it seemed nothing could survive there.

  Caradryel nodded. ‘The druchii have survived. No, more than that. In their own twisted way they have flourished in the Land of Chill. Their numbers have grown. They’ve raised new generations of traitors out in the wilds.’

  ‘While we fought the dwarfs, Malekith was watching and waiting,’ Thoriol said. ‘He feigned weakness, letting us think him beaten. All the while he was raising new armies in secret, biding his time until Ulthuan was fully engaged against the dawi. Then, like a slinking serpent, the host of Naggaroth struck our homeland.’

  ‘The druchii have raised the fortress of Anlec once more with their foul magics,’ Caradryel said. ‘They have landed warriors on the Blighted Isle. Even the loudest voices crying for calm, claiming these are naught but pirates, have been forced to admit it is a full-out invasion.’ Caradryel fingered the ring he wore, the emblem of the Phoenix King emblazoned upon it. ‘When we need him most, Caledor is lost to us. Who will lead the asur into battle without him? Who will stand up to the malice of Naggaroth?’

  Thoriol shook his head. ‘My uncle wasn’t the kind to lead anyone. He could command, he could coerce and demand, but he couldn’t lead. All his life he lived in the shadow of my grandfather and, in the end, it was as a shadow of my grandfather he died. A warrior like him has courage and he has determination, but he lacks the vision and the wisdom to be a conqueror.’

  ‘You are wiser than your uncle,’ Caradryel said. ‘You have his courage, but you have your father’s wisdom.’

  ‘Do I?’ Thoriol asked. ‘Even if I were certain, even if I were everything you believe me to be, I couldn’t take the crown. The people would see me as naught but my uncle’s shadow. They would see in me the echo of the failures that brought us to this calamity. Ulthuan needs a new king to lead her, not Caledor III. I wonder if there isn’t a curse against the blood of House Tor Caled, if the Witch King’s spite hasn’t infected our souls and made us poisonous to all we hold dear.’

  ‘Fear the things you know and let the unknown attend itself,’ Caradryel advised. ‘Ulthuan needs a king. We need the unity and determinacy that only a king can provide.’

  ‘I agree,’ Thoriol said, smiling as he set his hand on Caradryel’s shoulder. ‘That is why when we return to Ulthuan I shall advise the Council of Princes, and any others who might care to listen, that in these dark times we need a king who can unite, not simply one who can win battles. I will advise them that there is only one highborn to my knowledge who can bring together the factions and divisions in our society that were caused by my uncle. That asur is you, Caradryel. You have the confidence of my mother and her supporters, but as my uncle’s steward you will also have the loyalty of the late king’s court.’

  The colour drained out of Caradryel’s face. He was clearly horrified by the prospect. ‘But… I… I am no king.’

  ‘That is why you must become one,’ Thoriol said. ‘It is those who covet the crown most who are least worthy of it.’ Bitterness gripped the prince’s features. ‘But you’ll need a new crown. Leave the old one to the dwarfs. Let its loss be a lesson to our people that pride has its price.’

  Morgrim tipped his tankard as a regiment of axemen passed him in the street. A bit of the amber liquid sloshed down the side of the pewter cup, spilling onto his boots. The thane frowned as he considered the wasted ale. Before capturing the elgi city, the dawi warriors had ransacked their own baggage train, fortifying themselves with beer until the stores were all but depleted. Too many novices among the army – they thought to replenish the stores with what they captured from the elves. Morgrim hoped they had a taste for thin elven wines, otherwise it was going to be a terribly dry march back to the Karaz Ankor.

  When the axemen passed, Morgrim continued his march towards the harbour. Every step he looked at the crumbling splendour of Tor Alessi. More than simply the ruin of war, the city seemed to be visibly withering before his eyes. The beauty and lustre of its palaces and pavilions were wilting, unable to suffer the harsh glow of conquest. Morgrim had seen it happen before, in the other cities the dwarfs had conquered. Once the elgi were gone, they seemed to take with them the essence of the places they’d built. The glamour, the wondrous enchantment dissipated. It almost seemed that Tor Alessi was ageing in front of him. Soon it would be just another lifeless, haunted place, like Oeragor and the others. Even if the dwarfs wanted to preserve them, to keep the elgi cities for their own, they wouldn’t be able to stop the decay. When the last elf abandoned them, the soul was cut from their cities, leaving behind only a dead shell.

  Morgrim reached the end of the street, the harbour opening out before him. A great throng of dawi warriors was gathered about the docks. Earlier this district had echoed with cheers and catcalls, the boisterous revelry of the victorious. Now, however, there was only a sombre silence. The last of the elf ships was pulling out into the bay, her sails unfurled to catch the wind that would speed her back to her island kingdom.

  The dwarf who’d been christened Elgidum could readily appreciate the mood of the warriors. The thrill of victory was leaving them. As they watched that last elf ship depart, a new thought had entered their minds. Perhaps it had occurred to some of them before, but for many of them it was the first time they’d been forced to confront the question. The war was over – what would they do now? Many of these warriors had been born and raised in conflict; they knew nothing else. So long had they been focused on driving the elgi from the Old World that now they held that dream in their hands, they didn’t know what to do with it. None of them had planned for what sort of future lay beyond this day.

  The war had changed the dawi. Morgrim recognised that fact every time he looked into the faces of the new generations. They’d been tempered upon the anvil of battle and suckled at the teat of hate. If anything, they were more dour and unforgiving than those who had come before. The Slayer Cult Forek Grimbok had founded was emblematic of what the dwarfs had allowed themselves to become: more obsessed with atoning for their mistakes than recognising and fixing them.

  Such would be the kingdom Morgrim would one day inherit from his uncle
. Would he be able to lead it into a new golden age, or would he simply be there to watch it as it continued to fade?

  As the sword wound in his side sent a new flare of pain coursing through his body, Morgrim wondered if Imladrik had foreseen all of this that day so long ago when they’d met outside the walls of Tor Alessi for one last pathetic try at peace.

  How different it all might have been if he’d allowed himself to listen to his friend that day.

  Am I dead?

  The thought echoed through Liandra’s mind. It seemed an absurd question to ask. Simply being able to form the thought should have been answer enough. Yet she couldn’t be certain. She felt detached from her own body, and what little sense of it she possessed was cold and distant. She could see and she could hear and she could smell, but these sensations appeared removed from her body. She seemed to be staring down at herself, watching as she was carried down a winding forest trail. Strange shapes flickered among the trees, recalling to her the grisly things that had risen from the forest to destroy King Varnuf’s army.

  Through her haze of confusion, she focused upon the one carrying her. He was a tall elf, arrayed in buckskin and a cloak of leaves, a deer-hide hood with attached antlers covering most of his head and face. It was more some uncanny instinct than anything about his appearance that sent hate surging through her body.

  ‘Druchii,’ Liandra hissed through her cold lips. She tried to twist out of the elf’s grip, but found that the effort was beyond her numb body.

  The elf carrying her stopped. He lowered his face, staring down at her. His features were hard, weathered by a life in the wilds. His eyes had the same fey quality as that of Aismarr, though with an even more pronounced remoteness about them.

  ‘Druchii,’ the elf repeated, as if trying to recall the meaning of the word. At last he nodded his head. ‘Yes, I think I must have been.’ He peered more closely at Liandra. ‘I recall a sorceress named Drutheira. She was precious to me once, but somehow the memory of her refused to fade with all the rest. It was that memory which led me to you. I could sense you were there when she died.’

  ‘Then you are druchii,’ Liandra accused, yet even as she did she found it hard to remember the root of her hate. The memories of her mother dying in a corsair raid, of her own near-death at the hands of a druchii, these were less intimate now than they had been – like things she’d heard in a story rather than the trauma of her childhood.

  ‘I am Sevekai,’ the elf corrected her. ‘Soon, perhaps not even that.’ He nodded his head to the path ahead of them. For the first time Liandra noted the curious turns their route took, as though the forest were bending itself around them. Oaks would be replaced with ash and yew in a heartbeat, bushes would vanish, brooks would dissolve. It was less as if they moved along the path and more as if the path flowed around them.

  ‘Am I dead?’ Liandra wondered, this time articulating her question.

  Sevekai smiled at her. ‘We must all die to be reborn,’ he said. ‘Druchii and asur, we must all cut away what we have been. We must go beyond what we were and become what we must be.’

  They reached the end of the path, entering a vast clearing. Liandra managed to lift her head, astonished to see so many elves gathered in this place. Most were arrayed in the same primitive fashion as Sevekai, and many had that same fey look in their eyes. Although nearly all of them were asur, here and there the odd druchii stood among them – apparently without distinction.

  Ahead of them, a great wall of branches and thrones rose up, like the rampart of some fantastic fortress. There was a light beyond that barrier, a light profoundly warm and inviting. Somehow, Liandra knew that some of those gathered in the clearing around her had been waiting here for centuries to step into that light.

  ‘Your trial is ended, Liandra of House Athinol. And with it, our journey begins,’ Sevekai said. ‘We will die and be reborn in the light of the forest.’

  As Liandra watched, the wall of branches began to untwine, folding back upon itself to expose the light beyond. The heart of the forest.

  ‘What will we become?’ Liandra asked Sevekai.

  ‘What the forest wishes us to become,’ he answered. ‘The protectors and watchers, the guardians who will preserve it against axe and flame. Defenders who can recognise danger with more cleverness than beasts and with more immediacy than spirits.

  ‘We will become the asrai.’

  About the Author

  C L Werner’s Black Library credits include the Space Marine Battles novel The Siege of Castellax, the End Times novel Deathblade, Mathias Thulmann: Witch Hunter, Runefang, the Brunner the Bounty Hunter trilogy, the Thanquol and Boneripper series and Time of Legends: The Black Plague series. Currently living in the American south-west, he continues to write stories of mayhem and madness set in the worlds of Warhammer and Warhammer 40,000.

  An extract from The End Times: The Curse of Khaine.

  At some point lost in the depths of time someone had called it the Black Tower. Perhaps it had been black then, and perhaps it had been merely a tower. Now it was the highest pinnacle at the centre of Naggarond. The sprawling fortress had grown hundreds of outer fortifications and buttresses, spawned a warren of alleys and streets, rooftop passages and arcing bridges, becoming a settle­ment unto itself where the only law was the shifting will of the Witch King, alliances were fleeting and death a constant risk.

  Its walls were festooned with the heads and corpses of the thousands that had displeased Malekith over the preceding millennia. Some were hung upon hooks and chains, others in nooses and gibbets. Hundreds were skeletons, preserved by dire magic, but dozens were more recent, mouldering flesh clinging to bones gnawed by the clouds of harpies that circled over the bastion seeking new victims to scavenge.

  The Black Tower.

  A name filled with more grief and terror than three simple words could describe, etched into the last memories of the unfortunates upon the wall, burned into the agony of those still writhing in the dungeons that were dug into the bedrock beneath the high walls and banner-wreathed ramparts.

  None remembered who had first named it, not even Malekith himself as he sat upon his iron throne in a grand hall atop the tallest keep. He did remember a time when Naggarond had not existed, one of only a handful of beings across the entire world.

  He had grown up in the Black Tower, the grim atmosphere overshadowed by the brooding presence of his father, Aenarion, and the wicked, bloody machinations of his mother, Morathi. His opponents had claimed that those decades had laid a similar darkness upon his heart.

  The Witch King no longer possessed lips, but the irony of history would have caused them to twist into a cruel smile. A face ravaged by holy fire contorted beneath hot iron in an approximation of humour, the sort of humour that delighted in looking out of the window at the heads of a dozen generals who had failed Malekith during the recent war against the barbarous northmen. He viewed them now, taking satisfaction from the screams that had filled this chamber as their bodies had been split apart by dark magic and heated blades.

  He looked out past these tokens of his anger, to the surrounding fortress and the high curtain walls beyond. Past them dark shadows pierced the sky, none quite as tall as the Black Tower, shrouded in the dismal chill mists of Naggaroth.

  Naggarond.

  But this was not the city of his birth, though the Black Tower had been his childhood home. That honour belonged to a fallen place, razed and raised again and again throughout the turning epochs, built upon the blood-soaked soil of ancient Nagarythe.

  Anlec.

  Capital of Aenarion, once the strongest city in the world, shaming even Karaz-a-Karak of the dwarfs. Anlec, envy of Ulthuan, which had fallen in battle only once, and that had been to Malekith himself and allies within the walls.

  All now was ruin. The Black Tower was all that remained of Anlec. The memory was sharp even though six thous
and years old.

  The storm-wracked seas crashed against a harsh shore of rock ­pinnacles, foaming madly. The skies were in turmoil, blackened by dark magic. Through the spume and rain dark, massive shapes surged across the seas, towering edifices of battlement and wall.

  The castles of Nagarythe followed in the wake of the largest floating citadel, upon the highest tower of which stood Malekith. The lashing rain steamed from his armour as he turned at the sound of Morathi’s voice from the archway behind him.

  ‘This is where we flee to?’ she said, anger flashing in her eyes. ‘This cold, bleak land?’

  ‘They will not follow us here,’ replied the Witch King. ‘We are the Naggarothi – we were born in the north and in the north we will be born again. This land, bleak as it is, shall be ours. Naggaroth.’

  ‘To build a new kingdom?’ sneered Morathi. ‘To accept your defeat and start afresh as if Nagarythe had never existed?’

  ‘No,’ replied Malekith, flames leaping from his iron body. ‘We will never forget that which has been taken from us. Ulthuan belongs to me. If it takes a thousand years, ten thousand years, I will claim my rightful place as king. I am the son of Aenarion. It is my destiny.’

  Time – mortality – was a concern for lesser beings. Millennia meant nothing to the Witch King. The tally of false Phoenix Kings that had been crowned and fallen over the course of Malekith’s life could not be numbered on two hands and he had greeted the death of each with little regard.

  Sometimes he lost entire days reliving the events of his past, withdrawing into his thoughts when the burning agony of his physical shell became too much to bear. The temptation was in him again to reflect on ages past, not to escape pain, but to alleviate the boredom that gnawed at his wits.