Gods & Mortals

by Various Authors

  ‘Secure yourselves!’ Horgarr yelled, putting action to words as he wrapped his arms around a stanchion. The other crewmen caught hold of rails and guide ropes, chains and hatchcovers, bracing themselves for the detonation.

  Brokrin kept his eyes locked on the ghost ship as it closed with the mine. For just a moment, he thought its spectral substance was too little to trigger the device. The glowing prow was within only a few yards of the beacon and still there was no explosion. Then the front third of the phantom, that which replicated the crushed regions of the wreck, gave way to the rearward sections where the physical residue of the ship acted as a solid core for the apparition. A shrill note rose from the beacon, its light changing from a blinking yellow to a steady red. Brokrin opened his mouth to keep the pressure from the imminent explosion from popping his ears.

  The supremacy mine detonated in a blinding flare of violence. The soft light of the moon was banished by the dazzling fury of a tremendous explosion. The roar rumbled through the canyons, reverberating across the landscape. Rocks crashed down from the cliffs; buttes and windswept pillars fractured and went clattering down into the valley. A thick plume of smoke, blacker than the night around it, spilled high into the sky.

  The Iron Dragon was rocked from side to side by the explosion. Brokrin could feel the fillings in his teeth shiver as the shock wave swept through him. Buckets and tools, anything that wasn’t fastened down on the deck was sent dancing about by the impact, some of them clattering over the side to vanish into the night.

  Brokrin shook his head and tried to clear the ringing from his ears. He released the bottom rung of the ladder beneath Ghazul’s Bane and forced himself back to his feet. Firmly he walked across the still-shuddering deck and stared out at the dark plume of smoke. No sign of silvery phantoms now, only the mephitic residue left by the supremacy mine.

  ‘See, lads,’ Gotramm shouted to his arkanauts. ‘The cap’n was right! All it needed was a proper application of violence!’

  The Kharadron slowly gathered at the ironclad’s rails, staring out across the night. The dreaded phantom was nowhere to be seen. The immense power of the supremacy mine had blasted it out of the sky.

  Brokrin climbed the ladder back to the gun platform where Arrik and his team were making a quick inspection of Ghazul’s Bane to ensure the great skyhook had suffered no damage from the explosion. They snapped to attention when the captain came towards them.

  ‘Keep her aimed at that smoke,’ Brokrin told them. He wanted to believe the phantom had been destroyed by the explosion, but that sense of nagging uneasiness was still there. A vessel that defied the laws of time and mortality was one that might not obey the violence of a Kharadron mine.

  ‘Nothing could have survived that…’ Arrik began to protest. The gun commander’s good eye opened wide as he turned towards the smoke. ‘Grungni’s Beard,’ he moaned.

  Just visible through the smoke was a silvery shape, a glow that echoed the moonlight. The phantom wreck was steaming through the column of smoke, its ghostly crew still clustered about its deck.

  Brokrin opened his far-glass and trained it on the phantom ship. His skin crawled when the lens brought the wraith-like crew into focus, their archaic clothes and withered faces, their hungry, empty eyes. Hastily he turned the glass downwards, fixating upon the solid wreck at the core of the apparition. What he saw little resembled the derelict he had boarded. It was a jumble of ruptured plates and shattered timbers, busted crates and smashed planks. The supremacy mine hadn’t hurt the phantom, but it had delivered a crushing blow to the ­material foundation inside it.

  The observation gave Brokrin a desperate idea. ‘Arrik, aim Ghazul’s Bane at the wreck inside that spook!’ he ordered. ‘If we can’t blast it out of the sky, maybe we can drag it down!’

  Arrik and his team hurried to get the great skyhook ready. At a signal from the gun commander, the huge weapon was turned to the oncoming phantom. The massive skyhook growled as it was hurled from the gun, its heavy chain unspooling behind it.

  For a tense moment, Brokrin watched the giant harpoon streak towards the phantom. Then there was a satisfying crunch of splintering wood and shattered metal as the skyhook ripped into the wreck. The phantom shivered in mid-air, winking in and out of view like a sputtering candle. With the skyhook embedded in its guts, the ghostly ship stopped moving, its menacing approach arrested.

  A fierce cheer went up from the Iron Dragon’s crew. Brokrin smiled and gazed at the horizon. It was still several hours before the moon would set, but if they could keep the phantom at bay until then…

  ‘The ghosts!’ the lookout in the endrin’s cupola shouted. ‘They are doing something!’

  Brokrin put the far-glass back to his eye. He fixated once more on the hollow-faced apparitions that stood upon the phantom’s deck. As the lookout had said, the ghosts were doing something. Something Brokrin recognised only too well. Quickly he turned to the loud-mouth array.

  ‘All hands! Prepare to repel boarders!’

  Brokrin looked across the black gulf of night that separated the two ships. He saw the ghostly duardin draw battleaxes and pikes, cutlasses and crude bolt-throwing pistols. Then, as though the ships were side by side, the wraiths threw themselves up and over the gunwales of their phantom vessel. The spectral company did not plummet earthwards, but instead billowed across the open air, drifting inexorably towards the Iron Dragon.

  ‘Lay into them!’ Drumark howled as the ghostly boarders drew close. He punctuated his command by discharging his reloaded decksweeper into the oncoming throng. The foremost of the wraiths burst apart in the vicious hail of gunfire, but the silvery wisps of their substance came fluttering back again. In only a few heartbeats they resumed the shapes Drumark had fired into.

  The fire from the other Grundstok thunderers and from Gotramm’s arkanauts was equally ineffective. As the first of the duardin ghosts surged up onto the deck, Mortrimm lashed out at them with a skypike, but the heavy blade passed through the creatures as though they were naught but smoke. One of the wraiths brought its spectral cutlass chopping down against the heft of the skypike. Mortrimm cried out and stumbled backwards, clutching at his arm.

  ‘Cold,’ the navigator gasped. ‘So cold…’

  Brokrin leapt down to defend Mortrimm before the ghost could press its attack. His axe flashed through the wraith with as little effect as the skypike. When it struck back at him with its cutlass, he parried it with the flat of his axe. At once he felt an icy chill sear through his body, as though every nerve was aflame with cold fire. He staggered back and struggled to keep hold of his axe with his suddenly numbed fingers.

  Across the ship the other Kharadron were likewise beset by the ghosts. Gotramm fired his pistol into one wraith, then tried to bring his cutter slashing into its chest only to have the spectre’s broadaxe block his blow. Drumark drove the butt of his decksweeper into the withered face of a boarder only to be knocked back by the unfazed creature’s pike. Horgarr brought an aetheric torch searing into the eyes of a ghost only to have the flame extinguished by the aethereal chill of the apparition.

  Brokrin saw the plight of his crew. There seemed nothing that would harm the spectral invaders, but true to his earlier conviction, he would not let them take him without a fight. Tightening his grip on the axe he held, Brokrin started towards the ghost that had struck him.

  Before he could reach the apparition, the wraith drew back. Brokrin saw that the other ghosts were likewise falling away from the Kharadron, not pressing their attacks against the crew. A moment later he saw why. A bearded ghost wearing a tricorn hat swept over the Iron Dragon’s side and down onto the deck. The spectre’s hollow eyes fixated upon Brokrin. Without looking away from Brokrin, it gestured at Mortrimm and the ingot of deep gold thrust under the navigator’s belt.

  ‘Cap’n? You can’t give it to him!’ Skaggi’s voice raised in protest. The call to repel boarders h
ad brought the logisticator on deck, but he seemed more upset over losing the deep gold than the ghosts themselves.

  Brokrin nodded to the ghost-captain and crouched over Mortrimm. ‘Looks like they want it back,’ he apologised to the navigator.

  ‘Would have been easier if they’d just asked,’ Mortrimm grumbled as he handed the ingot over to Brokrin.

  Brokrin held the deep gold out to the ghost-captain. The wraith gestured to the phantom he had been fighting. Brokrin felt the same chill course through him as before when the spectre took the ingot from him. Fighting down his discomfort, he kept his gaze fixated on the ghost-captain.

  ‘You have what you wanted,’ he told the wraith. ‘Now get off my ship.’

  The ghostly captain returned his gaze with its hollow eyes. Behind it, the spectral duardin continued to finger their weapons. The phantom captain raised its hand and in its grip there suddenly appeared a book. Battered and worn with age, far more trim and slender than the copious tome Brokrin knew, it was still recognisable as the artycles of the Kharadron Code. The wraith held it towards him, the pages fluttering until they settled upon a particular passage.

  ‘They want wergild,’ Skaggi grumbled. The logisticator had come forward in some futile effort to stop the exchange of the deep gold. Now, close to the spectres, he thought better of defying their demands.

  ‘Wergild?’ Mortrimm muttered.

  ‘Restitution for damages done to their ship,’ Skaggi explained.

  ‘But she was a wreck before we even laid eyes on her!’ Mortrimm objected.

  Brokrin shook his head and stared into the hollow eyes of the ghost. There was just the faintest twinkle in them now, the gleam of a duardin about to haggle for a deal. However many centuries lay between the ghosts and their old lives, they were still Kharadron.

  ‘What do you expect as payment?’ Brokrin growled.

  The ghost-captain jabbed its thumb towards the forward hold, the hold that held the gems and perfumes the Iron Dragon had gathered from the humans of Farnost. It represented the bulk of the trade they had been able to draw over the course of the voyage.

  ‘Why not ask for the whole blasted ship?’ Brokrin hissed.

  The ghost pointed off towards the silvery phantom, as though explaining to Brokrin that it already had a ship. What it wanted was cargo.

  Resigned, Brokrin bowed his head. As he did so, the ghosts began to vanish one after another. The spectral captain was the last to dissipate, a suggestion of a smile pulling at its withered face before it faded away.

  ‘Arrik!’ Brokrin called out. ‘Draw in the skyhook!’ While the gun crew began drawing the chain back, Brokrin turned his far-glass on the phantom. The ghost ship’s decks were again filled with activity, only this time the spectres were not getting ready to attack the Iron Dragon. Instead they were conveying all-too-familiar cargo into their aethereal holds. Brokrin stifled a moan of disgust as he watched the solid cargo fall through the ghostly shell of the ship and hurtle into the canyon far below.

  ‘There’s a grim lesson to be learned here,’ Mortrimm said, still massaging his numbed arm.

  Brokrin ground his teeth together as he watched the phantom ship build up steam and fly away into the darkness.

  ‘Yes,’ Brokrin agreed. ‘The lesson is that you can’t haggle with ghosts.’

  EIGHT LAMENTATIONS: THE TAINTED AXE

  Josh Reynolds

  ‘The grove is singing tonight, Sir Roggen. Be wary.’

  Roggen stopped. The voice seemed to come from nowhere, echoing through the tumbledown ruins that lay at the top of the slope.

  ‘Who speaks?’ Roggen said softly. He was a big man, built for war rather than peace. Even out of his armour, he looked like a warrior. His mane of unkempt hair merged with a thicket-like beard, the better to hide his scarred features, and his rangy limbs were thick with hard-earned muscle. His hand – his good hand – itched for the hilt of his blade. But his sword, along with his war-plate, had been left in his cell, back in the chapterhouse. At the moment, he wore only a simple habit of woven fibres, belted at the waist with a strip of leather. The traditional garb of the knights of the Order of the Furrow.

  ‘Only me, brother. It is my night to sit watch.’

  Roggen looked down. A crooked shape sat in the moonlight, sitting cross-legged beneath the broken remains of what had once been an archway. Roggen had taken the sentry for a stone, at first, due to his stillness. ‘Hygal, is that you?’

  ‘In the flesh, brother. What remains of it.’ Hygal bent, coughing wetly. The moss-leper’s form was hidden beneath thick burlap robes and a concealing sack-hood, but these did little to conceal the musky stink of his affliction. Beneath the robes, Roggen knew that the other knight’s body would be covered in ever-growing patches of cancerous moss. It ate away at flesh and muscle, leaving only dense, green clumps clinging to the bone. It was a common ailment in these precarious times. When the winds blew hot and damp, carrying spores north from the Verdant Bay, no one was safe. Not even knights.

  Mercifully, the afflicted felt little in the way of pain. And despite his illness, Hygal could still wield a blade. A sheathed sword lay across his chest, its hilt rising above his shoulder. Bandaged fingers tapped tunelessly against its length. ‘I heard that you’d returned to us at last, brother. I’m glad to see you’ve come back safe from the wilds of Ghur.’

  Roggen lifted his other hand – or what was left of it. A mangled stump, bound in dressings. It hurt, but then, it always hurt these days. Sometimes it was only a little ache. Other times – now, for instance – it was a searing knot of agony that threatened to drag the burly knight to his knees. It was strange to him how something that was no longer there could hurt so badly. That he had lost it in service to a god was some comfort.

  He had returned to Ghyran after its loss, seeking a familiar place to heal. The god Grungni, in whose service he had been hurt, had offered to craft him a fine replacement of silver and steel, but Roggen had turned down the offer. He had half hoped the arts of his Order might restore his missing limb, or at least alleviate the pain. So far, that had not been the case. ‘Safe, yes. But it shall always hold a piece of me, I fear.’

  Hygal laughed until he wheezed. ‘Better a hand than a head, eh?’

  ‘It was a very good hand, brother.’

  Hygal extended his own. Moss was growing between and over the bandages in places. ‘I’d give you one of mine, but… well.’

  ‘I thank you for the offer, brother, even so.’ Roggen looked past the archway, into the grove. Once, this place had been a chapel of stone, dedicated to some forgotten god or other. Now, its walls were gone, its roof long since fallen in, leaving only a few scattered archways and flat stones underfoot to mark its passing. A cathedral of ironwood trees rose tall, as if reaching towards the stars of Azyr, far above. As Hygal had said, the rustle of the boughs in the wind sounded like singing.

  ‘Something is abroad in the grove this night. I hear it wandering among the graves of our Order. Like loose leaves scraping on stone. I think it is waiting on someone.’ Hygal looked up at him. ‘You should go back to your cell, brother. Let the night keep its secrets.’ He gestured back towards the low wedge of the chapterhouse, where its outer ramparts emerged from the hill. The fortress had been built into the slope centuries earlier – or perhaps the hill had grown up around the fortress. It was hard to say, in Ghyran.

  Roggen had followed a winding set of crudely carved stone steps up from those angular walls of stone and wood, to reach the top of the slope, drawn by something he could not give name to. A dream? A compulsion? He could not say. He knew only that something – someone – was waiting for him. ‘I think I am expected, brother,’ he said. ‘But I thank you for the warning.’

  Roggen made his way into the ironwood grove. The trees were tall and strong, growing among the ruins in copses and bunches. Their roots stretched deep into the
hill and, in places, even through the stone and mortar of the chapterhouse within. They nestled among the graves of the honoured dead, who were bound in sacks and buried here, where they might add their strength to that of the trees.

  His Order wore no metal, nor bore it into battle. Such was against the oath they’d made in generations past to the Everqueen. Their armour, their weapons, all were constructed from ironwood. They grew their war-plate in this very grove, from seeds gifted to them by Alarielle, long before the coming of Chaos.

  They had worshipped a different god, once. Or so the stories said. Now, the Order of the Furrow bowed only to the Lady of Leaves, and watered her sacred forests with the blood of her enemies – and their own, when necessary.

  Thick grasses grew between the few remaining stones, rustling softly in the night wind. It almost sounded like whispering, and Roggen wondered whether it was a greeting – or a warning. The rustling of the grasses and the creaking of the branches overhead stilled suddenly and he stopped.

  ‘I am here,’ he said.

  ‘So I see.’

  At first, he thought the words merely a trick of the wind. Then, out of the corner of his eye, he saw her. A tall shape, undeniably feminine, but not human. ‘Do you know me, son of man?’

  ‘I do not.’

  ‘And yet, I have called, and you have come.’

  ‘Even so,’ Roggen said. He forced himself to relax. ‘I ask you to name yourself, my lady. Who has called me here?’ He flexed his good hand. ‘And why?’

  ‘I have as many names as there are leaves on the trees.’ She laughed, and the sound of it – like thorns clattering over bone – made him shiver. ‘Your brotherhood calls me the Bramble-Maiden, sister to the Lady of Vines and daughter of the Everqueen. Do you know me now, son of man?’