by Various
An unlucky legend that would not end today.
A dry wind breathed over the Sea of Bones, like a bored and ancient ghost blowing dust from the flat expanse. A pall hung over it, bone white, cloaking the sky with the diffuse, eerie glow of endlessly refracted sunlight.
But there was no sun. Twisters of dust twice the height of a man snaked over the barren wastes.
Ramus had been expecting the sea that the name implied, but what dragged at his boots now was a vast desert, not one of ice or sand, but of bone. Bones of every type. Bones of every age and species and extent of decay.
And there was dust. He would not have been surprised to learn that it was endless. Such a natural barrier was surely impassable, even for the Junkar of old. That was how it had come to be named.
How many millions – billions – must have perished here? What disaster had slaughtered them, and what madness allowed the creation of this mass grave? Those were questions that even Sigmar might struggle to answer, but there was one that Ramus felt he could now answer for himself.
He knew why Mannfred von Carstein had come here.
‘What is that?’ murmured Sagittus. Dust had built up around his eyeslits and mouthpiece, and ground from his joints like pepper from a mill when he raised his arms to cover his eyes and peer into the dust storm.
Ramus waded forwards. The wind had lifted the dust from one corner of a partially buried structure. It had been scrap metal, painted red, and covered with glyphs of a painfully familiar design.
‘Orruk,’ said Vandalus, bent with exhaustion, hauling himself one foot at a time to Ramus’ side. ‘I can read it a little.’
‘What does it say?’
‘It’s an Ironjawz fort, what do you think it says? It says “Back off, begone, you’re not welcome. The boss of this place is the Great Red, and he’s bigger than your boss.”’
‘Eloquent. But no one is greater than my lord. We will defeat this Great Red too, if we must.’
Vandalus laid a comradely hand on Ramus’ shoulder. His blue eyes smiled.
‘We will do it together. Brother.’
Great Red
David Guymer
Forward, thought Ramus, as though it were sheer will rather than Azyr-forged muscle that thumped his boot into the dust and dragged the other past it.
He could see nothing through the swirl of dust beyond the spitting candle flare of his reliquary staff, hear nothing but howling and the nail-like rap of fine grains of weathered bone hitting his black plate. He did not pity himself the loss of his senses. If there was anything that could be felt anywhere on the Sea of Bones then it was dust and sand and endless wind.
On, his mind intoned, and his body responded to the word as though it were a rod across his back. I will cover every grain of this accursed desert if that is what it takes to have Mannfred von Carstein’s neck between my hands, he swore silently.
The shield, Sigmar’s Gift, clanked against his back. The skull of the ogor, Skraggtuff, swung out and in and banged against his thigh. And he pushed on, forward.
‘We should ride this storm out, brother,’ yelled Vandalus. The Knight-Azyros was to Ramus’ left and half a dozen paces behind, walking bent into the wind, the skeletal frame of his wings tugged back. Wind-whipped totems of feathers, leaves and bits of bone swirled around his maroon armour, partially obscuring the depictions of stars, storms and wild beasts in gold. ‘My Prosecutors saw a huge number of Ironjaw orruks moving ahead of us. We could be on top of them already. The dust will give us no warning.’
Ramus snorted. ‘I thought men once called you the King of Dust.’
‘An easy title to claim and an easier one to give to another, but the dust respects me no more for it.’
‘We go on. Our guide is insistent that this is the Betrayer’s path.’
‘An ogor, and a dead one at that. The dead cannot be trusted.’
There was a dull pain in Ramus’ chest. Lord-Celestant Tarsus had used to say that. He shook his head and ploughed on.
He touched his fingers to the shield banging against his shoulders. There was a sudden hiss of burning metal and he snatched his fingers back. He smiled a grim smile as he shook off the sting. Sigmar’s Gift had delivered unto the Betrayer the God-King’s fire, and it remembered. The closer they drew the hotter it burned, and Ramus ardently prayed that the same would be true for Mannfred von Carstein’s undying flesh.
The ogor skull butted his thigh plate and bounced, out, in, and banged again. Skraggtuff had initially been part of a trap left for them by the Betrayer, but Mannfred was not the only one with talents.
Was he not Ramus of the Shadowed Soul, Lord-Relictor of the Fourth-Forged Host, the Hallowed Knights? His will was a conduit for the divine storm. Life and death were his to go between.
Splaying his fingers over the skull’s broad features so that they scratched in the sand over its eyes and mouth, he closed his eyes, and bent his mind towards the soul-eternal. He could see it still, a dull ember bound by the Betrayer’s dark necromancy to the ogor’s bones.
‘Awake, Skraggtuff.’ His spirit voice darted in and around his flesh like a sibilant, quicksilver tongue.
The sepulchral echoes that rang back from the storm brought an animal growl from Vandalus’ mask. He raised his lantern and readied his starblade, warily. ‘I still don’t like this, brother.’
Ramus ignored him. He did not like it either, but Sigmar demanded much of those to whom much was given, and the ogor was what Ramus had been given. If he was to recapture Mannfred, and in so doing atone for the failure of his embassy to the Great Necromancer and the loss of the Hallowed Knights’ Lord-Celestant, then he could ill afford to dismiss such gifts from his enemies.
‘Awake, Skraggtuff. It is I, Ramus, your brother in vengeance.’
Frost rimed the weathered metal of Ramus’ gauntlet where it covered the skull’s mouth. A spark of blueish light took up deep within the dead thing’s eyes.
‘Ungh. You.’ A pause. They were creeping in more often, growing longer. ‘Are we there yet?’
‘You tell me.’
‘He’s near. I can smell him. Can’t you?’
Ramus pulled his hand away. He felt the tenuous bridge between them snap and the light guttered and died. The frost on his palm needled to nothing, scoured to bare metal by the wind.
‘What did it say?’ Vandalus shouted after a moment.
‘He is near.’
‘That still leaves the problem of the Ironjawz.’
To the left and right, haggard-looking Hallowed Knights marched, draped in dust cloaks so heavy that only the meanest sliver of gold or silver glinted through the storm. Nodding in thought, Ramus forced himself on into the wind.
Were the Ironjawz a problem? Or were they just another gift from his enemies?
‘Sigmar has seen us this far, my friend. Have faith that he will not let us stray now.’
The broad axe hit Ramus’ shield with the weight of a felled tree. It scratched, snarled, squealed for purchase, but the shield held firm. Sigmarite was more miracle than metal, able to take many colours and forms, and this part of his mortis armour was far tougher than the mirrored silver it appeared to be. All that force had to go somewhere though, and if the shield did not yield, then it would go through Ramus.
He grunted with effort and the throbbing pain. His arm yielded, and the back of his shield struck his skull helm, twisted his face in, and drove his shoulder remorselessly down towards his bent knees. Metal scraped over metal. The crushing weight lifted, dragged back for a final, cleaving blow. Ramus imagined it scuffing along the dusty ground and looping up, up, glinting at arm’s length above his assailant’s monstrous head. The moment.
With a roar, he uncoiled and slammed his shield through the brute’s unguarded jaw.
The big orruk grunted. It was an ugly mound of muscle, sinew and scar
tissue encased in armour plates, impractically thick. Sand-worn spikes thrust out from shoulders, forearms and thighs. Another set curved up from the collar, so long they almost doubled as a visor and forced the orruk to squint between the notched edges. There were no conventional ‘joints’ or obvious points of weakness. There were no buckles or straps. Rather, the plates had been bent into one another as if by hand.
It swayed back maybe half a foot, braced its back leg, then drove a knee that sliced the lower rim of Ramus’ shield into his groin and knocked the Lord-Relictor’s legs from under him.
Not the reaction he had been hoping for.
‘Tough, these Ironjawz,’ he muttered as he rolled sideways.
He caught a glimpse of silver and blue where a Retributor and something hunched and dusty tussled in the wind, and then the orruk stomped down a boot.
Ramus came up onto his haunches, grey sand spraying from his hammer as he smashed aside the orruk’s axe. This was not a duel. Neither axe nor hammer was a weapon of refinement. Each was designed for smashing and killing, as the orruks and Sigmar’s Stormcast Eternals had themselves been so designed.
A lot of blood had been shed since Ramus had last crossed an opponent he could not overpower with the simple virtues of smashing and killing.
They crossed hafts and strained, beast versus divine. The orruk’s nose flapped wetly where Ramus’ shield had broken it, green-black blood and snot bubbling out with every breath, but it concerned the brute not at all. Ramus felt the desert dust sink around his boots. His arm began to burn with the effort.
‘We are not... your... enemy!’
Putting all his remaining strength into it, Ramus levered his haft up, turned the locked weapons like two halves of a wheel and forced the orruk to be turned with it or let go. It chose wrong. Ramus guessed right.
‘Hah!’
The orruk folded after its weapon, its nose cracking against the headbutt coming the other way. Ramus heard the crunch and splatter of a half job being messily finished. The orruk bent across him, off balance, axe blade in the dust. Ramus rammed his shoulder into its ribs, this time sending it stumbling away, then lashed his shield back across its jaw with a sound like an iron pot being smashed through a wall.
The blow actually straightened the orruk up. Its head snapped almost fully around, but it did not seem to feel a bit of it below the neck. It stuck out an arm and grabbed his throat.
Ramus felt his feet kick away from the ground as the Ironjaw hauled him to the level of its spiked grille. It glared at him with scrunched up red eyes. The visible bit of its dark face, wedged in tight, was scabbed with tough stubble. Its breath stank of leaf mulch and mushrooms.
Metal squealed as the Ironjaw tightened its grip, seeking to shape Ramus’ armour with its bare hands as it had presumably shaped its own. Like his shield, the armour held. It would take more even than the grip of an Ironjaw to make sigmarite bend. It still felt as though his eyeballs were going to burst out of his face.
He smashed his hammer into the orruk’s grille, but could not deliver force enough to break it. At the same time he drove his boot into its gut, but could not hit anything more vulnerable than muscle and iron. He managed to hook a finger up the orruk’s nose and dragged it up towards him. The creature twisted irritably and snapped at his hand, spraying his faceplate with spittle.
His vision began to blur. Bent, disjointed figures stumbled through the beating dust into his peripheral view and then faded to black. His ears, however, seemed to grow keener to compensate. The rasp of sand on dead throats, the pop of old joints.
‘Not... your... enemy.’
There was a hiss, a string of metallic thunks and a row of foot-long Sigmarite-tipped bolts stitched up the Ironjaw’s side. It grunted, in surprise rather than pain, and glanced down at the striking line of starmetal piercings running from hip to armpit. Ramus swung his boot up onto the lowest bolt. The sigmarite shaft held true, blessed be, his kick twisting the bolt sharply and driving it deeper into the orruk’s guts.
And that, by almighty Sigmar, it felt.
Ramus had his feet on the ground and dry, dusty air in his lungs before the orruk had thought to let rip a howl. Letting his shield hang from the wrist strap, he took his hammer two-handed like a mallet and cracked it across the side of the Ironjaw’s head. Moving around behind it, Ramus hammered his weapon into its back and shoved it down onto its face. It struggled to push itself up only for its arms to sink into the sand and Ramus’ boot to step on the back of its neck.
He ground in his heel until its spine finally snapped. The Ironjaw went limp, and Ramus made sure with a last hammer blow that cratered the back of its head and stippled his black greaves with gore.
‘Tough, these Ironjawz.’ He glanced sideways and nodded. The Judicator lowered his boltstorm crossbow, his dusty armour silver and blue. ‘My thanks, Sagittus.’
The Judicator-Prime gave a quick nod, redressed his aim to a point just above Ramus’ shoulder and fired again. Bolts fizzed past, and punched into the shambling corpses until there was no longer enough meat left on them to stand.
‘Only the faithful, Lord-Relictor.’
‘Only the faithful.’
With another tilt of the helm, the Judicator turned back to the fight.
Ramus did the same. He spotted his reliquary where he had left it, plunged into the shifting bone sands, both a battle standard and a waypoint should any of his knights become lost in the swirl. A fuzz of Azyric power spread into the grey around it, illuminating the morbid imagery of faith, death, and the storm depicted thereon in fits and snatches. Big, hulking shadows brawled around it, tusks, blades, and iron plates glinting blue, on the ground and in the sky above.
As Vandalus had predicted, the dust had allowed the Stormcasts to walk right into the Ironjawz and given neither side warning. Finding the orruks themselves beset was something neither had anticipated. Mannfred had been wily enough to avoid an encounter with the warclans of the Great Red thus far.
If Ramus had expected the orruks to be grateful for his aid – and in that initial flush of self-righteous glory in which he had almost felt his breath upon the vampire’s back, he had expected it – then he should have expected too his disappointment.
It was impossible at a glance to tell who had the edge. Sigmar’s Stormhosts excelled in close combat, as they had been forged to excel in all things, but the Ironjawz took a savage delight in it, as if they had been purposefully bred to go toe to toe with the mightiest warriors in the realms, and some of the largest carried twice the weight in muscle and half again the breadth.
Ramus stowed his shield and ran for his reliquary. He snatched it up, feet sliding in the shifting dust before he regained his footing, boot wedged under a sand pile of long, partially buried bones.
‘You!’ came the grunted, straightforward challenge, from a veritable behemoth of armour plate mounted on a seething, boar-like beast veering from the churn of bodies. ‘You’re mine! The Great Red’s gonna be the first over the Bone Sea, and I’ll be there with ’im.’
Its iron frame was so massive that it was almost as thick across the shoulders as it was tall. Each pauldron looked to have been remade from a complete anvil, and its elbows struck out like the two points of an upended diamond. Its mount was itself dressed in knotted sheets of mail that abraded its grizzled fur with every step and no doubt accounted for a measure of its wild-eyed ill temper.
The beast swept itself a path through the dust with long, saw-edged tusks, snorted, and thundered into a charge.
Ramus drew back his reliquary, lowered it as though it were a spear and the orruk a charging juggernaut. He growled the opening bars of a prayer. Lightning played around the metal haft. He felt a static tickle under his gauntleted fingers.
Before he could unleash it, the orruk was gone.
There was a creak, then a groan, as the Ironjaw’s hands flapped up
despairingly, and it sank rapidly into the ground. Ramus backed up quickly, his own feet sinking into the sudden flow of dust.
‘Grindworm!’ he roared, biceps bulging as he pushed back with his staff against the swelling current. He sought out Sagittus and his other Primes, couldn’t see them in the confusion, but waved his arm back anyway. ‘Stay clear!’
The ground flexed like a muscle and an Astral Templar Liberator disappeared in a plume of dust. There was a trembling deep underfoot. Stratified layers shuffled and restacked, the subterranean flows of sand shifting to accommodate the approach of some kraken of the desert sands, and then a terrific explosion carried the lot of it sky high, bones and debris blasted like grapeshot around the bolt of lightning that jagged up in search of the sky.
Ramus swore as his body plunged a foot deeper into the sand. Knuckles and teeth and weathered nubs of bone he could not identify swirled around him like the surface manifestation of a developing whirlpool. Everywhere, fissures opened to drink in the desert dust and the shambling undead, while Stormcasts and Ironjawz wrestled for the skeletal islands the retreating sands laid bare, carcasses so vast that entire armies could have fought over them unnoticed.
And then the Ironjaw leader and his boar mount reappeared.
Thrashing about under six feet of dust, both orruk and beast were trapped in a hellish, faceless orifice large enough to swallow both whole with room to spare. Dust spouted around the struggling orruk and a segmented body that seemed to be made wholly of sand reared up out of the desert floor.
Ramus scowled, trying to draw further away from the rising worm, but the suction on his legs was tremendous.
He did not know whether the creatures were truly living predators or a natural phenomenon of the Sea of Bones. The Astral Templars, however, had dubbed them grindworms, for the screeching, sand-scratching roar they made as they appeared and killed. Their attacks seemed random, drawn by fighting or the movement of large numbers on the surface, but Ramus could not with certainty say that there was not some malign will driving this monster onto him before all others.
