The Path to Glory

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  The Path to Glory – Evan Dicken

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  A Black Library Publication

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  The Path to Glory

  Evan Dicken

  Sulla

  ‘Hold the line!’ Captain Sulla shouted over the roar of combat. The Lantic forces drowned in a sea of blades, their ragged shield wall battered by the unreasoning tides of battle. Sulla swung her heavy greatsword, sprays of blood rising like startled birds as she hacked at the press.

  Azakul the Winnower’s host seemed without end. Chaos marauders pushed forward, their faces bent around armatures of rage, spitting blood and teeth as they beat at the Lantic line. Sulla screamed back at them – insults, curses, oaths, but no prayers.

  She would never make that mistake again.

  A shrieking face emerged from the press. Standing a head taller than his fellows, the marauder champion was cloud pale, his beard woven with Lantic medals similar to the ones glittering on Sulla’s breastplate. He howled a corrupted legionary battle hymn as he brought his maul whistling down. Rather than block the blow, Sulla retreated a step, grinning as the champion overextended himself and stumbled forward. She raised her greatsword like a spear so the momentum of the man’s charge impaled him on the long blade, bringing them face to face. She could see he was young, the blasphemous sigils etched into his flesh still red and raw – a recent convert, then, one of the poor souls Empress Xerastia had meant to rescue.

  His breath was hot on her cheek.

  ‘Die, traitor.’

  With a scowl, Sulla twisted her sword, dragging it through the marauder’s chest before kicking him back into his comrades. The battle eddied around her as the Chaos forces drew back, uncertain.

  Leaning on her sword, Sulla scanned the battle. The Lantic lines looked to be holding, a thin ribbon of gold arrayed against the fury of Azakul’s horde. The hot breeze carried hints of powder and oiled metal from the left flank, where the legion’s few cannons were ranged on the dune behind the scarred bulk of Old Tiberius, their last surviving steam tank. Like the heart of an ageing yet trusty warhorse, Tiberius’ boiler had burst as it slogged through the rusty orange sand of Chamon’s iron desert, but rather than abandon the steam tank, the legion had dragged it up onto the dune to serve as a bulwark against the Chaos forces.

  Pride blossomed in Sulla’s chest – even alone, surrounded, and betrayed by their god, the Lantic Empire didn’t abandon its own. Her people died like heroes, but they still died.

  ‘Captain!’ It was Ardahir, the standard bearer for the empress’ personal legion. A red-spotted bandage covered the ruin of his left eye, his gilded armour chipped and battered. He carried a blade in one hand, the other bound to the ragged Lantic banner. Limping up, he thrust his chin at the centre of the horde. ‘They made it! Empress Xerastia faces the Winnower.’

  Sulla squinted through the clouds of rust kicked up by the battle. The trackless iron desert had obscured the legion’s movements from the many Chaos warbands that roamed Chamon, but it was hell to fight in. They’d been just three days’ march from Uliashtai when the Winnower found them. Empress Xerastia had chosen to fight rather than lead another horde to the City of Gears.

  Sulla caught a flash of gold amidst the tarnished murk, the empress’ armour glimmering like a coin tossed into a murky fountain.

  Empress Xerastia’s plan had worked, in a way. The last remnants of the Lantic Legions had been too enticing a prize for the Winnower. The Chaos lord had committed his horde to the charge while Xerastia sneaked a cadre of hand-picked knights around to cut the head from the blasphemous host. But Azakul’s horde had been far larger than expected, its ranks swollen with traitors and fools.

  ‘He’s surrounded.’ Sulla gave Ardahir an anxious frown. ‘Does General Kelephon know?’

  ‘The general’s dead.’ The standard bearer winced. ‘Damn chimera broke through on the right, would’ve rolled up our entire flank if Kelephon hadn’t led the command battalion into the breach.’

  Anger rose like bile in Sulla’s throat. Kelephon had been a pompous ass, but no coward – far better than most of the Lantic nobles who’d purchased their commissions. Another death to lay at Sigmar’s feet. The god’s treachery burned in her memory, Sulla’s anger so hot and bright she felt as if it would burst from her in a spray of flame.

  ‘Who’s in charge, then?’ she asked.

  The standard bearer cocked his head.

  ‘No.’ Sulla’s mouth was dry, her scalp hot and prickly. ‘All of them?’

  ‘Afraid so.’ Ardahir glanced nervously towards the beleaguered Lantic lines. ‘Don’t mean to rush you, captain.’

  Sulla cursed. Empress Xerastia’s expedition to lift the siege of Uliashtai had been doomed from the start. The legion had fought its way to a dozen former Lantic cities only to find them destroyed or gone over to Chaos. Khemal, Nehaj, Thun – the names of the traitorous cities burned in Sulla’s memory. She’d even heard rumours that some of the Eshunnaic Legion had defected after the fall of the Gilded Steamgird, but that had to be impossible…

  When word had come that the mages in Uliashtai still resisted the tides of Chaos, Sulla had dared let herself be swept up by Xerastia’s blind hope. In the end, it had been a choice between dying by slow cuts or risking everything.

  It was the same choice Sulla faced now.

  Bright flashes marked the distant ridge where Empress Xerastia fought Azakul the Winnower. Few knights remained at his side, but they were cut off, buried by rank upon rank of dark-armoured warriors. The Chaos horde turned back on itself like a snake devouring its tail in an attempt to reach the Lantic empress. If Sulla called a retreat, the legion would survive, battered but intact.

  She discarded the thought with a fierce scowl. She was no traitor, no coward.

  ‘Captain, your orders?’ Ardahir asked.

  ‘Sigmar might have abandoned the empire, but I won’t.’ She nodded at Ardahir. ‘Give the call to dress ranks. We advance.’

  There were no more horses, so Sulla and the surviving greatswords formed the point of the charge; blade, axe and bow arrayed in staggered ranks behind. Spearmen screened the advance, holding back the screaming flood while the artillery launched a ragged fusillade to clear the way, Old Tiberius’ cannon booming like a funeral drum.

  Fury lent strength to Sulla’s swings, her blade in constant motion. Many thought the greatsword a weapon of pure strength. They hacked and chopped at their foes, wielding the blade with all the finesse of an orruk, never understanding greatswords required more care, more finesse than the lightest duelling sabre.

  Sulla cut into the seething press of bodies. Chaos came as a roiling throng, fierce but unordered, each warrior seeking to catch the attention of their dark gods, but their ferocity was no match for Lantic discipline.

  Sulla’s limbs burned, her greatsword as heavy as a steam tank. The air was thick with scents of blood, viscera and oiled steel. Her boots slipped on spilled entrails, her blade shrieked across pitted steel to nest in flesh. She was close enough to smell the foul exhalations of her foes, to see the flicker of fear in their eyes as her weapon came slashing down.

  And Sulla exalted in it.

  She might not be able to set her blade at Sigmar’s throat or strike down the traitorous Lofnir Fyreslayers who had destroyed the Gilded Steamgird, but she could kill the enemies of her people, here and now, stroke by bloody stroke. She and her comrades painted the corroded desert sand a bright crimson, draping the high iron dunes in a shroud of twisted bodies.

  The marauders drew back, fleeing before the men a
nd women in tattered gold. Sulla stumbled, her legs weak as wet clay, but a hand steadied her. She glanced back to see Ardahir, his standard torn but unbowed.

  The surviving Lantic soldiers were like statues covered in blood and flecks of rust. They closed ranks behind her, faces grim. Sulla turned to see a phalanx of heavily armoured warriors, shields marked with the ruinous powers’ twisted sigils, their helmets worked into the visages of fearsome beasts. She shouted the order to advance, already breaking into a run. She didn’t need to look back to know the others followed – they were Lantic, they wouldn’t abandon her.

  A Chaos warrior with a helmet like a snarling steelcat raised his shield to catch her blow, but Sulla reversed her swing, dropping low to hammer her blade into the back of the warrior’s knee. She leapt over the toppling man to bury her greatsword in the helmet of the traitor behind him.

  Sulla didn’t even see the axe coming. A heavy weight crashed into her side. Sulla’s breastplate took the worst of the blow, but it still knocked her from her feet. Sulla rolled on the ground, her mouth filling with bloody iron sand as she struggled to draw breath. The Chaos warrior raised his axe for the killing blow.

  A shadow fell over her, a curtain of heavy brocade draping over her face. She swatted the fabric before realising it was the Lantic banner. Ardahir had lunged from behind, driving the spike at the end of the banner pole into the traitor’s throat. With a snarl, the Chaos warrior hacked down, cutting the banner pole in half.

  Sulla rose with a strangled shout, her greatsword sweeping up to take off the enemy’s head. Lantic soldiers surged past, matching the fierceness of Azakul’s guard. For a moment, Sulla thought they could turn the tide, but there were too many foes, there were always too many.

  Beyond the mass of Chaos warriors, atop a ridge, Empress Xerastia battled alone, her armour bright against the rusty backdrop. She fought with spear and shield in the ancient fashion, the duardin runes inscribed in their gleaming surfaces burning like miniature suns as she parried blows from the Winnower’s flail. Tall as she was, the empress seemed a slight thing when ranged against the Chaos warlord’s dark bulk. The Winnower’s armour was a labyrinth of interlocking plates. Strips of steel and bronze slithered like serpents, blurring Azakul’s outline. The Winnower moved with a puppet’s jerky grace, seeming to hang from invisible strings as he pivoted to bring his flail arcing around once more.

  Xerastia rolled aside, driving her spear into the Winnower’s side. Azakul’s backswing knocked the empress’ winged helm from her head. The blow left Xerastia’s hair matted with gore, her one eye blackened and bloody, the empress’ expression showing no fear, no pain. With a defiant shout, Xerastia released her shield to put both hands on her spear, forcing the blade deeper into Azakul’s chest.

  The Chaos warlord’s scream was surprisingly human. He caught Xerastia by the throat, the clawed talons of his gauntlet gouging bloody rivulets in the empress’ flesh as he bent Xerastia slowly back.

  It seemed impossible, but even over the din Sulla could hear the crack of Xerastia’s spine breaking.

  Bitter rage bubbled up through the cracks in Sulla’s reason. She threw herself at the dark-armoured ranks, cursing her traitorous limbs for lacking strength to reach her empress.

  With a roar of triumph, Azakul flung Xerastia away. A cry went up from the Lantic troops, but there was no way to reach her. The Winnower swayed on his feet, black ichor dripping from the wound at his side as he shambled towards the dying Lantic empress.

  With a sound like a snapping banner a flash of azure lightning streaked down from the roiling copper clouds above to strike Xerastia’s body. Sulla blinked away flickering after-images, and saw the ridge where her empress had lain was scorched and empty.

  ‘It’s over, captain.’ Ardahir pulled her back.

  Sulla struggled free of his grip, but strong hands took hold of her – soldiers in Lantic gold, their expressions hard and bitter. Sulla saw bloodied arms and bandaged knees, faces caked in sand-gritted gore, her comrades almost indistinguishable from the marauders they fought.

  ‘We need to go,’ Ardahir shouted. ‘Before the Winnower’s host regroups.’

  Sulla drew in a shuddering breath. It was if a giant hand pressed down upon her, the mad strength bleeding away to leave nothing but hollow exhaustion.

  ‘The empire doesn’t abandon its own,’ she shouted as they dragged her from the battlefield.

  ‘Take a look, captain.’ Ardahir almost spat the words. ‘There’s none of our own left to abandon.’

  Kaslon

  Monsters came and monsters died. Transfixed by precise lines of golden light, bisected by sheets of sorcerous energy, their bones transmuted to lead, the teeming mass of Chaos fell before the power of the Gilded Order. Kaslon stood in the great pattern, his chant lending strength to the master mages at its centre. As a sorcerer of rank, Kaslon was entitled to one of the vertices, apprentices relegated to lines and connecting points, reduced to mere conduits.

  The mages stood between the horde and the shanty town that had sprung up outside the rune-covered walls of Uliashtai – The City of Gears, stronghold of the Gilded Order. More than a hundred mages of rank, all who remained of the Order, were arrayed upon the sacred geometry.

  Birdlike daemons slipped through the air, gouts of green balefire licking around the edges of the mages’ wards. Kaslon swallowed against the sudden upswell of fear, willing his power along the lines and vertices of the pattern’s radiant formulae.

  With a wave of her withered hand, Grandmaster Lek sent bladed parabolas arcing into the bird daemons, who fell like dying embers. In concert with the other masters Lek struck the ground with her staff and white gold lines radiated from the points of the pattern, carving through the horde outside the city walls.

  Kaslon tried not to look at the Lantic refugees crowded outside Uliashtai’s high walls. The refugees had come in their tens of thousands, but the autarch had ordered the gates closed before retreating to his palace, and a great shanty town had sprouted outside Uliashtai. Although the Gilded Order’s sorcery was mighty, it was not kind.

  At last, as it had a hundred times before, the gibbering mass retreated before the sacred geometries of metal. It had become something of a formula – the mages of the Gilded Order would decimate the horde, then Skayne Bloodtongue and his warlocks would spend weeks drawing more creatures from the twisted realms of Chaos. Over and over the pattern played out.

  Except this time, something was different.

  It came first as a tremor, a fractal splintering along the outer edges of Kaslon’s wards. One of the apprentices fell to her knees, a hand pressed to her forehead.

  ‘Keep the pattern!’ Grandmaster Lek called.

  Kaslon glanced to the pattern and found its lines bowed, razor straightness skewed as if viewed through a concave mirror. He felt his concentration slip and desperately tried to sing the lines back to congruence.

  The horizon seemed to shiver, and there, streaking from the ruins of the Gilded Steamgird on bladed disks, not a score of Chaos sorcerers, but a hundred, Skayne Bloodtongue at their head.

  The Chaos lord was armoured in a patchwork of scintillating scales that caught the sunlight, twisting and reflecting it like a spray of broken glass. Constellations of light spun around Bloodtongue, his slightest movement accompanied by bursts of prismatic colour. The sorcerer’s hair wild and unkempt, his craggy brow, deep-set eyes, and crooked grin giving his features a kindly, almost grandfatherly cast.

  Kaslon knew better than to be fooled.

  The ground shifted at the sorcerers’ passing, the air above rippling like a heat mirage. Lek brought her staff crashing down once more, but the lines that emerged were skewed and weak, the perfect symmetry of the pattern twisted beyond repair.

  It was too much. Kaslon stumbled away, hands raised to shield his eyes from the maddening distortion. He watched horrified as the apprenti
ces along the lines intersecting his vertices erupted in columns of bilious flames.

  Lek sang a shield of intersecting wards only to have the lines twist back, pinioning her to the ground. Arcs of golden light sprang from the disorganised pattern, cutting many of Bloodtongue’s warlocks from the air, but the survivors came on undaunted, the skein of reality warping before them.

  There was no time for consideration, no time for shame, only the need to escape. Kaslon sang the Golden Mean, rising into the air on a spiral of gilded steel. He glanced back to see the mages of the Gilded Order dying where they stood. Like candles raised against a storm, their sorceries were feeble, flickering things, easily snuffed. Kaslon looked away, cheeks burning. The pattern was broken, there was nothing to be done.

  He crested the wall near the city’s eastern gate, barely able to halt his descent. Uliashtai spread before him like the innards of a massive timepiece, streets, blocks, even entire districts rearranged by the methodical rotation of ancestor gears.

  It was just after noon, the great golden expanse of Clock Street a perfect line leading between the only two fixed points in Uliashtai: the Gilded Tower at the eastern end of the city and the Autarch’s Palace in the west. Visitors often became lost in the shifting paths, baffled by directions that changed depending on the time of day. They thought the city disordered, anarchic, but there was a rhythm to Uliashtai, a complex and beautiful pattern that allowed those who understood it to traverse the city with surprising speed.

  Kaslon had come over the wall near the eastern gate, so the Gilded Tower was nearby. He made for it. The tower would be safe; the survivors could regroup, strike back. Unfortunately, Clock Street thronged with terrified citizens.

  ‘What’s happening?’ A woman in cogtender leathers caught Kaslon’s sleeve.

  ‘Bloodtongue, he’s…’ Kaslon chewed his lip. What had Bloodtongue done? It seemed impossible that the Chaos lord had conjured so great a working. The ritual alone must have taken months, how had the masters not sensed it?

  ‘Will the walls fall?’ An old man with a spring-winding crook hobbled from the crowd. ‘Should we make for the Underway?’