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  Gravskein looked to Bulsurrus, awaiting his signal. He was the most transformed, and so the most enlightened, of the hunting party. He waited as the blood knight reached the dais of the Realmgate. The vampire turned his horse around slowly, scanning the wooded hills that embraced the gate on three sides.

  He will see us, Gravskein realised. The vampire was gazing at his surroundings with something greater than mere sight. She looked again at Bulsurrus, and he nodded. He saw the danger too.

  With the nod, the Unmade rushed out of concealment and charged, howling, down the hillside.

  There was little art to their attack. Once, in the lost time, there would have been. Now, there was only the direct charge, the straight line to the prey and to the evangelism of pain.

  The hunting party came down on the left flank of the undead, midway between the rear of the skeletons and corpses and zombies and the Realmgate. The blood knight saw them at once. He shouted, and with a thrust of his sword he commanded his troops to meet their attackers. The infantry ran forward, and they met the Unmade just before the base of the slope. Gravskein’s comrades had the advantage of speed and momentum, and they slashed into the blood knight’s troops.

  Bulsurrus whirled once, his arms outstretched, decapitating the skeletons closing with him, and then he turned, flying over the ground in his ecstatic sprint to reach the vampire. Gravskein followed. She had a flail-headed chain in one hand, a sword in the other, and she whipped the chain into the corpses. She moved swiftly, only a few paces behind Bulsurrus. She had little interest in the things without pain. She would fight to hold them off, but they were not important.

  Behind her, the rest of the band was not as fast, and plunged deeply into the struggle. Skeletons and zombies fell without a sound. Screams of rage and shouts of joyful agony reached her ears, though. Her comrades were dying too, but not without a final burst of blessed pain.

  The blood knight charged, the dire wolf at his side. He made for Bulsurrus. The Joyous One leapt high to meet the vampire, attacking with the swiftness of the wind, but the vampire was faster. He batted Bulsurrus’ blades aside with a contemptuous blow of his sword, smashing the Unmade away. Bulsurrus landed hard, one leg twisting badly beneath him.

  The dire wolf leapt at Gravskein before she could run to ­Bulsurrus’ aid. The massive beast flew through the air, a batter­ing ram of fur and muscle. It slammed into her and brought her down, its paws crushing her chest with its weight. It snarled and opened its jaws wide. Hot, foetid breath washed over Gravskein, and she stared into the darkness of its maw and at its curved-dagger teeth. She jabbed up with her sword, and the wolf reared back, evading her blow. Released, she scrambled back, but the beast came at her again, its jaws gaping to tear out her midsection. She kicked at it, jerking its head away once, but the animal was bigger, stronger and faster than she was. She was doing nothing more than delaying its meal by a few seconds.

  Then, with joy and exultation, she saw what she must do.

  She kicked again, this time aiming for the maw itself. The jaws snapped shut on her leg. The dire wolf’s teeth came together, severing muscle and snapping bone in a single, monstrously powerful bite. The wolf sank its teeth deeper, pulverising her limb. The pain was enormous, consuming, glorious. It was, since the removal of her face, the greatest pain she had experienced.

  The greatest gift.

  The undead monster gazed at her with baleful triumph as it chewed, breaking more bone. It thought she was helpless, a fallen prey for it to devour as it saw fit. The wolf was mistaken. She was energised, transformed by the gift it had bestowed upon her. It did not understand the truth of its situation. She was not the one in a trap. She had caught the wolf with her leg. She held it with her sacrifice.

  Gravskein jerked up, striking with chain and sword. The chain whipped around the wolf’s throat, tearing muscle apart as the flail smashed against the left side of its skull, caving in bone. Gravskein plunged her blade through the wolf’s right eye and into its brain. The beast’s body jerked violently, severing her leg completely below the knee. Frenzied with pain, she yanked the sword free and put out the beast’s other eye. The dire wolf howled, and the necromantic sorcery that held it together began to unravel. Gravskein hauled its head to the side with the chain, cutting deeper, and hacked with the sword until she decapitated the monster and it fell, stilled.

  Her blood pumped in cataracts from her stump. The wolf’s fangs were rotten, its saliva poisonous, and the crimson that fell from her was already streaked with thick clots of black. The pain of the injury paled next to the fire, the devouring, putrid fire that coursed through her body. The injury the wolf had inflicted upon her was trying to kill her, but she embraced the agony with such fervour that she held death aside. She would not surrender to darkness while there was still a heartbeat’s worth of pain to experience.

  She pushed herself away from the dire wolf and lunged up on her remaining leg. A few yards away, the blood knight was toying with Bulsurrus. The Joyous One was fast, squirming like an insect out of the way of each sword blow, but he could not rise to counter-attack. Gravskein saw the struggle through a haze of red and cracked silver. Her vision was narrowing. Her body was weakening quickly, but the wracking bliss carried her forward. The vampire had his back to her, and she hopped forward, a bleeding, savage grotesque of slaughter. The world grew slippery, falling away from her conscious grasp. The only solid thing in her vision was the blood knight. She lurched towards him, propelled by a vortex of agony. There was no conscious thought. There was action, every movement summoned as if by the dictates of fate. It was as though she were beyond choice, blissfully caught in a dance of death.

  She was barely aware that she was raising her blade. She was aware of plunging it down, at the apex of a final lunge. She stabbed the vampire above his gorget, deep into the base of his skull. The blood knight froze mid-blow. A profound, paralysing shudder ran through his body from his spine down, rooting him to the spot.

  The world faded still more. Blood poured from Gravskein, soaking her leg, the back of the vampire’s armour and the ground below. Held up by wings of pain, Gravskein clung to the blood knight and sawed with her blade. He moved again, jerking and stumbling in a doomed effort to throw her off. In the darkening world, Bulsurrus rose and thrust his arm-blades into the vampire’s eyes. Gravskein kept sawing, and somewhere in the thick darkness closing in on her, the battle was ending. Skeletons and vampires were falling as she severed their leader’s will. The surviving Unmade rushed around the vampire, bringing him down in a storm of blows.

  Gravskein kept sawing even after the blood knight was on the ground. She sawed until his skull rolled free.

  Her memories smeared after that. Someone bound her wounds and stopped the bleeding, though she did not know it was Skarask who had helped her until long afterwards. Oblivion tried to claim her, but she clung to her pain. She floated in it, welcoming it as her identity and her salvation, and it kept her alive as her comrades carried her back in triumph to the ruins inhabited by the Unmade.

  ‘You have done well,’ voices said, cutting through the haze to become part of her fever dreams. ‘You will be honoured.’

  ‘I am not done,’ she moaned. ‘I must look for the poison.’

  She did not know what she meant, but the words burst from her with the force of prophecy.

  She was tended to, though she could not remember that either. Her next clear memory came some time later. The pain of the wound was still extreme. The poison’s fever still burned through her. But she could see again, and as she sat up she found herself on an eroded altar stone at the centre of a ring of pillars. Once majestic, the columns were now grey, stained with moss, their tops broken off. They were stumps of fingers stabbing up into the night.

  There were many other ruins beyond the ring of pillars. Everywhere, crumbling and half-buried, were the fading dreams of a once great civilisation. There had been maje
stic cities here. There were the stone ghosts of formal gardens, amphitheatres and palaces of learning. Before King Vourneste had become the Flayed King, Tzlid had been ruled by some of the greatest philosophers Shyish had ever seen. Then had come the final enlightenment. The Unmade had no use for the things that had been, but the vestigial memories of greatness lingered, an ill-defined and resented grief. They clung to the rubble of what was once their kingdom. They could not let go of what had become meaningless. Intimations of lost glory gnawed at their souls like a cancer.

  Gravskein knew those griefs and phantasmal regrets as well as any of her fellows. Now, though, they had receded to insignificance. She was conscious only of a present glory, a present honour. She was surrounded by tall, hooded figures. All their limbs were blades. They were the Blissful Ones of Tzlid. They were the most transformed of the Unmade, the ones who had ascended the highest on the mountain of pain. If she was on this slab of pitted marble, at the centre of this group, it could only be for one reason.

  The Blissful Ones were silent. Their faces were hidden. Above their heads, the skulls of the enemies who had brought them to this exalted state gazed with dark sockets upon Gravskein. One of the warriors advanced towards her. Between his arm-scythes, he held a new skull. It had been freshly skinned. Traces of blood still dripped from the naked bone.

  The skull had sharp fangs. It was the head of the blood knight.

  The Blissful One bowed, and set the skull on the end of the slab. Then he stepped back to rejoin the circle, and broke the silence at last. ‘We are the honoured of the Unmade. We are prepared to welcome you to our number. It falls to you to do what must be done. Prove yourself. Embrace the full dominion of pain.’

  Gravskein’s sword lay beside her. She picked it up. She looked at her remaining leg, then at the Blissful Ones. ‘Let pain be mine,’ she said. ‘Let me belong to pain.’ She did not hesitate. With a scream of ecstasy, she brought the blade down, cutting deep below the knee. Her blood jetted into her face as she sawed through skin, muscle and veins. Bone shards flew. She raised the sword and brought it down hard again, breaking bones. She half-severed her leg before she passed out from blood loss and pain. She had done enough, though. She had committed herself, and embraced what had been offered. When next she woke, her hands were gone, replaced with the lethal curve of iron, and her temples throbbed with the ache of the bolts fixing the eight-pointed halo to her head.

  The circle of the honoured was still around her. As she rose from the altar and stood for the first time, unsteadily at first, and then with growing wonder and certainty, on her new blades, they raised their arms and shouted.

  ‘Hail to the Flayed King!’ they cried. ‘Hail to the wonder of pain! Welcome, sister! Welcome, Child of Bliss!’

  Overcome, ecstatic, she howled her joy. They surrounded her, reaching out with their hooked blades. They linked hers to theirs, and Gravskein passed from one new comrade to the other, until the long line of the Blissful Ones danced, weaving between the rings of the columns.

  When the ceremony ended, and the dancers bowed to one another, she said, ‘I am, in the midst of my joy, humbled. I did not dream this honour could be mine.’

  ‘You earned the right of transformation through your actions at the Realmgate,’ the one who had led the ceremony told her. She recognised his voice now. It was Nazarg. ‘You were a great blade that cut deeply through the enemy. You are Gravskein the Harrower, and a warband is yours to lead.’

  Gravskein’s heart swelled with hope. ‘To lead a search?’

  Nazarg bowed his head. ‘Find the Tower of Revels, Harrower. The task is yours, now.’

  With her ascension, no one doubted the strength of her visions, not even Bulsurrus, though he chafed at the loss of his position compared to Gravskein’s. He followed her, though. He became one of the Companions of the Harrower.

  He and the others had followed her in the long search through the Bloodwind Spoil.

  The search that had killed so many of them.

  The search that seemed like it might be endless.

  But as she crouched between the split rocks in the Desolate Marches and gazed at the parade of her memories, she found the one that, above all others, gave her the strength she needed at this moment.

  It was the memory of the vision she had while she underwent her transformation. It was another vision of the tower, and of the lands on which its shadow fell. Her blood had still been tortured by the venom of the dire wolf’s saliva. Fever and rot roiled through her frame, and through her dreams. She saw the land awash with poison. A huge wave of shining black spread over the hills and plains, killing everything, drowning out the joy of pain. And the Tower of Revels was the source of the wave. The tower, that was the legacy of the Flayed King, the tower that should be in the possession of the Unmade, was claimed by a usurping hand. It had lost its true nature. It was corrupted.

  Gravskein had risen from her vision with new understanding. The tower must not only be found. It had to be retaken.

  She had at last defeated the venom that ran in her blood through the sacrifice of her limbs. So much of her had blood flowed out that it took the poison with it. But the venom had given her the new vision. Poison was what had corrupted the tower, and poison was what it sent out onto the land, and so poison would be the key to its discovery.

  Look for the poison.

  Look for the poison.

  Look for the poison.

  Gravskein stepped out from between the agonised rocks and looked out over the Desolate Marches again.

  How could I look for the poison when all was poisoned?

  That was how her search had foundered.

  Look more deeply. Be worthy, and find the greater death.

  Part II

  Gravskein led the band into the greater death. As before, they followed the tracks of dried gullies. These were, she thought, the veins through which the poison had flowed. She took her followers over the tortured earth to where the death was most profound. After more days – or weeks? or months? – of searching, one of the gullies opened up onto a strange landscape that had been blasted of even its identity. There was no horizon here, no light or darkness. There was only grey.

  Though there was no fog, Gravskein could see no more than fifty feet in any direction. Even after a few steps, she could not see the gulley that had led them here. The ground was hard and knobby. It felt like it had been scoured down to the fossilised bones of the earth. Something had come through and turned the land to nothing. Directions were now truly meaningless.

  ‘You have lost us,’ Bulsurrus said after what might have been a day of walking through the limbo. ‘We could walk in circles until we die and never know it.’

  For a moment, Gravskein thought he meant that they would not know that they had died. She could believe that, in this place. ‘We are going forward,’ she said.

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘I walk forward always. And think what is around us. Think what terrible poison could do this to the land. We are closer than we have ever been before.’

  ‘We are closer to our end than we have ever been before.’

  If either is true, then at least there will be an end to despair. ‘You will see,’ she said. ‘You should have joy in the pain of our quest. We are being rewarded even now.’

  They marched on, and there were never any landmarks, and never any change except in the growth of hunger, thirst and weakness. Before the limbo, they had come across, now and then, the beasts of the Eightpoints. Raptoryxes and blight serpents had preyed on the warband, and become prey in their turn. Every encounter was deadly, but the slain monsters had provided nourish­ment to the survivors. Now, though, there was nothing. No creature hunted in the grey. Gravskein did not even see the corpses of monsters foolish enough to have entered this territory. The smallest body would have been a landmark, a change. But there could be no change here.
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  Havskith, an Awakened One, succumbed. He dropped like a felled tree, dead before he hit the ground.

  Gravskein stopped marching. ‘We will halt here,’ she said. ‘Our comrade makes us the gift of his strength. Let us honour it.’

  The other Companions obeyed, partitioning the body with quick, brutal chops of their blades. Gravskein hooked chunks of flesh with her left scythe and brought the still-warm meat to her mouth. She chewed through gristle. The taste of blood gave her the illusion of respite from thirst.

  Bulsurrus stood next to her. ‘Let this be enough,’ he said, between mouthfuls of Havskith’s meat. He spoke quietly, at least, but the fact that he wanted this conversation to remain private suggested he was serious about his demands.

  ‘Enough?’ Gravskein asked. ‘You put a limit on the sacrifice you are prepared to make for the Unmade and the Flayed King?’

  ‘I put a limit on the sacrifice I will make for you. I will not have us walk pointlessly and die fruitlessly. Leadership came to you too soon. You are not ready.’

  ‘Your jealously is speaking, proving that it is you who is not ready to lead. You have no plan, no direction.’

  ‘I warn you…’ Bulsurrus began.

  ‘The warnings come from me,’ Gravskein hissed. ‘If you wish to lead, challenge me. Try to seize the warband and I will gut you. I swear by the Flayed King that your death will be quick and dishonourable.’

  ‘I will not let you kill us,’ Bulsurrus responded, but he walked away, holding back from an outright challenge for the moment.

  The Companions of the Harrower feasted until nothing remained of their comrade. His bones were cracked open, the marrow sucked clean. His skull was a broken, empty vessel. They moved on, given strength by his fatal weakness. Gravskein looked back once. They had barely started marching again, and already the pieces of Havskith had dis­appeared, the empty land as featureless as if he had never been.