Oaths and Conquests by William King

Author:William King
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Black Library
Published: 2020-01-16T12:12:41+00:00

GHOSTS OF KHAPHTAR

Miles A Drake

Her feet squelched in the putrid mud, pressed down by an unfamiliar weight. The hem of her dusky robe and much of her dark, glassy purple armour was caked in the necrogenous ooze. The noxious haze emanating from the landscape of rotting benthic matter grated at her lungs and burned her eyes.

The foggy currents of the aethersea that might once have brought comfort were stagnant, though she could still feel the ripples of movement cast by the exhausted strides of the namarti at her flanks, and the lethargic circling of her rakerdart. The latter emerged from behind the immense, bleached ribs of a rotting murkwhale, whose skeleton she strode through.

‘Heel, Ionian,’ Akhlys whispered.

The rakerdart did as it was bid. Its scales had turned a hypoxic purple.

‘It won’t be long now,’ she said, mournfully stroking the rakerdart’s dorsal fin with a gauntleted hand.

Death was everywhere, splayed out across the seabed. The decay made a final banquet for millions of chitinous scavengers, who glutted themselves on the rotting world they once flourished in, even as they slowly asphyxiated beneath the wilting, purple radiance that pierced the eerie haze.

She closed her eyes as another beast thrashed behind her. The last fangmora.

Hardening her resolve, she turned, seeing the ragged band file into the colossal ribcage of the murkwhale.

The namarti, several dozen in number, paused, listening to the dying eel. Their once lithe and imposing figures had given way to slumped exhaustion, and the runes on their foreheads, once glimmering with the light of stolen souls, were dull and muted. Several of them carried stretchers bearing comatose compatriots wrapped in damp, saline gauze.

Her gaze panned over to the convulsing fangmora, whose scales showed a more severe discolouration than Ionian’s. A trio of akhelians knelt beside it. Two held it down, easily overpowering its weak spasms. The third, the beast’s bonded master, removed his helm and drew his helsabre.

With a single word of deliverance, he opened the beast’s throat with the inward curve of his blade. A flood of purple sprayed, misting in the air for a moment, caught in the aethersea’s stagnant current, before condensing to sink into the mud.

The akhelian stood, head bowed, helm clutched in the crook of his arm. His regal poise had faded, and his expression showed a blank, hopeless void. He turned as Tethyssian, the tidecaster, approached. The isharann’s loose robes were weighed down by caked mud as he drew back his cowl. He regarded the dead fangmora, before looking up to its former master. ‘May I speak the Rite of Severance?’ he asked, his voice solemn and tired.

‘For what?’ The akhelian stared blankly at the tidecaster, his voice barely a whisper. ‘There are no ebbing tides to dispatch the beast’s spirit upon. The sea is dead. And so is that which was bound to me.’

As an isharann, Akhlys knew the rite bore no true sorrow. The akhelians shared no emotional bond with their enslaved beasts. But it still held significance.

Tethyssian’s lips tightened. ‘Ceremony and tradition, Saturiandi.

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