Kva's body was more intact than most. He lay with his eyes and mouth open, his body encased in a sleeve of melting ice shot through with ribbons of blood. The ice was already beginning to run in the savage summer's heat. Nearby lay Kva's twin guardians Sharing flesh as they had before their birth, they were mashed into a single mass.

The grand menhir was blackened and tilted to one side. Paler stone showed where it had been forced partially from the ground. A crack ran across the middle, close to breaking it in two.

Bjorn sniffed at the air.

'Stinks, doesn't it?' said Russ. 'Magic and desperation. Like Prospero.' He shook his head. 'We use the weapons of the enemy at our peril, but I don't see any other choice.'

'Kva warned you,' said Bjorn, 'and now he is dead.'

'He did. So did Malcador, and Constantin Valdor. They were all right. I have what I need but at such cost…' He stopped himself saying something he would regret. 'This place,' he said suddenly. 'It must be destroyed. It is tainted. Fell things move here. The barrier between warp and world has thinned.'

'You shall burn it?' said Bjorn.

'No, my son,' said Russ. 'That will not be nearly enough. The Krakgard must be remade and the Hel-road through Syrtyr's Door closed. That way will not be safe to use again.' He growled. 'Another task for a later day. We have much to do before.'

Russ touched the ice covering Kva's face. It was slippery with running water.

'Until next winter,' he said.

Fifteen

Fifteen

The Battle Of Trisolian A-4

Broad beams of lightning gunfire cracked the air with sudden, heat-driven displacement, shaking the storage cavern with unnatural thunder. A cohort of thallaxii stalked past guns flashing their coruscating arcs of death. Trisolian A-4's subterranean agrifields could not fall.

If the world died their main food supply would be lost and they would be starved out The fighting began there against groups of Traitor Legion infiltrators seeking to end the campaign before it began.

They had been spotted. Battle commenced. Naturally the magos domina directed the fight from her fortress realm within the Septa station of the Heptaligon. Only her lucky underlings got to experience the thrill of combat.

That is how she had put it to Cawl Had his sense of self-preservation not intervened, he would have begged to differ.