I sat at the River Run with autumn still on the trees and no intention of going back into the Forest, and I went back into the Forest, because Lotti asked and I owe her.

Four others were at the table. Gotfrit, a high elf, a shadow warrior by his own account. Grandi, a dwarf, a soldier. Lars, a man of the Empire who takes bounties. Tally, a high elf and an arcane wizard. Lotti came to us and asked a favour: a forester had been attacked in the woods a few hours outside the city, and his wife Marta wanted to know what had done it. That was the whole of what she could tell us. Not where, not when, not by what.

Marta was being comforted by a man whose name I was given and cannot now recall. I set that down because it is a shameful thing in a priest. A man’s name is the smallest coin you can pay him and I spent his and lost it. He was short with us at first, and rightly so, for we were strangers asking a grieving woman for directions, but a little plain speaking brought him round, and he drew us a map. Charcoal on a scraped piece of parchment, and worth more than anything else we had. I knew the country on it. It lies not far from where we lost Oskar Venn’s trail last month.

Thank Ulric for the eyes of Lars and Gotfrit. The sign was nothing a man like me would have seen, and between them they had it inside the hour. It brought us to an opening in the trees where the forester had been taken. Goblin arrows lay everywhere, in the dirt and standing out of the trunks. I took that for the answer to Marta’s question and thought us finished before midday. I was wrong twice over, as will become plain.

We searched the clearing instead. One of us found a great armoured orc crouched waiting in the brush. I cannot say who, as I was working the far side. Several of us took the high rock in the middle of the clearing and set ourselves on it. Grandi did not. He went straight at the thing, alone, and buried his axe in its shoulder, and it cried out in pain and then in rage. I had time to think that was brave and no time at all to think it was reckless, because the arrows started then, from every quarter: above us in the trees, level with us in the brush, below us from a gulch cut into the southern side. Goblins. They had let us walk into the middle of it and spring the trap ourselves.

I will not claim I kept my head. I was turned about and useless for a moment. I did see Grandi finish the orc, and I saw his face afterwards, and dwarfs are hard to read but I would call that satisfied.

The heaviest shooting came out of the southern gulch, so I went into it, to put myself between it and the rock. There were three of them down there. I brought my axe over my head meaning to split the nearest and it was not there any more, for the thing moved like a cat, and while I was recovering another put a spear into my shoulder. A puncture, nothing more, and the armour took most of it. But I had been treating them as vermin and they had drawn blood off me in one pass, and I want that written down so I remember it.

I could hear the fight going on above me and could not reach it. So I called on Ulric, and for the second time he answered. A white wolf came, spectral as the first. Whether it was the same one or another I cannot say and do not expect to. It took the nearest goblin in its jaws, opened it, and threw what was left up out of the gulch onto the ground above. The other two ran. They can move, as I have said.

By the time I climbed back the rest had run too, and my allies had two of them tangled in a net. Gotfrit and Grandi were putting questions to them. Grandi caved in the skull of the first, and the second talked quickly and at length. It swore the forester was no work of theirs. It said the beasts had done it, and it told us where the beasts were to be found, and it said all of this with a dwarf’s wet axe in front of its face, which is a poor place from which to judge a creature’s honesty. We walked away and I heard the axe come down behind us and did not turn around.

I have thought about that since. They had put arrows into us from cover, and the dwarf did what dwarfs do with greenskins, and the second had already given us all it had to give. I am not troubled by their deaths. I am a little troubled by how little the manner of it troubled me at the time.

Its directions took us southeast to a smaller clearing, and in that clearing lay a half-dozen beastmen full of goblin arrows. Dead some days. Lars put a bolt into one anyway, which I thought sensible. In the middle of the ground stood a stone, and on the stone was writing, and both Tally and I knew the hand of it. Nehekharan. The same hand as the stone in the camp where the thing came up out of the ground.

Then a goblin showed itself on the ridge above us, a big one, some manner of chief in that country, speaking broken Reikspiel, and it asked us for help. There were undead in a dwarf hold nearby and it wanted them cleared out. It showed us the door, hidden in the mountainside and covered over with the carcass of a beastman. I asked it about the forester before we went in. It gave me the same answer the one in the net had given, that the beasts had done the killing, and it gave it easily, the way a creature answers a question it has already decided about.

I will not pretend I am easy about what we did next. We took a greenskin’s errand and did it. But undead squatting in a dwarf hold is the worse thing of the two, and leaving it so because I disliked who pointed at it would have been pride dressed as piety.

Gotfrit went in first to scout and came back saying roots had reached for him. Grandi took us down. He slipped them and set himself where they would come again, and when I followed and they lashed out at me I got clear and he cut them apart. They went on writhing on the stone a long while after, like worms cut in half.

The stair ended in an antechamber with a raised dais in the centre. Grandi named the place a wayhold, a watch-post on a road the dwarfs do not use any more, and said the dais was where the watch stood to be counted. Ulric knows if that is what it was still being used for. There were two wights in it.

I prayed again, and again he came. Frost crept along the edge of my axe and the air went cold around me, and I felt him standing at my shoulder in much the same way Grandi was standing at my shoulder. I do not know how else to put it.

Then they were on us. Grandi and I held the line. A crossbow bolt went into the chest of the one in front of me. That was Lars, behind and to my right, already winding for the next. The thing came in and swung and I got my guard up and it was faster than a dead thing has any right to be, and it took me in the side. Where its blade touched my armour the metal rusted and flaked away under it. I have seen that once before, on the thing that turned to sand, and I do not like having seen it twice.

With his fury in me I put my axe through its chest and it went down and stayed down. Grandi and Tally had already broken the other badly between them. Gotfrit shot it from cover and it left them and turned on him, and I came off the dais onto it axe-first and that was the end of it.

When it fell the room changed. There is no better word. A pressure went out of the air, something leaving that had been there longer than the wights had. The cold went out of me with it and the frost ran off my blade in water.

There was nothing else in that hold but more of the same writing on the walls. I want to be plain about why that sits badly with me. Dwarfs did not cut those marks. Dwarfs do not write in that hand. Someone came after, into a hold the dwarfs had abandoned, and wrote on its walls in the tongue of a dead country two thousand miles south of here, and then something settled in and the roots grew over the stair.

We went out the way we came in and the goblin chief was gone. We walked back to the city and parted.

I went to Marta and I could not tell her what killed her husband. There were goblin arrows all over the ground where he was taken, and that was my answer until the goblins themselves gave me another. The one in the net denied it and named the beasts. The chief on the ridge said the same. Goblins lie the way other creatures breathe, and two of them agreeing on a thing proves only that both had the same reason to say it. But the beasts in that second clearing had been shot full of goblin arrows themselves, so there was a war of sorts going on in that country between the two of them, and a forester working a wood between two such hosts could have taken his death from either hand. That is what I told her, in fewer words than these. She wanted something to hate and I had nothing to give her but a choice of two.

It is little comfort and it does not bring the man back. Life on the edge of the Great Forest is paid for in exactly this coin, and she knew that when she married a forester, and knowing it is no help at all. I count Lotti’s debt discharged. I do not feel squared.

He answered me twice in one day. I set down last month that the gift was running thin, like water through cloth, and I believed it when I wrote it. It did not feel thin in that gulch and it did not feel thin on that dais. I have no account to give of that. Perhaps it comes full when there is nothing else between me and the thing in front of me, and goes quiet when I kneel alone and ask for proof. That would be like him.

One thing more, which I write because I think it is true and not because I want it to be. Tally said, on the road back, that the dead are stirring more than they ought, that something is waking, and that these things are one thing and not many. I am no scholar. But the lich beneath Garffan’s Rest, the thing out of the ground in the beastmen’s camp, and now two wights in a dwarf wayhold with Nehekharan cut into the walls above them. That is three, in one season, inside a week’s walk of my own door. I can count that far.

It is Kaldezeit now. The cold has come in its proper season and the frost on my blanket in the mornings means nothing at all any more.

I find I would rather have the warning.

Valdenheim Wolfhart

Date of Expedition: September 29.

Party Members: Alaric (Hedge Wizard), Negen (Thief), Talindor (Road Warden), Valdenheim (Priest of Ulric).

Major Discoveries: A potential dark artifact connected to Nehekaran powers.

Casualties: None.

Part 1

Aubentag, the 6th of Brauzeit. Written in the beastmen's camp, by their own fire.

I set this down while my hands still shake, so that I have it true before I have it tidy.

I came into the Forest because I was asked. A voice woke me and asked a favour, find a relic of evil and destroy it, for its taint runs ahead of a darkness the Great Forest is not ready for. I remember little else of it. I remember what followed: frost on my blanket in a warm autumn, snow falling out of season, wolves howling over Talagaad where there are no wolves, and in the morning Ulric nearer to me than he has ever been. He has granted me things I will not write down. I will say only that since that night I have felt the grant thinning, like a grip loosening, and I understand well enough what is being asked. The favour is not finished. Neither, then, is the blessing.

We met at the forest's edge, at a shrine to Taal among the standing stones. Our quarry was one Oskar Venn, a trader in things better left alone. Three others had come for him. Talindor, a high elf road warden, to keep danger off the roads. Negen Rustig, a thief, who was with us at Garffan's Rest and who is in these places because thieves are. Alaric, a hedge wizard out of Bretonnia, drawn by the artefact's power, which is reason enough to watch him. Of my own reason I said little, and still cannot say it plainly.

The trail was easy at first and we ran it close. It took us into a clearing that stank of rot, where the trees stood like willows and were not. The signs were there to read and we did not read them, bones in the roots, the dead already taken down and put to use feeding the things that took them. The limbs had us before we understood we were being hunted. We cut ourselves loose. It cost us hours we could not spare, and Venn's lead grew.

Clear of them, we found a second shrine of Taal, deeper in, on a game trail that sees little use. A man stood at it, unassuming and very sure of himself. East of him the ground had been split by a great cleft, and beside the cleft lay a man cleaved in half; how he came to that, none of us could say, and I do not think the stranger could either. He gave his name as Albrecht Tagentodt and said he was hunting Venn as well, and said almost nothing more. When the talking had gone on a while he called two crossbowmen out of cover, and when it had gone on a little longer and we had agreed to walk together, he called two more. I am glad no one reached for a weapon at that shrine. We would have died at it. I cannot name what is wrong with the man, only that something is, and so I did not take the front. Better to be behind the bolts than before them.

We had the trail again when the noises started off the path. Talindor went north to look. One of the crossbowmen went south. We heard him die, and afterwards we found him in pieces hung about the trees. We went on. Whatever walked beside us kept at it until a second mercenary broke and ran, and he did not get far, and he was left flayed in the branches like the first. I will not pretend we were not unnerved. There was nothing else to do but continue, so we continued.

That trail brought us to the third shrine of Taal, and the third shrine was desecrated. The beasts had thrown down the god's own stones and raised an effigy of the Ruinous Powers on the wreck of them. South of it they were dancing. That is blasphemy, and blasphemy is answered.

I was lost to the rage. I own it. I had no tact in me and no thought of the others; I screamed Ulric's fury at the sky, and for that or for some reason of his own he answered me. A white wolf came, spectral, and went into the fight at my side. Through the haze I saw Negen and Talindor slip into the trees, and Tagentodt and his two and Alaric go after them. I charged.

A great Gor met me, curl-horned and heavy with muscle, a curved axe in each hand. Two more of its kind stood behind it and a half-dozen Ungors besides. I split it from skull to sternum. The next was on me before the first had dropped, both axes coming down, and I got the haft of my axe up and no more than that. I will not lie about what happened next: the wolf saved me. More of them had closed in when they saw the first fall, and the wolf fought with Ulric's own fury among them, and it tore out a throat, and it took a blow that was meant for my head.

I know little of the rest with any certainty. Some of the beasts broke toward Alaric; he was alive at the end, so I suppose he dealt with them, though I could not tell you how. I saw fire fall among the ones ringing me and the wolf and burn them where they stood. I do not know whether that was Alaric or Tagentodt. Either way I disapprove. Either way I am standing.

There was no rest in it. The camp's champion came out, a Bestigor, twice the height of a man, a two-handed axe as long as a man is tall, skulls hung about him. My arms were dead and I felt the fury rise in me again regardless. Then the ground itself belched, and something worse came up out of it.

It had the make of what we met beneath Garffan's Rest. A serpent's body, a man's torso above it, a face of golden mask, a tail that ended in a spear, and a glaive in its hands. It stood taller than the Bestigor. The champion of the dark gods barely had time to turn before that tail went through him, and the thing threw him aside like a sack. I have no explanation for it. The beasts' master and the thing from the sand are not friends, and that is worth more to me than any explanation.

I charged it, and the wolf came. My axe bit it. Its tail came for me and the wolf clamped the tail in its jaws and held, and the thing turned on the wolf instead of me, and that is twice Ulric saved my life. Negen put fire into it from the treeline, how he managed that at such a distance I do not know, and have not asked. In its rage it tore loose, slung the wolf against one of the stones, and broke it. It went out like mist in morning sun. I do not know if a thing like that can be killed, or only sent back. I mean to find out before I pray for it again.

Then it came back to me. I had my axe up across my body to turn the glaive, and an arrow struck it from somewhere behind me, and the arrow's push threw its lurch wrong, and its own weight carried its head down onto my blade. That is how it ended. That is all it was. Then the flesh of it ran to sand and the metal rusted as though a thousand years went by in a breath, and the wind through the camp took what was left of it away.

So we sit in a dead camp and eat by the beasts' fire. Of the four who set out from the standing stones, four remain. Of Tagentodt's men, Tagentodt and one mercenary; the other went under a Gor's axe. We rest here a while because men who do not rest make mistakes, and I have made enough of those today.

Venn is still ahead of us, and he still carries the thing. Nothing that happened in this clearing changes that.

May Ulric guide us.

Valdenheim Wolfhart

Part 2

Konistag, the 22nd of Brauzeit. Written in Talagaad, at the shrine on the north bank.

We rested in the dead camp until the fires burned down, and then we took up the trail again.

For four days we had it. Talindor read the ground better than any of us and Negen read the places a man stops to rest, and between the two of them we kept Venn ahead of us and close. On the fifth day the rain came and did not stop, and the Forest did what the Forest does. The sign went soft. Then it was just gone. We spent two more days casting about for it in country that had never seen a road, and found a stream crossing where the bank had been cut by something that may have been a boot and may have been a hoof, and that was the last of it.

I put the loss where it belongs. We lost Venn in the clearing of those wrong trees, not at the stream. Everything after was us trying to make up hours we had already spent. I read that ground badly. The bones were there to be seen and I did not see them.

So the man is at large. Where he has gone I do not know. What he carries I do not know either, except that it is a thing whose taint runs ahead of a darkness, and that it is further from my hand now than when I set out.

We parted at the forest's edge. Tagentodt went north with his last man and said nothing worth writing down, which is all he ever said. He knows my face and I know his. We will meet again or we will not. Talindor took the road east. Negen went wherever thieves go, and I did not ask; the man saved my life with fire I still cannot account for, and a debt is a poor reason to pry. Alaric I have not seen since.

Of the thing that came up out of the ground I have learned only that its origins lie far to the south, beyond the Black Mountains and a great deal of country past them, in a place some call the land of the dead and the learned name "Nehekhara." I have the word from a scroll requisitioned from the Temple of Morr at the behest of my betters in Middenheim, and I set it down as it was written, since it is not a word in any tongue of mine. What I know is this: it was not the beasts' ally. It killed their champion before it came for us, and it was already old when it came. There is a hand behind it that is not the hand behind them. I mean to find out whose. There may yet be more in the archives of Middenheim, and Brother Gerlach has been generous with an old acolyte before.

On the matter of the blessing I will be plain, since this book is for me.

Nine days ago I knelt alone and asked, and the thing I asked for came, but it came slow and it came thin, like water through a cloth. It has been slower each time since. I do not think I imagine it. Ulric asked a favour of me and it is not done. The errand stands open and the man who was its object is loose in the world, and by every reckoning I have ever been taught, what was given to me should have been taken back at that stream.

It has not been taken back. I do not call that mercy. The White Wolf does not deal in mercy and never has; he is the god of the strength you hold onto with your hands, and a man who keeps a strength he has not earned is not forgiven, he is being watched. I would rather have been stripped at the stream. A clean judgement I would understand. This is a hand left on my shoulder.

The wolves have stopped howling over the city. I had thought that would be a comfort and it is not.

The frost was on my blanket again this morning, and when I went out to draw water there was snow coming down over the Rows, light, not sticking. It is Brauzeit. The brewers are still at the vats.

It should not be snowing.

Valdenheim Wolfhart

Date of Expedition: September 14
Party Members: Valdenheim Wolfhart (Priest of Ulric), Agnes (Knight), Wolfgang "Fiddler" (Engineer), Negin Rustig (Thief), Tally (High Elf Arcane Wizard)
Major Discoveries: An ancient mausoleum beneath Garffan's Rest, built in no fashion known to the Empire — three levels deep, trapped, and carved throughout with hieroglyphs, vultures and jackals. A lord of undeath lay in a black sarcophagus at its bottom, attended by two silver-halberded guardians. Both destroyed. The thing spoke of a master. We did not learn who.
Casualties: None among the party. Two villagers of Garffan's Rest found dead. Two others never found.

The leaves were turning when we came to Garffan's Rest, by separate roads and separate reasons, and found the village with a hole in it. Two villagers had gone into the old mausoleum on the hill. Two of their kin had gone in after them. None had come out. Father Albrecht Fen, a priest of Taal, and Reeve Ilse Rann told us the tales. Daemons. Deaths going back generations. One found bled white. Another hanged with no rope. They offered twenty gold crowns for the truth of it, and for the living, if there were any. Gold is nothing to a priest of Ulric. But a door that eats people and is left standing is an insult, and Ulric's will was that I should walk through it.

We went.

The first level was the entrance and nothing more — a stair going down with statues on either side.

The second level was trapped and made no sense to me. Hieroglyphs cut into the walls. Sealed urns. Beetles worked in stone. Vultures, over and over, and other ornament of a kind I have never seen in the Empire nor heard described. The arrows came first, down the length of the passage, and took Fiddler. I went to him to see to the wound, and in doing so I put my weight where I should not have. The stair beneath us gave way and became a steep ramp. We went down it together. There were spikes at the bottom. That is where Fiddler lost his teeth. Tally mended him with sorcery — a miraculous thing, and one I have no liking for, though I will not pretend it did not save him. The teeth are still gone.

The third level was the same work grown thicker, the carvings crowding every surface. Statues lined the walls the whole length of it — men's bodies with the heads of vultures and jackals, standing in rows, watching nothing. There we found two of the missing, hacked to pieces. The other two we never found. I do not know what became of them, and I will not pretend otherwise to their kin. One hall ended in nothing but a jackal-headed statue. Another ended in a door. Behind the door was a chamber of sarcophagi, and at its head a great black one, ornamented beyond the rest. What was in it was already getting out.

Withered skeletons stirred to meet us. Behind them stood two guardians in better preservation than any of it, bearing silver halberds twice the height of a man, and they did not move at all. Agnes went in first and Fiddler behind him. I took the nearest skeleton and cleaved it through. Agnes broke the second with a downward swing, and it came apart like dry sticks. The guardians watched. Their master was still working to free itself from the black casket.

Fiddler took his moment and put a handgun ball directly into the thing. It struck — and the creature's body shimmered with some working of magic, and it was merely angered. It came across the chamber for him. Tally stood beside him and called out its weaknesses. Fiddler drew his blade, his shot spent, and vaulted from a sarcophagus to take a skeleton through the ribs.

Then blades passed my shoulder out of the dark and went into the eye sockets of two more skeletons, and they fell to dust. I saw the outline of Negen Rustig for half a heartbeat before the shadows had him again. Agnes and I finished the rest. The dead thing reached Fiddler.

What Fiddler did next I cannot account for — whether it was wit, or fortune, or a god's hand on his shoulder. He set off black powder in the creature's face. The blast lit it, deafened it, and tore apart whatever protection it had wrapped around itself. Agnes charged while it reeled and took its leg off with his sword. As it went down burning, I took its head with an upward swing. The head flew the length of the chamber and landed in the black sarcophagus, and the lid closed over it by itself.

The two guardians crumbled where they stood.

It spoke while it came at us. It spoke of a master. That is all I have, and I would rather say so than guess. We took what treasure was there. I do not know what any of it is for. We carried what was left of the two back up into the light and told Fen and the Reeve plainly what had happened below — including that two are still unaccounted for. They were less pleased by the truth than men usually are. They paid the sum agreed.

We left Garffan's Rest as we came to it.

The thing in the black casket is dead. Whatever built that place is not, and no hand of the Old World I know built it.

— Valdenheim Wolfhart, Priest of Ulric