doubt it. We are talking about magic on a scale that only gods or daemon princes could work. Nonetheless, possible or not, I think that is what Morathi intends. I think it is what she always intended, even before she met Aenarion.’
‘She must be stopped,’ said Teclis.
‘Indeed she must. You are here because we need a weapon against those who would swallow the world. You will be our sword.’
‘Me?’ Teclis felt suddenly very vulnerable. It was all very well saying that someone had to stop the most powerful sorceress of all time. It was an entirely different matter when you yourself might be the one chosen to do it.
Caledor’s expression was bleak. ‘We all feel that way when destiny taps us on the shoulder. I never thought that one day…’
He looked away and shook his head. The walls of the chamber seemed to fade, and Teclis looked out onto the vast, glittering space beyond. As far as the horizon an enormous pattern of light blazed. At its centre a cancerous darkness was eating away at it. Around that darkness blazing figures, elf-like but sky-tall, worked spells to keep it contained. Even as they did so, the darkness threatened to erupt in a different part of the pattern.
The walls returned. The chamber coalesced around them. Caledor, who had seemed for a moment to be one of those distant gigantic figures, was once more his stooped self, small and infinitely sad. ‘We cannot do it. We are trapped here. We have screamed warnings in the dreams of the Wise. We have woven spells to summon aid to us. You are what we have been sent.’
‘So she must be stopped,’ Teclis said softly. ‘What must I do?’
‘You must return and tell the wizards of Hoeth to prepare for war. And you must prepare for war yourself.’
‘Me? I am not a fighter.’
‘You are of the blood of Aenarion. I doubt you will have a problem with killing.’
‘It’s the being killed I have a problem with.’
‘Everything that lives has that problem.’
You do not, Teclis wanted to say. It was almost as if the old wizard could read his mind. ‘I am no longer alive,’ he said.
‘I am sorry,’ said Teclis.
‘That makes two of us,’ said Caledor. He tilted his head to one side, as if listening to something or someone very far away.
‘Our time here is over.’
He rose from his chair with very great reluctance and walked as slowly as a prisoner going to his own execution towards the door. Every step seemed to take him a prodigious effort of will. He turned when he reached the door, his hand trembling on the handle.
‘Farewell, Teclis, son of Arathion. Make sure your brother stays alive. If he falls, you fall and our world falls with you.’
Teclis did not know what to say. Caledor opened the door. The blazing inferno of the Vortex sprang into being behind him. Blast furnace heat washed across the room. Caledor stepped through the doorway and walked out onto the pattern, every step agonisingly slow. His body started to shrivel and burn as it had burned for over six thousand years. He raised his arms as if to cast a spell, a blazing figure crucified against the light, a weary ghost returning to hell to perform its final duties, of its own free will.
Watching him, Teclis knew he could not ever do that.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
The scouts reported back early in the evening. Dorian greeted them in his command tent. They were the best of their kind, males, trained from early childhood when they were abducted from their kindred on Death Night. They had proven early their gift for survival by living through being tossed into a cauldron of boiling blood. That had been the start of a lifetime of hardships that had made them among the best killers in a nation famed for its murderousness. Assassins of the Cult of Khaine.
‘We have found the tournament ground, general,’ said the assassin. ‘It is where the king said it would be.’
‘Did you ever doubt it?’ Dorian asked, not because he thought the assassin ever had, but because he disliked him and his entire breed. They made him too nervous. They belonged to the Cult, body and soul, and it belonged to Morathi. It formed part of an extensive and alternative system of government to Malekith’s. Rumour had it that the cults of pleasure performed the same function albeit in secret.