CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Gabriel woke with a start. The ground was heaving beneath him like the deck of a ship and the town was filled with light. It looked as though Morrslieb had achieved its aim and enveloped the landscape. The wizard climbed unsteadily to his feet and looked around. He could just about make out the vague shapes of knights, beastmen, dragons and other, even stranger things. The whole riotous menagerie was tumbling back and forth across the square and none of the combatants seemed quite sure who they were meant to be fighting. It was less like a battle than a panicked riot. Buildings were toppling all over the town and the people of Schwarzbach had abandoned the relative safety of their cellars and lofts to flee in terror. Monsters devoured half of them before they reached the town gates, and Gabriel dreaded to think what would be waiting for those who reached the hills.

He looked back towards the tower, wondering how things could have gone so spectacularly wrong. He had to shield his eyes from the incandescent column of light and, as he stepped closer, his hairless face started to redden and blister. He ignored the pain and peered into the blaze. After a few seconds he saw a rotund, silhouetted figure, standing near the base of the fire.

He hurried towards him. “Move back! You’ll be destroyed!”

As the bürgermeister turned around, Gabriel saw that even though his face was hideously burned, it was locked in a manic grin.

“It’s working!” he cried, his voice little more than a croak.

Gabriel stepped closer, grimacing at the heat. “What? Has my master harnessed the power of the stars?”

Groot laughed wildly and dropped to his knees. “No, you idiot. I’m talking about my mistress. Natalya’s centuries of grief are finally over.” He collapsed onto his back, still laughing as blood bubbled up between his teeth.

Gabriel reached into the inferno and grabbed the man’s foot. Groot was much lighter than he expected and he managed to drag him back across the rippling flagstones to the steps. He shoved him behind a stump of ruined wall and knelt by his side. “What do you mean? Who is Natalya?”

Groot was seconds from death, but his blood-slick chins were still quivering with laughter. “Razumov’s love, you pallid freak. You and your senile master have done nothing but her bidding since you left Altdorf.”

“Her bidding?”

“Yes, her bidding, you simpleton!”

Gabriel leaned back, shaking his head. “How—” he began, but he realised that Groot was beyond hearing. The flames had utterly destroyed his lungs and he was coughing up thick, clotted lumps of blackened flesh. As his massive body shook, a morbid curiosity overtook the wizard and he gently pulled open the man’s robes, confused as to how someone so huge could weigh so little.

As the charred cloth fell open, Gabriel hissed and leapt to his feet, backing away quickly from the dying man. Groot’s body was covered in gaping mouths, lined with tiny fangs. They were opening and closing as he shivered and moaned, consumed by hunger, even as they died.

Gabriel looked back at the tower. “It’s a trick,” he droned. “A cult.” He lifted his staff, preparing to brave the flames, but before he had taken more than a few steps the world tilted on its axis and threw him through the air, smashing him into the crowds of battling figures. As he rolled and stumbled through the tumult, he saw something almost too strange to bear. The storm was raging with such power that it had torn the whole town from the earth. He glimpsed a crater—a vast bowl of scarred earth, where Schwarzbach should have been—then he slammed into a wall and lost consciousness.

The world swam back into view but it was not the world Gabriel remembered. He was trapped beneath a chunk of masonry. It had shattered a bone in his leg—he could see a pale, bloody shard jutting out from his robes. The pain was breathtaking, but he realised that the stone had probably saved his life. Figures were tumbling past him as the town flew free, unshackled from gravity or logic. He groaned in pain and looked around at the chaos. Schwarzbach was not just in flight, it was collapsing. Whole districts had sheared away, hurled into the ether and leaving the central square with a halo of fractured, cobbled streets.

Beyond the town’s crumbling borders was a confusing montage of shifting hues and strange, briefly glimpsed vistas—landscapes torn from every corner of the world. Gabriel saw places that would have made no sense wherever they were. He saw great oceans of fire and towering forests of ice, but as soon as he tried to focus on any of them, they vanished, replaced by something equally absurd. He used his staff to lever the stone off his leg, then sat up and looked back at the tower. It had vanished, replaced by a slender column of nothing. It looked like a hole had been torn in the air, revealing the blank canvas behind reality.

The strangeness of it hurt Gabriel’s eyes and he looked back at the square. The knights and monsters were clinging desperately to life, hanging onto the rubble as Schwarzbach heaved and rolled. He noticed that one of the knights was struggling towards him and looked familiar.

“Reiksgraf,” said Gabriel.

“Stop it!” cried the knight as he tried to approach. The town was hanging at such a surreal angle that the reiksgraf had to climb down a street as though it were the sheer face of a mountain.

Gabriel shook his head in confusion. “Stop it?”

“We’re dying!” cried the knight, waving his broken sword at the spinning streets. “Stop the town! Land us somewhere!”

Gabriel nodded slowly, recognising the truth of the reiksgraf’s words. If the town continued spinning loose, it would eventually shed every one of its inhabitants, but if he could fix it to one of the scenes hurling past, they might even stand a chance of victory. Half of the beastmen had been left behind when Schwarzbach was torn from reality. And those that remained were consumed by madness—attacking their own kind as ferociously as the knights.

Gabriel closed his eyes and delved deep into his consciousness. As he muttered the first few syllables of a spell, he felt a huge wave of azyr wrench through his limbs. The magic was so overwhelming that he almost dropped his staff. Wherever they were now, the air was pure magic. The astrolabe at the end of his staff lit up like a beacon and began to spin. The celestial discs whirred around the orb at such speed that they blurred into a silver sphere. He stretched his thoughts beyond the rings, out into the vague regions beyond Schwarzbach. Lakes and cities tumbled through his mind in a delirious mess and he laughed at the impossibility of his task. “Where?” he wondered aloud.

“Land us somewhere!” cried the reiksgraf again, his voice shrill with madness.

Gabriel took a deep breath and poured every ounce of his power into the town’s shattered foundations, slamming Schwarzbach down onto the ground.

He did not have the faintest idea where he had taken them.