A Diviner's Field Notes

What Hell Sends

Kept current to the edge of the siege. I trained in divination, not zoology, but a wizard who cannot tell you what nearly killed her is not much of a wizard. This is what my own eyes and my own spellcraft have told me about the things we have actually crossed blades with, in the order the road delivered them.

I am not writing up everything Avernus has shown us. The column of bone devils that marched a few hundred roped souls past our camp on the Long Ride and never noticed us is not in this book; we did not fight it, and I would rather it stayed that way. What follows is only what came to blows.

The tally

The Long Ride's devils

Two days on foot across the Blood War's own airspace taught us what a lesser devil actually is: disposable. The spined devils were a scavenger pack drawn by the noise of two war machines that had collided further up the plain, and we put them down without anyone taking a real wound. The bone devil officer and his two bearded glaive-bearers were a different order of thing entirely, and had been tracking us since the wreck rather than stumbling on us. They were the only fight worth the name in two days of walking, and we were glad to be past them.

The vrock on the road

It dropped on the convoy out of a sulphur thermal and landed on the Tormentor's flatbed going straight for Kaelis on the harpoon, while a handful of manes on the ground barely slowed the Crushing Wheels down. We killed it the hard way, at close quarters, on a rig doing speed, and it cost Eryador more blood than it should have. The lesson I took from it, and mean to keep: the ground was right there the whole time, and none of us thought to put the thing over the side before we started trading blows with it. That bill is paid now. I do not intend to pay it twice.

Raggadragga, Wereboar Warlord

Self-styled lord of the Goreguts Gang, a wereboar who had turned what he learned of the wild into a small warband running down Maggie's caravans on the Knucklebones road. He drove a rig he called the Demon Grinder, two wereboars on the guns, two wererats on the harpoons, and he never got the chance to use any of it properly. Nuovis put his flanking riders over the side from the air before we had even boarded. I called an earth elemental into the cab and let it eat his hammer while the rest of the company worked him over the top of it; his own gore attack found the elemental far more often than it found us, and the elemental held anyway. Cornered, he overloaded his own engine rather than be taken, and the fight killed him before the fire could. He died in his own chassis, whole, which mattered more to the bounty than anything else about him. His curse never once landed on any of us, and I would like to keep that record clean if we ever meet another of his kind.

Ghulzarr and the Fangs of Yeenoghu

The one entry in this book still open. Ghulzarr is a gnoll demoniac, self-titled Drum-Warlord, and we have fought him twice now without finishing him either time. The first was at the Cold Mile, where he commanded a killbox from the top ring of a hanging scavenger roost his warband had seized, two vrocks working the air above him and his Fangs cutting the mooring lines to drop the whole structure on us. He dropped a working over the lot of them there, a hunger that ate at anyone caught in it, and it very nearly had Cael. We broke his gnolls and killed one vrock; he and the second vrock fled east, both badly hurt, carrying word of a Sword-bearer ahead of us into ground we had not yet crossed.

The second time was his answer to that: a five-round running fight down the road to the wreck, his drum-rig, two Tormentors, a swarm of frenzied Fangs on bikes and the surviving vrock, all thrown at a convoy we had shackled to a rescued Scavenger and could not simply outrun. He never had to close with us and never did. He broke off at the edge of the crash site rather than follow us in, which tells me the crash site frightens him more than we do, and that is worth remembering. He left with the vrock, two coins that were never ours to begin with, and a captured trike he fuelled on the spot, having lost both his own war machines in the chase. He is out there now, west of us, rebuilding what that chase cost him. We will meet him a third time, and I intend that meeting to be the last one.

The hellwasp hive

The wreck of Zariel's own flying fortress held a nest grown from its dead, resin the colour of amber with the crew still visible inside it, taken rather than killed. Seven drones came out of the troop deck's wall the moment Nuovis lifted a staff from four courses down, and the fight taught us something about the venom that no book of mine had ever recorded correctly. The sting does not kill. It takes: Kaelis and Eryador were both stung, paralysed, and being carried off into the resin before we broke it, and it was Cael who found, in the middle of the fighting, that his own gift for laying on hands undoes the poison the sting begins with. A hellwasp wants you whole and still, not dead, which is a mercy and a horror in the same breath, and I would rather know that about a thing than not.

At the door out, on our second visit, a rear-guard swarm broke from the barracks to stop us leaving. Cael turned a captured slurry gun on the body of it and drove most of them back; the few that got past us, I caught one whole inside a wall of force, the way you would trap an ordinary wasp under a drinking glass. It is still in there, so far as I know.

The Queen

She waits in the Core, at the bottom of the hull, coiled round an engine casing split and leaking white light. Gravid, she does not chase, and we did not go in for her: we went in for Coll and Doran, cut them whole out of the amber while she watched from the floor of the well and did nothing. It cost us anyway. Her reach caught Kaelis before we were done, and Cael went in with a blade rather than a prayer to cut what she had planted in him free before it could take hold. We left her exactly where she was. There was no clean kill and no ending to it, only a fifty-year-old mother of a hive left alive in a wreck we now have every reason never to go back to. I record her here because she is the one thing in this book that is not finished, and because I would rather remember precisely what we chose not to do than pretend the choice was made for us.

Current to the edge of the siege. Whatever the Citadel sends next, I expect this page to get a great deal longer before it gets shorter.

H.