Razumov's Tomb by Darius Hinks Page A

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