DAEMON OF THE DEEP

Rob Sanders

Even the storm was beautiful.

The churning clouds were lined silver, and lightning streaked across the sky in pastel blues and pinks. The thunder was a melodic boom and the Glass Sea a smashed mirror, the metallic waters reflecting the tempest above. From the bountiful ocean to the Shattered Isles with their jewelled beaches, all was fair to look upon. The islanders, too, were a handsome people. All but Silas.

Silas sat hunched on his bed watching the pretty patterns of the storm through the window. Lightning flashed colour across the room. His chambers were situated in the highest tower of Castle Sheldrac. His window commanded the best view on Ersatz Island. This was not because he commanded such respect – although he was the old chieftain’s youngest son. The view served as a reminder of the beauty of the realm. A contrast to the hideousness of his own form. Silas wore no chains and the chamber doors were not locked, but they might as well have been, for the chieftain’s son never left the tower. He could not bear to see the shame in his brothers’ eyes or the averted gaze of his aged father. He could not walk the clinking beaches of the gem-lined shore for the startled screams of fishwives, the pointing of fine children and island clansmen who shook their heads.

For a few horrible seconds, there was no lightning. The darkness of the casement became a momentary mirror and Silas had his appearance reflected back at him. Anyone would think that the chieftain’s son suffered from a horrific deformity of the face or that a disfiguring disease had ravaged his body. This was not the case. He was an islander. A son of the Shattered Isles. A Sheldrac, well bred. He was as handsome as his brother Rodric. His hair was a lustrous bronze, like his brother Hearn’s. He had his departed mother’s striking green eyes and the noble features of the old chieftain. But for the hump on his back and the curvature of his spine, he was as handsome as any noble son of Clan Sheldrac.

Silas heard shouting from the banquet hall below.

‘You cannot do this,’ a voice cried out. ‘You must not do this.’

It was Teagan. Lady Teagan had come to Ersatz Island from the small kingdom of Tesseraq. Like Ersatz, Tesseraq was a wondrous paradise of precious stone and fine people. The Shattered Isles were an assorted patchwork of dominions, held together by marriage alliances. While the people of Ersatz worshipped the Everqueen and local deities of the depths that blessed their island with bounty, the God-King was popular in civilised Tesseraq. Norvik, a priest of Sigmar, carried the word of the God-King to Ersatz. He had also brought one of King Tynarch’s one hundred daughters – noble maidens that carried his name and were used to forge alliances with distant dominions, like Ersatz.

‘Get out of my way, woman!’ That was Rodric, Silas decided. His brother’s steps echoed up the stone staircase.

‘You must not do this, my lord,’ Lady Teagan implored.

‘This is none of your concern,’ Hearn rumbled. Silas could hear his heavy step also. ‘This is clan business.’

‘But I am to be part of the island clan, am I not, my intended?’ she said to Rodric.

‘Get off me, girl,’ Rodric snapped back. ‘Know your place.’

‘Master Norvik, please,’ Teagan begged, her father’s imperiousness creeping into her voice.

‘It is the will of the God-King,’ Norvik told her in his cracked and aged voice. ‘If our kingdoms are ever to be part of the heavenly realm, we shall need noble men, worthy of Sigmar’s divinity. The healthy. The hardy. Men of clean limb. Men who are a reflection of His own perfect form. We dare not anger the God-King, my lady. Now step aside. This must be done.’

‘Somebody, help,’ Teagan called. ‘Your island prince is in danger.’ Nobody would come, however. No servant would act against their master on Ersatz. Every islander knew their place. Fishermen and seafarers were kings in their coastal cottages and aboard their own boats. They adorned their sharkskin vestments with gem and pearl, dining only on the finest fish the ocean had to offer. They took pride in hard work, married and were happy. They would do nothing to upset a paradise of their own making. They would not speak against their masters – and certainly not for one of the malformed like Silas.

The door burst open. Once more, lightning flashed through the window, casting the room in stark blue. Rodric entered. Silas could see righteous determination in his brother’s eyes. The hulking Hearn stood behind, framed in the doorway. Master Norvik, a bag of bones in a set of robes, leant upon his staff. His mouth might have been full of platitudes for Lady Teagan, but his bearded face was hard and uncompromising.

‘Well met, brothers,’ Silas said nervously, stepping down from the bed. ‘What troubles you on this stormy night?’

Teagan pushed past the men, putting her slender form between the hunchback and the brothers.

‘You would do this to your own kindred?’ the lady said. ‘What kind of monsters are you?’

‘My lady,’ Silas said, his head low and his eyes looking up at the interlopers. ‘My brothers mean me no harm. We are clansmen. We are blood.’

His words were delicate and full of false confidence. He felt Rodric waver. Hearn looked away.

‘Rodric,’ Teagan said. ‘Don’t do this. The gods abhor the spilling of brotherly blood.’

‘Not when it is in their service,’ Master Norvik said, the priest attempting to bolster Rodric and Hearn’s resolve. ‘The God-King demands it. He asks you for a pure bloodline and descendants worthy of the heavenly realm. Do not disappoint him, my lord. Think of your people. Think of yourself.’

‘Rodric?’ Silas said, his words atremble. ‘Hearn?’

‘This…’ Rodric said, ‘must be done.’

‘The net,’ Hearn called back down the staircase, his voice a faltering boom.

‘No,’ Teagan said, grabbing Silas and hauling him back towards the window. Servants of the coastal castle rushed in with a fishing net. As Rodric pulled Teagan away, the lady fought and shrieked. Silas couldn’t believe what was happening. He fell to his knees and begged for his life. He looked for a compassion in his brothers’ eyes that simply wasn’t there anymore. He felt the hands of servants on him and the net across the hunch of his back. As he resisted, the castle servants beat him down with marlinspikes.

Clawing and rolling within the net, Silas was dragged from his chambers. He was hauled past the turtleskin boots of his brothers and the skirt tails of Norvik’s robes. Out through the door and down the staircase. He cried out as he bumped down the harsh, stone steps, feeling his bones crack. Near the bottom, Silas’ temple was dashed against the stone. He felt blood in his eyes and the terrifying ordeal his life had just become faded in and out of focus. He could still hear Lady Teagan held back by servants, while his older brothers and their priest followed him down the stairs.

The servants hauled him across the polished, pearl floors of the castle chambers, through archways and by ancient furniture. In his panic and confusion, Silas became aware of light and heat. The great fire of the banquet hall was raging. Before it, in a whalebone chair, was his father. The islanders called the chieftain Old Lundal. With his years catching up to him, it had been Lundal who had accepted King Tynarch’s offer of an alliance and set in motion the events that would make Rodric chieftain.

‘Father!’ Silas called out. ‘Father, help me…’

Old Lundal was a dark blur before the fire. He turned his head slightly, before fixing his gaze back on the roaring flames. Charms and talismans jangled about his neck. Icons of his faith. The symbols of the Everqueen and the deities of the deep that were worshipped about the Shattered Isles.

‘Father! Father, don’t let them take me.’

As he was dragged through the banqueting hall, the net cutting into him, he heard the boots of his brothers pause by their father. Nothing was said. As Silas was hauled out of the great castle doors and across the rough stone bridge leading from the castle to the island, the brothers followed, out into the storm.

Above, the clouds swirled and churned. The path was lit up by bolts of blue and pink lightning, cutting up the sky. The servants crunched through the sand. Instead of tiny grains, the path – like the beach – was made up of tiny slivers of gemstone. Instead of pebbles, jewels lined the trail, slicing at Silas’ netted form. It was raining. The drizzle created a polychromatic sheen and faint rainbows in the gloom. Norvik and the brothers crunched up behind, soaked to the skin in the storm.

As Silas was dragged through the fishing village surrounding the castle he called out for assistance. His voice, full of disbelief and terror, was largely lost to the bombast of the storm. Those fishermen and their wives who did hear him opened their doors, not to help their clansman but to look on in silence. Children came to their windows to get a glimpse of the hunchback being dragged away.

Silas’ voice trailed miserably off to nothing. The people of Ersatz would not help him. Theirs was an idyllic existence. They did not want it tarnished by one whose presence only reminded them of its potential for ugliness and imperfection. Even fish that displayed the slightest hint of a flaw in their scales or fins were discarded. Those whose taste did not meet expectation were dumped. The islanders wouldn’t blemish their jewel-encrusted cottages and silver shoreline with rotting fish and the stench of decay, however. Children were sent across the island to throw rejected morsels and leftovers into a collapsed sea cave called the Grotto. Silas had even heard dark stories of islanders taking ailing or disfigured newborns across to the Grotto and pitching the disappointments into the depths.

As he was dragged across the island’s rocky interior with Rodric, Hearn and master Norvik striding through the rain behind, Silas Sheldrac came to the heart-scalding conclusion that he was about to die. He moaned the pain of his broken bones and gashed head. Finally, his lips found their way back to his wretched entreaties. To his brothers’ names. To prayers. The path became bumpier and more rugged on the approach to the Grotto, bare of the island’s vegetation, where islanders had come for generations to dispose of things unwanted.

‘Rodric,’ Silas sobbed as the servants heaved the net to a stop at the craggy edge of the Grotto. ‘Hearn. Brothers, I beg of you. Do not listen to this godless priest. Look at me. I am your clansman. Your kin. I am Silas.’

As the lightning flashed above them and thunder fell like song from the sky, Silas saw his brothers. Drizzle dripped from their taut features. They were steeling themselves but they were resolved. Master Norvik stabbed his staff into the ground. He looked to the pair and then to Silas.

‘You are a thing unfinished,’ Norvik said. ‘Unfit for this realm. We are destined for the heavens, to sit by great Sigmar’s side. You will not hold us back.’

Knowing that the brothers would struggle to give the order, the priest nodded to the servants. They picked up the net on both sides with Silas rocking like an infant in a cradle between them. He shrieked as the net swung back and forth over the lip of the collapsed cave. Even the flashing lightning could not illuminate its foul depths. For a moment, Silas entertained the thought that this was all some terrible jest or nightmare. That the priest, the servants and his brothers might break out in laughter or that he might wake up in his chambers, the sun flooding through his casement.

And then he was plummeting. Plunging into darkness. The collapsed opening, and the men who had pitched him to his death, flashed before his eyes as he tumbled down through the cavernous Grotto. He could not even flail, for the net entangling his limbs. He readied himself for the end.

Silas Sheldrac fell.

The light of the storm faded.

Darkness became everything.

Whatever Silas hit, it wasn’t rock. It wasn’t seawater either. Still wrapped in the net, he bounced off something soft and wet. Liquid fountained up about Silas. Broken ribs grated inside his chest with every tumble. It was dark and disorientating, but he definitely got the feeling he was rolling down some kind of slope. His ears were filled with the buzzing of disturbed flies. It was difficult to breath, but when he did, he wished he hadn’t. He gagged and retched. The stench was overpowering. With clouds of fat, black flies swarming and cold slime whipping about his rolling form, Silas endured the descent until he finally levelled off, the momentum carrying him into cold water.

He lay there for a moment, in the stinking shallows. He blinked his disbelief. It was a miracle he was alive. The Grotto was thick with putridity and gloom. Silas could hear the whoosh of stormy waves and the hiss of spray. Flashes of lightning found their way into the cavernous chamber from the collapsed entrance above and from a cave entrance, half-submerged by the sea. They gave the momentary impression of a large, craggy chamber. A rancid, forgotten place.

The light of the storm also revealed to Silas the reason that he had survived. He had plummeted down through the cavern only to land on the rotting mountain of fish and detritus thrown into the Grotto by the islanders over the years. He was soaked through with oily spoilage and dripping with entrails. He reeked to the heavenly realm but still he was thankful for the colossal heap of decomposing flesh.

Silas untangled himself from the fisherman’s net and crawled out of the shallows. He sat on the rocky floor of the Grotto, clutching broken ribs and a shattered arm that ached with agonies to come. Still, he was alive, and the ironic circumstances of his survival were not lost on Silas. Looking up at the mountain of rot that he had been due to become, he chuckled to himself. An expression of hysteria that escaped his pain-lined lips. It died in his throat as the mountain chuckled back.

Scrabbling back through the rock pools and the filth of the chamber, Silas sensed great movement. Towering above him and edged in the light of the storm, the huge mound of decaying flesh seemed to turn. Its outline was suddenly a deafening swarm of flies, while an avalanche of maggot-infested fish tumbled down it, almost burying Silas. Beneath the carpet of insects and crustaceans feeding off the rot, a monstrous creature was revealed. Kicking away from the living mountain, Silas found his feet slipping on the slimy cave floor.

Framed in the flash of lightning, Silas got a measure of the thing, its true dimensions and the horror of its form. Beneath the rot pile was a green monster – hunched like him. Its leathery hide could barely contain its own diseased flesh. A huge belly was ripe with infection and dribbling pus, while its pudgy arms and legs were leprous and scaly. Its skin was encrusted with coral blooms, barnacles and anemones. Its form was draped in seaweed and swarmed with scuttling crabs. Shattered horns of dead coral sprouted from its fat head, while hooded rolls of fat all but obscured the searing intensity of the creature’s blood-bright eyes. The corners of its grotesque mouth retracted in a horrific smile that revealed rows of needle-like teeth. Its body quaked with an infernal chuckle that built to a cavern-shaking laughter. Its monstrous form throbbed with sour malevolence.

Silas lay there, at the mountainous creature’s mercy, under the baleful scrutiny of its gaze. It waited until he built up the nerve to part his lips.

‘What are you?’

‘I am the unwanted,’ the monster told him, its voice echoing horribly about the Grotto. ‘The waste. The dread and detritus. The rot forgotten. I am ugliness itself. The devourer of every imperfect thing.’

‘How can this be?’ Silas marvelled with his heart in his throat.

‘How does anything come into being?’ the diseased mountain asked him back. ‘Through industry or neglect. I am the product of both. Your wasteful people have dumped all that is unworthy of their lips and loins in this dark place. Like a bottomless pit. Except, this isn’t a bottomless pit. I am. For generations, the flawed flesh has been my meat and the sacrificial soul my drink. Souls like your own. A soul I chose to spare.’

‘Then I live no less at your mercy than I did at my kindred’s,’ Silas spat.

‘Careful, boy,’ the monster warned him with a grotesque grin. ‘You need not live at all. Besides – I can help you with that.’

‘Help me?’ Silas said.

‘In time,’ the monster told him. ‘Time is a powerful thing. It turns the most glorious warriors of the realms into feasts for maggots. The most savage creatures to legend. Kingdoms to dust.’

‘Why would I want your help?’ Silas said, shaking his head. ‘You are the darkness that infects my lands. That poisons the people. That afflicts my brothers with a fever of the mind – for they know not what they have done.’

‘They know,’ the repulsive creature insisted. ‘Just like every hollow parent and spiteful sibling to have pitched some broken unfortunate into these depths. We are the same, you and I. We are the afflicted. The forsaken. There are many forms of darkness. Some split the sky with their power. Some worm their way into hearts and homes. And some fester in piles of rotting flesh. You would know if my darkness had benighted your tiny island. Let me help you, hunchback, and it will. ’

Silas held his broken arm to his smashed ribs. He looked wretchedly about the cavern, at the sea water washing in through the entrance of the Grotto and at the colossal daemon before him. His brothers had thrown him to his death. The islanders had stood by and done nothing. And the monster had saved his life. Hiding in the Grotto, with only the flies and the creature for company, Silas had few options. Still, he knew this thing that offered to help him must be an infernal servant of the Dark Gods. A dread entity of the beyond.

‘You can trust me, mortal,’ the daemon said. ‘There is an evil sweeping your land, with its hooks in your family and clan. I am not that evil, but I can help you purge it.’

‘How?’ Silas shouted, his pain-threaded voice echoing about the Grotto. He lifted his broken arm. ‘I am a brother betrayed. A hunchback, broken of body and spirit.’

‘I can teach you to reach beyond such limitations,’ the daemon said. ‘To harness strengths you never knew you had.’

Silas found himself nodding slowly. A dreadful decision had been reached.

‘You seem to know me by my woes,’ Silas said. ‘How should I know you?’

‘Like all monsters,’ the daemon told him. ‘By my name and the doom that walks hand in hand with it. I am Hergustagrue.’

‘Silas… formerly of the Clan Sheldrac.’

The daemon brought forth a slimy claw. In it he clutched a dribbling handful of rotten fish.

‘Eat, Silas,’ Hergustagrue said. ‘You shall need your strength for the trials ahead.’

The sun rose over its reflection in the silver waters of the Glass Sea, as it came to do many times thereafter. The tides came in and out across the bejewelled beaches of Ersatz Island. Life went on. The seasons passed, and with them, returning fishing boats – first with bountiful nets of fish, then seabed traps, before finally hauling in the carcasses of speared glitterskin sharks. Seaweed turned from green to brown. Squalls came and went, and the days got shorter. The years went by unnoticed, until one morning in the long season. It was high tide, with a mirror mist coming in off the silver waters.

Silas Sheldrac broke the surface. His sorcerer’s staff of dead coral and skull reared up out of the perfection of the shallows – waters in which the clanspeople of Ersatz Island admired themselves every day. His hood rose above the waves, and with it, his ghoulish face. His skin was waterlogged and white, like something long dead that had drifted down into the depths for shelled, spindle-limbed nightmares to pick apart. His body was bloated and his back hunched. Sea lice crawled across his pallid flesh while serpentine hagfish squirmed through it. The sorcerer’s grotesque form was covered in a cloak and ragged robes, fashioned from a mouldy black canvas sail: some remnant of a shipwreck brought in on the tide. The tattered fishing net in which he had been thrown into the Grotto still clung to his form, a reminder of his former treatment.

As he strode up out of the shallows and onto the beach, gemstones crunched beneath his feet. He opened his mouth to utter the dread words of a sorcerous curse. Black fluid leaked from his pincer-plucked lips and a small crab scuttled from his mouth and up one nostril. Silas’ words sounded like the hiss of the surf. As he spoke them, the water about his feet started to foam and thrash with fish. Thousands and thousands of fish. The fish flipped and flopped at the water’s edge, throwing themselves up onto the beach in some kind of diseased madness. All along the island’s coastline, fish threw themselves from the water, flapping and squirming across each other’s bodies, their mouths and gills gulping for air, until they died.

The silver mist rolling inland blackened about Silas like a besmirched mirror. Fishermen and their sons walked down the shore towards a small fleet of boats that sat beached and ready to launch. Even men such as these revelled in their simple finery. Sharkskin jerkins. Scaled boat-cloaks. Jewels glittering in their long hair. They were up at the crack of dawn, priding themselves on their work. Repairing their nets, shearing barnacles from their boats’ hulls and bringing in only the very best the sea had to offer.

Silas did not allow the fishermen to see him. They saw only what they expected to see: dark reflections of themselves in the mirrored mist. That was, until they saw what waited for them in the surf. Their catch, already dragged from the sea and lying dead along the beach. Such a spectacle drew consternation from such simple folk, with calls for brothers, fathers and grandfathers from the village. Questions hung without answers, for no man of the Shattered Isles had seen the like before.

With a few more damned words falling from his diseased lips, fat maggots began to writhe and wriggle between the scales of the fish, out of eyes and the mouths of the dead creatures. As Silas visited a new plague upon the island, fishermen stumbled back in revulsion.

Stabbing his staff into the gemstone beach, the sorcerer made his way up the shoreline, cloaked in the silver vapour. As the sun rose, he saw islanders going about their business. Old women slaved at garment and sailcloth with ivory needle and thread. Wives prepared veritable breakfast banquets for their hard-working husbands. Children played games of petty supremacy between the cottages, the treatment of their peers nasty and merciless. Silas moved through the village unnoticed, looking into the open doors of cottages. Inside, the fishermen’s homes were decorated with pearl, dead coral and pretty shells. Fires roared before scrimshawed furniture of whalebone, while the plumage of colourful seabirds served as curtains and the covers for beds and tables. Jewels sat in the glass of the windows, allowing light of many colours to flood into the rooms.

The cottages were small, merely the beachside hovels of common clansmen, but they were palaces compared to the horror Silas had called home for the last few years. The Grotto had been cold and wet. With only the crabs and Hergustagrue for company, he had dined only on the islanders’ rotting leftovers. There was little to do but listen to the great daemon speak on the strength and cankerous virtues of his Dark God and of Silas’ revenge. To learn the dread arts of summoning and sorcery. To become one with the darkness and the deep.

‘Mungo,’ a woman called, a comely fisherman’s wife with an armful of driftwood for the fire. ‘Wherever are you going boy, in such a hurry?’

A young lad with a mole on his chin – one of the fisherman’s sons Silas had seen on the beach – was running up the track between the cottages. He ran past Silas, who was unseen in the silvery mist. The sorcerer’s powers drew the reflective haze to him, hiding his grotesque form but revealing to him, in its swirls and billows, the presence of others.

‘Pa says to run to the castle,’ the boy called back at his mother, breathless. ‘Something’s happened on the beach.’

‘What?’ his mother called back, but Mungo was gone. Tapping his staff along the track, Silas followed the boy.

Above the cloud bank, Silas saw the towers of Sheldrac Castle. It was a rough sort of fortification. Not like the fine palaces he had heard about on the larger and more central kingdoms of the Shattered Isles. Ersatz Island had no need of a palace or citadel. Constructed hundreds of years before from dark coastal stone, threaded with gemstone, it barely qualified as a castle. Its walls had never had to withstand an enemy attack and no soldiers stood on its roughly hewn bridgeway. It had stood indomitable, however, before the wrath of storms and all the Glass Sea could throw at it.

The boy Mungo crossed the bridge and pushed his way tentatively through the great doors. Silas followed him in, the mirror mist pouring in with him to fill the chambers and banqueting hall beyond with a reflective haze.

In the great hall, the fire burned as brightly as ever. Mungo moved around the figure sat before the flames. He went to say something before thinking better of it and moving on. Silas approached the figure, the creatures crawling across his diseased flesh retracting from the heat of the fire. There Old Lundal sat. The former chieftain was but skin and bone, barely alive but for the transfixed stare of his misted eyes on the intense flames. Gone were his myriad trinkets of faith. Instead, the old man wore the heavy chain and hammer-styled medallion of Sigmar, like some kind of penance. Silas laid his fat, pallid hands on Lundal’s shoulders and leant his lips in towards the old chieftain’s ear.

‘Worry not, father,’ the sorcerer said. ‘It is me, Silas. The answer to unspeakable prayers. It will all be over soon.’

‘But my lord,’ Mungo implored, re-entering the banquet hall. Silas turned. His brother Hearn had entered the room. As tall and strapping as ever, his face was a mask of savagery. He was followed by some of the same household servants that had helped carry Silas to the Grotto.

‘Damn you,’ he spat at one of them, showing them the stitching on his sharkskin cloak. ‘Don’t you think to cross me. Look at it. Look at it! You dropped a stitch man. You think that good enough for Clan Sheldrac, do you? You think a man can serve his God-King thus? I should have you whipped, dog.’

‘My lord,’ Mungo called, the urgency evident in his voice. ‘My father sent me. There’s something you should see…’

Hearn turned angrily on the boy. The back of his hand came around, striking Mungo savagely across the face and sending the boy to the floor in a heap. He was too shocked even to sob, and kicked away from Hearn across the polished floor.

‘You impudent pup,’ Hearn glowered. ‘How dare you interrupt me?’ He looked from the boy back to the servants. As he grew ever more incensed, he tore the cloak from his shoulders and threw it at one of the servants before snatching a whip from where it was coiled over a whalebone chair. ‘This isn’t worthy of my shoulders. Insult me with your efforts, will you? Well you’ll never do it again, damn your hides. I’ll flay the flesh from your own backs,’ he told them as they backed from him.

As Mungo scrambled for the stairs, Silas followed him, the sorcerer at one with the silver mist. Making his way with difficulty up the stone steps and remembering how they had broken him as he had tumbled down them, Silas found the boy outside the chieftain’s chambers. The rooms had belonged to his mother and father once. Now they housed Rodric, his children and whatever island woman he was favouring that week.

As Silas stood there, obscured by the reflective mist, he watched scores of children swarming about the landing. They were lean and fine-limbed, yet their eyes betrayed the glint of hunger. Not for food but for attention. They had been raised in an atmosphere of competition: their father’s love the prize. Like a pack of predators, they had sought to weed out the weakest among their number to improve their chances. Their mothers being the daughters of fishermen and island folk, they were bastards all. Rodric had been seeking perfection amongst his children, hoping that each one would be more worthy of his bloodline and the God-King than the last. They lived, however, to be made Rodric’s heir.

As Mungo moved through their number, the eyes of the girls and boys glinted with vicious intent. They closed in on the boy, who was still clutching the side of his face, red where Hearn had struck it. Mungo stopped, his eyes wet with tears. He was unsure of himself around the mob of children. They just stared at him like a piece of meat in the offing.

Suddenly, one of the chamber doors opened. Silas could hear the wailing of women inside, though knew not the cause. The chieftain walked out onto the landing. Rodric was bare to the waist, the extravagant length of a seal-fur cloak trailing across the polished floor behind him. His mouth was fixed in a cruel grin, showing perfect teeth. His eyes were glazed and his gaze distant, as though he were reliving terrible things that he had done.

‘Father!’

The children forgot about Mungo and swarmed in on the chieftain, clamouring for his vacant attentions. Rodric seemed not to see them, striding through their number, knocking several of the youngest over. They pulled at his cloak and clawed at his muscular torso.

‘My lord…’ Mungo said tentatively. Silas watched from the silver swirl of the mist that was feeling its way up through the castle. Rodric reached out for the handle of a door further down the landing. As he heard the boy’s voice, he stopped. It was not the sound of his own brood, cawing as they were around him like baby birds for attention. He stared right through the boy.

‘My father sent me, my lord chieftain,’ Mungo told him. ‘On the beach, my lord. There are events that demand…’

‘…my attention,’ Rodric said, his voice a silky whisper. He smiled as though he found humour in the words.

‘Will you come down, to see for yourself, lord chieftain?’

In answer to Mungo’s question, Rodric’s mad smile widened further. Almost as though he had forgotten the boy’s report and himself, the chieftain turned the handle and opened the door. From within, Silas could hear the sobbing of different women. As Rodric disappeared inside, his children turned their attention to Mungo, but he was gone, a boy-shaped hole in the silvery mist.

Silas found him on the floor above, knocking furiously at a door upon which a hammer of Sigmar hung crooked, its metal dull and tarnished. Mungo kept looking behind him for any sign of the children. Instead, he found the landing lost in the depths of the mirrored haze. Silas watched as Mungo pushed at the door and entered the darkness of the chamber beyond.

‘Master Norvik,’ the boy called. The chamber beyond was thick with candle smoke. Silas followed the boy in. The rooms had been fitted out as some kind of ghastly chapel. Norvik had brought with him from Tesseraq the trappings of his God-King and decorated the chapel. It had been his hope to bring Sigmar’s word to Ersatz Island. To bring the chieftain and Clan Sheldrac into the faith before converting the rest of the islanders. This had never happened, however. The tapestries hung in tatters, and icons of the God-King lay unceremoniously against walls. Everything was buried in dirty scrolls and nameless tomes. The room smelled of old blood.

About the chamber, there were sigils that Silas recognised. Dread shapes made up of orbs and crescents, painted onto the stone of walls, cut into rough altars and crafted in the metal of standing icons and hanging talismans. They were not symbols of Sigmar.

Hergustagrue had told them that they were the sign of the Prince of Excess – an enemy god. The darkness that had long eaten away at his people and enslaved Silas’ family. The prideful hearts of each and every islander now beat with devotion to the long-lost god, and in some ways, always had done. It was there in the rise of the Sheldracs and the clan’s history. It had travelled with the priest Norvik from Tesseraq and the Shattered Isles. In turn, several fishermen had left the island. They set off across the ocean in their boats, in search of Slaanesh in the great silver emptiness – never to return. Meanwhile, those left behind transformed Ersatz into an island paradise, awaiting the Dark Prince’s return.

‘Master Norvik,’ Mungo said. He found the terrible old man, hunched over a table, scribbling madness into parchment with a barbed quill: plans for the dread deity’s return. Turning, the priest regarded the boy from the darkness of his hood.

‘Master Norvik,’ Mungo said. ‘There are strange happenings on the beach.’

‘What happenings?’ the priest said, plucking the barbed quill from his bloody fingers.

‘Fish throw themselves from the water to die along our shores,’ the boy told him. ‘They are diseased, my lord. Rotting at our feet and crawling with maggots.’

The priest got down from his stool and hobbled towards Mungo. He nodded as the boy described the bizarre events on the beach. There was something in the way Norvik approached the boy, his eyes gleaming within the hood, that prompted the boy to step back, but he found the stone altar behind him. Norvik reached for a curved blade that sat in a filthy sheath on his belt. The dagger’s blade was stained red.

‘How long have you had that mole, boy?’ Norvik said, drawing the blade. Mungo reached for his chin. Terror crossed the boy’s features as the priest hobbled towards him.

Like oil on water, the silvery mist dissipated to reveal the sorcerer Silas in his disgusting robes. The sudden appearance attracted Norvik’s attention. The priest was surprised to see the figure standing there with his staff, and turned the wicked blade of the sacrificial dagger on Silas. Norvik looked from the sorcerer to Mungo and then back again.

‘Who are you?’ Norvik asked, drawing back his hood. The priest’s parchment skin was stretched across his perfect skull. He flashed Silas file-sharpened teeth and milky eyes.

‘Go, boy,’ Silas said, his words like a snake sloughing off its skin. Mungo ran from the chapel.

‘Speak,’ the twisted priest demanded.

‘I am but a man,’ Silas told him. ‘Unworthy before the gaze of the gods. I am flaws long forgotten. I am something returned from nothing.’

Norvik licked at his sharp teeth with a crescent-forked tongue. The sacrificial dagger came up with sudden violence. The priest stuck Silas with the blade. The sorcerer felt the blood-stained steel puncture his robes and slip into his diseased flesh. Norvik stabbed him again and again, expecting the robed figure to fall to the ground, clutching his stomach. Instead the blade sank into the waterlogged flesh, doing little to the diseased blubber. Silas could barely feel the presence of the knife in his gut.

The sorcerer put his lips to Norvik’s pointed ear.

‘I am Silas,’ the sorcerer told him, ‘of Clan Sheldrac. And I have come home.’

Silas grabbed Norvik by his chin with a hunchback’s strength and held him there. A stream of sorcerous corruption poured from his lips, into the priest’s ear. Norvik struggled and screamed, filling with the warping filth. Silas held the priest to him as he bubbled, blistered and wept puss. Silas left Norvik there, a steaming mound of diseased flesh.

Climbing the steps of the castle tower, the sorcerer came to a familiar door. It had been his own, the door belonging to his former chambers. It was barred and locked. Tapping his staff against the wood, he rotted the door on its hinges. As the soggy pulp fell aside, Silas walked in. There he found Lady Teagan, sat on his bed. Her face was thin and drawn. She was a frail shadow of her former self, but her eyes still burned bright with regal defiance. As the sorcerer crossed the chamber, she moved back across the bed as far as her chains and manacles would allow. Lifting her hands she made fists, suggesting that she would lash out if Silas got too close. Unwilling to be part of the inhumanity and abuses of the castle, she had fought Norvik and the brothers to become more trouble than she was worth. She had ended up imprisoned in the tower and all but forgotten.

‘I have come for you,’ Silas told her. He reached out for her chains but Teagan retreated. Her nose wrinkled at his stench. She took in his disgusting form. His ragged robes. His rotten face. His hunched back.

‘Silas?’ she said, not quite believing what she was seeing.

He laid his diseased hands upon her chains. At his touch, the metal links became tarnished. They rusted over before disintegrating into a red mulch on the bed. Teagan rubbed her raw wrists and backed towards the window. He reached out for her but, with fear and revulsion, she climbed into the casement. It became obvious that the lady would rather throw herself from the tower than be touched by the sorcerer’s cold, drowned flesh.

‘I… I thought you were dead,’ she said.

‘I thought that myself for a while,’ the sorcerer told her, standing before the window, ‘but it seems that there is a world of difference between being almost dead and actually dead. And I have brought that world with me.’

The two of them heard it at first. A distant drone, building. The horrid buzz of fat flies. The sound was everywhere. Then they saw it. Like a filthy stain, it spread. Maggots had squirmed from the dead fish with sorcerous speed. Their pupae had encrusted the mounds of rot that had lined the beach. From these, an infernal plague of flies had crawled, dried their wings and taken to the air. They swarmed the fleeing fishermen and swirled up the beach. They blanketed the cottages with their filth. Silas and Teagan watched the black swarm grow and swallow the village, the insects covering everything and everyone. Cottage windows were closed and doors locked, but there was nowhere to hide. Islanders thrashed and ran out onto the beach, covered from head to toe in fat, black flies.

‘No,’ Teagan said, backing from the window. ‘This is your doing?’

Silas nodded with rancid pride, watching his unfolding plague claim Ersatz Island. Lady Teagan retreated towards the doorway. Away from the horror. Away from Silas. Down the stairs, she heard the maddening drone of flies and the sound of screaming. The plague had reached the castle. She moved away from the doorway. It had no door.

‘You are safe,’ Silas told her. ‘But you are the only islander who can claim that.’

Lady Teagan slid her back down the cold, stone wall and hugged her knees to her chest. All that she had endured and the hopelessness that she had resisted seemed to crash down on her in that moment.

‘What have you done?’ she said, her voice a harsh whisper. ‘What have you become?’

‘I am what I have always been,’ Silas told her. ‘I am the ugly truth that must be faced.’

The two of them waited there, until the drone died away and the screams became whimpers and moans. ‘It’s time,’ the sorcerer told her, turning suddenly. He grabbed her by the hand. Teagan barely noticed the rotten fingers clasped about her own. She had retreated to the only place she could. The dark warmth of her own thoughts. A place where the horror around her wasn’t happening.

Tapping his staff down the steps, the hunchback dragged Teagan along with him. The silver mist was gone, as had the swarm of flies. The pair of them crunched down through the black carpet of dead insects. As they moved down through the castle, Silas found his brothers, their prisoners, servants and the bastards of Clan Sheldrac, all wallowing in their agonies.

Silas stopped, holding Lady Teagan to his side. He watched Rodric and Hearn stagger about their halls. Eaten alive by the flies, their perfect forms and handsome features were now a mess of infection and flesh swollen with laid eggs. Maggots squirmed beneath their diseased skin and the brothers groaned at the monstrosities they had become. The chieftain saw Silas and fell to his knees before the sorcerer. A moan of physical agony turned to spiritual torment as Rodric clawed at his disgusting features.

Flesh came away from his form like crusty pupae. Strings of pus dribbled between the pieces, and maggots rained to the ground. Rodric roared as Hearn and the other unfortunates started similarly tearing at themselves and the ugliness they had become. What was waiting beneath was not the Sheldrac brothers.

Teagan screamed.

Beneath the oozing shell of fly-savaged flesh was a daemon entity. Stubby, single horns erupted from their heads. Green, otherworldly flesh barely covered their grotesque skulls, while a single eye burned with murky malevolence. Sloughing off the diseased shell of the brothers with their filthy claws, the daemons revealed spindly limbs and pot-bellied forms.

Teagan was beside herself as she was surrounded by plague-infested monsters, all emerging from the clansmen and islanders.

‘Come,’ Silas Sheldrac said, dragging Teagan towards the door. The daemons followed with their diseased gait and indomitable step, leaving all that they had been behind. As the fire burned bright in the banquet hall, the sorcerer thought he smelled roasting flesh. The whalebone chair before the great hearth was empty. Within the flames, the sorcerer fancied he could see Old Lundal – the old man having thrown himself in the fire to escape the flies. Silas let a sickly smile cross his face before leaving Castle Sheldrac once and for all.

Lady Teagan’s sobs and moans accompanied their walk down to the beach. Followed by lengthening columns of infested daemons, Silas made his way through the village, his staff tapping the way. Islanders groaned from their afflictions, tearing at the corruption visited upon their fine flesh by the fly swarm. Plaguebearing daemons of different sizes and horrific appearance emerged from the flesh of fishermen, their wives and their children. None were spared. Falling in behind the sorcerer, they crunched their way down the beach to the silver surf.

There, Silas and Teagan found a mountain of rotting fish waiting for them in the shallows. The creatures flung themselves out of the water, creating the mound before dying and rotting on the bone. Festering disease and decomposition turned the mountain of rot into a monstrosity of one flesh. A tooth-lined mouth smiled through the corruption and eyes opened in what became a horrible face. The daemon Hergustagrue had arrived to admire his acolyte’s work.

Teagan’s mind was broken. She was beyond such horror now but stifled her sobbing as the daemon fixed her with his malevolent gaze. Silas bowed before his infernal sponsor.

‘In the morning, the Dark Prince’s acolyte had this island in his clutches,’ Silas told his master. ‘By the afternoon, it belonged to the Great Lord of Decay.’

‘You have done well, Silas,’ Hergustagrue told him, settling his foul bulk in the silvery shallows. The water about him turned black with his polluting form. ‘You have avenged yourself and pleased our foetid master. Now it is time to bring his rank glory to the rest of these damned isles. To seek out sorcerers like yourself to sustain our presence in this realm.’

Silas bowed his hooded head, before turning to his daemon horde.

‘Come, my tallymen,’ he called. ‘There are souls to weigh and measure beyond these shores. Dark powers to harness and realmgates that await our corruption.’

In unison, the plaguebearers marched forth, setting their disgusting forms against the fishing boats that lay beached on the bejewelled beach. Some vessels were grander still, fat transports Master Norvik had intended to use in the ocean-going search for his dark god. With diseased brawn, they pushed the boats into the shallows and launched the small fleet, raising their black sails. As a rancid daemon helped Silas up the side of the largest boat, the hunchbacked sorcerer dragged Lady Teagan with him. She tried to pull away from his foetid grip, but Silas hauled her back to him. As her face almost touched his rancid own, she cried the last of her tears.

‘Silas,’ she sobbed. ‘Please… please.’

‘Worry not, Lady Teagan,’ Silas Sheldrac told her. ‘We are done with this wretched place. Now I am going to take you home.’

About the Author

Rob Sanders is the author of ‘The Serpent Beneath’, a novella that appeared in the New York Times bestselling Horus Heresy anthology The Primarchs. His other Black Library credits include the Warhammer 40,000 titles Adeptus Mechanicus: Skitarius and Tech-Priest, Legion of the Damned, Atlas Infernal and Redemption Corps and the audio drama The Path Forsaken. He has also written the Warhammer Archaon duology, Everchosen and Lord of Chaos along with many Quick Reads for the Horus Heresy and Warhammer 40,000. He lives in the city of Lincoln, UK.

The Lords of Chaos gather their forces...
The Call of Chaos echoes across across the Mortal Realms and into the grim darkness of the far future.

Two new serialised supplements, and new fiction for Warhammer 40,000 and Warhammer Age of Sigmar.
Collect them all and answer the Call of Chaos.

A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION

Published in 2015 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.

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All Rights Reserved.

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ISBN: 978-1-78572-017-8

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