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The Deeper Shade – C L Werner

About the Author

An Extract from ‘Hallowed Knights: Black Pyramid’

A Black Library Publication

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The Deeper Shade

C L Werner

Mighty waves crashed against the craggy shore, splashing the luminescent boulders with a briny spray. Steam rose from the rocks as the salt evaporated, repulsed by the strange stones. Dun-coloured surf-spiders cast webs across the vapour, greedily drawing the dissolved mineral into their maws with clawlike mandibles. Overhead, flocks of winged lizards circled in search of the squamous molluscs cast up by the tide. Plantlike anemones slowly slithered along the beach, their stinging tendrils ready to stun any lizard that flew too near and their foot-stomachs ready to consume anything left helpless on the sand.

The shores of Gharn were vibrant with strange life. All except one place. A great finger of luminescent stone that projected far out into the bay, curling in upon itself like the horn of a mighty ram. Such was the atmosphere of nameless dread that clung to the spot that not even the surf-spiders were witless enough to trespass there. Only men had so little regard for their own lives.

Thalinosh of Charr ran his fingers through the turquoise feathers that coated his arms and studied the grim outcropping. The curving mass of rocks was just as he had seen it when he had cast the rune-bones and made his auguries. It was always a risk to seek wisdom from daemons, for there was invariably a maliciousness in such transactions, lies hidden inside truth and truth woven within a skein of lies. To gain power, a sorcerer had to quickly learn what to believe and what to reject.

‘There it is, my lord. The Claw of Mermedus.’ The words came in a low whine from the tortured wreck that had been Thalinosh’s apprentice until a few weeks ago. He tried to give his master an ingratiating smile, but his face was too mangled to manage the effort. ‘That is where I was attacked. I was fortunate to escape with my life.’

‘Yes,’ Thalinosh hissed. ‘Most fortunate. Even more fortunate that I found you before Carradras.’ The sorcerer’s hands tightened into fists as he spoke his rival’s name. Gratz had grown impatient and ambitious, seeking a master who would advance his knowledge of the black arts more swiftly than Thalinosh. Carradras had promised to meet those desires… for a price.

‘The dogs of Chaos always bite their own!’ A bitter laugh wracked the battered old man who lay prostrate in the sand at Thalinosh’s feet. His face was a mash of bruises and cuts, his once pristine robes now tattered and torn. There was a jewelled chain around his neck, but the symbol that had once hung from it was gone, stamped underfoot by Thalinosh’s followers. The Hammer of the God-King was not exactly held with fondness by the disciples of Tzeentch.

The old man’s speech brought an angry snarl from the creature that stood over him. The fur-covered brute stamped down with his iron-shod hoof and smashed the captive’s thigh. Sharga grunted in amusement when the priest cried out in pain. The rest of Thalinosh’s warband echoed the beastman’s savage laughter.

‘No more games,’ Thalinosh said, raising one of his feathered hands and commanding his followers to silence. Human and beastkin alike, they knew better than to question the sorcerer’s orders. They had the recent example of the priest’s torture to remind them of what happened to those who defied Thalinosh.

Thalinosh knelt beside the old man. His touch was almost gentle when he reached out and lifted the priest’s face from the sand so they might look one another in the eye. ‘This is the place I am meant to be. The place the Changer has sent me to find.’ The sorcerer’s sallow features drew back in a cold smile. ‘Tell me again why your people will not fish in this bay. Why they will not hunt along this shore.’ He looked out to the outcropping. ‘Why is it that nothing will dare those rocks?’

The old priest returned Thalinosh’s gaze. For just an instant, through the mien of defeat and subjugation, the sorcerer detected a glimmer of triumph. The prisoner had let his guard down and now the captor would wrest the truth from his mind.

‘You… Will… Speak…’ Thalinosh’s eyes blazed with energy as he evoked his magic. Some of the feathers on his arms curled up and fell out, rolling across the sand as desiccated, withered things. He could feel the arcane power crawling through his flesh, seeking to transform still more of his body. He redirected that power into his spell, setting his mind against the priest’s will.

Weakened by torture and doubt, the priest’s defiance was not equal to Thalinosh’s magic. Words came spilling off his tongue. ‘There is a cave beneath the water where dwells a ravenous phantom. Man or beast, it spares nothing that invades its domain. It pulls its victims asunder, leaving only ragged fragments to be washed in with the tide. The bones are always cracked, the marrow sucked out and only a black slime left within. No ship will dare these waters and no village has long stood upon these shores.’

Thalinosh smiled at the priest’s recitation. ‘A phantom?’ he mused. ‘You claim it is some murdering ghost that has wrought such havoc? Yet what need would a ghost have for the marrow in a man’s bones? What revenant would squander its wrath upon fish and birds?’

‘It has been seen,’ the old man whispered. ‘Or rather the effect of its attack has been seen. Sailors brought up from the decks of their ships, screaming as spectral hands broke them apart, rending them limb by limb.’ He drove his fist against the sand. ‘I have seen it happen, watched as my own wife was taken by the accursed fiend!’

The sorcerer laid his hand on his prisoner’s head. ‘I have seen it too. In my auguries.’ He glanced at the cowering Gratz. ‘My apprentice has told me something of it, how it tried to snatch him from his boat but instead only succeeded in taking from him the treasure he stole from me. A treasure that has been lost.’ Thalinosh gazed out at the bay, his eyes peering at the rolling waves. ‘Until now, that is.’

Sharga cocked his goat-like head to one side and peered at Thalinosh with a bulbous, ophidian eye. ‘Cave is under water. Can not fight. You bring ghost out for fight?’

Thalinosh scowled at his bestial underling. ‘It is no ghost,’ he told Sharga, making sure his voice was loud enough for the rest of the warband to hear. ‘And it would serve no purpose to lure our enemy to us. We must face it in its lair.’

‘How?’ the ebon-armoured Borir asked. The warrior rapped her gauntlet against the steel of her breastplate. ‘I have served under your banner for many years, but I did not do so simply to sink and drown.’ She turned her skull-masked helm and considered the rest of Thalinosh’s dozen followers. ‘We are none of us fish, sorcerer. We cannot march into this phantom’s watery grave.’

Thalinosh gestured at Borir with a crooked finger. ‘We can and we will,’ he told her. He stared down at the captive priest. ‘With a bit of help from our new friend, we will find the cave.’

The priest howled in terror when he saw the cruel gleam in Thalinosh’s eyes.

The priest was a long time in dying. Thalinosh had counted upon that. Some rituals demanded copious amounts of blood, others could be performed only at certain junctures of the constellations. This spell, however, had demanded pain.

Borir had done the cutting, plying the athame with the grisly facility of a butcher. Staked out on the beach at the shore of the bay, the old man was skinned and gutted like a fish, a red ruin of humanity that lingered on only because of the magical sympathy between himself and the pounding waves. With each wet, bloody breath the prisoner drew, a great torrent of water was drawn up from the bay and hurled back into the vastness of the sea. A rippling barrier of force kept the waves from crashing down again, a spiral of eldritch power that defied the raging elements.

Thalinosh gave the dying priest an almost affectionate glance as the bay was drained. Only the diametric opposition of the sacrifice could have endowed the ritual with the power to do what he demanded of it. The pious zealotry of a holy man matched against the profane ambitions of the sorcerer. It was almost beautiful in its poetry of antagonism.

The other component of the sacrifice sat on the sands with his legs folded. Gratz, Thalinosh’s apprentice, had been oblivious to his true role in the ritual until much too late. The sorcerer used his former student as a conduit, a channel for the awesome magic he evoked. There was only so much power a frail mantle of mortal flesh could withstand. Gratz was past that limit now. His body had been reduced to a blackened husk, the skin sloughing away from his smouldering bones. Like the priest, the apprentice persisted only because of the ritual’s energies; without that his tortured wretchedness would have expired hours ago.

‘It is enough,’ Thalinosh decided when the bay was drained down to the very dregs. From where he stood on the beach he could see the black fissure that gaped on the opposite side of the emptied bay, at the base of the clawlike rock. The cave mouth stood exposed, a dark cavity in the luminescent stone. A litter of bones and wrecked ships poked up from the muddy floor, the oldest of them coated in thick encrustations of barnacles. The haunter of the bay had been quite busy over the centuries.

‘It is enough,’ the sorcerer repeated. He motioned to Sharga. The beastman swung his heavy cudgel and mashed the priest’s skull with a single blow. The last draw of seawater fell back into the bay, spilling across the mud and pooling in its deepest recesses as the prisoner’s pulse was silenced. Gratz howled even louder as the full force of the spell closed upon him. Thalinosh gave his apprentice an appraising scrutiny. There was enough left of the man that he should be good for a few more hours. After that, the barrier between bay and sea would vanish and the waves would come crashing back. Before that happened, his work needed to be finished.

‘Stay here and watch over Gratz,’ Thalinosh commanded two of his other acolytes. The robed cultists flanked the doomed apprentice, standing guard over him with bared swords. There was small chance of anyone or anything disturbing the ritual now, but it paid to be cautious.

‘You are going down to the cave?’ Borir asked, a trace of uneasiness in her tone.

‘We are going into the cave,’ Thalinosh corrected her. His gaze swept across the rest of his retinue. Erudite cultists, barbaric warriors and mutant beastkin, they all shrank before the sorcerer’s imperious regard. ‘What we have come here to find is in that cave,’ he stated. ‘And we are not leaving here without it.’ He pointed at Gratz’s withered body and drew their attention to the man’s fading vitality. It was a vivid way to impress on them the essence of urgency.

The warband hastened down into the muck of the bay, sloughing through the mire of mud and sand. They picked their way across the field of skeletons and wrecked ships, drawing towards the black opening of the cave. A warm, evil smell billowed from the fissure, a cloying stench that made the skin crawl. The luminous rock was subdued here, cloaked in a black scum that dripped from the walls. Jumbled bones lay heaped around the cave’s mouth, splintered in some uncanny fashion that made them look twisted rather than cracked. Thalinosh paused to examine one. Just as the priest had said, the marrow had been extracted and replaced with a tarry sort of slime.

Leading the way, one of the beastmen was the first to venture into the cave. His terrified bleats were heard a moment later. When Thalinosh reached the cave mouth, the cries collapsed into a sickening gurgle. All that could be seen of the creature were his horns as he was sucked down by a patch of quicksand.

‘Bind yourselves together,’ Borir ordered as she retrieved a roll of rope from one of the marauders. ‘Around the waist and in groups of three.’

Thalinosh declined Borir’s offer to tie the sorcerer to herself and Sharga. He had his own methods of escaping the hazards of the cave if it became necessary.

Their precautions taken, the warband resumed their advance into the rank depths of the cave. The layer of slime that coated the walls was patchy, exposing just enough of the luminescent rock to ease the gloom, casting everything in a mousy grey light. The profusion of splintered bones remained persistent, but now they were mingled with other debris. Rusted armour and swords were much in evidence, as were the decaying remains of chests and casks. Goblets and plates of obvious workmanship lay scattered about. Battered coffers rested amidst piles of coins. The gleam of gemstones shone from the mud and slime. All the treasures of sunken ships and demolished villages had been drawn into the cave.

‘Something is here,’ Borir whispered, her sword clenched tight in her hands. Far from evoking a sense of avarice, seeing the accumulated treasure had instead aroused an increased wariness in the warrior.

‘This predator’s lair,’ Sharga grunted. ‘Hunter live here. Bring prey here to eat.’ The beastman lifted his head and snorted loudly. ‘Cannot tell if smell old or new. Maybe hunter here. Maybe hunter gone.’

Thalinosh made arcane passes with his hands, evoking a minor divination spell. ‘What I seek is deeper in the cave,’ he declared. ‘Whatever is here, be it beast, phantom or daemon, it will not stand in my way.’ He waved his hand at the leading group of warriors. ‘Onwards, or would you prefer to wait for the sea to come rushing back?’

The threat overcame the misgivings of his followers. Warily, they probed further into the gloom of the grotto. Finally, the leading warrior called back to Thalinosh. ‘My lord, the way ahead is still flooded! The tunnel angles downwards and is filled with water.’

Thalinosh moved forwards and inspected the scene. The tunnel remained wide enough to run a brace of chariots through side by side and the ceiling was still far above them. The floor, however, had taken a sharp decline, angling deeper than it had before. Ahead of them, all that could be seen was the reflection of light across still water. It was here in this flooded cavern, his sorcery told him, that the thing he sought would be found.

‘We go on,’ Thalinosh said. He pointed at his vanguard and slowly gestured to the flooded tunnel. ‘Do not fear. My magic will protect you from whatever waits in the dark.’

Reassured, the warrior and those tied to him by the rope advanced into the ankle-high water. The second group of three followed after them. Thalinosh motioned to Borir and Sharga to wait. Let the others take the risk of drawing out the cave’s inhabitant. They could be replaced easily enough. More easily than the magic it would take to really cast protective wards over them.

Thalinosh let the two groups of minions get twenty yards down the flooded tunnel before he ordered his henchmen to follow. The sorcerer kept behind them, his eyes glowing with arcane light as they adjusted to the increasing darkness. The walls here were thick with slime, almost utterly blotting out the luminescent rock beneath. Long strings of black mucus dripped from the ceiling, lending their reek to the clammy, stagnant air.

‘Bones under water,’ the bird-faced beastman leading the second group of three declared. ‘Toes feel bones.’

‘Hold your tongue, turnskin,’ the vanguard hissed. ‘Your racket might wake the phantom.’ The warning made the two cultists with him glance around in fear while the scraggly brays in the second group looked behind to gauge how far they would have to run if they had to flee the cave. The bird-faced tzaangor leading them grunted sullenly, but made no further comment.

The cave pushed deeper into the earth. The water level now was chest-high for the warrior leading the way. The walls were so thick with slime that the intruders began slashing at them with their swords and axes to scrape away some of the encrustation and expose patches of luminous rock to provide them a little light.

A sound from ahead stopped the vanguard just as he was swinging his sword to chop at the wall. A loud, wet plop that echoed through the tunnel, it was unlike the faint drips and splashes caused by the mucus falling from the roof.

Thalinosh’s magically attuned sight could decipher no more than the mundane vision of his followers. Stifled by the reek in the air, even the bestial senses of his more animalistic minions were unable to detect anything. All they had were their ears, and everyone was silent as they strained to draw some betraying sound from the darkness.

The tense vigil ended in a blood-curdling shriek. The lead warrior screamed and flailed at the water. Before anyone could react, he was yanked under the scummy surface. The cultist behind him howled in terror as the rope grew taut and he too was jerked beneath the water. The last of the trio whipped out his knife and sawed frantically at the rope. He was also pulled under, but unlike his companions, he soon reappeared, gasping and floundering in the flooded tunnel. Freed from the drag of his doomed comrades, the cultist started swimming back towards Thalinosh and the others.

Panicked cries filled the cave. The tzaangor and his brays were clawing at their rope, preferring to risk the quicksand than be drowned by whatever had taken the vanguard. Borir and Sharga had already slashed the cord that connected them, but neither strayed any deeper into the cave.

Thalinosh raised his hand and muttered words of power. From his palm, a sphere of blue light flashed into being and went streaking down the tunnel. By its glow, the terrified cultist could be seen trudging through the water. Beyond him, a litter of torn flesh bobbed to the surface, remains so ravaged they scarcely could be recognised as human.

‘Hold fast!’ Thalinosh snarled at his minions. The beastmen gazed at him in confusion. The surviving cultist simply ignored him and continued to flee.

By the magic light, Thalinosh could see the water behind the defiant cultist shiver, disturbed by something moving beneath it. The surface bubbled violently, as though the thing were rising. Yet still there was nothing to be seen.

The cultist shrieked as he was suddenly jerked backwards. Thalinosh watched in wonder as the man was lifted into the air. He flailed about, suspended midway between the water and the dripping roof. The sorcerer could see nothing holding the man. There was a grisly rending sound. An arm popped from its socket and was then torn free. Then the opposite leg was pulled from the man’s body.

It was, Thalinosh thought, just as the priest had claimed – havoc wrought by an invisible phantom.

Only one thing marred the impression. When the cultist’s other leg was ripped free, Thalinosh saw his midsection collapse as well, pinched as if gripped in a gargant’s hand.

‘Stay, you fools!’ the sorcerer snarled as his remaining followers turned towards the mouth of the cave. ‘It is no ghost, and I will prove it to you!’

At his gesture, Thalinosh brought the sphere of light speeding down towards the levitating cultist. Before the orb could reach the body it crashed against some unseen barrier between magic and man. The sphere shattered, dispersing as a wave of crackling blue lightning. As the wave shivered through the air, it followed the contours of the immense bulk that towered over its mangled victim. Thick tentacles were revealed, wrapped about the corpse and its severed limbs. The outlines of a vast body-head were suggested, rearing up from the scummy water.

‘Krakigon,’ Thalinosh hissed. He had read of such monsters in obscure bestiaries but never had he expected to see one. For one thing, it was reputed that they made themselves invisible by means of the slime they excreted from their pores.

Reeling from the shock of Thalinosh’s spell, the krakigon lurched backwards. It hurled the dismembered pieces of its victim away, sending them crashing against the walls. As the sections of carcass struck, patches of slime rubbed away. The luminescent rock was exposed, throwing shafts of light into the cave. Those bits of the krakigon caught in the light stood revealed, taking on a visible solidity. The beast’s hide was at once both rubbery and scaly, shaded a dull grey with yellow markings. The tip of each tentacle ended in a bony spear, its edges viciously barbed. Along the underside of each limb were thousands of tiny toothless mouths, each with a sharp tongue as barbed and gruesome as the spears themselves.

Those portions of the krakigon caught in the light swiftly adjusted to the illumination, fading again into invisibility as it matched its hue to the difference. The beast swung its tentacles at the walls, rubbing its slimy skin across the exposed rock to once more smother its light in slime.

‘Before it can vanish!’ Borir shouted. ‘Attack! Kill!’ She raised her sickle-bladed sword and charged towards the krakigon. The beastkin, only a moment before on the verge of panic, rallied to her and rushed at the monster in a snarling mass.

Thalinosh drew upon his sorcery to set an aura of energy crackling around Borir before she reached the monster. When the krakigon struck at her, the scaly arm was repulsed by the arcane ward, peeling away like the petals of some gory flower. The limb flailed about in agony, no longer an unseen phantom, but a dead mass of tissue incapable of camouflaging itself.

The tzaangor was not so fortunate as Borir. Without Thalinosh’s protection, he was snatched up in the krakigon’s coils. The beastman howled as he was pulled from the water and dashed against the roof of the cave. A single blow was enough to turn his birdlike head into bloody mash. One of the brays was caught by an invisible tentacle, his furry body twisted by the unseen grip until it was wrenched in half and sent flying across the cave.

‘Under the water!’ Thalinosh shouted to his followers. The surviving members of his warband ducked under the scummy surface as the sorcerer stretched forth his hand. From his fingers a writhing sheet of gibbous fire exploded across the tunnel. The outline of the krakigon stood revealed as its gigantic bulk was caught in the fire. The brute’s tentacles lashed through the air as the arcane flames flared across it. The slime coating its limbs sizzled away in the conflagration.

So too did the slime coating the walls and ceiling. Burned away by the sorcerer, the muck exposed the long-hidden luminous rock beneath. The krakigon’s smoking body was caught in the light, its charred hide incapable of reacting to the sudden illumination. The monster stood revealed in its totality, a great scaly bulk some fifty feet long with tentacles jutting from its rubbery sides. Four enormous flippers propelled it through the water. The head jutted directly from the top of its roughly ovoid body, a string of eight black eyes flanked by feathery gills.

Thalinosh fixated upon a single spot on the brute’s body, a darker patch amidst its greys and yellows, an impossible shadow embedded in its scaly hide. He recognised the object caught there, the artefact that had been stolen from him by his treacherous apprentice. A sliver of shadowy glass the length of his hand. A relic from a lost realm and an eldritch magic.

The sorcerer raised his hand once more, but the immolation he had conjured had taxed his energies and disturbed his concentration. Instead Thalinosh pointed at the artefact. ‘The shadeglass,’ he snarled at his followers. ‘Retrieve the shadeglass!’

Sharga nodded his horned head and bellowed a savage war cry. The beastman leapt upon the krakigon, chopping at it with his axe. At the same time, Borir came against the monster from the side. Her sword licked across one of the tentacles, severing it almost at the root, and sent it squirming mindlessly through the water.

The krakigon lurched forwards; three of its tentacles lashed out and caught the last of the brays. The screaming beastman was wrenched apart by the scaly coils. The gory remains were tossed aside as the monster surged for Borir.

Sharga charged the monster, sinking his axe into the krakigon’s hide. He swung his weapon as though it were a mountaineer’s pick, using it to ascend the creature’s enormity. It flailed about, lashing at him with several tentacles, oblivious to the gashes its spear-like spikes opened in its rubbery flesh.

Borir dived beneath the water to avoid the coils that whipped towards her. Sinking from view, the warrior circled the krakigon to rise behind it. Sighting the monster’s enormous eye, she hefted her sword like a javelin and hurled it at the staring orb. The sickle blade raked across the gigantic eye. Pulpy jelly exploded from the ruptured organ and the krakigon shuddered in agonised spasms.

‘Sharga! The shadeglass!’ Thalinosh shouted to the beastman. The goat-headed henchman was clinging to the writhing krakigon like a horsebreaker riding a wild stallion. Turn and shudder whichever way it might, the tortured monster could not throw Sharga off.

Thalinosh drew upon the dregs of arcane power yet lingering in his drained essence. Again, a crackle of fire leapt from his outstretched hand. No grand conflagration as before, but a mere lance of fiery light. Yet he put the spell to more direct effect. Following Borir’s example, he attacked one of the monster’s eyes, popping it in a burst of steam and blood.

The krakigon’s tentacles whipped across the ceiling, gouging great gaps in the rock. Debris rained down on the creature, slamming into its scaly body. While the pain-maddened brute lashed out at the rocks, Sharga made his move. Plunging away from the grip of his axe and leaving the weapon embedded in the monster’s hide, he sought the dark, shimmering sliver of shadeglass. The beastman bellowed as he tore at the trapped artefact. It was wedged deep in the krakigon’s flesh, but Sharga’s brawny grasp was such that it came free with a single pull.

The beastman toppled into the water with his prize. The krakigon lashed the water around Sharga, but before it could make a more determined assault, a great boulder came crashing down from the roof of its cave. The monster’s central mass was smashed beneath the enormous weight, crushed beneath it like an insect. The flailing tentacles groped and slithered against the burden, but try as it might, the mass was too much for the krakigon to budge.

Sharga sloshed his way through the flooded tunnel, water dripping from his fur, blood oozing from his wounds. He held the shadeglass before him, proudly showing it to Thalinosh. Then the beastman stopped. A confused look swept into his eyes. He stared down at his chest, unable to comprehend the blade that had punched through his back and skewered his heart. He bellowed and fell to his knees. His last act was to turn his horned head and stare at his murderer.

Borir ripped the athame free and snatched the shadeglass from Sharga’s faltering grip. She stepped back as the beastman collapsed face first into the black water. The warrior flicked his blood from the ceremonial dagger and turned towards Thalinosh.

‘Treachery,’ the sorcerer stated.

Borir laughed. ‘Oh yes, treachery,’ she mocked him. ‘You should not have expended so much of your power fighting the krakigon. I have been with you long enough to know your limits.’ She shook her head. ‘I would have waited, but this opportunity was too good to forsake.’

‘Carradras must have promised you a great deal,’ Thalinosh said. ‘When Gratz stole the shadeglass, I suspected he did not act alone. He must have held that secret to the last, thinking you would save him.’

Thalinosh expected Borir to say something. He was surprised when she suddenly threw the dagger at him. The athame flickered as it sped across the tunnel and struck the sorcerer, burying its blade deep in his chest. He staggered back. The sorcerer struck the wall and slowly slid to the floor.

‘Carradras is mighty in the esteem of Tzeentch,’ Borir declared. ‘His star is rising, while yours has most certainly set, Thalinosh of Charr. For all your divinations, you could not see what was right before you!’

It was Thalinosh’s turn to laugh. ‘If my foresight has failed me, how much more has your own betrayed you, Borir? I am dying, and with me dies my magic. What do you think will hold the sea back when I am gone?’

Borir’s eyes went wide as she realised the import of Thalinosh’s words. Gratz was simply a vessel, a channel by which the sorcerer’s spell was maintained. Without Thalinosh, the enchantment would be broken and the krakigon’s cave would be submerged once more!

The warrior did not linger to mock the man she had betrayed. Quickly wrapping the shadeglass in her cloak, she ran down the tunnel. Thalinosh watched her go. Her panic was a thing of true amusement.

Once Borir was out of sight, Thalinosh reached to his chest and withdrew the athame. The dagger had struck true, but it was he who had forged it and his magic that endowed its enchantment. Stabbing him with it was like returning a part of his own body to him. As the blade emerged from his flesh, the wound closed up behind it.

Thalinosh glanced at the trapped krakigon and at the hole it had ripped from the ceiling. He could see the faint twinkle of starlight through that hole. An egress far more convenient than the way he had entered the grotto.

The sorcerer laughed as he thought of Borir racing back through the cave and the frantic climb up the cliff. Even moving at her most frantic, how long would it take her to reach the top? Thalinosh hurried to the hole in the roof of the grotto. He drew the last dregs of power from his body, willing the arcane energies to hasten his ascent.

Sunlight spilled down around Thalinosh as he emerged onto the beach. In the distance he could see the guards standing beside Gratz’s withered body. He could see the drained bay and the magical barrier that kept the sea from rushing back in. There was the black mouth of the cave and, just faintly visible, an armoured figure scrambling away from it.

Thalinosh paused as he considered the shadeglass. It was a curious relic, something that would be full of promise once it yielded its secrets to him. It would be a shame to lose it again when it was so nearly his. Yet Borir had spoken truth when she said she knew the limits of his power. He had no magic left to use against her. All he had was the sorcery he had already evoked.

At a gesture from Thalinosh, Gratz fell prostrate into the sand, his body crumbling into chalky dust. The guards fled from the grisly remains, but their panic was magnified still further when they looked out to the bay and saw the barrier extinguished.

A shriek of terror rang out as Thalinosh saw Borir for the last time. The sea came flooding back into the bay, rushing to fill the places his sorcery had drawn it from. The warrior was smashed beneath the deluge, vanishing the instant her shattered body was engulfed by the waves. Perhaps they would carry her back into the cave, leaving her corpse with those of the krakigon’s victims.

Thalinosh stared at the swirling, pounding waves that refilled the bay. His eyes penetrated the angry waters, trying to imagine where the shadeglass had been thrown by the tempest. When he rested and recovered his arcane energies, he would make his auguries. He would return to reclaim the relic.

And this time he could content himself that there would be no traitors in the fold.

About the Author

C L Werner’s Black Library credits include the Age of Sigmar novels Overlords of the Iron Dragon and The Tainted Heart, the novella ‘Scion of the Storm’ in Hammers of Sigmar, the Warhammer novels Deathblade, Mathias Thulmann: Witch Hunter, Runefang and Brunner the Bounty Hunter, the Thanquol and Boneripper series and Time of Legends: The Black Plague series. For Warhammer 40,000 he has written the Space Marine Battles novel The Siege of Castellax. Currently living in the American south-west, he continues to write stories of mayhem and madness set in the Warhammer worlds.

An extract from Hallowed Knights: Black Pyramid.

Shyish was a place of bitter endings and silent decay.

Graveyards that had once been cities dotted a landscape broken by war, their streets lost to shadows and dust. Carrion birds circled the high places, and jackals haunted the low. And everywhere was dusty silence.

The city of Caddow was no different. It sprawled across the Sea of Dust like a broken corpse. Its once-mighty eyries were reduced to jagged ruin, and the stones of its high walls had fallen and lay scattered for leagues. Dust-barques that had once carried holds of spices and damask lay forgotten in dune-swallowed docklands, and the palaces of the mighty were home now only to night-birds and hoofed beasts. A forest of stone rose where once a city had thrived. Silent and forgotten.

‘Uzkul-ha!’

As the cry echoed over the broken city, the night erupted in fire. Long dragon-tongues of red-and-orange flame licked out, scoring the darkness. Startled flocks of carrion birds rose skyward.

‘Uzkul-ha!’

Another crash of voices, another ripple of fire. Broken, twisted shapes slumped or were thrown back into the dust, their unnatural flesh steaming. Nightmarish creatures, part man, part animal, clad in rotting damask and tarnished gold, fell back from the high, steep steps of the black pyramid. They howled and gibbered as they retreated, sounding much like the beasts they resembled.

‘Gazul-akit-ha!’ A single voice bellowed, as the echoes of fire faded.

‘Uzkul! Uzkul! Uzkul!’ came the shouted response, echoing out over the shattered grandeur of the city. Fifty duardin voices, raised in defiance. Raised in prayer. The constant thump of a pommel stone against the inner rim of a shield accompanied the words. Funerary bells began to ring, slow and dolorous. Iron-shod feet stamped in a mournful rhythm.

The Gazul-Zagaz began to sing. A dirge of mourning, for the dead yet to be. Singing their souls to the deep caverns of Gazul, the Lord of Underearth, who was dead himself. All things died and walked in the deep, even gods. That was the way of it. But what was death to a god? ‘Dust, and less than dust,’ Gnol-Tul said softly, as he stroked the thick spade of salt-and-pepper beard that spilled down over his barrel chest.

Like all duardin, he was built like a cask of ale, with thick arms and legs. Age had not dimmed his vigour, though he’d seen more centuries than he had fingers. He looked on in satisfaction as his kinband shouted their song into the teeth of the enemy. Though there were only fifty of the Pyredrakes, they were worth three times that.

Clad in coats and cowls of burnished gromril, each of his warriors wore a steel war-mask wrought in the shape of a skull, and carried a baroque drakegun. Besides the hand cannons, each duardin was armed with a square pavise shield, which doubled as both bulwark and firing stand, and a heavy, flat blade, suitable for butchery and little else.

At that moment, the shield wall stretched across the southern tier of the ziggurat, protecting two lines of Pyredrakes. The first line would fire then step back to reload, allowing the second rank to take their place. A hoary strategy, but effective. Tul thought the old ways of war were often the best, and served against the disorganised rabble below well enough. Beastkin had little in the way of tactical acumen. They were savage and strong, but strength alone was as dust against iron and fire.

So had it always been, so would it always be.

Tul and his bier, his chosen companions, stood behind the firing lines. Armed with round shields, wrought in the shape of a scowling countenance, and carrying heavy runeblades, his bier was composed of proven warriors, those who had already sung their death-song and consigned their souls to the Underearth. Unlike the Pyredrakes, they wore white robes, and their masks were of silver rather than iron.

Tul himself wore the golden mask of an elder, and beneath it his skin and hair were marked with the sacred ashes of his ancestors. He carried a double-handed runeblade cradled in the crook of his arm. It was an old thing, hungry for death, and nameless, as was proper. To name a thing was to give it a will of its own, and a wilful weapon was one that could not be trusted. There were many named blades in the shadow-vaults of the Gazul-Zagaz, and there they would remain, until Shyish sank into the twilight sea.

Tul and his kinband had fought their way through the ruins and up the steps of the ziggurat over the course of several days, leaving a trail of dead and dying beastkin in their wake. The ruins were full of the creatures – thousands of them, breeding in the dark – and the duardin had roused them all as they advanced deeper into the city. But what were beasts, to the warriors of the Gazul-Zagaz?

‘The gor flee, elder,’ Hok, his tolvan, said. ‘Our fire warms their bones overmuch.’ His subordinate held a heavy stone tablet, upon which the names of the honoured dead would be carved upon victory – or just prior to defeat. Either way, their names would be recorded, and added to the Long Dirge of the Gazul-Zagaz.

‘They will come again and in greater numbers,’ Tul said, tugging on his ash-streaked beard. ‘They are brief things, and determined.’ The warriors of his bier nodded sagely at this. They were all veterans of a thousand similar skirmishes, their birth-swords grown dull on the bones of gor and ik – beastkin and daemons, as the Azyrites called them.

As he thought of their allies, a flash of silver, somewhere out in the dark below, caught his eye. He heard the sound of a hunting horn, and the shriek of one of the Azyrites’ great beasts. Then, cerulean light sparked, and he heard the whipcrack of a boltstorm pistol.

‘The Swiftblade is close,’ Hok said, his disapproval evident.

Tul smiled sourly. Hok was referring to their ally, Lord-Aquilor Sathphren Swiftblade. Tul’s mind tripped over the unfamiliar title. It had too many words, and unnecessary ones at that. Why advertise the swiftness of your blade to the enemy? Surely it was better for such things to be a surprise. Then, there was much about the Stormcasts, and Sathphren in particular, that was confusing.

‘As he promised,’ Tul said. Hok bowed his head, accepting this chastisement with grace. Confusing or not, the Azyrite was an ally. He had helped the Gazul-Zagaz, and so, they would help him. An oath for an oath, a debt for a debt. ‘By sorrow fail, and by sadness bound,’ he murmured, reciting the ancient oath – the first oath and the last – made to the Lord of Underearth by his folk, in the days before the coming of the Undying King.

‘An oath for an oath,’ Hok said, and the others murmured agreement.

‘As it was, as it must be,’ Tul said, finishing the oath. He glanced up towards the pyramid’s summit, where a massive, four-sided archway of carven stone topped the edifice. Shaped to resemble nothing so much as a great flock of birds, rising skywards to a single point, the archway sat atop a circular dais of curious construction, marked by runic sigils unfamiliar to Tul’s eye.

Sathphren had called it the Corvine Gate. Once, the realmgate had linked this part of Shyish to somewhere in Azyr, the Realm of Heavens. Tul let his gaze rise to the stars overhead, where Azyr bled into Shyish, and every other mortal realm besides. The Gates of Azyr had been sealed long ago, as the Ruinous Powers spread their baleful influence through the realms. Now, at last, they were opening once more.

Tul could not say whether that was entirely a good thing or not. But an oath was an oath, and he would pay his folk’s debt, as he must. ‘They’ve caught the gor,’ Hok said, drawing Tul from his contemplation of the stars. Hok leaned over and spat. ‘Will they drive them back to us? It is only fitting.’

Tul shook his head. ‘No. They are selfish and careless, these Azyrites.’ Then, that was often the way of stars – heedless of all that they shone on. One could not expect them to hold to the niceties of civilised folk. ‘Sathphren will take them for himself.’

His warriors grumbled at this, equal parts annoyed and amused. The Azyrites – these Stormcast Eternals, as they called themselves – were powerful allies. And faithful, in their own way, to their own god, Sigmar. The Gazul-Zagaz knew him as the Starlit King, and it was said that he had walked among them often, in days of antiquity. Before Gazul had fallen silent, his temples cast down and his folk scattered.

Powerful, yes, and faithful, to be sure. But like children. Careless and eager. But that was no bad thing, perhaps. For children soon grew up. Then, perhaps, they would truly be allies worthy of the Gazul-Zagaz, in fact as well as in deed.

He squinted, catching sight of more silvery flashes in the dark. Eerie cries echoed up from the ruins. The Swiftblade fancied himself a hunter, Tul knew. Well, he would find plenty of prey this night. He smiled: a hard, merciless expression.

Beast howls filled the night. A tide of filth flowed up the steps of the pyramid, surging forwards on hooves and claws. They made a great noise as they came, almost joyous in its intensity. As if they knew the oblivion that awaited them, and welcomed it.

‘Uzkul-ha,’ he said, softly. He lifted his sheathed blade over his head. ‘Uzkul-ha!’

‘Uzkul,’ came the response from his warriors. Death.

‘Uzkul! Uzkul! Uzkul!’

Click here to buy Hallowed Knights: Black Pyramid.

A Black Library Publication

First published in Great Britain in 2018 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.
Cover illustration by Christian Byrne.

The Deeper Shade © Copyright Games Workshop Limited 2018. The Deeper Shade, GW, Games Workshop, Black Library, Warhammer, Warhammer Age of Sigmar, Stormcast Eternals, and all associated logos, illustrations, images, names, creatures, races, vehicles, locations, weapons, characters, and the distinctive likenesses thereof, are either ® or TM, and/or © Games Workshop Limited, variably registered around the world.
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ISBN: 978-1-78030-772-5

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