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The Interrogator – Richard Strachan

About the Author

An Extract from ‘Hallowed Ground’

A Black Library Publication

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The Interrogator

Richard Strachan

The important thing was not to panic, Gaspar told himself. They must know it was a mistake, a terrible, terrible mistake.

There was a smell in the air of blocked drains and mould, the sharp metallic hint somewhere of what he hoped wasn’t blood. He sucked another breath in, spat it out, tried to peer through the weave of the sack on his head. Breath ragged, the hood smothering his face, sweat trickling down his forehead. There was a smear of torchlight somewhere off to his left, but everything else was in shadow.

Another drip of sweat coursed down the side of his nose. His hands were chained to a table in front of him, stretched out. It felt like someone had gone out of their way to make the chair he sat on as uncomfortable as possible. There was a constant tension in the small of his back, in his hips, his shoulders.

Tentatively he cleared his throat. ‘Hello? Is anyone there?’ He tried to muffle a sob. ‘Please,’ he said, ‘there’s been… This isn’t right, someone’s made a mistake, I swear!’

They’d taken him as he was leaving work. Stepping out of the Scrivener’s Guild, pausing a moment to inhale the heady evening scent of Hammerhal before heading home. Then a blow to the kidney that had him seeing fire, a hood thrust over his head, another solid punch to the stomach. The world had tipped, fallen back, broken into shadow and light as the pain rummaged its way through him. He’d felt himself bundled across the pavement, the hiss and slam of a carriage door, the rush of footsteps. A jouncing, rackety journey at speed, the sound of the horse’s hooves like some mad, discordant drumbeat. Then endless flights of stairs, his arms gripped on either side. And finally darkness, and silence, and that smell in the air he hoped wasn’t blood.

‘Please!’ he cried out again. ‘I haven’t done anything wrong!’

‘I’ll be the judge of that,’ a cold voice said in his ear.

The hood was whipped off his head. After all that darkness, the blaze of the burning torch blinded him. He screwed his eyes shut, heard footsteps, the screech of a chair being pulled out on the other side of the table.

Slowly he opened his eyes. He was in a stone cell, perhaps no more than fifteen feet from end to end. The ceiling was low and dripped with moisture. The torch flames wrinkled weakly against the wall on his left. He could see a door of black ironoak on the other side of the cell, with a narrow metal grille set into it at head height. And between Gaspar and the door, sitting opposite him at the table, was a woman.

A wide-brimmed hat with a tall crown cast her face in shadow. She wore a dark red coat, stained with travel, a pauldron of battered armour on her right shoulder, a pair of worn black leather gloves. He could see the glint of her eyes in the shadow beneath the hat’s brim. Hard eyes. Cold as ice. There was a stack of parchment on the table in front of her.

She folded her arms. ‘Your name is Gaspar Helding,’ she said. ‘You live on the first storey of the tenement block on the corner of Threshing Place. You work as a draftsman for the Scrivener’s Guild on Selstone Avenue, copying and filing requisition documents for the High Architect’s office. Stonemasonry supplies, scaffolding orders… that kind of thing.’

‘Who are you?’ Gaspar squeaked. He cleared his throat, struggled against the chains, tried to inject some force into his voice. ‘What is this? I demand you let me go, this is, it’s… It’s an outrage, I am an innocent man! What do you want with me!’

The woman glanced without interest through the pile of documents. ‘What I want?’ she said. ‘What I want is the truth. Nothing more, nothing less.’

She took off the hat and laid it on the table between them. She had lank blonde hair, cut close at the sides and the back, a lock falling forward over her right eye. She brushed it away. There was a scar against her forehead, he saw, curving down and passing over her cheekbone. It twisted her face slightly on that side, made her seem as if she was scowling. Which, Gaspar was sure, she was most of the time anyway.

‘As for who I am,’ she said. Her eyes flicked up at him. ‘My name is Doralia ven Denst. I’m an agent of the Most Holy Order of Azyr. And you, Gaspar Helding, have found yourself in a world of trouble.’

He tried to laugh then, as if it was all some absurd joke. Some ridiculous prank that he had finally seen through.

‘The Order of Azyr!’ He tried to chuckle, but it still came out as a sob. ‘What in the name of Sigmar would a witch hunter from the Order of Azyr want with me? I’m a draftsman, a copywriter! I’m not important, I’m not…’ He looked at her, pleading. ‘I’m not anything.’

The blow seemed to come out of nowhere, she moved so fast. One moment Gaspar was sitting there with his arms stretched forward on the table, as though begging for mercy, the next there was a pinwheeling spray of white light and he was slumped against the table leg with blood pouring out of his nose.

His arms were twisted round and his legs were askew on the dirty cell floor. A great tide of pain came washing over him, cloying and thick and then sharp and searing. He retched, whimpering with shock. Bubbles of blood and spit popped on his lips. He tried to clamber up onto his knees.

The woman was behind him then. He felt her hands under his arms as she lifted him back into his seat, far stronger than he would have guessed. He winced and shuffled and sat there, still with his arms stretched out. Shuddering, the blood dripping from his nose onto the table.

He couldn’t look at her. He just shook and huffed in breath after breath, waves of burning heat and freezing cold washing over him. The pain in his nose receded to a dull, insistent ache, spreading out to grip his entire skull.

‘Let’s try again,’ the agent said into the silence. Her voice was utterly calm, as bloodless as stone. She reached for a sheet of parchment from the top of the pile and read it with as much emotion as she might recite a shopping list. ‘Two days ago you left work on Selstone Avenue and turned left, instead of right as you usually do. You walked two blocks along the avenue until you came to the Grindstone Tavern on the corner of Longwheeler Place.’

‘What?’ Gaspar managed to moan. ‘I don’t understand, so… so what if I did?’

‘You bought a tankard of Buckmaster’s Brew,’ she said, ignoring him, still reading from the parchment. ‘You sat at a table on the western edge of the common room, and when you left you turned the tankard so the handle was pointing towards the second window on the eastern side.’

‘So? So what, what does it matter?’ Gaspar cried. The blood was thick in his nose now, a congealed plug that he tried to snort out. ‘I had a tankard of ale, is that a crime?’

The witch hunter’s voice rose slightly, climbing in pitch. ‘Then, on the walk home to Threshing Place, you stopped to purchase a bag of fireberries from the market at Green Ash Square. You said to the market trader who sold you the berries that’ – she looked up at him with disgust, as if she had expected nothing less – ‘that you thought it might rain later that evening…’

His mind reeled. He couldn’t for a moment remember seeing anyone who might have been following him, let alone this awful vision with her burgundy coat, her wide-brimmed witch hunter’s hat, those cold, dead eyes.

He tried to marshal all of his faculties, to make his voice as calm and reasonable as he could. This was an agent of the Order of Azyr, not some street thug or cut-throat. Surely, if he could just make her see the truth then she would have to let him go? Surely?

‘Please, you must understand…’ he started. He fixed her with his gaze, trying to project every last thread of his sentiment towards her. ‘I have nothing but respect for the order and the dangerous work you do to keep us safe… But this is absurd, ridiculous beyond belief, it’s… Can’t you see? I left work, I went for a quick drink, I brought some fireberries… How in the name of Sigmar does something like that lead to something like this?’

He saw the blow coming this time and flinched against it, twisting his head to the side, eyes screwed shut and his shoulder up against his ear.

‘No, please! I beg you–’

Her fist caught him a solid crack against the temple. Another burst of light, a sick yawing to the side, then a rough hand around his throat dragging him back up. The fist came thudding into his ear next and made his head ring. He cried out, wailing like a baby.

‘What does it mean!’ the witch hunter shouted. She struck him again, slapping his jaw. ‘The handle of the tankard, the eastern window!’ A hand twisted his right ear until he screamed. ‘The fireberries! Rain! What does it mean!’

She grabbed his head and slammed it down hard against the table, with a crack so ear-splittingly loud Gaspar thought she must have broken his skull. He slumped to the floor, hands straining against the chains, blood pouring down his face. Every beat of his heart shivered through his weeping body. He could not breathe, could not open his eyes to look at the sheer fury that was standing above him.

‘Who were you signalling in the Grindstone Tavern?’ she said. Her voice was low now, but there was a tremble in it too, as if it were taking all of her self-control not to simply beat him to death in the middle of this miserable cell. ‘What do the fireberries mean? When is it going to rain, Gaspar? You need to tell me.’

She sat down again and adjusted her coat, pausing to push back that lank lock of hair. She looked through the documents in front of her. Gaspar’s watery sobs trickled across the room.

‘I want to tell you a story,’ she said at last.

He glanced up at her through his bloodshot eyes. She wasn’t looking at him now. She was staring at the flame of the torch, writhing there in its metal sconce against the stone wall. The drip of moisture from the ceiling, the crackle of the fire, the creak of her leather coat as she breathed. There was no other sound.

‘This was a few years back,’ she continued. ‘Maybe longer – I forget. After a while, all the years seem to blend into each other. The places too. This was back in Excelsis, in Ghur. Ever been to Ghur, Helding?’

He shook his head. ‘I’ve… I’ve never even left Hammerhal,’ he stuttered.

‘Strange place. Fierce. Not somewhere you can let your guard down.’ Her mouth twisted into a tight smile. ‘Where is?’

Gaspar nodded. He had no idea where she was going with this, but anything that kept her occupied and not beating him half to death was to be wholeheartedly encouraged.

‘I was hunting rogue spells,’ she said. ‘Predatory incantations that had slipped the bonds of their masters. They can cause a lot of problems, let me tell you. Anyway, this one was bad. A dark vortex that caused uncontrollable grief and panic in anyone it touched. It had been haunting this district for weeks, appearing and reappearing at will. Folk were literally dying of sorrow whenever it came near. All their worst upsets and sadnesses, multiplied a thousand-fold…’

Her voice drifted away for a moment. Gaspar glanced at her, was shocked to see a gleam of moisture in her eye. He looked away as she flicked her gaze towards him.

‘I dealt with the spell, put it down,’ she said. ‘Nullstone bolt from my crossbow, job done. So I thought anyway. Turned out it just came back the next night. And then the night after that. Every time I put it down, it just came back. Took me a while to figure out what was going on.’

A silence opened between them. Drip of moisture, crackle of flame. The creak of her leather coat. Eventually Gaspar realised that he was expected to fill this silence.

‘What… what was going on?’ he mumbled.

‘Wasn’t a spell at all,’ she said. She leaned back in her chair and put her feet up on the corner of the table. ‘It was an energy, a projection of some kind. I tracked the source down to a building in the middle of the district. An orphanage for children whose parents had been killed serving in the Freeguild. Just imagine all that grief, all that sorrow, concentrated in one place… There’s a lot of magic seeps through the streets of Excelsis. The Spear of Mallus sits there in the harbour, and everyone with the coin to spare can buy themselves a glimpse of the future. Like I said, strange place. Still, I stopped the vortex in the end. I got the job done. I always do.’

Gaspar took the hint this time. The longer she kept talking, he thought, the better it would be for him. So much harder to torture someone when you’ve had a long conversation with them, wasn’t it?

‘How did you stop it?’ he said.

The witch hunter picked up her hat from the table, sat there smoothing out the brim while she looked into the flames.

‘I had two choices,’ she said. ‘The grieving children were the source of the vortex, so I could either cure them of their grief or… I could find a more permanent solution. Sacrifice the few so the many would be safe. That kind of thing. Tough choice.’

She swung her legs down suddenly and leaned across the table, her face like it was carved out of wood.

‘But I made it all the same,’ she said. ‘And let me ask you this, Helding – do I look like the kind of person who can cheer up little grieving children?’

Gaspar shrank away from her, trying to stop the tears pricking in his eyes again.

‘Why are you telling me this?’

She tossed the hat back onto the table. ‘I need you to understand how serious this is, and what’s at stake. I need you to accept that I will get the job done – no matter what.’

There was a creak of leather, a scuffle of parchment as she snatched up the documents, the scrape of her chair. Gaspar heard the door open and close with a flat, muffled boom. He held the tears in, tried to cover his face with his hands. The torch crackled and smoked. He was alone.

He rehearsed his lines, like a new performer taking the stage in a mummer’s troupe. As the cell seemed to shrink and close in around him, Gaspar tried to go over every innocuous detail from the list the witch hunter had read out. The tavern, the tankard of ale, the market. Despite everything that had happened, he still placed all his faith in the idea that if he could just make her see reason, then she would have to let him go. Make her see how ordinary, how everyday, how… boring all this truly was. When did it become a crime to be boring?

He writhed in his chair, trying to find any position that didn’t make his muscles ache. His face was numb and he was sure his nose was broken. There was a welt rising up on his forehead. His wrists were chafed raw from the manacles that kept his hands in place.

Hours might have passed. Days, even. The shadows did not lengthen here. The torchlight seemed inexhaustible. However long it was though, eventually he heard footsteps in the corridor. He sat up as best he could, his heart hammering.

The door opened. She stepped back inside, barely looking at him, and closed it behind her. She had that same pile of documents in her hand.

‘Two weeks ago,’ she said as she sat down, as if they had only broken off from a pleasant conversation a moment ago. She plucked out a slip of parchment and passed it over the table. ‘You wrote this and filed it in the guild office.’

Gaspar looked down at the paper. It was a bill of sale for masonry repairs on one of the bridges across the Adramar Rift, near the Azyrite Claim. He looked back at the witch hunter, confused.

‘It’s… I don’t know what to say, it’s just an invoice. I must file hundreds of these a week.’

‘Look closer,’ she said. After a moment, to Gaspar’s continued bafflement, she leaned forward and tapped a gloved finger against the location address. Gaspar flinched as her hand reached across the table.

‘You’ve misspelled “Adramar”,’ she said. ‘You’ve written “Adramer” instead.’

Gaspar shook his head. ‘It’s a simple spelling mistake, that’s all. There’s so much material to deal with, so many documents coming through the office, endless files of them, it’s inevitable. Little mistakes are going to slip through! You can’t arrest me for a mistake!’

‘The next day,’ ven Denst said, ‘the very next day, Lord Serraster ven Hext, the Prime Commander of the Grand Conclave of Hammerhal, was assassinated in the Azyrite Claim. A poisoned crossbow bolt, he never saw it coming. But you did, didn’t you?’

Gaspar reeled back. ‘What? This is insane, you can’t possibly think I had anything to do with that! In the name of Sigmar, please…’

She flung another document across the table at him.

‘This is a contract for a scaffolding merchant to set up a platform around the clock tower at the Freeguild barracks on Tallow Park,’ she said. ‘Repairs to be carried out on the clock the following week. The next day,’ she said again, ‘the very next day, there’s a mutiny in the Sunlancers Regiment, an uprising that leaves its commanding officer dead and a hundred troops executed for treason.’

She reached out and tapped the document.

‘And what’s that?’ she said. ‘You’ve misspelled it as “Tallaw Park”. Do you see where I’m going with this, Helding?’

She snapped out another sheet of parchment.

‘A draft information notice for the roadworks on Leadhanger Alley. Another misspelled name. And the next day what do we see?’

Gaspar felt the tears slide down the edge of his broken nose. ‘I don’t know.’

‘Yes you do,’ ven Denst said. ‘The High Theogonist himself was kidnapped from the temple at the end of the alley, while visiting the old priest who had trained him in the Sigmarite College.’

Without warning, she slammed her fist down onto the table. Gaspar cried out.

‘Murder, mutiny, kidnap,’ she shouted. ‘And you’re implicated, Helding, in every single one! Who did you signal in the Grindstone Tavern? When will it rain? You will give me the information I need or you will leave this cell in pieces, I promise you.’

‘It means nothing!’ Gaspar screamed. His shoulders shook as he sobbed. ‘It’s pure coincidence, I swear!’

‘Names!’ ven Denst barked at him. ‘Locations, codes, meeting houses! Tell me!’

It was like a torrent had been unleashed in him, a babbling, surging river. He shook and clasped his hands together and wept and pleaded, and he couldn’t stop the tears from falling even if he’d wanted to.

‘I am nobody, I’m nothing, I swear to you!’ he insisted. ‘You have to believe me! I grew up in Hammerhal, in the Narrows, I’ve lived here my whole life and I’ve never done anything wrong! My mother was a seamstress for a clothing factory that made uniforms for the Freeguilds, my father was an aether-lamp lighter in the Heart of Rubeous district – they couldn’t even read or write, but when I was schooled by the local priest he put my name forward for the Scrivener’s College, and I’ve worked there ever since! It is the undying truth, I promise you! I’ve got nothing to do with any of this!’

‘The mistakes on the documents, Helding,’ the witch hunter growled, shaking her head. ‘The Grindstone Tavern… The fireberries… It’s not looking good for you…’

He tried to reach out for her, hands clawing at the table, as if touching her would somehow force her to accept the truth of what he was saying.

‘Do you have any idea how much work passes through these hands every day?’ he said. It took every last measure of his self-control to force his voice out of the high, hysterical pitch it had reached. ‘There are so few of us, and so many documents, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds…’

‘Scrivener for the Office of the High Architect,’ she said grimly. ‘It’s too convenient, too perfect. You have access to any part of the city you need.’

‘I’ve worked there for twenty years,’ he shouted, ‘it’s all I know! I copy the documents as they come in, I file the originals and send the copies out – it’s… it’s dull, mundane, boring work, but it’s all I know, I’m telling you. And mistakes slip through, of course they do! I’m just an ordinary man, I’m going to make mistakes, I can’t help it. I’m exhausted. I live in one room on Threshing Place – half the time I can’t sleep because of the noise from the other rooms in that building, of course I’m going to be tired! Day in, day out, no one to come home to, nothing to look forward to but another day of endless, crushing work… And then another week, and another month, another year, and nothing at the end of it – no reward, no thanks, nothing! Do you know how few embers I earn every month for that work? So what if once a week I treat myself to a tankard of ale at the Grindstone? For Sigmar’s sake, how is that a crime?’

‘Buckmaster’s Brew?’ she said.

‘I like Buckmaster’s Brew!’

‘Fireberries?’

‘It’s just a treat!’

She shook her head. ‘Nobody likes fireberries, Helding.’

‘I like them!’

She leaned across the table, jaw set, slow and implacable. More like a natural disaster than a person: an avalanche, a snowdrift, a bleak squall of rain.

‘This is the problem,’ she said quietly. ‘You’re beginning to make me doubt myself, Helding.’

‘I’m not trying to make you doubt yourself, I promise, I just need you to believe the truth. I’m telling the truth, this is all just some horrible coincidence.’

He held her eyes, felt the liquid swimming in his own. There was a lump as big as his fist in his throat, a knot slowly tightening in his gut. The witch hunter, this Doralia ven Denst, held his gaze until it felt like her eyes were boring into his head.

‘I took a vow when I joined the Order of Azyr,’ she said. ‘To protect Sigmar’s dominion, no matter what. To make the decisions others couldn’t make, or just didn’t want to. There’s a conspiracy underway to destabilise this city, I can feel it. But maybe, just maybe, you might be innocent.’

He felt the warm tide of relief swell just in front of him, but he did not dare open the floodgates yet.

‘I am innocent,’ he said. ‘I swear on almighty Sigmar himself, I am innocent.’

She took off her hat and placed it on the table again, sat back in her chair. She did not take her eyes from him.

‘That’s the problem, though,’ she said. ‘Doubt.’

‘But how can that be a problem?’ he whined. ‘There is no proof, it’s all just circumstantial! It’s coincidence, mistakes, happenstance! That’s why you feel doubt, witch hunter, surely you must see that? Do the laws of Sigmar not say that it’s better for a guilty man to go free than an innocent man to be punished?’

‘Laws of Sigmar, maybe,’ she said. ‘Not the laws of the Order of Azyr.’

‘What do you mean?’ he said, voice quavering.

‘I can’t afford to give you the benefit of the doubt. If there’s a risk – just the smallest, most infinitesimal risk – that you might be lying… Well, even if I think you’re probably innocent I have to kill you anyway. You understand. Just in case.’

The tide of relief shivered and contracted and drew further away from shore.

‘The realms are larger than you can ever know, and more dangerous than you can possibly imagine.’ She leaned in across the table, her eyes never leaving his. He could feel her breath against his skin almost, could feel the caged violence inside her, the anger. ‘Keeping Sigmar’s dominion safe sometimes means doing things it can be hard to live with. Believe me,’ she said, ‘I know. But it doesn’t mean I won’t do them.’

‘How can I convince you?’ he pleaded with her. ‘I will do anything.’

The witch hunter stared at him a moment longer in silence. Then, with a slight shake of her head, she took a key from her pocket and reached across the table to unlock the manacles. Gaspar rubbed his wrists, groaning against the respite of his aching back. He gave her a puzzled, shifty look, not quite daring to believe what had happened.

And then from her belt she drew a foot-long, single-edged blade. She passed it across the table towards him, hilt first.

‘It’s not just a question of convincing me,’ she said. ‘You’re going to have to make me believe.’

Tentatively, as if reaching out for a burning brand, Gaspar picked up the knife. He felt the heft of the blade, the balance point in the hilt, the smooth leather of the grip. He watched a greasy, silver line swim down the edge, like light on the flank of a fish.

A ludicrous possibility passed through his mind – leap across the table, plunge the knife in her heart, run through the door and… Then what? Hard to believe there weren’t another dozen agents just as ruthless as this one waiting for him out there. And Gaspar was no killer. How many people must this witch hunter have killed in the course of her career? He shuddered to think.

‘What do you want me to do with this?’ he said. He managed to keep his voice level.

The witch hunter showed him a smile, but there wasn’t a hint of mirth about it. He realised suddenly that she was holding a pistol, the hammer cocked back, the long barrel resting on the edge of the table and pointing directly at his face.

‘I want you to take the knife in your right hand,’ she said calmly, ‘and cut off your left hand.’

He looked at the blade. Looked at his hand. Looked, though he couldn’t bear to, at the witch hunter in front of him.

‘You’re insane…’ he whispered. ‘What kind of monster are you?’

‘I’m no kind of monster, Helding. Believe me, I’ve fought monsters. The real ones.’

‘But I am innocent,’ he wept. He still had the knife in his hand. He pointed it at her, hoping to make her flinch or back down, or… But her face didn’t even flicker.

‘Then make me believe you’re innocent,’ she said. ‘Cut off your hand, and I’ll know. I’ll let you out of here and you can walk free. Hell, you’ll still have your right hand, you can go straight back to work… If you don’t, then this is just the beginning. You think this cell is bad? A week in my company and you’ll be begging to be brought back here. You’ll be begging to cut off that hand.’

He actually held the edge of the blade to his wrist. Pressed down, watched a trickle of blood well up from the split skin.

‘You can’t begin to imagine how much I’ve sacrificed in my work,’ she told him. There was something almost sympathetic in her voice, as if she’d once been in this position too. ‘Think of it that way. Every moment I spend with you, if you’re really innocent, is a moment I can’t spend trying to catch the guilty. Make this sacrifice, Gaspar Helding, and you can walk free, an innocent man.’

‘Please…’

‘When you think about it, it’s no real sacrifice at all. Duardin artificers in this city can make all sorts of wonderful things. Replacement limbs, all cogs and wheels and the like. They’d knock you up a new hand in no time. You’d hardly notice the difference. It’ll be even better than the old one.’

‘I can’t, I…’

‘Damn clever folk, the duardin.’

‘But… my hand, it’s…’

‘For the good of Hammerhal, Helding. For the good of the realm.’

He believed her, that was the thing. He knew this cell was only the antechamber to a whole world of misery. And at the end of it all, if he was lucky, would be a bullet in the back of the head and an unmarked grave. If he was lucky…

He turned his pleading, watery eyes on her. Gods, but she was like flint, as unmoved as the ironoak door behind her. There was nothing he could say. There was nothing he could do. The only way through that door was along the edge of this knife.

‘I am innocent,’ he said. And he brought the blade chopping down.

She watched the hand go springing away from him and flop off the table, a jet of dark blood spurting out after. Doralia lifted the sheaf of papers as the blood lapped towards them. The scream that came out of his mouth was feral, deranged. The knife clanged to the ground as he threw himself backwards, clutching the stump, eyes bloated with shock. Doralia stood and rapped on the door. Two witch hunters came in, thickset men with their sleeves rolled up, leather aprons on to protect against the mess. They grabbed Helding from both sides, one of them wrapping a quick tourniquet around the stump.

‘At least now we’re getting somewhere,’ she said. She nodded to the other witch hunters and they hauled him from the chair. ‘This is just the start, Helding…’

It was like a change in the weather, a storm front flashing down quickly across a parched grey landscape. Helding’s face was wrenched with fury, his eyes shining like sparks of fire. Spit flashed from his mouth as he swore at her, his face flecked with blood.

‘Damn you, ven Denst, how did you know! How the hell did you know!’

She picked up her hat, tucked the pistol in her belt.

‘An innocent man would never have done that,’ she said. ‘Someone who’d spent his whole life working in the Scrivener’s Guild, who came home to that bare apartment in Threshing Place every day, who had that same tankard of Buckmaster’s Brew every week, would never have the imagination to picture what might come next, or what sacrifice was worth making to avoid it. Only a guilty man would. Someone who knew. An innocent man would still think it was all a mistake, and that if only I could see the mistake it would all go away. Well, it’s not a mistake. It never is.’

‘It makes no difference what you do to me!’ he cried, as they dragged him away. ‘The rain will fall, witch hunter, and the insects who call this city home will beg for mercy before my Dark Master is done! The rain will fall on Sigmar’s dominion and wash you all away, I swear it! The Lord of the Abyss, the Harbinger, he will tear your soul to shreds in the majesty of his anger!’

She could hear his screams of rage echoing all the way down the corridor. Not pleading now, not protesting his innocence, but shrieking about the vengeance they’d face, the punishment. Made no difference; they’d get to the truth of what he knew either way. Whatever foul Chaos cult he had dedicated himself to, they would be hunted down and purged with the utmost prejudice.

Someone like Helding, someone that good, never believed it was over for them until their heart gave out. They thought they were still in charge, until the very end. That was the secret, Doralia thought. Knowing when you were beaten. Knowing when it was all over and you’d be better off just lying down to die.

She wondered if she’d ever know that herself. Hadn’t happened yet. But then, as she’d told Gaspar Helding, the realms were more dangerous than he could possibly imagine. It would all catch up with her one day.

She looked at the severed hand lying there on the floor in a slick of blood.

Not this day, though.

About the Author

Richard Strachan is a writer and editor who lives with his partner and two children in Edinburgh, UK. Despite his best efforts, both children stubbornly refuse to be interested in tabletop wargaming. His first story for Black Library, ‘The Widow Tide’, appeared in the Warhammer Horror anthology Maledictions, and he has since written ‘Blood of the Flayer’, ‘Tesserae’ and the Warcry Catacombs novel Blood of the Everchosen.

An extract from Hallowed Ground.

The sun was on its long decline as the scavenger came across the dead. Spears of light lanced down from the far horizon and stabbed into the littered plain. The afternoon drowsed into dusk, coloured by all the bold shades of Ghur: purple and scarlet, orange and gold. It would be a long night, the scavenger thought. You could never really tell in this realm; even the nights seemed possessed of their own volatile and irrepressible will. They lasted as long as they pleased.

He waited above the plain for a little while, crouched by an outcrop of rock until the light had further dimmed. Around him, tough sprigs of thorn grass wavered in the breeze. He tapped his fingers lightly against the flank of his cart and gazed down on the spread of corpses a hundred yards away. Orruks mostly, he thought. An ogor or two, perhaps. Stragglers from the great armies that had marched this way a season ago, heading to the city on the Coast of Tusks – Excelsis, proud bastion of Sigmar’s domain. Fell tales had drifted along the trade routes since then, weaving their way through the wilderness. Awful stories of slaughter and dread, mayhem and violence. The walls of the city had been breached, some said. The populace had been drowned in their own blood. The hosts of Destruction had given no quarter, and they had feasted well that night.

Kragnos…

The scavenger shivered. He had heard the rumours. Some said a god had burst forth from the mountains of Ghur, a beast fit to trample entire empires into the dust. A new god or a very old one, no one could quite say. Whether Excelsis had survived or not was hardly his business, but he doubted any mortal stronghold could have held back such violence. The ground had shuddered for days with the passing of the host, but the scavenger had not been foolish enough to try and lay eyes on it. Better to wait, he had thought. Better to skulk about in the mountains and keep your head down, emerging only when the air had ceased to tremble with rage.

Whether these orruks and ogors on the plain below him had died at their own hands or at the hands of their enemies was not the scavenger’s business either. They were a brutish, violent breed, and it would have come as no surprise if they had all torn themselves apart over some slight or insult, or just for the sheer pleasure of fighting. No matter. He only cared that they had left a goodly spread of bodies for him to pick over. Weapons, scraps of armour, trinkets – all would fetch a decent price in any of the frontier towns on the other side of the plains. Some young bloods would trade all they had for orruk teeth as well; a handful of those in your pocket and you could pretend to any maid you fancied that you had torn them from the beast’s jaw with your own hands. The scavenger chuckled to himself. There was hardly a thing in the Mortal Realms you couldn’t put a price to one way or the other, or that someone, somewhere, wouldn’t be willing to pay for.

When the dusk had deepened a little further, he dragged his cart down the dusty incline towards the dead, rolling it over the stones and thorn grass. The smell from the bodies was atrocious, but it was nothing the scavenger hadn’t experienced before. He dragged his scarf up over his mouth and nose, and hefted the tools on his belt: pliers for teeth, a bone saw to cut rings from fingers, hammer and chisel in case he was lucky enough to find any jewels embedded in shields or breastplates. He hummed mildly to himself as he got to work, ignoring the slick, mouldering flesh under his hands; the cold dead eyes that stared up in milky blindness at the spread of night, its gaudy weave of stars. Battered pauldrons, iron belt buckles, earrings and teeth – all of it went into his cart.

He had been working for perhaps an hour when he heard the footsteps. The night was still and cool now, broken only by the distant roar of the Hellspeak Mountains grinding themselves together, the hooting call of some plains-bird scurrying across the dust. But then he heard them, steady and firm, crunching across the ground ahead of him, and… something else. A shuffling, stumbling tread; a quiet, eerie moan that raised the hairs on the back of his neck.

The scavenger stopped where he was, crouched by the stinking corpse of an orruk, its eyes frozen in shock at whatever blow had killed it. He gripped his shears and carefully drew his cloak around his shoulders, hoping the darkness would be enough to hide him. Damn it, he’d fight if he had to, but he muttered a prayer to Sigmar, Alarielle, Nagash and any other god he could think of all the same. Kragnos, even.

Kragnos protect me…

The footsteps came closer. The sound of that faint shuffle weaved itself around and through them, a dragging scuffle against the dirt. The scavenger raised his head and risked a glance from the shadows of his hood. There, skirting the spread of corpses, was a dark figure wrapped in a black cloak, holding an obsidian staff. He walked confidently but without haste, and at his side there moved… something.

Gods, the scavenger thought, is that… is that a child? The scavenger peered into the shadows, and as he did so the spheres above were unveiled of cloud, and the scene was lit for a moment by a pale and trembling light.

‘I seek the way to Excelsis, friend,’ the figure said.

He stopped no more than twenty yards away, on the edge of the charnel ground. His voice rang out like a bell in the stillness of the night. By his side, the child – if that’s what it was – stumbled to a halt. The scavenger could see its pallid face, thin and drawn, the dark eyes under a hooded brow. The figure reached out and carefully gathered the child into the folds of his cloak.

‘Am I on the right track?’ he said.

There was no longer any point in hiding. The scavenger slowly stood, his shears still gripped in his hand. Wrenching his eyes away from the child, he said, ‘Close enough, sir. You’re maybe a week away from it, on foot, if it’s on foot you’ll be going.’

‘It is.’

The scavenger swallowed. The stranger was slight, his face veiled by the shadows. He had no weapons, as far as the scavenger could see, but in all his long years on the plains of Ghur, he didn’t think he’d ever come across someone who radiated such a feeling of danger and threat. It came off him like an aura. The very rays of the dying sun seemed to fear him.

‘I’m honour bound to say,’ the scavenger stuttered, ‘that you might not find Excelsis in quite the state you were hoping.’

‘How so?’

‘A big battle,’ he said, ‘not a season past. Terrible destruction, from what I heard. The walls thrown down, people slaughtered in the streets. Sure, it’s said the city doesn’t even stand no more.’

The smile that broke across the figure’s face was terrible. The scavenger looked away. His legs were shaking, he realised. He wanted more than anything to run, but intuition told him that to do so would only be to invite disaster.

‘I can assure you otherwise,’ the figure said. ‘The city stands, and I would go there.’ He looked around at the corpses at their feet, tangled and rotting. ‘I see you have no fear of the dead,’ he said.

‘No, lord,’ the scavenger said, wringing his hands. ‘What’s ceased to live can’t hurt no one now, can it?’

The dark figure laughed. The child at his side began to tremble, making a horrible choking sound in its throat. Its hands shook, the jaw champed open and closed. Immediately the man crouched and wrapped his arm around its shoulders, hushing it, whispering in a soft and gentle voice.

‘There now,’ he said. ‘Peace, my son, peace.’

The scavenger felt he was going to scream. No corpse he had come across, no matter how ravaged and mutilated, had ever seemed as awful as that blank-faced child trembling in its father’s arms.

When the boy had calmed down, the dark figure stood and drew his cloak tight around him.

‘To Excelsis, then,’ he said. He smiled and gave a courteous nod. The scavenger averted his eyes.

He watched them walk off into the shadows, heading deeper into the night. Eventually, all he could hear of them were those flat, patient footsteps and that shuffling tread as it broke against the dusty plains, and the further they went, the better the scavenger began to feel. It was like a cold, clammy blanket had been taken from his shoulders.

He wiped the sweat from his brow and sagged against the side of his cart.

Gods be praised, he thought as he reached for his flask. Sigmar, Alarielle, or whichever one of you kept your eye on me then, thanks be unto you for keeping me safe!

He tipped the flask to his mouth and drank deep, the firewater burning a channel of courage all the way down his chest and into his stomach. As he pushed the cork back into the bottle he glanced at the bodies at his feet, steeling himself to get back to work. He clipped the shears to his belt and unhooked the pliers, kneeling down in the dirt and tugging open the jaw of the nearest orruk. The stench of its rotten mouth was appalling, but with a lighter heart he began to prise and probe, tapping the pliers against one of the creature’s massive tusks.

It took him a moment to realise that the orruk was looking at him. They all were – each of them staring at him through the milky pupils of their cold, dead eyes.

A Black Library Publication

First published in Great Britain in 2022 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

Represented by: Games Workshop Limited – Irish branch, Unit 3, Lower Liffey Street, Dublin 1,D01 K199, Ireland.

Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.
Cover illustration by Thomas Elliott.

The Interrogator © Copyright Games Workshop Limited 2022. The Interrogator, 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: 978-1-80407-115-1

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