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Dark Master – Richard Strachan

About the Author

An Extract from ‘Warcry Catacombs: Blood of the Everchosen’

A Black Library Publication

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Dark Master

By Richard Strachan

Hot with shame, Adel Janssen dropped from the stage at the Melody Inn and slumped into his corner seat next to Gisela, where he promptly buried his face in his hands.

‘It wasn’t that bad,’ Gisela said. She patted his trembling shoulder and pushed his tankard across the table towards him. ‘Honestly, at the bridge on “Sweet is the Wooing”, you could see people really starting to enjoy it.’

Adel looked at her through a crack in his fingers.

‘That is a barefaced lie,’ he muttered. ‘I broke a string on the bridge of “Sweet is the Wooing”.’

Gisela pushed a lock of rusty red hair behind her ear. Her wide green eyes looked remarkably sincere. ‘But that just shows how passionate a player you are,’ she said. ‘How much the music moves you.’

‘I forgot the words to “The Forlorn Charge”! When the Griffon Spears started their attack, I forgot their name!’

He gave his lute a bitter glare and snatched up his tankard. There were two dozen tables around the stage, most of them packed with musicians waiting their turn to perform. There was a smell in the air of spilled beer, strong firewater and wine. The smoke from Ghyranian cheroots rose up to wreathe the rafters in a faint blue haze. Amidst all the excited chatter of the young musicians keen to make their mark – as well as the grizzled old balladeers who would show them how it was really done – Adel could see more than a few of his peers hiding their mouths as they laughed at him.

‘Sigmar save me,’ he groaned. ‘I’m the worst musician in Hammerhal.’

‘A rare moment of insight, Janssen,’ a sneering voice said behind him.

Adel turned to see Viktor ven Durchanweld looming over him. Viktor was tall, sharp-faced and blue-eyed, with tumbling, raven-black locks that women, for some unfathomable reason, found attractive. On top of that, he could actually play the mandolin he was cradling in his arms, and play it damned well.

‘Viktor,’ Adel said coldly.

‘But you’re not the worst musician in Hammerhal,’ Viktor said. He gave a thin, reptilian smile. ‘In fact, you’re quite the worst musician in all of Aqshy…’

Adel gritted his teeth. He couldn’t think of a decent retort; after all, there was a good chance Viktor was right. He glowered at him instead, and called out, ‘Good luck with your performance!’ in a way that he hoped was dripping with irony.

Viktor turned back to him as he idly tuned his instrument.

‘I don’t need luck, Janssen,’ he said. ‘Some of us are actually good at this.’

Later, as they walked back to their separate lodgings through the tangled, sultry streets of Blackwood Town, Adel treated Gisela to a long, expletive-filled rant about the qualities or otherwise of Viktor ven Durchanweld, mandolin players, the clientele at the Melody Inn and his prospects in the upcoming Symposium, which was being held in no less a venue than the Lonely Bard in the Riftmarket, on the other side of Cinderfall.

‘I’ve paid my two embers already,’ he moaned. ‘I have to go through with it. Sigmar’s blood, I’m going to humiliate myself!’

Gisela, her silver lyre resting on her shoulder, walked at his side, her head down. A fine, humid mist blew down the street. Even at night, the heat of the city spread across their shoulders like a blanket. Adel could hear the tinkle of broken glass from the ale houses down Hotspear Lane, the calls of the costermongers flogging the last of their wares before they closed up their barrows for the night. The mighty sprawl of Hammerhal simmered with activity around them; the greatest and most powerful city in Sigmar’s domain, home to untold millions of the richest and poorest people in the realm – and Adel Janssen had never felt so alone.

‘It won’t be so bad,’ Gisela said. She took his arm. ‘You just need more practice.’

‘I’ve got less than a week! All the practice in the world isn’t going to make a difference. This is the Symposium! The chance to win patronage from Lord Hoenstahl himself! He’s on the Grand Conclave! The winner plays recitals at Hoenstahl’s private parties in front of the most influential people in the city. If I were to actually win…’

He sighed. The feel of Gisela’s arm was doing much to improve his mood, but Adel knew he couldn’t put himself through this much longer. He just had to admit it. He couldn’t play. He loved music, he lived and breathed it. The way one could conjure the most devastating emotions from a few strings and some polished wood was a form of magic a thousand times more potent than anything in the Collegiate Arcane. But whatever mystical skill you needed to craft music, he just didn’t have it.

‘Viktor was right,’ Adel murmured. ‘I am the worst musician in Aqshy.’

Gisela gave an exasperated sigh. She pulled him up short and turned him round to face her, and although he was a head taller he found himself quaking under her fierce gaze. They had stopped in front of Zymmerman’s Musical Emporium. The dimpled, lead-lined window was dark, but Adel was still worried that the old man would burst from his door and demand the three dozen embers he still owed for the lute. He’d never pay that back, not now.

‘It’s not magic,’ she said firmly. ‘It’s just hard work. There are no shortcuts, no tricks. It’s just practice. And if you’re not prepared for that hard work, then yes, you will humiliate yourself at the Symposium. You can’t always get what you want, Adel, but if you do your best, you’ll certainly rid yourself of this miserable self-pity.’

Adel nodded, ashamed. Gisela looked up at him and her face softened. She jutted her chin towards the music shop and smiled.

‘Or failing that, you could just steal the Secret Chord from old Zymmerman. That would solve all your problems, wouldn’t it?’

He looked round at the shop, its plain frontage, the collection of instruments in the darkened window.

‘What “Secret Chord”?’ he said. ‘What are you talking about?’

Gisela was astonished. ‘Seriously? Everyone down the Melody jokes about it all the time. Apparently old Zymmerman has some ancient grimoire hidden away in there,’ she said. ‘A book of terrible spells that includes the mysteries of a chord so powerful it can summon a daemon… Chained by the beauty of the music, he’s forced to grant you one wish…’ She laughed. ‘There’s a crossroads in the Narrows. Play that chord in that place at midnight and ask for your heart’s desire. Rumour has it Lucass Brinke tried to haggle with Zymmerman for the book once, but the old goat sent him packing. So they say, anyway.’

Adel stared at the Emporium, his mind turning over. He felt a dull thrill spreading in his stomach. Your heart’s desire…

‘Do you think he would sell it? Or let me borrow it, maybe? Or even just let me look at it quickly, try to get an idea of it…’

Gisela reached up and rapped her knuckles against his forehead.

‘Ow!’ He winced. ‘What did you do that for?’

‘It’s not real, you idiot,’ she laughed. ‘There is no book, no “Secret Chord”… It’s just a tall tale, musicians’ folklore! Have you lost your mind? Honestly, Adel, I had no idea you were so gullible…’

At the corner of the Charway and Ardient Street they said goodbye for the night. Gisela went up on her toes to give Adel a chaste kiss on the cheek.

‘Hard work and practice,’ she said. ‘That’s all it takes.’

Adel nodded. ‘Hard work and practice…’ Then he looked back down the Charway, where Zymmerman’s Musical Emporium waited for him in the darkness.

On balance, he thought to himself, this was probably the stupidest thing he had ever done.

Adel turned the pick to the left and felt the tumblers clack as they fell away from the lock. The door creaked slowly open. He breathed out and used his sleeve to wipe the sweat from his forehead, glancing round to check that no one had seen him. There were piles of mouldering refuse further up the alleyway, cobblestones slick with rainwater and slime, the liquid dart of a cat out on the prowl. No people though. No one to see what he was doing.

He slipped inside and closed the door behind him, pausing to breathe in the air: the cedar scent of cimbaloms and mandolins, the polished mahogany of totem harps, the crisp smell of citrus balm for catgut lute strings. He felt the old thrill deep in his bones. He almost took his lute from his back, fingers curling to frame the chords that would launch him into ‘A Summer’s Fancy’.

He sighed and turned away from the display room, pushing open the green-panelled door at the back of the shop and stepping into old Zymmerman’s office. Light from the aetherlamps along the Charway fell into the room from the narrow window high on its upper wall. The beams flickered with dust motes. If he were going to find the book anywhere, it would be here.

For an hour he flipped through account books, turned over stacked piles of sheet music, blew the dust from crackling invoices and orders, and rummaged through the shelves. In the corner of the room was Zymmerman’s roll-top desk, but when he lifted the lid all he could see were inkpots, blank parchment, sealing wax and quills. He pulled the drawers open and slammed them back, pausing only to take a quick slug of firewater from the bottle the old man had stashed there. He was running out of time. Midnight, Gisela had said, and now the bells were tolling the half hour before it.

Then, in the bottom drawer, behind a loose panel at the very back, Adel’s fingers brushed against a strongbox with a broken hinge. He carefully pulled it out and opened the lid. There, inside, was the key to his fortune – the book that was going to turn him from a bumbling, ham-fisted amateur, much mocked by his rivals, into the greatest musician Hammerhal had ever seen.

The crossroads was a drear and empty place deep in the Narrows, the spot where Erretzen Lane passed across Brennend Street. On either side there was nothing but waste ground tangled in weeds, and to Adel’s left stood the shabby remains of an old shack that had been broken up for firewood. The roads themselves were little better than dirt tracks. Coils of rusty wire lay in the burnt grass beside the road with scraps and wreckage of old carts and barrows. Much further down Erretzen Lane, Adel could see lights, the run-down shanty huts on the fringes of the Narrows, but here there was nothing. It was as if people had tried to settle in this spot and then, for whatever reason, packed up and gone away.

A single aetherlamp fizzled above him, casting down a wavering circle of sea-foam light. Adel clutched the book he had stolen from Zymmerman in trembling hands. The lute felt heavy on his back. From far away over the roofs and pinnacles of the mighty city he heard the bells of the Great Cathedral of Sigmar toll the passing hour.

No, he thought. Without a doubt, this is the stupidest thing I have ever done…

He quickly drew his lute from his back and sat cross-legged on the ground, then flicked through the book, looking for the right page. It was a slim and crumbling leather-bound volume with a strange geometric design burned into the cover that he couldn’t look at without feeling oddly queasy. The pages crackled as he turned them. He thought they might be made of human skin…

He found the right place and stared again at the pictogram of the Secret Chord. There were words on the page that he couldn’t decipher, but the illustration of the chord was clear. He held the neck of his lute and tried to mirror the positions, clamping his index finger to press down the fourteenth and fifteenth strings at once, twisting up with his little finger to reach the fourth fret…

In the midnight hour, the bells of the city tolled on.

Adel growled with frustration. Gods, this is impossible! You’d need two extra fingers to manage this!

He scowled, bared his teeth, wrenched his wrist round until he felt a tendon buzzing in the back of his hand. The whole position was agonising, but he persevered. Beads of sweat broke out on his forehead. The night felt as hot as noon around him. Cramps were forming in his arms, and there was a high, thin whine screaming in his ears, but still Adel tried to form the chord, his eyes flicking from the neck of his lute to the pages of the book he had laid out on the ground. He smacked the strings with his right hand and heard a mad, discordant jangle. He stretched again, crying with pain, trying to hook his finger across another fraction of an inch to cover the bottom of the fourth fret…

And then something clicked. He drew his thumb down the catgut strings, and he could almost see the music unfurl in front of him. The cathedral’s last bell tolled mournfully against the night, and the chord chimed like the breaking dawn: sharp and clear, lilting and mellow, and underneath it a strange, sustained tone rang out that seemed to grow louder and more persistent as the other notes began to fade. The tone modulated and broke apart with a sudden, wrenching screech that made him throw his hands up and cover his ears, his eyes screwed shut with pain.

When he opened them again, Adel Janssen was not alone.

The crossroads was misty and vague, drenched in a vaporous, purple haze. He could see the tumbledown shack in the waste ground, but it seemed somehow impossibly distant and as if he were looking at it underwater. The sound of the city around him, always so vibrant and cacophonous, was muted and still – a weird background drone that made him feel sick. Adel scrambled to his feet, his lute lying forgotten on the ground. He had the sense that he had been shifted to the side, pushed from reality into a place that was somehow apart from the crossroads where he had played the chord. It was cold in that strange shadow place. He had read tales and accounts of the mysterious realm of Ulgu, and he wondered for a moment if that’s where he was now – wrenched from Aqshy, dragged across the aether by who-knew-what fell magic. He started to shiver. And then from behind him a voice began to speak.

‘Long has it been since one of your kind attempted that equation, boy.’

A tear slipped from the corner of Adel’s eye. His throat was thick with fear. The voice dripped over his shoulder, as cold as ashes, as fierce as the burning sun. He wanted more than anything to flee, but some desperate instinct told him that to run would only be to invite destruction. He stood there, rooted to the spot. No force in Aqshy would make him turn around and face the owner of that voice.

No force, except perhaps his heart’s desire…

‘Face me, child. Face me and ask your boon.’

Adel summoned every last scrap of courage he possessed. Shaking with fear, his hands raised in prayer or beseeching, he slowly turned around.

‘Open your eyes…’ the voice commanded. ‘Look on the First Prince…’

Adel opened his eyes and screamed.

Like a shadow made flesh, the daemon stood there, grinning at him. He felt like a child before a god, cowering in the shade of a thunderstorm. So vast was the creature that he could barely take it in. Its eyes burned in its skull, boiling embers beneath a ridge of bone. Great horns swept back from its head, and its wings were stretched out like leather sails, ragged and stinking, festooned with skulls and clanking chains. Its skin was the deep and dolorous grey of ancient corpses, and it wore only a tabard of mouldering cloth and greasy black chainmail. The air buckled and frayed around it as if ashamed. The haze of purple smoke that masked the space where the crossroads had been flickered with black lightning. The daemon stepped forward, and sparks flamed and died under the scaled talons of its feet.

Adel fell at once to the ground, weeping in terror.

‘Get back!’ he cried, holding out his hands to ward it off. ‘Please, spare me!’

‘You have called on the First Prince, child, with an equation that has long since passed out of mortal mind.’

‘It… it was a chord,’ Adel stuttered. ‘On my lute… A chord I played. I’m sorry!’

‘Chord, equation, they are much the same, for music and mathematics are each the secret language of this thing you call reality. It matters not to me – you called, and I have answered.’

‘I take it back!’

‘You cannot. The forms have been released, the summons has been made. I am here.’

Adel grovelled in the dirt, bowing down to the daemon in some parody of obeisance, writhing in terror. Everything had fled his mind – all thoughts of the Symposium, of Gisela, of Viktor ven Durchanweld, his hopes of securing Lord Hoenstahl’s patronage. He wanted only to live, to be free of this awful thing.

‘Lord Hoenstahl…’ the creature said. Its whisper was like the hissing of an ocean boiling into steam. Adel felt it rummage in his mind as easily as he had rummaged through Zymmerman’s roll-top desk. ‘Hammerhal, then…’ it said. ‘Symposium… Yesssss…’

It laughed, a sick crescendo. Adel covered his ears again, but when the daemon spoke its voice unfurled inside his head.

You shall have this, boy. It pleases me to do this thing and it suits my purpose. Musicians are like priests, are they not? With access to the highest and the lowest rungs of society… Now say it… Say it!

Adel fell backwards, screaming, arm raised to ward off a blow that never came. The daemon hunkered over him, stinking of madness, death and sorrow. Its shadow was as cold as the deeps of the sea.

‘Please!’ he cried. ‘I want only to win the Symposium! I want to be the best!’

Yes… Say it, boy, say the words and it shall be yours!

‘I want to be the greatest musician in the Mortal Realms!’

There was silence, sudden and shocking, broken only by the echo of dark laughter that rolled across the rooftops of the city like a distant storm front. Adel swooned. Fumbling out his hand, his vision black, he touched his lute and drew it close, and then Adel Janssen passed into a deep and terrible sleep.

He didn’t know which was better – the look of lovestruck awe on Gisela’s face, or the sour disbelief on Viktor ven Durchanweld’s. As Adel Janssen stepped from the stage of the Lonely Bard he savoured both, luxuriating in the stunned silence that greeted his performance, the faint, resonating echo of his final notes as they washed through the tavern’s long, oak-panelled hall. He saw Lord Hoenstahl himself wipe a tear from the corner of his eye as he sat there at a table near the front – and then a thousand people erupted into the most rapturous applause Adel had ever heard. And all of it was for him.

Gisela, her face flushed, pushed through the crowds that were mobbing him, slapping him on the back, thrusting calling cards in his face, or purses of money, or drinks. Her lip was trembling and she pressed a handkerchief to her eye. She looked shaken to the core. Adel, nodding his thanks to his well-wishers, took her arm and steered her away from the front of the stage.

‘Sigmar’s blood, Adel,’ she said, her voice stumbling. ‘I… I’m speechless, I don’t know what to say!’

‘It was your encouragement, Gisela,’ he said, taking her hands. ‘I wouldn’t have done it without you. Practice, you said. And so I did!’

The crowd began to part, falling into a respectful silence. Adel looked round to see Lord Hoenstahl approaching with his entourage: his bodyguards and secretaries, his valet, the obsequious train of people that followed in the wake of one of the city’s most influential dignitaries. Hoenstahl was a small, dark figure, compact and perfectly groomed in his crimson frock coat made from the finest Ghyranian silks. He held a gold-topped cane and wore close-fitting knee-high boots that were of a leather so brightly polished it was almost dazzling. He radiated power and commanded respect, and Adel found himself instinctively bowing. It was always a puzzle why those who sat on the Grand Conclave of Hammerhal itself were so keen to acquire their own personal musicians from the common pool, but, like everything else to do with the city’s great houses, it wasn’t Adel’s place to question.

‘My lord,’ he said. ‘I do hope my humble performance was to your liking?’

Silence had descended on the crowd, who eagerly watched for Hoenstahl’s response. To be awarded patronage at the Symposium was to be given an entrée to the highest of high society. It was a guarantee of wealth, influence and respect. It could change your life. Adel felt curiously calm as he stared into the aristocrat’s eyes. On stage, his hands had felt as if they belonged to someone else, as if another force were moving through him and playing the lute in his stead – music itself had used him for its instrument, and although there were still half a dozen players yet to take the stage, Adel knew that he had won. There was no question of it, and so when Lord Hoenstahl stepped forward he did not feel surprised in the slightest.

‘My friend,’ the aristocrat said with barely suppressed passion. He reached up to clasp Adel’s shoulders. His eyes were still wet, and he kissed the young man fiercely on both cheeks. ‘I have never heard anything as extraordinary as the music you played tonight. When you reached the end of “The Forlorn Charge” I swear I saw the Griffons themselves charging the greenskin hordes. It would be my great honour to offer you my patronage. If, of course, one so skilled would accept it.’

Adel, with that same feeling of calm acceptance, inclined his head. ‘My lord,’ he said. ‘The honour would be entirely mine.’

Hoenstahl closed his eyes in relief. He gestured to his valet, who produced a card. Adel took it – an address deep in Sanctor Tulis, a rarefied district of fine palaces and villas.

‘Be there in two days’ time,’ Hoenstahl said. ‘A small recitation I have arranged for some close friends and colleagues.’ He clutched the gold top of his cane and gave a thin smile. ‘I have no doubt that your performance will make me – and you, of course – the toast of the Conclave!’

Hoenstahl swept from the Lonely Bard, his entourage scurrying behind him, not deigning to watch the remaining performances. Adel clutched the card as if it were worth more than gold. He thought suddenly of the crossroads earlier in the week, but the memory was faint. It trembled on the edge of his mind.

‘Only a dream…’ he muttered to himself.

‘What was that?’ Gisela said, taking his arm.

‘Nothing,’ Adel said, and smiled, basking in the adulation of the crowd. They turned to go, and as they reached the door Adel almost bumped into Viktor ven Durchanweld, who was trying to make a surreptitious exit.

‘Janssen,’ Viktor said, his voice like poison. He drew himself up. ‘I suppose… congratulations are in order,’ he said. ‘You acquitted yourself remarkably well–’

‘I know,’ Adel said as he pushed past him, grinning. ‘Some of us are actually good at this.’

Two days later, Adel found himself in surroundings more opulent than he could possibly have imagined. Lord Hoenstahl’s villa was a marvel of polished stormstone imported from Excelsis, the airy halls and passages decorated in frescoes and tapestries depicting some of the greatest moments in Hammerhal’s long and proud military history. Every surface seemed to hold ornaments of unparalleled extravagance. On the floor were carpets made from the striped hides of savage beasts, of amber mammoths and tyger-wolves, all imported from Ghur and the height of contemporary fashion, according to Hoenstahl.

‘In the Conclave, I’m afraid to say,’ Hoenstahl told Adel as he led him through the rooms and corridors of the villa, ‘fashion is as much a part of one’s armoury as wealth or family status. But not too much,’ he smiled. ‘It wouldn’t do to be vulgar, now, would it?’

‘Of course not, my lord,’ Adel laughed.

And to think I grew up with six of us crammed into a single room in the backstreets of Scorchcross…

Hoenstahl showed him into a wide chamber on the second floor that was tastefully decorated with fresh Hyshian flower blooms. The walls were painted a beautiful satin cream and the floor was a smouldering red marble, veined with black. There were around thirty people in the chamber sitting at round, glass-topped tables, all of which had been set up around a small dais. Adel could see troops of scowling guardsmen and private bodyguards lining the walls, each group warily watching the others in case of assassination attempts. Politics at this high level, he was quite sure, depended as much on who was quickest with a blade or a poisoned cup.

Hoenstahl introduced him as ‘Quite simply the greatest young musician in all of Aqshy. Indeed, I would hazard he is the greatest in the Mortal Realms, and it is my great pleasure that he has agreed to my patronage.’

There was a ripple of tentative applause, as if the audience preferred to withhold their judgement until they had actually heard him play. Hoenstahl ushered Adel onto the dais and then took his seat at the very front, a look on his face of smug self-satisfaction.

The nerves Adel had felt as he walked through the corridors of Hoenstahl’s mansion dissipated as he unpacked his lute from its case. He bowed to the audience, the great and good of Hammerhal, members of the Grand Conclave all – a collection of pampered fops and hard-faced cynics, each desperate to outdo the others and gain the tiniest advantage in the city’s labyrinthine politics. He ran his fingers in a quick flurry of arpeggios to test the acoustics in the room.

‘My lords and ladies,’ he said. ‘This song…’

He looked at his hand as it formed the notes of the Secret Chord. He frowned. It didn’t belong to him, he thought to himself. This wasn’t his hand.

He stared at the audience, noting a few raised eyebrows, the uncomfortable look on Hoenstahl’s face. Adel laughed, but it felt like the sound was coming from somewhere over his shoulder. He wanted to scream.

‘Please!’ he said in a strained voice. He felt his throat thicken and distort, and then the words that spilled from his mouth were not his words at all. ‘This song is called… “The Ballad of the Crossroads”…’

And then Adel Janssen began to play.

He could not stop. His right hand came jerking down and up, down and up, thrashing at the strings. His left twisted and darted around the frets, spraying blood against the neck. He was sure his index finger was broken. He sang, but it was more of a demented shriek and the words were from a language he did not know. Down and up, down and up went the ragged rhythm, and Adel Janssen could not look away.

Standing in the reek, laughing in a fume of blood, the First Prince spread its leathery wings. Its sword smoked with gore, and the bodies of the Conclave were strewn about its reptilian feet. The chamber’s cream walls were smeared with blood, and in the corners of the room the bouquets of Hyshian flowers had burned down to charred stumps. Adel wept. He could not stop singing. He could not stop playing. His fingers were cut to ribbons, and the lute was slick with blood.

‘Such sweet music, Adel Janssen,’ the First Prince said. ‘And music opens many doors, does it not? Keep singing, boy. Sing for your dark master! Sing Be’lakor’s praises until you can sing no more!’

Lord Hoenstahl knelt at the daemon’s feet. He was ashen, shuddering, his face as vacant as a newborn babe’s. Apart from Adel Janssen, he was the only living thing in the room.

The daemon, like a shadow creeping across a patch of sunlight, stretched out a monstrous claw towards him. Hoenstahl did not respond. Slowly, without drawing blood, the claw slipped into his mind.

‘There,’ the daemon said. ‘Congratulations, Lord Hoenstahl. You are now the undisputed leader of the Conclave in Hammerhal. It is now yours, as you are now mine. You will be my faithful servant in Sigmar’s city…’

The aristocrat got to his feet. He had stopped shaking and his eyes were like glass. Adel wrenched his gaze down at his lute – he had broken most of his strings, but still, somehow, the tune played on in all its discordant madness. Still he sang, tripping through a weird glissando, straining his voice up towards notes that did not exist, and down towards sounds too low for the human ear.

‘As for you, Adel Janssen,’ the daemon said. ‘I believe our bargain is complete. You are the greatest musician in the Mortal Realms, are you not?’

It spread its arms to indicate the charnel house around it.

‘For who else could have accomplished so much with music alone?’

They were talking about it all across the city: how Lord Hoenstahl had lured his rivals to his villa and had them murdered. They were all traitors, it was said, and Hoenstahl had done a great thing for Hammerhal. Nipped a conspiracy in the bud, saved the city, even. Old Zymmerman didn’t pay much attention to rumours, though.

Like the ratmen in the sewers, he thought. He’d believe that when he saw it too.

He unlocked the door of his shop and bustled through to his office to get himself ready for the day. That young fool Janssen was never going to pay off what he owed, even if he had won the Symposium. No matter. Zymmerman would score his name out in the ledger. He’d heard that Janssen was forced to play night and day for Hoenstahl now. Played until his fingers bled, so they claimed. All just gossip and hearsay though. He didn’t put any store in it. Still, if it was true, it was no more than Janssen deserved.

In his office at the back, Zymmerman sat down heavily in his chair and rooted about in his desk for a bottle of firewater. Just the thing to get the morning started. He found the bottle and took a swig. He heard the bells chime out on the shop floor as the front door opened. An early customer. Probably that young idiot Brinke, the harp player, whining on about the Secret Chord again. Zymmerman sighed. They never learned. That was musicians for you.

He tossed the bottle back into the drawer and hauled himself to his feet.

‘Just coming,’ he called out. ‘Be with you shortly.’

He reached the door, but then turned back and looked at the desk. No harm in checking, he supposed. He pulled open the bottom drawer. The strongbox with the broken hinge was still there, and when he opened it up he could see the little leather-bound book sitting undisturbed. For a moment he thought there was a little streak of what might be blood on the cover, but when he looked more closely there was nothing there.

Just a trick of the light, he thought. He closed the drawer and bustled through into the sales room, his hands clasped together.

‘Now then!’ he said. ‘Lutes, mandolins, lyres? What can I do for you this fine morning?’

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.

An extract from Warcry Catacombs: Blood of the Everchosen.

On the edge of the blasted wasteland that was the Desolate March, the settlement of Spite prepared for the Feast of the Black Spire.

Spite was a mean collection of squalid huts and tumbledown shacks, and as the evening crept through its meagre streets the wind began to blow from off the plains. The mountains of the Fangs, like a ragged jaw, loomed dark in the distance. The horizon flashed and muttered with thunder, and great banks of cloud roiled like silt in brackish water across those distant peaks. The storm was moving closer.

Ankhad huddled into his cloak as he moved through the streets, a bucket of water sloshing at his side. Uneasily he passed the towering model of the Black Spire, the seat of the Everchosen, which had been cobbled together from bone and rusting scrap in the middle of the town square – the centrepiece of the ceremonies that would take place later that night. He turned his gaze from it. Archaon Everchosen, the lord of this benighted land… Ankhad had never thought it advisable to pay too much attention to the Three-Eyed King; there was always the chance that the Three-Eyed King would start paying attention to you.

The wind picked up, stripping the plain of its ferrous topsoil and scouring it across the night. Lightning stabbed towards the earth, probing its way from the mountains to the edge of the March. The air in Spite was febrile and tense, and the gathering storm had only made it worse. Ankhad had already passed a scuffle or two, mutants and scavengers squabbling over a crust of bread or a scrap of salvage, rolling in the dust in bitter argument. No doubt blades had been drawn and buried, although it was death to shed blood on the Feast of the Black Spire. He cut through the derelict market and watched the other looters gather round to watch as another fight broke out.

Like corpse-hawks, he thought. Waiting for the scraps…

He hurried on, toting the bucket he had filled with muddy water at the well. The clouds seemed to drift closer above the settlement, thick and menacing. Spite’s rickety walls shivered in the wind, rattling with blown dust and sand. Ankhad grimaced at the smell in the air, the rank scent of fear and festering meat.

Above him, the clouds flickered and pulsed with light. Thunder rumbled across the land, shaking the very air, as coarse and violent as if the mountains themselves were being ground together. Ankhad flinched as the air cracked and trembled around him, and then, as he reached his hut on the edge of the settlement, a spear of red lightning crashed down with a deafening bark against the scrubland outside the gates. He heard her scream.

‘Ilthis!’ he said. He pulled back the heavy hide that served as the hut’s door, and the smell assailed him at once – a coppery tang, the harsh, metallic scent of her lifeblood pouring out onto the earth.

She was dying. Ankhad knew that. He knelt at the side of the bed and squeezed her hand. Sweat ran greasily down her face and her skin was grey. She twitched and mumbled, her green eyes staring into the hut’s dim light, seeing nothing. Below her waist the sheets were drenched in blood.

‘Ilthis,’ he said softly. He dipped a rag into the bucket of water and wiped her brow. Her stomach heaved and twisted. He could see the child toiling under the skin, stretching it as if trying to break through. ‘Ilthis, can you hear me?’

She shook her head, her breath harsh and stuttering.

‘I don’t know what to do. Please… tell me what to do? Don’t leave me here, not on my own.’

He pressed his forehead to the back of her hand. Her skin was cold.

How could this bright thing be so cold? he thought. This pillar of flame, this incandescent life so fierce and free.

The storm ravaged the settlement outside. He heard the rain begin its deafening percussion against the roof, but when he looked to the window he saw that the glass was sheeted in red. Blood rain, he thought, and fear twisted uneasily in his gut. On this day, of all days.

Ilthis writhed on the bed and wailed again, but her voice was strained and weak now. It trailed off into silence. She shuddered, and then the walls were rattling around him, the wind threatening to tear them down. Ankhad wiped the cloth across her face. When he passed it over her eyes, he knew that she would see nothing at all now, ever again.

The green had faded to black. She was gone.

Now, at the moment she left it, he thought of the moment she had first come into his life. There had been a whipping storm then, too. Savage winds on the outskirts of Carngrad, the rubbish and detritus of another skirmish in the scrubland, the smell of dead meat and spilled blood on the air. A sandstorm had been blowing in from the Corpseworm Marches, and then stumbling through the whirlwind in the aftermath of the fight came Ilthis, trailing a scavengers’ caravan of looted silks. She had wandered, as if led by fate, into a warzone. He had taken her and everything she owned as a prize, one of the easiest he had ever won.

Fool, he thought. To think you could ever own such a woman! She tamed me, as no one ever could. She owned me, and I was hers entire.

‘I’m so sorry,’ Ankhad whispered.

The skin of her stomach buckled, undulating in the candlelight like some fevered tide. He let go of her hand and drew his knife.

They came for him not long after the last scream had died.

Ankhad heard the tramp of their feet across the muddy ground. Lothin, as close as Spite came to a town chief, was the first to the hut. When he threw back the flap Ankhad saw that his face was streaked with blood from the rain, his hair matted to his scalp. The settlement outside was a morass. The lightning, as it stabbed across the sky, fused and cooked the raindrops into weeping scabs, and they fell on Spite like bloody snowflakes.

Lothin was small, hunched, his head swollen with festering lumps. As he entered the hut, he was flanked by his enforcer, Grulsham Mof, a quick and deadly fighter with a great, spiked club in his hand. Others milled about the entrance, apprehensive and uncertain, some slinking off to lose themselves in Spite’s ramshackle streets, others bearing weapons and girding themselves for a fight.

Fine, Ankhad thought. A fight is what you shall have…

‘Ankhad,’ Lothin cried, his voice almost drowned out by the thunder. ‘What have you done?’ He shifted his weight from one foot to the other. One of his eyes was cloudy with cataracts; the other two were sharp and black, and they looked almost sad.

‘What needed to be done,’ Ankhad said. He still sat there by the bedside, next to the peeled and opened body of his dead wife. When the baby cried, everyone stepped back. Lothin raised his knife.

‘You said it wouldn’t be for another month!’ he said. ‘Not on Feast Day, Ankhad! Don’t you know what this means?’

‘Life comes when it must,’ Ankhad muttered. He turned and stood, and the baby he had cut from his wife’s belly mewled in his arms. He had wrapped the child in a cloth, red and filthy from its birth. Born in a bath of blood, lifted from its mother’s corpse, the child opened its mouth and cried again.

Others pushed past Lothin to crowd the hut’s entrance, a stinking mob of scavengers and mutants cursing and muttering to themselves, scratching with fused claws or peering into the gloom with bulbous eyes. Ankhad stood there, warily watching them. The bag he had hastily packed was at his feet, and his knife, its blade cleaned of Ilthis’ blood, was tucked into his belt. He was a big man, rangy and tough, seasoned where others would have been whittled down by all his years in the Desolate March. Although he was far older than most of the scavengers who crowded his door, the years hadn’t diminished his sense of danger. Ankhad had heard the rumours others told about him. Some said he had been a warrior once, a pilgrim from the outside realms come to lay his sword on the steps of the Black Spire. Others claimed he was no more than any other native of the Bloodwind Spoil, a cowering scrap merchant, a ragpicker just like the rest of them – only luckier, because he had found in Spite a cursed little settlement full of ragpickers smaller than he was. Let them say what they wanted; he did not care.

‘A child born on Feast Day is for the gods,’ Lothin said in his rasping voice. ‘It’s always been thus. And this storm, the blood rain… The omens cannot be denied. It must die.’

‘You would spill blood on the Feast of the Black Spire?’ Ankhad said. His voice was low, his bearing outwardly calm. ‘Let me tell you then – so would I.’

Grulsham Mof stepped forward, his club in his hands, but Lothin held him back. He looked uneasy. Where others dominated through violence, Lothin’s strength had always been in his cunning, even in his sense of diplomacy.

‘Tarnot’s already broken that rule,’ Lothin said. ‘He killed Mad Rhukar in the marketplace. He dies tonight, as he must, but there’s no need for you to join him.’

Beyond Lothin, out in the street, Ankhad could see Tarnot cast down into the mud on his knees, his arms bent behind his back. He was a young man, his eyes wide-spaced on either side of his head like a fish’s, his lank hair plastered to his face from the bloody rain. He grinned wildly.

‘He started it!’ Tarnot protested. ‘Shanked me in the back, he did.’

‘And you tore out his throat with your teeth,’ Lothin called wearily over his shoulder.

‘You never said,’ Tarnot shot back. ‘What’s it to be in the end then? Stoning? I think I’d like a good stoning, if I’ve got a choice.’

‘You, we’ll drown in the water trough,’ Lothin said. ‘The baby… I’m sorry, Ankhad, for what it’s worth. But the child must be burned. The True Gods demand it. It’s their right.’

As if it understood their words, the child cried again, and from the crashing skies came an answering rumble of thunder, the flash-crack of red lightning. Ankhad flinched. The spire at the centre of the Eightpoints hung heavy on his mind then, stabbing its weight deep into his marrow. He looked down into his son’s face, and for the briefest moment, as if illuminated in the lightning flash, he saw a mask of shadow pass quickly across it – a mask in the shape of an eight-pointed star.

‘I will kill every man, woman and child here before I let you harm this baby,’ Ankhad said, and he knew they all believed him. Cudgels were hefted, and the press of bodies in the street grew nearer. Ankhad dropped his hand to the hilt of his knife. Over Lothin’s shoulder he could just see Tarnot, struggling against his captors and straining to stand up.

‘Ankhad,’ Tarnot shouted. ‘It’s over for me, but it doesn’t have to be for you.’ Through the press of bodies, their eyes met. ‘Run!’ he shouted.

The fight, such as it was, lasted mere moments, but it was long enough.

He owed Tarnot nothing. They had passed no more than a handful of words in all the months he had lived in Spite, but something had made the other man help him. Whatever it was, Ankhad silently thanked him for it.

He saw Tarnot break free and snap an elbow into his captor’s face, sliding then through the mud to launch himself at Lothin’s back. Grulsham Mof, with no room to swing his spiked club, dropped his weapon and punched Tarnot in the side until his ribs cracked, but by that point Tarnot was lost under a scrum of bodies and Ankhad was kicking his way through the mouldering planks of the hut’s wall. He had the baby clutched tightly in his arms and he paused to swing his pack up onto his shoulder – and then the wasteland of the Desolate March was there before him, strobed with red lightning, black and forbidding and no less dangerous than the streets of Spite.

‘Run, Ankhad!’ he could hear Tarnot shout, before his voice was muffled into silence. ‘Run!’

Ankhad ran, and the miserable little town of Spite was smothered in the blood rain behind him.

Click here to buy Warcry Catacombs: Blood of the Everchosen.

A Black Library Publication

First published in Great Britain in 2021.
This eBook edition published in 2021 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

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Cover illustration by Catherine O’Connor.

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