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He Feasts Forever – Lora Gray

About the Author

An Extract from ‘Genevieve Undead’

A Black Library Publication

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He Feasts Forever

by Lora Gray

In the king’s kitchens, the hearth fires roared. Row upon row of lambs sizzled on spits, their small bodies skinned and dripping. Racks of suckling pigs, their throats knotted with garlic and thyme, roasted high above the coals. Sauces simmered. Stews roiled. In the hazy dimness, snug in the flesh-sweet smoke, the kitchen boys scurried, a clattering chaos of chopping and shouting, cursing and laughter.

There was nowhere else Dedric would rather have been.

He was smiling, slicing a tray of goose livers with Milo, the slaughterer, when the kitchen door slammed open with a burst of fresh air and light.

Hodge hulked into the doorway like a thunderhead, a stag draped over his shoulders, the aborted stumps of its young antlers rattling against the door frame, its broken neck swivelling. Even with the light at his brother’s back, Dedric could see the irritated, impatient set of Hodge’s jaw. For an uneasy beat, the kitchen stilled. Hodge may have been the king’s favourite huntsman, but his temper was as vicious as his marksmanship. It was an unspoken rule that he only delivered his kills early in the morning when everyone but Dedric or the occasional, unfortunate scullion was still asleep.

Milo elbowed Dedric. ‘Best see what Hodge wants,’ he whispered. ‘Before Old Poldrake crosses him.’

Dedric glanced over his shoulder to where Old Poldrake stood at the main hearth. The royal chef’s arms were folded. A scowl puckered his jowls and he puffed his chest as he faced Hodge across the hazy kitchen. The king had been gone for months, leading his armies and fighting for the glory and honour of the realm, and Old Poldrake was intent on making his victorious homecoming an event to remember. Every dish was carefully curated, every moment of the preparation meticulously timed. Hodge’s appearance was unscheduled and Old Poldrake’s temper rivalled Hodge’s when the rhythm of his kitchen was compromised.

A fight between the two of them would do nobody any good.

Dedric tentatively raised his hand. Old Poldrake’s gaze snapped between him and his brother. With a small snort, Old Poldrake gave Dedric a reluctant nod and then shouted for everyone to get back to work.

Dedric murmured an apology as he stood, the goose liver slipping, wet and plump, from his fingertips onto the tray. Milo simply shrugged and began slicing it himself. It wasn’t the first time Dedric had been forced to intervene when it came to his older brother.

Wiping his hands on his apron, Dedric hurried across the kitchen, dodging a pair of scullions scrubbing a splotch of red mud from the tiles beside the door. Outside, the sun was thin, the sky a bright wash of amethyst. Dedric squinted against it as he closed the door behind himself.

Without pretext, Hodge grunted and moved to shrug the dead deer into Dedric’s arms. ‘For the feast,’ he said.

Dedric stepped back and shook his head. ‘I can’t.’

Hodge’s expression sharpened. Dedric knew that look all too well. It meant a clean shot. Or a slap. Or a fist to the gut.

‘The larder is full, Hodge,’ Dedric continued quickly, his voice cracking. ‘There’s no space to be had in the smoke house or the kitchens. Old Poldrake is working us sun up to sun down. Nobody will have time to cook it properly.’

Hodge sneered and crowded Dedric against the closed kitchen door. He was a full head taller and nearly twice as broad as Dedric and his bulk blocked out the sun as he leaned in. The dead stag’s head swung between them, the gamey smell of blood-wet fur smothering Dedric like a damp blanket. He could see himself reflected in the deer’s dark eye, small and cringing against the door, the inky pupil tracking the anxious hitch of his shoulders.

‘Then make time, little brother,’ Hodge said. ‘Do you know where I’ll be sitting at the feast?’

Dedric peeled his gaze away from the stag’s eye and shook his head.

‘Perhaps I’ll be at his majesty’s right hand.’ Hodge grinned, but the nasty curve of his lip made the joke sour. ‘Perhaps he’s going to gift me a cup of royal wine. Royal. Wine. Dedric.’ Hodge poked his finger between Dedric’s eyes to emphasise each word. ‘Have you ever even seen royal wine? Red as blood? Sweet and dark? It will be my reward for my loyalty and service to the kingdom. When was the last time the king offered you a cup of royal wine?’

‘N-never.’

‘That’s right. Never. Because I’m the king’s best huntsman. And what are you? A cook. So do your duty and cook.’ Hodge slugged the deer unceremoniously into Dedric’s arms.

Dedric staggered, loose bone and wet fur shoving him against the door as his brother strode away from him and across the courtyard.

Dedric looked down at the dead stag, heavy as a sleeping child against him, its neck twisted round, fur pale as cream. Its mouth was parted. A fly crawled over the pink of its tongue. Its eyes were baleful and cold.

He tried not to think about the way they seemed to follow him as he went back inside.

It was well after midnight when Dedric startled awake. The raucousness of the daytime kitchen had been replaced by lonesome clanks as a handful of the youngest spit boys tended the long-roasting meat. From where he was on the opposite side of the huge room, Dedric could barely hear their sleepy murmurs.

Butchering his brother’s stag had taken longer than he’d expected and by the time he’d finished the duties Old Poldrake had assigned him, Dedric had already been droop-eyed and yawning. Still, he hadn’t meant to fall asleep, and he stood quickly from the corner he’d slumped into, embarrassed; but the younger boys were far enough away from him that none of them seemed to have noticed.

With a sigh, Dedric returned to the butcher block where he’d been working. He’d already parcelled the stag’s body and steeped the choicest cuts into a marinade to tenderise them. The tang of it pinched saliva from the corners of Dedric’s mouth. He considered pressing a headcheese as well, though it would have been ambitious considering the time he had. He turned the stag’s disconnected head over in his hands, the spine slithering across the cutting board. How best to boil it to softness? How best to scrape out the tongue and pare away the cheeks? But every time he caught the stag’s eyes, wet and gummy in the flickering light, the air felt somehow too thick to breathe.

Dedric bit back a wave of uneasiness and shook his head, moving to the small hearth where he was boiling the stag’s bones to broth. The scent of marrow and cloves wafted up to meet him as he stirred it, and it was then that Dedric realised he wasn’t alone in his corner of the kitchen.

Tucked into the shadows between the hearth and the butcher block, was a small boy. For a moment, he was so still that Dedric thought he was a dream clinging to the edges of his exhausted brain. But no, that pale shape was most definitely a boy. His skinny knees were pulled tight to his chest; his round face was upturned. His eyes, glistening and dark as the young stag’s, peered at him with such unblinking intensity that Dedric had to fight the urge to back away.

Dedric shook himself. He was overworked and his imagination was clearly getting the better of him. It was just a little boy. What harm could he possibly be?

‘What are you doing back there?’ he asked, kneeling down to better see him.

The boy’s eyes followed him, but he didn’t speak.

‘Are you one of the new scullions?’ Dedric asked. ‘You shouldn’t be here unsupervised.’

The boy didn’t move.

Dedric’s belly curled and the hairs on the back of his neck prickled. He worked the moisture back into his mouth. ‘What is your name?’

The boy simply stared and Dedric felt like he’d been pinned by those eyes, wide and bottomless, urging him to look back. No boy should have had eyes like that. They were wild eyes. Animal eyes.

Dedric stood quickly and made a show of brushing off his apron as if he could convince himself he wasn’t as unnerved as he felt. It was just a boy. Just a boy. ‘I suppose I’ll have to fetch Old Poldrake, then, won’t I? He hates untended children fiddling about in his kitchen. Why, the last one who–’

‘Don’t you remember me?’ The boy’s voice slid over Dedric like cold air in a draughty room.

Dedric fought a shiver and cleared his throat. ‘So you are one of the new scullions. Though I can’t say I recall having met you before.’

The boy’s eyes narrowed. ‘We’ve met.’

Dedric tried to tell himself that the malice in the boy’s expression was a trick of the light. ‘Where?’

‘The Eastern Road.’

Dedric frowned. ‘The Eastern Road?’ The bone broth bubbled fitfully and he gave it a quick stir. The stag’s bones clinked softly against the cast iron.

The boy flinched, his attention flickering to the pot for a quick moment as he tugged his legs closer to his body. ‘I was with my family,’ he said. ‘My mother. My father. My sister.’

‘You came here to apprentice?’

‘No.’ The boy’s voice was brittle as he looked towards the stag’s head on the butcher block, dark, unblinking eyes fixed on dark, unblinking eyes. ‘I was lost.’

Dedric gripped the spoon tightly. ‘We should tell Old Poldrake. Perhaps he’ll know where your family…’

The boy’s gaze moved slowly back to Dedric and, yes, there was malice there, sharp as a cleaver. ‘They’re dead. They died on the Eastern Road. You don’t remember?’

‘I have never travelled the Eastern Road.’ There had never been a reason to leave the castle. Dedric was perfectly happy here in the kitchens surrounded by his friends and the beautiful chaos of the feasts, familiar smells and sounds. It was comfortable. It was home.

But there, niggling at the edge of his thoughts, was a memory, a watery impression of a golden road stretching out before him. It was just a single, hazy vision. He couldn’t remember much else. He couldn’t recall much of his past at all, he realised with a jolt. Just this castle. This kitchen. Before that, nothing.

The room felt unsteady around him. The floor wavered beneath his feet. Sweat blossomed on Dedric’s forehead and upper lip. He felt clammy. Sick. And that boy was still staring at him, swaying in time with the spoon Dedric was using to stir the bone broth. Back and forth. Back and forth.

‘Dedric!’

Dedric started so badly, he dropped the spoon. Broth splattered into the coals, the fire flaring and sputtering. One of the spit boys had finally spotted him from across the room. Dedric’s heart was thundering so loudly in his ears, he almost didn’t hear him.

‘That the stag your brother killed?’ the spit boy asked. ‘I heard tell it was a good one. You roasting it?’

‘Yes.’ Dedric’s voice shook in spite of his efforts. He opened his mouth to ask if anyone knew anything about this strange, orphaned boy crouched in the shadows beside him, but when Dedric turned, the boy was gone.

Dedric was gathering herbs at the edge of the field, where the courtyard met the wasteland, when he saw his brother emerge from the forest. He watched him for several seconds before gathering the courage to speak.

‘Hodge!’

‘What?’ Hodge’s voice was pinched as he turned to look at Dedric from across the grey field, the castle towering behind him.

Dedric was certain Hodge had seen him crouched in the tall grass. He was equally certain by the way Hodge’s hand tightened around his bow that he didn’t want to talk. His quiver was full and he was clearly on his way to a hunt.

But Dedric had to ask. He’d been haunted by the memory of the strange boy all day. Where had he gone? Was he following him? Paranoia crept over Dedric in waves, the world around him mercurial with his exhausted delusions. An eagle circling overhead seemed as intent on him as a vulture over rotting meat. A palm of rosemary seemed like a handful of fingernails. Fennel became shavings of bone, the fronds smooth as shaved marrow.

And every shadow held a pair of dark, unblinking eyes, whispers of the Eastern Road Dedric should somehow remember.

Except that Dedric couldn’t recall much of anything, let alone how he’d come to this castle. It was as if a curtain had been drawn over his memories and he couldn’t, for the life of him, see past it, except for those hazy impressions of a golden road.

That strange boy had seemed so certain when he insisted that they’d met there.

Dedric gathered his courage and stood, his satchel clutched to his chest like a shield as he faced his brother across the grey field. ‘Do you remember how we came to the king’s castle?’ Dedric asked. ‘Was it by the Eastern Road?’’

A tendon corded dangerously on the side of Hodge’s neck as he clenched his teeth. ‘Go back to your weeds, little brother. I have work to do.’ He shrugged his quiver higher on his shoulder and turned to continue towards the forest.

‘I remember a road,’ Dedric continued, his voice trembling. ‘A golden road. But nothing else. Nothing but this castle. No childhood, no family, except for you.’

Annoyance snapped through Hodge’s posture as he turned and strode towards him.

Dedric flinched and shrank back, his voice small. ‘We can’t have been here forever. Where are our mother and father? Surely there is more to our lives than this place.’

Hodge was on him so quickly, Dedric barely had time to react. He grabbed Dedric by the wrist, wrenching his arm behind him before grabbing the scruff of his neck with his free hand. He forced Dedric’s body down, yanked his head up.

It was as if somebody had ripped the curtain in Dedric’s head aside. Memory flashed through him, a clawed hand on the back of his neck, digging into his skin, that golden road splayed all around him. Someone forced his jaws apart. Everything smelled like blood. There was screaming, high-pitched and ragged. Pale figures crowded around him. Monsters. Monsters opening his mouth, shoving raw meat past his lips. Dedric clenched his teeth, but gore spurted between them and filled his mouth, his throat. He choked. Heaved. Blood gushed over his lips, a long vein slithering over his chin. On the ground, there was a pile of raw meat and a severed, human hand. Dedric’s heart hammered him away from the terrible vision.

‘Look at it.’ Hodge tightened his grip.

He wasn’t on the golden road. He was in a field and Hodge was forcing him to look up at the king’s castle, looming dark against the amethyst sky.

‘What more do you want?’ Hodge growled in Dedric’s ear. ‘Are you saying his grace isn’t good enough for you? That you’d rather be elsewhere?’

‘No,’ Dedric whispered. His eyes watered and even he wasn’t sure if it was from the viciousness of his brother’s grip or the memory that had snapped through him.

Hodge pinched Dedric’s neck mercilessly and wrenched his arm until pain lanced through the socket. ‘I couldn’t hear you.’

‘No!’

Hodge shoved Dedric and he stumbled, losing his balance and landing on his hands and knees, the herbs he’d gathered scattering in the tall grass. Rosemary. Thyme. Bones. Fingernails. The tall grass was grey. The earth beneath was red as wine. Red as blood. Dedric closed his eyes and tried to swallow the sick creeping up his throat.

‘I’m in the king’s favour, Dedric,’ Hodge said, his eyes narrow, his teeth bared. ‘If I ever hear you disrespect what he has given us again, if you ruin this for me, I’ll cut out your tongue, you ungrateful little cuss.’ Hodge turned, his shoulders drawn to his ears, and stalked across the field towards the forest.

Dedric watched him leave, his breath tight in his chest. For a moment, he had seen fear in his brother’s eyes. There had been a twinge of panic in his voice that had nothing to do with Dedric ruining his brother’s position as the king’s favourite huntsman.

Dedric knew, with a horrible certainty that curdled in his belly like sour milk, that Hodge couldn’t remember how they’d come there either.

It was night by the time Dedric returned to the castle. He was so distracted by the memory of the golden road, the way the taste of uncooked flesh seemed to cling to the roof of his mouth, that he hadn’t managed to collect all the herbs he’d needed. His satchel was only half-full. Tugging the cowl of his cloak more securely around his face, he tried to distract himself with the few herbs he’d managed to find before the sun went down. He didn’t want to think about sinew squishing through the gaps of his teeth or the thick river of blood flowing down his throat.

The kitchen was strangely empty when he opened the door. The cook fires were crackling but abandoned.

All was quiet.

Only there, beside the butchered remains of Hodge’s prized stag, was that strange boy, that horrible boy who’d pulled the memory of the Eastern Road from Dedric’s head, who had no business in the kitchen in the first place. He stood, still as stone, beside the hearth, his arm immersed in the boiling bone broth.

‘Get away from there!’ Dedric rushed forward. The boy was burning himself! Scalding himself! Spoiling the broth!

Before Dedric could snatch his arm away, the boy pulled back. His flesh was whole, seemingly unhurt. His hand was dry as he stepped to the other side of the hearth, his eyes steady and furious.

Dedric grabbed a spoon from the rack beside the hearth, brandishing it for a moment, before frantically stirring the broth as if he could somehow purify it. Bones bobbed to the surface, but the femur there was too long and too thick for a deer’s leg. Where were the hooves? Instead, there were small, flat ankle bones and… wrists? Knuckles? Fingers?

Dedric rounded on the boy. ‘What did you do?’

The boy didn’t move. ‘What did I do?’ His lips curled and Dedric wasn’t sure if he was smiling or snarling. ‘What did you do?’

The kitchen walls seemed to swell, the thick stone throbbing with heat, the air thick as pudding.

The boy stepped closer. ‘We were on the Eastern Road,’ he rasped. ‘Travelling to visit my uncle. We stopped to rest for the night and I left my mother, father and sister to find blackberries for our supper. They were my sister’s favourite. When I returned you were there.’

Dedric’s stomach roiled, unsettled as the broth in that heavy pot. It felt as if the kitchen itself were pulling sweat from him and adding it to its own terrible swelter. For the first time in what he remembered of his life, Dedric didn’t want to be in that kitchen. He wanted to run, but, try as he might, he couldn’t look away from the boy.

‘You were there,’ the boy said. ‘You and the other monsters.’

No.

No.

‘You’d torn my father in two,’ the boy continued. ‘I found his legs, first. His shoes were missing along with his toes. My mother’s arms were threaded through the wagon wheels like ribbons and I found her head in the weeds. Her lips had been bitten away. My sister’s hair was strewn all around you and they were feeding you her flesh.’

Dedric shook his head, but the memories punched through the heat of the kitchen. A carpet of blonde hair all around him like a golden road stretching in all directions. Pale hands, long fingers, clawlike and barely human. Monsters holding him down. Mordants. The word swam to the surface with such clarity, Dedric clutched his head. Mordants were prying his jaw wide, pressing that girl’s flesh into his mouth. And he didn’t want it. He didn’t want to be one of them. He didn’t want to be a monster, but Dedric could feel that girl’s gristle against his lips, could see her torso heaving sideways as they ripped her leg from her hip, muscle popping away from her thigh bone like broken twine. He remembered Hodge beside him too, full to bursting with human flesh and panting.

‘I tried to stop you,’ the boy whispered, so close Dedric could feel his breath like ice through the unbearable kitchen heat. ‘I tried to kill you, but your brother shot me. Like an animal, he shot me, and what did you do?’

Dedric’s breath hitched. He glanced to the pot beside him, into the broth, at those bones that couldn’t possibly be a stag’s bones. Trembling, Dedric looked to the butcher’s block where he’d left the deer’s head and there, in its place, was the decapitated head of the young boy, cheeks sagging to rot, eyes bulging past their lids like half-peeled grapes, black and unblinking as the stag’s had been. Roasting in the hearth were a little boy’s legs, ankles dislocated, feet bent backward and dangling.

Only now, Dedric saw the truth.

The comforting heat of the Ghoul-King’s kitchen, all that familiar smoke, had dissolved like lifting fog. The room was suddenly, undeniably, frigid. The walls that had once felt as secure as an embrace were ruined and crumbling. The hearths, whose fires should have been glowing merrily, were nothing but piles of mud and twigs. The spits were nothing but broken wagon wheels and the rusted remnants of swords and, on every one of them, instead of ham hocks or fat chicken breasts, Dedric saw severed human arms and naked torsos, the ribs cracked and bowed towards the earth. On a chopping board, what were once carrots were now fingers, nail beds putrid, maggots squirming from cuticles. A basket of onions was now a pile of human hearts, lumped together and sticky. There were kidneys glazed with offal, carefully arranged atop a bed of flayed and spongey lungs. Tongues hung from a drying rack like squab and all around him was the stench of rotting meat, cloying and thick.

Dedric’s pulse galloped into his throat. His mouth was dry. For a frantic moment, Dedric thought that if he could rid himself of that horrible, gheistly boy, slice him out of existence, the nightmare around him would disappear too. Dedric fumbled a rusted sword from one of the spits and slashed at the boy’s belly. His chest. His demented, smiling face. But with every stroke, the boy’s body parted and reformed as easily as a puff of steam.

Dedric stumbled away from him, away from the hearth and the nightmarish feast all around him, his hands plastered over his mouth, his gut threatening to heave. The boy’s gheist smiled, smug and satisfied as he began to fade. He was as thin and insubstantial as a shadow as Dedric turned and fled.

Dedric careened out of the kitchen and into the courtyard, trying to ignore the way his body felt somehow bigger than it should have. Were his hands ever quite so long? Was that metallic heat on the back of his tongue blood?

The castle loomed above him, the towers now little more than a mountain of rubble heaving up from a burnt and barren landscape. Emerging from a crooked jumble of unearthed tree trunks was a mordant, and another and another, their bare skulls and hulking shoulders gleaming in the moonlight, their teeth dangling with flesh. Their eyes were hungry.

‘What’s wrong?’ one of them asked. Dedric knew that booming voice, though it was distorted and monstrous, as if the vocal cords had been shredded. It was Old Poldrake.

Standing beside him was Milo, the slaughterer, his friend. Milo tipped his head, his clawed hand outstretched. ‘Are you all right, Dedric?’ he asked. ‘You don’t look well.’

Dedric tripped over his own feet and scrambled away from them. Into the night, he fled, away from the castle and the kitchen, away from all those familiar things, their glamour stripped, away from the gheist of that boy and his dark, unblinking eyes.

Dedric sprinted through the courtyard turned graveyard, dirge songs following him on the night-time air. He was halfway to the forest when Hodge appeared.

‘Little brother!’ Hodge’s face was distorted, pointed and pale, more monster than man. His quiver was empty. The gutted body of a woman was slumped over his shoulders, her mutilated neck swinging. Her wet hair roped over her face. Her belly gaped like an open, screaming mouth.

Dedric choked back a groan. Spots blossomed over his eyes as he turned, sprinting away from his brother and the Ghoul-King’s castle. His kitchens. His home.

‘Where do you think you’re going?’ Hodge’s voice echoed behind him.

Dedric did not turn back.

It was nearly morning when Dedric reached the Eastern Road. The moon was small and descending. The road was an uneven ribbon of grey in the dimness. Exhausted, Dedric staggered onto it.

He half expected someone – Hodge, Old Poldrake, or Milo – to follow him through the forest. Every time he lost his footing or stumbled, Dedric looked over his shoulder, terrified that he’d see their pale faces, twisted and only vaguely familiar, with those monstrously long jaws, and those sharp, dripping teeth.

But nobody came.

So Dedric continued on, fear driving him like a heavy whip. He was hungry. His legs began to wobble, but he pressed on, hugging the edges of the road, brambles snagging the hem of his cloak and thorns ripping at his already tattered clothes.

The sky had just begun to brighten when a singular, golden light appeared on the road ahead of him. It crested the low, rolling hill, bobbing, buttery and wholesome, in the darkness. It took Dedric a moment to realise it was a lantern, swaying high atop a wagon. As it drew closer, he could hear wheels creaking, a horse’s shod feet and voices, meager and thin in the predawn hush.

Human voices.

Dedric’s first instinct was to run towards them, to scream for help, to beg somebody to take him farther from that terrible castle faster than his spent legs could carry him.

But what if they didn’t believe him?

What if they thought he was a monster too?

Dedric tried to ignore the paleness of his own hands as he pulled his cowl tighter to hide his face. He tried not to think about the way his fingers, nails sharp and impossibly long, snagged the cloth as he sank into the cover of a thicket beside the road. Maybe he should have remained hidden and let them pass, but he had no place to go but that pile of broken stone and rotting flesh that he had believed was his home, and he couldn’t possibly go back there.

He was cold.

And hungry.

So very hungry.

The wagon rattled closer and he could hear their voices more distinctly now. A man. A woman. At least two children. He could see them, their faces surfacing like dumplings in a stirred pot.

And, oh.

Oh, he could smell them. Their scent was like roasting meat drifting through the cool morning air, fresh and sweet as spring lambs, juicy as those tender, suckling pigs he had helped Milo skewer so very carefully two days before. Dedric’s stomach grumbled. His mouth watered and he stepped onto the road, his cowl low over his face.

The horse startled, snorting as it tossed its head and danced away from Dedric.

The driver cursed, snapping the reins taut and shouting, ‘Whoa!’ He squinted, trying to see Dedric in the dimness, his hand producing a dagger from his belt. ‘Who goes there?’

The woman clasped a child to her. ‘We haven’t any gold!’

Dedric cleared his throat. ‘I’m not going to rob you.’ His voice was rough and painfully uneven.

Now that he was closer, he could see the family more clearly. The man’s forearms were as firm as mutton. The woman’s breasts were as smooth as boiled hare’s belly. A child peered down at him from her mother’s embrace, her cheeks as tender as slivers of fatted veal.

Dedric swallowed heavily. ‘I need passage to the nearest town.’

‘We’re travelling to Mhurghast,’ the man said, shifting in his seat and exchanging an uneasy look with his wife, his hand tightening on the hilt of his dagger. ‘We’re not in the habit of letting strangers ride with us. At least not for free.’

‘I don’t have any money,’ Dedric said.

The man reaffirmed his grip on the horse’s reins, readying to steer their cart well around him, to continue down the road, but Dedric stepped forward with more strength and speed than his exhausted body should have been capable of. He gripped the edge of the cart. The wood creaked beneath his hand.

‘I could work for my passage,’ Dedric said as he looked up at them. The lantern light flickered merrily as a hearth fire, basting their skin. Hunger curled through him like a fist and Dedric inhaled deeply. They smelled so good. So savoury. So deliciously sweet.

The man looked down at him uncertainly. ‘What are you offering?’ he asked, his voice trembling.

Dedric licked his lips and replied, very softly, ‘I’m an excellent cook.’

About the Author

Lora Gray lives and works in Northeast Ohio. Their fiction has appeared in various publications including Shimmer, The Dark and Flash Fiction Online. When they aren’t writing, Lora works as an illustrator, dance instructor and wrangler of a very smart cat named Cecil. ‘Crimson Snow’ is Lora’s first story for Black Library.

An extract from Genevieve Undead.

He had a name once, but hadn’t heard it spoken in years. Sometimes, it was hard to remember what it had been. Even he thought of himself as the Trapdoor Daemon. When they dared speak of him, that was what the company of the Vargr Breughel called their ghost.

He had been haunting this building for years enough to know its secret by-ways. After springing the catch of the hidden trapdoor, he eased himself into Box Seven, first dangling by strong tentacles, then dropping the last inches to the familiar carpet. Tonight was the premiere of The Strange History of Dr Zhiekhill and Mr Chaida, originally by the Kislevite dramatist V.I. Tiodorov, now adapted by the Vargr Breughel’s genius-in-residence, Detlef Sierck.

The Trapdoor Daemon knew Tiodorov’s hoary melodrama from earlier translations, and wondered how Detlef would bring life back to it. He’d taken an interest in rehearsals, particularly in the progress of his protégée, Eva Savinien, but had deliberately refrained from seeing the piece all through until tonight. When the curtain came down on the fifth act, the ghost would decide whether to give the play his blessing or his curse.

He was recognized as the permanent and non-paying licensee of Box Seven, and he was invoked whenever a production went well or ill. The success of A Farce of the Fog was laid to his approval of the comedy, and the disastrous series of accidents that plagued the never-premiered revival of Manfred von Diehl’s Strange Flower were also set at his door. Some had glimpsed him, and a good many more fancied they had. A theatre was not a proper theatre without a ghost. And there were always old stage-hands and character actors eager to pass on stories to frighten the little chorines and apprentices who passed through the Vargr Breughel Memorial Playhouse.

Even Detlef Sierck, actor-manager of the Vargr Breughel company, occasionally spoke with affection of him, and continued the custom of previous managements by having an offering placed in Box Seven on the first night of any production.

Actually, for the ghost things were much improved since Detlef took over the house. When the theatre had been the Beloved of Shallya and specialised in underpatronised but uplifting religious dramas, the offerings had been of incense and a live kid. Now, reflecting an earthier, more popular approach, the offering took the form of a large trencher of meats and vegetables prepared by the skilled company chef, with a couple of bottles of Bretonnian wine thrown in.

The Trapdoor Daemon wondered if Detlef instinctively understood his needs were far more those of a physical being than a disembodied spirit.

Eating was difficult without hands, but the years had forced him to become used to his ruff of muscular appendages, and he was able to work the morsels up from the trencher towards the sucking, beaked hole of his mouth with something approaching dexterity. He had uncorked the first bottle with a quick constriction, and took frequent swigs at a vintage that must have been laid down around the year of his birth. He brushed away that thought – his former life seemed less real now than the fictions which paraded before him every evening – and settled his bulk into the nest of broken chairs and cushions adapted to his shape, awaiting the curtain. He sensed the excitement of the first night crowd and, from the darkness of Box Seven, saw the glitter of jewels and silks down below. A Detlef Sierck premiere was an occasion in Altdorf for the court to come out and parade.

The Trapdoor Daemon understood the Emperor himself was not present – since his experience at the fortress of Drachenfels, Karl-Franz disliked the theatre in general and Detlef Sierck’s theatre in particular – but that Prince Luitpold was occupying the Imperial box. Many of the finest and foremost of the Empire would be in the house, as intent on being seen as on seeing the play. The critics were in their corner, quills bristling and inkpots ready. Wealthy merchants packed the stalls, looking up at the assembled courtiers and aristocrats in the circle who, in their turn, looked to the Imperial connections in the private boxes.

A dignified explosion of clapping greeted the orchestra as Felix Hubermann, the conductor, led his musicians in the Imperial national anthem, ‘Hail to the House of the Second Wilhelm.’ The ghost resisted the impulse to flap his appendages together in a schlumphing approximation of applause. In the Imperial box, the future emperor appeared and graciously accepted the admiration of his future subjects. Prince Luitpold was a handsome boy on the point of becoming a handsome young man. His companion for the evening was handsome too, although the Trapdoor Daemon knew she was not young. Genevieve Dieudonné, dressed far more simply than the brocaded and lace-swathed Luitpold, appeared to be a girl of some sixteen summers, but it was well-known that Detlef Sierck’s mistress was actually in her six hundred and sixty-eighth year.

A heroine of the Empire yet something of an embarrassment, she didn’t look entirely comfortable in the Imperial presence, and tried to keep in the shadows while the prince waved to the crowd. Across the auditorium, the ghost caught the sharp glint of red in her eyes, and wondered if her nightsight could pierce the darkness that sweated like squid’s ink from his pores. If the vampire girl saw him, she didn’t betray anything. She was probably too nervous of her position to pay any attention to him. Heroine or not, a vampire’s position in human society is precarious. Too many remembered the centuries Kislev suffered under Tsarina Kattarin.

Also in the Prince’s party was Mornan Tybalt, grey-faced and self-made keeper of the Imperial counting house, and Graf Rudiger von Unheimlich, hard-hearted and forceful patron of the League of Karl-Franz, a to-the-death defender of aristocratic privilege. They were known to hate each other with a poisonous fervour, the upstart Tybalt having the temerity to believe that ability and intellect were more important qualifications for high office than breeding, lineage and a title, while the pure-blooded huntsman von Unheimlich maintained that all Tybalt’s policies had brought to the Empire was riot and upheaval. The Trapdoor Daemon fancied that neither the Chancellor nor the Graf would have much attention for the play, each fuming at the imperially-ordained need not to attempt physical violence upon the other in the course of the evening.

The house settled, and the prince took his chair. It was time for the drama. The ghost adjusted his position, and fixed his attention on the opening curtains. Beyond the red velvet was darkness. Hubermann held a flute to his lips, and played a strange, high melody. Then the limelights flared, and the audience was transported to another century, another country.

The action of Dr Zhiekhill and Mr Chaida was set in pre-Kattarin Kislev, and concerned a humble cleric of Shallya who, under the influence of a magic potion, transforms into another person entirely, a prodigy of evil. In the first scene, Zhiekhill was debating good and evil with his philosopher brother, as the darkness gathered outside the temple, seeping in between the stately columns.

It was easy to see what attracted Detlef Sierck, as adaptor and actor, to the Tiodorov story. The dual role was a challenge beyond anything the performer had done before. And the subject was an obvious development of the macabre vein that had been creeping lately into the playwright’s work. Even the comedy of A Farce of the Fog had found room for a throat-slitting imp and much talk of the hypocrisy of supposedly good men. Critics traced Detlef’s dark obsessions back to the famously interrupted premiere of his work Drachenfels, during which the actor had faced and bested not a stage monster but the Great Enchanter himself, Constant Drachenfels. Detlef had tackled that experience face-on in The Treachery of Oswald, in which he had taken the role of the possessed Laszlo Lowenstein, and now he was returning to the hurt inside him, nagging again at the themes of duality, treachery and the existence of a monstrous world underneath the ordinary.

His brother gone, Zhiekhill was locked up in his chapel, fussing with the bubbling liquids that combined to make his potion. Detlef, intent on delaying the expected, was playing the scene with a comic touch, as if Zhiekhill weren’t quite aware what he was doing. In his recent works, Detlef’s view of evil was changing, as if he were coming to believe it was not an external thing, like Drachenfels usurping the body of Lowenstein, but a canker that came from within, like the treachery forming in the heart of Oswald, or the murderous, lecherous, spiteful Chaida straining to escape from the confines of the pious, devout, kindly Zhiekhill.

On the stage, the potion was ready. Detlef-as-Zhiekhill drained it, and Hubermann’s eerie tune began again as the influence of the magic took hold. Dr Zhiekhill and Mr Chaida forced the Trapdoor Daemon to consider things he would rather forget. As Chaida first appeared, with Detlef performing marvels of stage magic and facial contortion to suggest the violent transformation, he remembered his own former shape, and the Tzeentch-born changes that slowly overcame him. When, at the point Detlef-as-Chaida was strangling Zhiekhill’s brother, the monster was pulled back inside the cleric and Zhiekhill, chastened and shaking, stood revealed before the philosopher, the ghost was slapped by the realization that this would never happen to him. Zhiekhill and Chaida might be in an eternal struggle, neither ever gaining complete control, but he was forever and for good or ill the Trapdoor Daemon. He would never revert to his old self.

Then the drama caught him again, and he was tugged from his own thoughts, gripped by the way Detlef retold the tale. In Tiodorov, the two sides of the protagonist were reflected by the two women associated with them, Zhiekhill with his virtuous wife and Chaida with a brazen slut of the streets. Detlef had taken this tired cliché and replaced the stick figures with human beings.

Sonja Zhiekhill, played by Illona Horvathy, was a restless, passionate woman, bored enough with her husband to take a young cossack as a lover and attracted, despite herself, to the twisted and dangerous Mr Chaida. While Nita, the harlot, was played by Eva Savinien as a lost child, willing to endure the brutal treatment of Chaida because the monster at least pays her some attention.

The murder scene drew gasps from the auditorium, and the ghost knew Detlef would, in order to increase the clamour for tickets, spread around a rumour that ladies fainted by the dozen. While Detlef’s Chaida might be a triumph of the stage, the most chilling depiction of pure evil he had ever seen, there was no doubt that the revelation of the play was Eva Savinien’s tragic Nita. In A Farce of the Fog, Eva had taken and transformed the dullest of parts – the faithful maidservant – and this was her first chance to graduate to anything like a leading role. Eva’s glowing performance made the ghost’s chest swell wet with pride, for she was currently his special interest.

Noticing her when she first came to the company, he had exerted his influence to help her along. Eva’s triumph was also his. Her Nita quite outshone Illona Horvathy’s higher-billed heroine, and the Trapdoor Daemon wondered whether there was anything of Genevieve Dieudonné in Detlef’s writing of the part.

The scene was the low dive behind the temple of Shallya, where Chaida makes his lodging, and Chaida was trying to get rid of Nita. Earlier, he had arranged an assignation here with Sonja, believing his seduction of the wife he still believes virtuous will signify an utter triumph over the Zhiekhill half of his soul. The argument that led to murder was over the pettiest of things, a pair of shoes without which Nita refuses to go out into the snow-thick streets of Kislev. Gradually, a little fire came into Nita’s complaints and, for the first time, she tried to stand up to her brutish protector. Finally, almost as an afterthought, Chaida struck the girl down with a mailed glove, landing a blow of such force that a splash of blood erupted from her skull like juice from a crushed orange.

Stage blood flew.

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Warhammer horror

A Black Library Publication

First published in Great Britain in 2019 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.
Cover illustration by Alex Boyd.

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ISBN: 978-1-78999-621-0

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