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The Hunt – David Annandale

About the Author

An Extract from ‘Genevieve Undead’

A Black Library Publication

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The Hunt

by David Annandale

The screams are growing louder.

You know they are. Ever since they began, more than a month ago now, the wails have torn the nights apart with greater ferocity. The sounds claw at the darkness. You can almost see the gashes, bright as lightning, lingering as guilt. You can almost see them. When you close your eyes, they are there in your personal darkness, flashing and throbbing with each peak of the howls. You don’t close your eyes often, though. Not if you can help it. Because there is something you can see.

You see what is screaming. You see the spectral host. The screams are louder because the phantoms are closer. Night after night, they draw nearer. They are coming for you, Bered Davan. They first appeared as a foul glimmer on the horizon, barely visible to you, invisible to anyone else. With each fall of dark, they have closed in. It has been a gradual approach, though they are close enough now that you can see that they are racing wildly to reach you. The ground they cover is not the same as that which you tread. They must cross great ethereal distances before they reach you. That is a small comfort, but at least it exists. You still have some time. A little, but it is yours to act in, however you choose to do so.

Have you been choosing wisely? You think not, though it is becoming more and more difficult to think. You have slept so little since the howling began. You never sleep at night now, and only in brief fits during the day. Time, yes, but so little. So very, very little. Like a tide, the host’s approach is imperceptible moment by moment. Like a tide, it cannot be stopped. Unlike a tide, it will never recede.

The spectres will come until they fall upon you. The end will be bad. You should try to fight them. You don’t think you can. You know you cannot defeat such a horror on your own. You know you are strong. But you also know that you lack strength enough to try. And so your portion of shame grows, for this, witch hunter, is not how you should face your end.

You have been at the casement of your bedchamber all night. Your quarters, in the peak of a thin tower near the centre of the Free City of Everyth in the realm of Ghyran, give you a fine perspective of encroaching fate. You have spent the hours of darkness looking out over the steeply gabled, moss-covered roofs below, watching your doom, futilely covering your ears against the shrieks. You watch the host as you would a storm. Its movements are furious, though it closes in slowly. You can see it far better than you would like. What started as a glow, and then a mist with dreadful purpose, has become an army. You see the shapes of spectres.

You see the thing that leads them. It is the thing of screams. It is the thing that will destroy you. You even have a name for this horror. Banshee.

This knowledge grants no power. It brings only greater terror.

Dawn breaks, the arrival of grey in the sky that you await with such fervour every night. You try to think of it as a surcease, though you know it is an illusion. The fear is undiminished. The gift of dawn is the silence of the screams, the vanishing of the host. The absence is a lie, because the spectres will be that much closer when night comes again. If you cannot see them, though, and you cannot hear them, then perhaps you will sleep, if only a little. In the slow, twilight hour when Hysh and Ulgu exchange their roles in the dance, when night sighs its last and day gathers its breath, you have found the pause between vigilance and duty. Here alone is the pitiful fragment that is all that remains of rest for you.

You rise from your casement chair and stumble towards the straw mattress that lies in the corner of your chamber. Your quarters are an elevated cell. You disdain luxuries. The chair and the table are carved from aged, fallen timber. A chest holds your clothes and your weapons. There is nothing else. You need nothing else. Nothing else except sleep.

On this day, that is denied you. You lie down, and there is a knock at your door. You contain your sigh, because it might be heard, and you rise again. You take a moment, seeking to gather your energy and your dignity.

As if there were any way to hide the haggard sag of your face.

Your sunken, haunted eyes.

You open the door to Kolth, your servant.

‘Forgive me for waking you, witch hunter,’ he says, his eyes lowered. He has never had the courage to look directly at your face. He is loyal, and he is fiercely proud to serve you as you serve Sigmar, but he fears you, too, and the judgement that you wield. ‘Your help is urgently needed.’

‘Who by?’

‘Thevena Pasala, master.’

It is good that Kolth stares at the floor. Otherwise, he would see your eyes widen at that name. For a long time now, since before even you became a witch hunter, it is a name you cannot hear without a painful spasm of guilt. Today, though, hope flares in your chest. She has asked for you, for your help.

You never dared look to her for redemption. Now, perhaps, it is offered.

You cannot help but think this is a sign. There might yet be a way of halting the doom that comes for you.

Your carriage travels through the twisting streets of Everyth, heading for Rissilant, the manor house that is the home of Thevena Pasala. The journey is frustratingly slow. You have to fight down the illusion that you would get there faster on foot.

Everyth is built on a hillside, its streets not carved out of the rock, but following the natural ridges of the slope. As if in exchange, the ridges are plentiful and level, the hill inviting the presence of a city. Everyth bears the scars of the Age of Chaos, but some of its former beauty has returned. Everyth withstood the long night that preceded the coming of the Stormcast Eternals. Long besieged, it never fell, and it has grown strong again in the new age.

You are part of the reason why this has happened. You are one of Everyth’s saviours. Yet you feel no sense of pride. You feel only guilt. You made a decision, once. It was the correct one. It is the one for which you are desperate to be forgiven. And maybe, today, forgiveness will be yours.

You were not on the ramparts of Everyth when the forces of Sigmar and the hope they brought struck like a cleansing storm in this region of Ghyran. You were at Grenholm Keep, two leagues distant from the city, crowning a lower, rocky promontory overlooking the Allasha river. Grenholm Keep blocked the advance of the Ruinous Powers to Everyth. The siege it withstood went on so long, it seemed to you and your comrades that it was truly eternal. But then the Hallowed Knights marched into Ghyran. The people of Everyth and its environs rallied together into a new army.

This is when you made your decision. You have relived it ten thousand times since that day, and you do again with renewed pain now. Your pulse beats harder as you draw near to Rissilant. This is not fear that shakes you. The spectres at your heels leave no room for you to fear anything but them. If not fear, then this is anxiety compounded of hope and shame.

The choice you faced was simple in its alternatives, complex in its costs. You could continue to defend Grenholm Keep, but its strength was expended. Its fall could not be long in coming.

(You insist on telling yourself this even now.)

Or you could abandon Grenholm to the inevitable, and join what would become the Freeguild of Everyth and fight to save the city.

Your comrades refused to abandon their posts. You were swept up in the great fervour for Sigmar. You fought for Everyth, and Everyth prevailed.

And Grenholm Keep fell.

Thevena Pasala was your oldest friend. You would have died for each other. Yet you left her with all the others in Grenholm Keep. When the daemons of the Plague God, Nurgle, were finally thrown back, and the shambling, festering horrors were purged from the guttering ruins of the keep, Thevena was one of the few mortals to emerge from the rubble. Even with your blood burning with the flames of victory and of faith, you could not bring yourself to face Thevena. You did not speak to her then, nor on any occasion since. You knew what she and the few other survivors would think of you.

Even when you became a witch hunter, and your name was spoken in whispers across Everyth, you did not seek her out. How could she forgive you? Had positions been reversed, you would not have forgiven her.

Today, though, something has changed. Something is different. Miracles are possible today.

Thevena is waiting on the steps of Rissilant when your carriage arrives. You alight, and she descends the stairs with her arms reaching forward. You hurry to her, and you embrace. You do not care who witnesses this unguarded display of emotion in the fearsome witch hunter. There is no time for dissembling and a denial of what you feel. The warmth of her welcome is more than you ever dared to hope for. It is more than you deserve, and you tell her so a short while later, when the two of you are sitting in the withdrawing chamber on the second floor of Rissilant.

‘We faced hard choices in the end, at Grenholm,’ Thevena says gently. ‘You did what you thought was right.’

‘Do you think it was?’

She laughs. ‘How can I judge a witch hunter?’

‘I’m asking you to.’ Your voice has dropped to a murmur.

She sees that you are serious, and that you put much stock in her answer. The seconds pass while she thinks. At last, she says, ‘I know what I felt on that day.’

You wince.

‘But I survived,’ she adds quickly. ‘And look.’ She waves a hand to take in the chamber. ‘I have done better than survive. I am thriving.’ It is true. Over the years, she has become one of the most prosperous merchants in Everyth. She and you were born under the tyranny of the Ruinous Powers. You never knew anything except the privations of struggle and war. She has become wealthy. She could not be what she is now if there were no longer an Everyth. ‘If there had not been a rush to defend the city, perhaps it and the keep would have fallen. Maybe you saved me by abandoning me.’

She smiles, but you cannot.

‘I cannot judge,’ she says. ‘I’m sorry, but I can’t.’

Can you forgive? you want to ask. The dread of no holds your tongue. Thevena’s equivocation makes you question the full depth of her welcome. Even with her wealth and position, she can no more cross a witch hunter than can Kolth.

There are so many things you wish you could say. Don’t be afraid of me. I’m Bered. Just Bered. If I could change what happened at Grenholm Keep, I would, but I can’t, and I need you to understand I did what had to be done. You believe that. You must. Don’t you?

Instead, you say, ‘Why did you send for me?’

‘Because I have evidence of a cult devoted to Chaos at work in the city.’

‘Show me.’ You are on safe ground. You can speak with authority again.

Thevena rises and pulls a chest across the floor to where the two of you are seated before her ivy-covered balcony. She lifts the lid and reveals a jumble of food cases and the bottoms of barrels.

The reason for her concern is obvious. Dark runes have been burned into the surface of every object in the chest.

‘This is all from one shipment,’ she says. ‘We had an entire caravan of provisions prepared for the journey east, towards Mhurghast.’ The plague daemons have been pushed back many leagues in that direction. Thevena does much to supply the efforts of Everyth’s Freeguild to purge the spawn of plagues from Ghyran altogether. What she has found in here is serious.

‘And the provisions?’ you ask.

‘Tainted. Turned to poison. I would never have known if a barrel had not fallen from a wagon and broken. When we saw what was inside, we checked the rest. We might have killed hundreds...’

‘Who is your cooper?’

There will be no further talk of forgiveness or the past. You will do what your calling demands of you, and cling to the hope that forgiveness does lie down this path, and with it escape from the screaming dead.

You reach the cooper’s not long after work for the day has begun. It is a warehouse and workshop combined. This a prosperous enterprise, but Thevena has warned you that she suspects the owner, Aran Folkene, has ties to dubious elements in Everyth. His buildings are at the edge of the artisan quarter of the city, and its back looks out upon the narrower, darker alleys that twist through areas heavily damaged during the wars. Fire has swept through this part of the city more than once, and much of it still lies in ruins. The people who live here do not have the means to rebuild, and few in the rest of Everyth have the interest or the will.

You enter the warehouse from the rear doors. Silence falls as if cast by your shadow. The workers stop in mid-task, their faces stricken by the sight of your dark cloak and wide, feathered hat. You stand in the doorway, waiting, letting the simple threat of your presence do its work.

You have done this so many times before. You are good at it. Today, you can barely concentrate. The night is still a fresh memory. The phantoms were so close.

It is only morning, but the night to come is rushing for you, the hours flowing away like water.

Whispers spread through the warehouse, and it is only a short time before Aran Folkene trots across the floor to you, his hands clasped in obsequious modesty, his head bowed.

‘Witch Hunter Davan,’ he says, ‘you honour us. How can I be of service?’

You stroll past him, towards a row of completed barrels. You raise the lids one by one. ‘I have seen containers bearing the marks of Chaos. Containers supplied by you.’

He turns pale.

‘There must be some mistake. We are loyal servants of Sigmar, all of us.’

‘That would be reassuring,’ you say, ‘if I believed you.’ You look back at the entrance, and the blackened ruins beyond.

‘I do not judge my workers by their origins,’ Aran says quietly.

‘Perhaps you should.’ You turn back to the barrels. You have seen no runes yet, but your work has just begun.

You raise your voice, addressing everyone in the warehouse. ‘You will leave this space. You will wait for me in the front of the shop. All of you. Wait, and be ready to answer my questions.’

‘Witch hunter...’ Aran begins.

‘You too.’

You stare at him until he complies.

Once you are alone, you move quickly through the rows of barrels and crates, torch in hand, prying open lids at random. You find nothing. It is possible that no tainted receptacles remain. This would be unfortunate. The less evidence you find, the more forceful your methods of interrogation will have to be.

There is a pyramid of barrels against the far wall. You stop at the foot of the pile. It is constructed in steps, making it possible to climb to the top row and pull the barrels down. If there are any more of the unclean objects still in the warehouse, this would be a good place to hide them.

You start to climb, torch still in hand. The shadows are thick here, and they waver in the light of the flame. You are three levels up when one shadow, next to the wall, detaches itself from the others and hurls itself at you.

What chance does a mortal attacker have against you? You, who have been claimed as prey by the dead?

You thrust the torch into the face of the assassin. He screams as his hood catches fire. Yet he does not retreat. He attacks still, already dying and maddened with pain, but driven to kill you by some greater force than his own will to live. Blind, he slashes at you, forcing you back a step. You draw your sword and drive its point through the man’s neck.

The corpse tumbles down the barrels to the ground.

You descend, stamp out the flames on the smouldering cloak and hood, and examine the assassin. His features are burned beyond recognition. His clothes are finely sewn, though. This was a man of means. You were too quick to make assumptions about Aran’s workforce.

You continue your examination. The man bears no jewellery, though there are veins of ur-gold in the hilt of his sword. When you cut open his tunic, you find tattoos. You grunt twice, first with satisfaction, then with shock. You expected to find the runes of Chaos, and the slithering shapes mark this wretch as a worshipper of Slaanesh.

You did not expect to find the sign of vines entwining a mace.

The sign of Grenholm Keep.

You step back from the corpse, breathing heavily. The path before you is clear, and you dread it.

You must return to the keep.

The night and your past are reaching out to seize you.

Day is failing as you climb the hill towards Grenholm Keep. How can the hours have slipped away so quickly? How could it have taken you so long to prepare, and so long to travel to the keep? How could you have been so spendthrift with your waning time?

If there are answers, they do not matter. Soon, the screams will return. Soon, you will see the host. You do not know if they will reach you this night. But they might. They are so close now.

At least you are not alone. Thevena is at your side, armed as she has not been since the siege. Her chain mail was once a verdant green, but it was battered and bloodied so during the siege that little of its original colour remains. Thevena kept it as a memorial to the dead of the keep, and she has donned it again in their honour, and, she has explained, as a symbol against the betrayal of Grenholm’s spirit that you found marked on the assassin.

You should not have gone back to Rissilant. You should not have told her what you found. This is not her fight. You should have made your preparations and headed out. But the dread of the night was too strong.

You feel the cold breath of fate on your neck. You feel the end approach. And if this night is to be your last, though it fills your soul with shame to give in to such craven emotions, you could not bear the thought of disappearing into silence. You wanted someone to know where you had gone and why. So you spoke to Thevena.

There was no one else. Your path has been a lonely one. You had comrades in Grenholm Keep. Since then, you have not. You have only had suspects and servants. Kolth has been loyal, but you do not see him as your peer. You need to be remembered by someone worthy.

But most of all, you need to be remembered by Thevena, and remembered without hate.

You did not expect her to accompany you. So you tell yourself, repeatedly, until this seems to be something very like the truth. You are glad she is there, though. For so many reasons, you are glad. If she has not explicitly forgiven you, she has not condemned you, either. You will follow the trail of the Slaaneshi cult and exterminate every member, and she might well bear witness to that, and though what you do, you do for Sigmar, if this helps her too… well, that will sit well with you.

And you will not be alone on this night. You will not be alone.

You think you might be performing your final tasks as witch hunter. If you can act honourably until the end, you tell yourself you will be satisfied.

The ruins of Grenholm Keep loom before you. The green has not covered them. The fallen towers and tumbled walls remain bare, like the bleached bones of a leviathan. The destruction the forces of Chaos wreaked here was too savage. The land has not been able to begin healing yet.

‘How many survived?’ you ask Thevena.

‘I don’t know. I saw no one else when I emerged, but that means little. I was below ground, alone, for days.’

There is no adequate response to that statement, so you make none.

‘To fight so long against Chaos, and then betray the cause when the light of Sigmar has come to us...’ Thevena sighs. ‘I do not like to think any of our comrades on the ramparts had it in them to be so treacherous.’

‘Nor do I.’

The talk of betrayal makes you uncomfortable, even though it is treachery that you have come here to find.

The last of twilight fails when you are less than a hundred yards from the ruins. The darkness of Ulgu covers Ghyran. You have been bracing yourself these past moments, and yet you are not prepared for the fury of the scream. It is enormous. It is as if the firmament itself howls in anger. You stagger. You gasp.

‘Bered?’ Thevena asks. ‘What is it? Are you ill?’

I am not ill, you think. I am doomed. You look behind you. The spectral host is at the bottom of the hill, closer than it has ever been before, and encircling the rise. This is the night, then. This is the reckoning. There will be no escape. You cannot descend from Grenholm Keep, and you do not doubt that the phantoms will reach the ruins before dawn.

The banshee points up the slope, her hair and robes billowing in the ethereal wind. She sees you, and her scream surrounds you, consumes you, and scrapes you hollow. You turn away with a groan, stumbling again, and Thevena holds you up.

‘Do you not hear them?’ you ask. ‘Do you not see them?’

‘See what?’

You shake your head. ‘Nothing. Nothing. An attack has begun, but it does not concern you.’ It is better that she cannot see what is coming for you. It would be wrong for her to become an innocent victim of your fate.

Of what am I guilty? you want to cry out. You do not, because you know the answer. The truth is all the more obvious since Thevena sees and hears nothing. The dead are the comrades you abandoned. They have been waiting for you to return to Grenholm Keep to exact their revenge.

I betrayed nothing. I fought for Ghyran. I fight for Sigmar.

You wish your protestations carried more conviction in your heart.

How can the truth feel so much like a lie?

No matter. No matter. You have a calling, and you will not abandon it now. You steady your breathing. You walk more quickly, as if even a small increase of distance could diminish the intensity of that shriek. You will learn what there is to learn in Grenholm Keep, and if you must die here, then you will charge Thevena to carry the knowledge found here back to Everyth, to raise the alarm, and to take the battle to the cult.

You reach the gate of the keep. It is open, and passing through it no longer leads to a courtyard beyond the walls. Instead, the collapse of the keep has created a dome of rubble. You and Thevena penetrate into the darkness, your torches a weak circle of light revealing the angles of shattered stonework, scarred with burns. You see window frames turned on their sides and filled with boulders, fragments of staircases scattered like wheat, hints of corridors leading off like web strands into abyssal blackness.

Thevena’s breath catches. She pales, and it is clear now that she is finding each step as difficult as you are. ‘I had hoped I would never be here again,’ she says.

You can see the nightmare of her final days in the keep surfacing in her memory, attacking her as savagely as the shriek that is calling for you. ‘You should go,’ you say.

She shakes her head. ‘This is too important.’

Then you will face your ordeals together. You raise your torch higher, spreading the light a bit further. You examine the slumped walls of rubble, looking for any sign of your prey. It is almost impossible for you to concentrate on your task. The scream is growing louder and louder. You are running out of time.

Why have you come here? Why have you hastened your end? Why are you still trying to finish a struggle that you cannot win in the time remaining to you? Why do you not flee?

Your breath is coming in quick gasps. Inside your leather gauntlets, your palms are cold and covered in sweat.

Then you see it. Where the broken cobbles drop away in a steep slope, a rune, malevolently sensuous in its curves, has been daubed in blood on a broken slab.

‘There,’ you say, and then stop.

The shriek is in the ruins with you. It shakes dust from the roof of stone. There is too much light, and it is a terrible light, the sickly glow of sepulchres. You turn, and the banshee is in the gateway, phantoms raging about her.

‘No,’ you say, and take a step backward. ‘Help me,’ you beg Thevena.

You do not want to die. Not like this. The last of your discipline breaks. You thought you could fight until the end. You were wrong. The terror that has come is too great. You resisted until the moment came, and here is your limit. You are not the warrior you were called upon to be.

You experience a moment of clarity that you have been suppressing for years. You know the answer to the question of whether you rushed to join the Devoted of Sigmar, or fled Grenholm Keep.

The knowledge snaps you in half.

‘Can’t you see them?’ you cry hopelessly. ‘Can’t you hear them?’

And then, suddenly, gloriously, you are no longer alone.

‘I do,’ Thevena says, and her eyes are wide with fear. She covers her ears.

‘They are here for me,’ you say.

Two things happen at once. The host bursts into the ruins, and Thevena takes your arm and the two of you run, sliding and slipping down the slope. The banshee howls in rage, her hands snatching for you, and missing by a breath.

Down you flee, and surely it is Sigmar who guides your footsteps and keeps you from falling, for you succeed in putting some distance between yourselves and the spectres.

‘I’ll hide you!’ Thevena shouts. You can barely hear her.

‘How?’

‘Where I sheltered from the Maggotkin.’

You can think of nothing better, and to follow in Thevena’s footsteps somehow seems fitting. You will repeat her ordeal, and it was one from which she emerged.

The rune you saw is unimportant now. If you survive, you will hunt again.

You descend deep in the dark. The shadows thicken, pushing against the light of the torches. You can barely see two steps ahead, and the scream of the banshee threatens to shatter your skull in two.

You reach a lower vault, one that is still relatively intact. Water is trickling in from somewhere. It is an inch deep on the floor. Thevena splashes across the vault to the far wall. She kneels and pushes a stone aside, revealing a cavity in the base of the wall. ‘In here,’ she says.

You approach. You look into blackness. You hesitate.

The glow of the phantoms fills the vault. There is no more time, and there is nowhere else to run.

There is a sudden, slicing flash of pain in the back of your legs and you fall, twisting. You land on your back, and Thevena is standing over you, holding the sword she used to sever your tendons. She glances back at the phantoms and hurries to push you into the hole.

You shake your head. You want to plead, to beg, and to ask why, why, why? The words do not come, but Thevena answers all the same, because she wants you to know, she needs you to know.

‘There is ecstasy in purest revenge,’ she whispers. ‘I have given my worship for this ecstasy. It is glorious.’ She hisses in delight and gives you a final push.

As you slide into the dark, your last sight of Thevena is of her exultation just before the spirits fall upon her, screaming in rage.

Too late, you understand. The host was a warning, its ghostly arms seeking futilely to arrest your fate.

You slide until you come to a jarring stop, your head jerked to a sharp angle and held tight between stone. You are wedged upside down between tonnes of rubble, the jagged texture of the stone pressing against your back and chest. Foul water trickles into your mouth. You choke and gag, but you catch rasping breaths in between retching.

In your mind, you are screaming, believing yourself to be absolutely alone.

You are wrong. I am here with you. I am a keeper of secrets, and you will be my secret plaything for an age of exquisite torment.

About the Author

David Annandale is the author of the novella The Faith and the Flesh, which features in the Warhammer Horror portmanteau The Wicked and the Damned. His work for the Horus Heresy range includes the novels Ruinstorm and The Damnation of Pythos, and the Primarchs novels Roboute Guilliman: Lord of Ultramar and Vulkan: Lord of Drakes. For Warhammer 40,000 he has written Warlord: Fury of the God-Machine, the Yarrick series, and several stories involving the Grey Knights, as well as titles for The Beast Arises and the Space Marine Battles series. For Warhammer Age of Sigmar he has written Neferata: Mortarch of Blood. David lectures at a Canadian university, on subjects ranging from English literature to horror films and video games.

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 illustrations by Dave Greco and Alex Boyd.

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ISBN: 978-1-78999-619-7

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