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A Moment of Cruelty – Phil Kelly

About the Author

An Extract from ‘Dark Harvest’

A Black Library Imprint

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A Moment of Cruelty

Phil Kelly

Alabastian Valenth the First awoke to the surging patter of sleet on his bedroom window. He groaned, scratching his hip as his sleep-gummed eyes peeled open. Feeble light diffused through the musky fug that hung in his bedroom. Always so damn gloomy in Shyish. Not like Azyr. Not like the land of his true birthright.

Mhurghast’s sun had always been weak. It was why the mists lingered in the city’s streets so long. They made people-watching out of the Valenth mansion’s attic window, his favourite pastime when drink-ridden and melancholy, a rare indulgence. ‘A kind of morbid voyeurism,’ his best friend Harratio had called it. Perhaps there was some truth in that, for he had developed a habit of idly dwelling on peasants’ tales whilst staring into the mist. Tales of tortured phantoms and leering cannibals, of hungry things that could take human form and beasts that walked as men.

How wonderful it would be to have a proper summer to burn the mists away. Just a few weeks of undiluted Hyshian sunshine to put some colour in his pale skin and banish the dark thoughts. Was that too much to ask?

The young noble raised an arm, bleary-eyed. He turned the limb in the half-light, a master carpenter examining a pearwood carving fresh from the lathe. Still near perfect, even in his late twenties. Still wrinkle-free, blemish-free. Small wonder so many ingénues and princelings had shared his bed sheets of late.

Alabastian cut a dash in the high society of Mhurghast, and used his reputation as an eligible scion to full effect. In fact, in the recent past, he had been described by one of his admirers as magnificent. He smiled at the memory, stretching like a cat, then winced as a beam of afternoon sun crept into the corner of his eye. Admittedly he was not feeling quite so magnificent today, but given that he preferred to sleep alone – and had kicked out many a conquest during the small hours to ensure it – it hardly mattered. A slow, insidious headache was mounting an offensive on his frontal lobe, almost certainly thanks to another late night with Harratio and his viciously strong–

Pater Nagash! His costume meet!

Alabastian sat bolt upright in a tangle of stained silk, stomach lurching with a queasy bulge of vomit that he only just managed to keep down. How could he be so careless? He cast a bitter glance at Mother’s water clock by his bed, the Azyrite relic accusing him as usual with its constant drip, drip, drip. Three hours late. He reached over to turn the clock sideways, but his drink-torpor made him clumsy, and he knocked it into the cupboard instead. The intricate artefact spun away, bouncing hard off the chaise longue before shattering on the floor’s mosaic of bluestone and jet.

‘Damn it all.’

Slowly he felt his rage dwindle and pass into sullen languor and irritation. The floor was always a little too cold for his bare feet, no matter how much wood he had Maltratt burn in the hearth overnight. Now, with shards of broken glass scattered across it, it would be even more obnoxious to cross to the bathroom. And with Mother gone, he would have to get the staff to clean it up all by himself.

With a great, shuddering sigh, Alabastian hauled himself out of the other side of the bed. He stepped around the periphery of the room with exaggerated, careful steps. A shard of Azyrite crystal punctured the meat of his foot nonetheless. He hissed, breathing hard, before finding the splinter. His questing fingers yanked it out to send droplets of blood pattering onto the bluestone. A howl of pain echoed down the corridor.

Moments later the heavy thuds of the house guard shook the stairs.

‘Sire,’ came the voice of his head guard, Maltratt. ‘Are you hurt?’ She had a deep voice, for a woman, but given her wrestler’s build perhaps that was little surprise.

‘It’s just a splinter, damn it. You idle buffoons can go back to your card game.’

‘If you are sure you are well, sir, I will leave you,’ said Maltratt. She bowed stiffly, and made for the stairs. Xarantine, her second-in-command, met his gaze for a moment with a look of barely concealed contempt. ‘Our apologies for disturbing your morning exercise,’ she said, turning to follow her reporting officer back downstairs.

Maltratt was deferential enough, but her second-in-command had never liked him. Since Mother had passed away, the redhead hadn’t been afraid to show it.

‘Xarantine?’

‘What?’ she said, turning back with her eyes hooded.

‘Get Lassiter to prepare me a coach. I’m running late. I depart in fifteen minutes for the costumiers, to the very second.’

‘You gave him the day off, remember? After getting back so late last night.’

‘What? I don’t remember doing that.’

Xarantine raised an eyebrow, her lips pursed.

‘Fine then,’ he said, shaking his head to clear some of the muzzy spider silk of his headache. ‘I’m perfectly capable of walking there. I’m a grown man, after all.’

‘Very good.’ The guardswoman’s expression suggested he was anything but. Alabastian smiled mirthlessly, and slammed the door in her face.

The mist from the River Hisset rose over the Necrai Bridge like a revenant crawling from an open grave. Purple-grey, it curled its long fingers through the column-lined sides to cover the flagstones in a haze of clinging condensation. Beyond it the palace dominated the horizon, the baroque shadow of mansions built around it in the Azyrite style only just visible through the mist.

‘More like cursed Ulgu than Shyish, these days,’ muttered Alabastian. ‘Malerion’s breath everywhere.’ In truth the cool, wet mist was not near as dangerous as its Ulguan equivalent. It was a mere inconvenience rather than a hungering, sentient force. Yet the things it could hide gave him a delicious shiver of fear, the undead foremost amongst them.

Face your terrors, Mother had always said. Perhaps that was why he and Harratio had chosen to dress as long-skulled, blood-slicked gheists for the coming Lunaghast Ball, cushions stuffed under their tattered cloaks to give them the hunchbacked silhouettes of glaivewraiths. Legend had it the hunter-spirits were slow creatures, but that the spearing, piercing blades they held before them were inescapable. Much like Pater Nagash’s revenge. The young nobles had considered it an apt metaphor for their rise to prominence in Mhurghast society. Slow, but inevitable.

As he strode towards his rendezvous at the costumier’s, the mist’s chill grasped Alabastian’s shoulders and pushed its invisible talons into the meat of his chest. He pulled his jade pashmina tighter, tucking its ends into his doublet. Good cloth, he thought, distracting himself by admiring its pattern of interlocking Valenth heraldry. A fine garment with which to impress Harratio, and one with a story behind it, for it had been bought for a pittance from a desperate Azyrite seamstress. Yet against the penetrating cold of the Mhurghast night, it was about as much use as a lacy negligee.

A stooped shadow shuffled from the mist to his left, becoming a yellow-toothed woman with a missing leg. She was about Xarantine’s age, but had more in common with a stooped crone, presumably through the trials of what had obviously been a very hard life. Her smashed-up features were twisted into an eager expression, a brown plague-stain on her forehead as if she had been splashed with blood that she had never bothered to wash off.

‘Sally from the castle,’ she said. ‘Water for a tale?’

‘I think not.’

‘I can spin a fine yarn about the Old War, laddie, if you have a drop of aqua to loosen the tongue.’

‘None for you, wretch,’ said Alabastian. ‘I have better things to spend my money on than hot air.’

‘Sally from the castle!’ she shouted after him, as if he would bother to remember her name. His hand strayed to protect the leather-bound phials of aqua ghyranis at his waist. It was precious stuff. Even a few drips of the sacred water could cure a common ailment, or revive a dying rose with which to impress a paramour. Used as a currency across the realms, it was a mark of status to own even one full globe of the stuff. The Valenth dynasty had once owned three entire vats of it.

Alabastian moved to the other side of the bridge to get away from the deranged woman’s accusing glare, and found another shadow solidifying in the mist to his right. A threadbare blanket was spread out before a skeletally thin craftswoman, trinkets of Shyishan poormetal and crow’s bones tied with plaited hair spread across her cloth in an impressive fan pattern.

By the fact there were no gaps in the design, business had not been brisk.

‘Talisman for the young dasher?’

‘If you are living proof of the luck they bring,’ said Alabastian, ‘then I will firmly decline.’

More beggars and madmen lined the bridge, crooning or hawking their wares. They were almost certainly Reclaimed, those poor and underprivileged natives of Shyish who had somehow survived the reign of Chaos and, since the raising of the new cities, found refuge amongst the new wave of Azyrite settlers. They had a reputation for being unkempt, embittered and usually wounded, in mind if not in body.

Alabastian cursed his own tardiness. If he had woken up before late afternoon, he could have taken the Bridge of Nobles before it shut for the evening. He could even have stopped for a little gossip with Ghuara and the rest of the Black Halberds at Bridge’s End, so as to have something to offer Harratio.

Instead he was running the gauntlet of the poor and the disfigured, the madness of the Old War reflected in the eyes of those who had only just escaped it. He clucked in disapproval whenever a shadow approached him in the mist, and steered away, making for the central span to better avoid the living detritus at the bridge’s edge.

For a moment, the mist parted, and Alabastian’s eyes were drawn to the sparkling amethyst lights of the waterfront. All those high buildings and glass-roofed palaces made for a grand sight, their rain-slick obsidian gleaming with the moisture of the River Hisset.

‘Please,’ came a wheezing, phlegm-thick voice.

Alabastian nearly tripped over a kneeling figure, all but prostrate, on the flagstones.

‘A drop, sire. Please.’

The beggar was clad in a filthy green jerkin, head down as if in genuflection. A ratty, threadbare shawl covered most of his features, one eye staring out from the wrapping where the other was no more than a cataracted lump. The man’s arms were outstretched, lined with the most terrible sores, and his palms were offered up as if to receive a gift. Alabastian nearly choked in disgust as he saw the beggar was missing three of his fingers. The stumps were still wet with half-dissolute flesh, a fluid like off-white gruel dripping from the stubby remnants of his digits.

‘Please,’ hissed the apparition, his voice dry and hoarse. ‘Please. I beg of you. Just a drop.’

‘I think not,’ said Alabastian, staggering in his haste to get away. ‘Better luck in the next life.’

He pressed on, looking back to dispel a horrible, irrational suspicion the leprous beggar was crawling after him. He heard something skitter in the mist, and for a moment imagined the creature shuffling on all fours towards him at unnatural speed. Must have been a bloat-rat, he told himself. Nothing more.

Still the young noble felt a burning need to run home and wash himself, to scrub his skin from head to toe in as hot a bath as he could stand. The idea of meeting with Harratio and playing at costumes had lost all its lustre. He wanted nothing more than to hide in his bedroom and blast that spectre from his mind with some strong Glymmsforge sweetblack. Yet already he had committed one faux pas by being tardy for a dressmaker’s appointment. To miss it altogether would invite social rancour from an influential friend, and that he could not afford.

Alabastian pressed on through the mist, glad beyond words to reach the far end of the bridge. Beyond it lay the cobbled streets that stretched towards the Artisanry District. The Black Halberds kept the riff-raff off the main streets; their wages depended on it. He passed two of the guards at the bridge’s barbican, their upright silhouettes in stark contrast to those of the dregs on the bridge.

‘Evening, sire,’ one of them ventured.

‘It is that,’ he replied. ‘Though not a good one.’

Something of his usual confidence bled into Alabastian’s step once more as he continued on past the guards into the well-paved streets of Jeweller’s Row and made his way for Tzendril’s Costumiers. Perhaps something could be salvaged from the day after all.

‘I tell you, Harratio,’ said Alabastian, adjusting his codpiece with a great show of effort, ‘it’s an absolute shithole when you stray past the Halberds.’

‘How so?’ said his friend, his slender physique revealed once more as he shed the glaivewraith costume’s inner framework and tossed it casually aside. ‘I mean, one hears things, of course, but I haven’t been out of the Quarter for months.’

It was a well-known fact that Harratio d’Asbe rarely ventured out of the city’s Temple, Palace and Artisan districts. The d’Asbes were even richer than the Valenths, which alone had elevated their eldest son to heroic status amongst their peers. Yet on matters outside his clique, he was painfully naïve.

‘You should see the peasants massing on the bridge,’ said Alabastian. ‘Hawkers, thriftsmen, grafters and grifters of all stripes. Stop for even a moment and you’ll walk away with your phials dry and your shoes filthy.’

‘How repugnant.’ The d’Asbe looked down his beak of a nose towards Alabastian as if he himself may have become infected. He turned to the costumier, dismissing him with a wave of his white silk glove.

‘I know. I live in fear of one of them touching my skin. Transmitting lice or something. If that happened I’d see them all burnt alive.’

‘I pity you, dear Basti. Over this side of the water, we talk not of fleas, nor paupers, but of velvet-tongued beauties who shift form the better to entice you.’

Alabastian managed a thin smile. ‘One day, I’ll be over this side of the river with you.’

‘Improving one’s lot is purely a matter of persistence.’

‘That and ruthlessness, perhaps. Not something we Valenths have ever lacked.’

‘You say that, handsome,’ said Harratio, ‘but I know you better than that. You’re too soft for this side of town.’

‘Soft as the steel I’ll see sprout from your back, one day.’

Harratio pretended to look appalled, then shrugged and flicked him a kiss from long, well-manicured fingertips. ‘Just make sure I’m wearing the glaivewraith costume first.’

‘The seamsters have done a fine job, but I still think Pater Nagash might spot you for the callow youth you are.’

‘He knows us all, in the end. There is no escape.’

Alabastian frowned at the odd comment, approaching the velvet-shrouded mirror at the back of the room and idly moving its concealing cloth with an outstretched finger.

‘Leave that, please,’ said Harratio. ‘It’s an heirloom I’m taking over to Aunt Dauntrice. Father won’t trust a courier with it. If he sees so much as a finger-smear upon its glass, I’ll feel his horsewhip.’

‘Still a tyrant, then.’

‘Only when he prises himself from the morgue,’ sniffed Harratio. ‘Anyway. See you at the ball next week. We’re meeting at the Jewel for sundown. Don’t be late this time, or I’ll blacken your reputation even further.’

‘After today, the party can’t come soon enough.’

‘You should take Negatian Bridge on your way back, if you want to avoid all that horridness.’

Sketching a salute with his glass before downing the salty, liquorice-foul sweetblack in a single draught, Alabastian turned to open the doors wide. He took a deep breath of cool air. Free from the cloying scents of the costumiers, he found his spirits were quite restored – and not just because of the fortifying liquor he and Harratio had supped on throughout the fitting session. This was his city, he told himself, ripe for the taking. He would tear through her social strata one after another until all looked up to him. Even Harratio, king of Mhurghast’s trendsetters, would kneel to him one day. It was his birthright; they would be his adoring acolytes, one way or another. He had the beauty for it, and the drive. Woe betide any who tried to stop him.

Chin jutting and chest full, Alabastian strode out into the night without looking back.

When he was sure Alabastian would not return, Harratio headed for the mirror on the drawer-board. Carefully taking the shroud from the mirror, folding it and putting it in his leather satchel, he took out a trio of candles and lit them with an heirloom spark-box. The room filled with the scent of sizzling fat, the porcine tang of burning human tallow wafting from the wicks. Harratio said three ancient words of power, and within the mirror coalesced a reflection.

The image was rippled, making him feel like he was gazing up at it from within a deep black pool. And perhaps he was.

The apparition slowly resolved into something pox-scarred and foul, and then, as the light of recognition lit its one good eye, it bared its rotting teeth in something approximating a smile.

The River Hisset was still sending up its mists as Alabastian ventured towards the Necrai Bridge. He felt a thin gruel of fear creep up his throat at the thought of seeing the beggar again, being forced to witness those horrible, flesh-drizzling finger stubs once more, but he choked it down. Face your terrors, he told himself.

Yet as he grew closer, as the bridge’s statues loomed out of the grey-white nothingness, he found his feet leading him away. There was no rush, no time pressure now that Harratio had been mollified, and the poor etiquette of his being late faded into the province of jest. He would confront his fears tomorrow, perhaps, in the light of day.

Remembering Harratio’s advice, Alabastian walked right past the Necrai Bridge and onwards along the river embankment. He heard the vague, distant clank of rigging against masts, the occasional babble of conversation drifting up from one of the river barges below. The sweetblack had given everything a kind of pleasant numbness, and the chill he had felt on his way over was kept at bay by a feeling of warm-skinned bonhomie. His path seemed to be weaving a little more than he intended it to, but the guardian rail – a wide slab atop sculpted caryatids that were painfully thin in the Athanasian fashion – helped him keep his bearings.

In fact, the journey seemed to be taking longer than it should have. Some of the voices in the fog had become harsh, menacing croaks, sounding barely human with the distortion of the river fog. He had a brief vision of a glaivewraith drifting in towards him, its distended horse-skull grinning behind the tip of a long polearm aimed straight for his heart. Once more he remembered Mother’s words from when he was a boy. It is not wise to mock the servants of Nagash, lest they come for you, and prove how deadly they are.

The sounds were getting louder, out there in the mist. Weird groans, distorted and wordless under the mournful cawing of gulls.

He put some confidence back in his stride, hand resting on his dress-dagger’s hilt as if he knew how to use it. What did the young and vital have to fear of musty old spectres? He was vaguely aware it was the liquor talking; such bottle-born courage was the reason it had been invented by the Glymmsforge alcomysts. But it worked.

Still, when the tall stanchions of the Negatian Bridge came into view, Alabastian felt a sensation of relief blossom within his gut. A left turn here, a left again on the other side, and he would be back on track.

The Negatian Bridge was narrower than the Necrai, and had less statuary, but with far less in the way of footfall it was usually free of mendicants. He increased his pace up the slight incline, hoping–

‘Please…’

There was a dark figure on his left, bowed low as if in supplication to a king.

‘Please, Master Valenth. Just a drop.’

Alabastian’s heart felt like it was going to explode. It was the beggar from the Necrai Bridge, his stubby fingers and filthy palms unmistakeable. Somehow he had got within five feet of him.

Staggering back, Alabastian hawked up an oyster gobbet of sweetblack-stained saliva and spat it towards the leper’s back. It landed full centre with a wet splat.

‘There,’ he said. ‘There’s your precious drop. Now don’t bother me again.’

There was a moment of stillness, numb and sobering. Whatever brief burst of courage had compelled him to spit on the creature evaporated. His fast walk turned into a strange half-run, then into a jog. He passed another figure in the mist, dark and tall, and nodded towards it as if all were well. Yet in his chest, his heart hammered.

The image of that creature skittering after him on all fours swelled up in his mind like blood welling from an arrow wound. He turned back, face taut with fear, but saw nothing.

At the end of the bridge, he forced himself to stop and turn, his dagger sliding from his sheath.

‘Come ahead, then,’ he whispered. ‘I’ll take a few more of those fingers from you. See how keen you are on harassing me then.’

Long seconds stretched by, the blanket of mist dampening his sleeves and hair. Nothing.

Alabastian huffed a cloud of condensing breath, pulled his collar up, and made for home. He felt a mighty need to square things with Xarantine, double the guard, and return to bed with the nightlamp at full blaze.

‘The scion returns,’ said Maltratt. ‘A pleasant evening, I trust?’

‘No,’ said Alabastian, barely meeting her eye as he slammed the coach house door shut. ‘It was not. In fact, it was perfectly awful. Ruined by a beggar who wouldn’t take no for an answer.’

‘Did he assail you?’ asked Xarantine, getting up from the card table to stand by Maltratt’s side.

‘He did not “assail” me, no,’ said Alabastian. ‘He followed me, is all. He lay in wait for me, hoping to beg some aqua, and I didn’t react well. I’m not sure how he got ahead of me, given his condition, but he did. It’s been a trying night.’

‘What do you mean by condition?’ said Xarantine.

‘Fingers missing, dripping skin, some hideous malady by the look of it.’

‘Moss leper, maybe,’ muttered Maltratt. ‘That gate to Ghyran in North Athanasia lets through all manner of freaks. Should be walled up for good.’

‘You want us to get out there?’ said Xarantine. ‘Make sure he gets a nice cold bath in the Hisset?’

‘I would prefer you to run me a nice hot one,’ said Alabastian. ‘I feel the need to scrub myself clean, then retire to fresh sheets and sleep with a guard close at hand.’

‘We can do that.’ Maltratt pointed a thick finger at Nimsk, one of the mansion’s teenage chambermen. ‘Nimsky, boil a few of the big kettles and get the young master his bath started.’

‘Right.’ The boy waved his hand in front of his nose. ‘About time, really.’

Maltratt snorted despite herself and turned back, cocking her head. ‘How was your mate? Bothered about you being so tardy?’

‘He was as perfectly put together as ever, and making me feel like a stablehand by comparison. Speaking of which, why am I still in the hallway? Would you mind not barring my way like some flophouse doorman?’

‘Sorry, young master,’ said Maltratt, stepping aside with her lantern jaw sticking out. ‘Old habits from my days in the Darkjackets. Enter, by all means. We’ll make sure there’s someone in earshot at all times.’

‘Ever so many thanks for doing your job.’ He tried to keep the acid from his tone, but with the comfort of familiar surroundings, old habits were already creeping back in. ‘Now get the bath kettles going. And I want it hot.’

Xarantine let out a measured breath. ‘Right you are,’ she said, ‘Alabastian.’

He lay in a tangle of sheets, unable to sleep. The wind outside the bedroom was insistent, and growing more so by the hour. Occasionally the curtains, custom-made of heavy velvet to keep out the sunlight and fringed with half-rotten lace, shifted or bulged as a draught made it through the oaken frames. The purple-grey mist from the river would have dispersed by now, thinned by the gathering tempest. Likely the Hisset would have been unveiled and robbed of its romantic mystique, exposed with its hunting vermin, bobbing corpses and all.

The streets, too, would be revealed, laid bare and perfect for a spot of voyeurism. He could easily grab a bottle of Mother’s finest Princedom Red from the cellar, climb the stairs to the attic and peer out of the window, watching the people of the city go about their business and taking notes on the activity of those he recognised. Then he remembered he had drunk the cellar dry some weeks ago, and slumped even further into his depressive fug.

The mantel roof of the mansion had such a commanding view over the southern plaza, where the statue of Lord Vandus formed a popular meeting point for lovers and conspirators alike. Yet after the trying events of the evening, and with the cellar dry, he really did not feel like it.

Which is precisely why you must do it, young man. Face it, the better to conquer it.

Mother’s voice, ringing in the back of his mind. Always so domineering. And usually right.

Alabastian lay fitfully in the sheets for a few more minutes, occasionally changing position in petulant bursts of activity and turning the pillow so it was cool against his cheek, but sleep wouldn’t come. When he did manage to doze a little, he saw the greyed-out mists of memory part to reveal that hideous, robe-swathed cripple, skin blotchy with sores and fingers adrip as one evil eye glinted in the half-light.

Sitting up with a heavy sigh, Alabastian pushed his fists into his eyes, and got to his feet. He made for the bedroom door, taking care to avoid the area he had strewn with broken glass earlier that day.

Face it, the better to conquer it.

Along the scuffed carpet he went to the far side of the hallway, where the steep stairs led up to the attic. Gingerly he climbed up, avoiding those floorboards that he knew would creak by planting one foot at the extreme diagonal every other step. No need to risk a ticking off from Maltratt, or worse, another raised eyebrow from Xarantine.

The attic spread before him as he reached the top of the stairs, its dusty confines full of furniture hooded by old sheets. Strewn around the place was a wide variety of the general bric-a-brac his father could never bring himself to give away, stashed up here by the staff after Baron Valenth had left town with his mistress.

Alabastian had once thought the place a treasure trove, a warren full of interesting hiding places for those rare occasions when Mother had deigned to play seek-the-stray with him. Not so much these days, when he saw it for what it was: a graveyard of sorts, the remnants of a dead marriage littered everywhere and sheeted the better to keep them out of sight, and therefore out of mind.

Come out, Bastian, come out and get what’s coming to you…

Slender trails of small footprints and scuffs had once showed the way through the jumble of furniture to his favourite nooks and dens. Now, there was but one path through the dust. It led to his rocking chair, strategically placed in front of the circular window that overlooked the statue of Lord Vandus. Alabastian’s fist closed in a gesture of triumph as he spotted a pewter drinking goblet and half-empty bottle of strong Athanasian that Harratio had given him at one of the costume fittings.

Broad shafts of light filtered through the circular window, the shadow of its frame settling upon the upholstered rocking chair like the crosshairs of a marksman’s arquebus. Alabastian slid into its recesses, the upholstery perfectly accommodating to his posture, and cast his eyes over the square below. Framed by mantled roofs, it was a stage, and he the aristocrat in the high box. The unwitting theatre was lit by Lunaghast, the Moon of Secrets. They said that its soft light could drive you mad, if you stood in it too long, and force you to babble your darkest secrets into the sky.

The tableau below was disappointingly empty. Alabastian picked up the wine goblet from beneath his chair, using the cuff of his sleeve to wipe it clean before filling it with the dregs of the red he retrieved after it. A thin spider-strand found its way into the thick crimson vintage in the process, but he fished it out, and took a swig. Past its best, perhaps, but eminently drinkable. It would fight the sweetblack for the honour of claiming his headache tomorrow, but he was willing to–

There was a figure down there in the square, looking up at him. Bent-backed and filthy with muck, it was craning its neck to peer up. Its face was half shrouded. In places it was wrinkled and sunken, like a rotten apple, whilst in others it was swollen and lumpy. He could make out the black slit of a mouth drooling beneath one glimmering, watery eye, and see its ravaged fingers held up in a gesture of pleading, those awful, dripping stumps gleaming in the moonlight.

‘Get away!’ cried Alabastian, tumbling out of the rocking chair. It whipped back and forth with crazed squeals of old wooden floorboards. His goblet hit the floor, a spill of wine like dark blood splashing across the lengths of oak and white dustsheets. He rushed back to the door, all thoughts of watching midnight lovers driven from his mind.

‘Xarantine! Maltratt!’

Alabastian thundered down the steep attic stairs, tripping down the last three in his haste to get away. He clutched at the dark mahogany banister, spinning around and twisting his ankle as he staggered down the hall. ‘Maltratt! Attend me, damn it!’

‘What is it? What happened?’ The close-cropped scalp of the house guard came into view on the stairs, followed by her broad shoulders. She gained the landing, eyes wide and alert and her hand on the pommel of her short sword. Xarantine came stamping up the stairs in her wake, hurriedly buckling on her breastplate.

‘That thing is outside, by Nagash! It followed me here! I didn’t give it the aqua it wanted, and now it’s coming after me. Get out there and kill it!’

‘We’ll see him off for you, sir,’ said Maltratt. ‘Run him along, sort of thing, send him packing.’

‘You’ll bloody well run him through!’ shrieked Alabastian.

Xarantine was already moving, jumping the last few stairs to the hallway and grabbing a halberd from the rack above the door. She lifted the latch with the butt of the polearm, pushing it wide before slipping out into the misty streets as slick as an eel. Maltratt thumped down the stairs behind her, drawing her short sword and moving out with the gait of some unstoppable bailiff.

Alabastian ventured down the stairs to watch them leave, then locked the door behind them with his heirloom keyslide and ran back to his bedroom. He slammed the door of that, too, pressing his back against it before dragging a chair over and wedging it under the door handle.

After what seemed like a solid hour of waiting he heard the lock slide open in the front door. He said nothing, still feeling tightness in his chest. He couldn’t help imagining the creature pushing its way inside to leave bloody handprints on the hallway plaster as it slunk up the stairs.

Then came the clump of boots. ‘Alabastian?’

Xarantine’s strident tones. He relaxed a little, standing up and straightening his jerkin.

‘Up here.’

There was a sharp rap on his bedroom door, and after a moment of steeling himself, he opened it halfway. Xarantine looked in, seeming stressed out, and for once, a little contrite.

‘Well? Did you kill it?’

‘We couldn’t find it, whatever it was.’

‘What does Mother pay you for? Get back out there!’

‘There’s no sign of anyone that fits your description. We can’t search the whole district. Look, we’ll both stand vigil tonight. Maltratt will take downstairs, I’ll be up here with you. No cards, no distractions.’

‘See that there aren’t. It will be a miracle if I can get any sleep at all without you two yammering away in your cups.’

Xarantine shook her head, her concerned expression replaced by a far more familiar look of exasperation. ‘Just try and rest, you bloody craven. And lay off the liquor awhile.’

‘Rest, she says. I’ll not be getting back to sleep anytime soon. In fact, I think I’ll come downstairs with you. Slum it for a bit. At least until we’re sure I’m safe.’

Alabastian sat huddled under a blanket in the servants’ quarters, stooped over a steaming cup of expensive Verdian tea as he stared out into nothingness. Maltratt and Xarantine kept him company, and every so often told him to get some sleep. Fools. How was he supposed to rest at all, with the vision of that thing foremost in his mind?

So he sat, eyes unfocused and knees pulled up under his chin, waiting for dawn.

He felt his hand stray down to his phial-belt, and considered taking a few drops of aqua ghyranis to keep him alert. It was not something he wanted to do in front of the staff, of course; if he was to indulge then he would be obliged to share by the rules of etiquette, and he was not in the business of giving something for nothing. Instead he dredged up the will to speak.

‘Is there any chance we can get Varda and ven Guillo back, do you think, with enough aqua? Double the manpower for a while?’

‘Not a chance,’ said Maltratt, her expression drooping like that of a longmouth hound. ‘Even if we knew where to find them, they went with the master of the house. They are as loyal to him as we are to you.’

Xarantine rolled her eyes, and put her feet up on the desk.

‘Can’t we call someone to help us? Anyone?’

‘What about your friends? Can you get some of them to stay over for a while until this blows over?’

‘Not likely,’ said Alabastian, blowing out his cheeks. ‘They’ll all be far too preoccupied with preparations for the ball. Even a visit is unlikely, this side of the river.’

‘Oh, I don’t know about that,’ said Maltratt. ‘Your mate, what’s he called, Horace or something–’

‘Harratio?’ said Alabastian, suddenly alert.

‘That’s the cove. He was over here the other day. Said his bladder was after him, and that he had no intention of using an alleyway. I know his coachman through Lassiter, he vouched for him.’

Alabastian scoffed. As if a noble needed a coachman to vouch for him.

‘I let him in,’ continued Maltratt. ‘Insisted on using the upstairs bathroom, for some reason. To be honest it looked like he was more interested in having a good snoop around than he was in using the lavatory. Still, he might be interested in staying for a day or two, don’t you think?’

‘You don’t know Harratio at all. He never comes this side of the river. Not since ven Breichart disappeared, anyway. You must be mistaken.’

‘Not the first time he’s done it,’ said Xarantine. ‘I remember something like that a few weeks back, Maltratt, when you were on leave. He’s old Azyr money, right? Tall fellow, with a nose like a butcher’s cleaver?’

Alabastian nearly choked at the blatant disrespect. ‘If the man has a weak bladder that’s his own business. It is not given to the staff to dwell on the shortcomings of their betters. Is this the sort of thing you talk about, down here?’

‘You bloody well brought it up,’ said Xarantine. ‘We’re only trying to help. As usual.’

‘Right,’ said Alabastian. ‘Let us sit in silence, then. That way you might actually pay attention to what’s going on around you.’

‘Fine words, from someone who spends the better part of each day slobbing around in bed.’

Alabastian felt his mood go from sullen to burning rage.

‘Enough! Enough waiting. We get our swords, strap on our breastplates, and we go out there and find this bastard. I know where he lingers. Then when we bump into him, we’ll slide a blade into his heart and whoops, over the bridge’s balustrade he goes, to join who knows how many hundreds of others floating in the Hisset. He’s a beggar, for the love of Sigmar! One of the Reclaimed! No one will miss him. That way we won’t have to worry about upping our vigilance, you addle-brained sots can go back to your cards, and I can get some damned sleep!’

‘Quite the speech,’ said Xarantine.

‘He needs sleep, that much is pretty obvious,’ muttered Maltratt. ‘Murder is not within our purview, young man. Your mother would be appalled.’

‘I have to admit, the boy’s suggestion has some appeal,’ said Xarantine.

‘You serious?’ said Maltratt, her eyes wide. ‘I thought those days were over.’

‘Depends on the circumstances,’ shrugged the redhead. ‘And these, despite our man here being the most irritating waste of space I’ve ever met, are not usual circumstances.’

‘We live in Shyish,’ said Maltratt. ‘If people started killing one another at every night phantom or knocking-gheist there’d be no one left come winter.’

‘Whatever it is that’s stalking Alabastian is staking the place out. That’s different. And if it knows where we live, I’d rather see it put down hard.’

‘It’s a beggar, Kaitlin,’ said Maltratt. ‘A plague victim, or a warrior come out of the Old War in the wilds, before Pater Nagash took back what was owed him. I’m not going out there to stab someone I don’t know, even if the young master is certain of his guilt. My father didn’t bring me up like that.’

Alabastian felt the wind sag out of his sails. When Maltratt set her mind to something, she would not be budged.

‘I’m going back to bed,’ he said, rubbing the heels of his palms into his eyes.

‘I’ll come up with you,’ said Maltratt. ‘Keep a vigil on the upper half of the place.’

‘I think I would prefer Xarantine on the top floor,’ said Alabastian, ‘and you as far away as possible.’ He pulled a sour expression before leaving the servants’ quarters, climbing the stairs to his bedroom with his footsteps as loud as he could make them. He yawned, slamming the door behind him and slumping into bed. His head felt full of broken glass, and his eyes were aching from stress. He burrowed under the silk sheets, feeling like death, and stewed in his own dark imaginings.

It took an hour and a half of sour, petulant thoughts, but eventually he fell asleep.

In the small hours, when the city was almost still, the night pushed tendrils of amethyst and grey across the landscape of Alabastian’s mind. He dreamed of vile, uncanny things, stilt-legged and scalpel-gloved with long masks protruding from their faces in the manner of a mosquito’s proboscis. They twitched and spasmed as they came closer. With the irrefutable logic of dreams, Alabastian knew their intent to operate no matter the cost.

Suddenly he was surrounded by them, laid out on the slab under their staring lenses. It was not the dissection table of a hospice, rather one at the centre of Mhurghast’s great scholar-theatres. Scores of staring, pallid faces looked down upon him, each entirely devoid of life. The lecture was in session, and he was the subject.

‘His thread grows thin,’ said one of them, his voice tinny and distant. ‘We will have to cut deep.’

‘Deep indeed, to find the soul,’ nodded another. ‘If it has not already atrophied to nothing.’

There was a hammering noise from high up in the amphitheatre’s shadowed eaves, rattling and urgent. Several of the strange surgeons looked up.

‘The Visitor is here,’ said the tallest of them.

‘So early,’ mused another.

‘We had best hasten,’ said a third. ‘Or the chance will be gone.’

‘Then bring forth the liquid of life.’

As one, the scalpels cut into Alabastian’s hip, belly and throat, and he began to scream.

‘Sir, are you all right?’

Maltratt had burst through the door like the first warrior through the breach of a lengthy siege. Her teeth were bared and her short sword drawn as she took in every detail of the room. Xarantine came in behind her, eyes scanning the corners of the chamber.

‘A nightmare,’ groaned Alabastian. ‘Just… just a nightmare, I think.’

‘I heard something,’ said Maltratt. ‘You knock something over, perhaps?’ She cast a meaningful glance at the broken Azyrite water clock, its fragments still scattered across the floor where Alabastian had left them the previous morning.

‘I did, yes. Though it was some time ago. What did you hear?’

‘Banging, rattling. Thought it was a storm at first, or at least high wind, but there’s been not so much as a drop of rain and Lassiter said it’s been calm all night.’ She shrugged, the leather of her armour groaning. ‘Probably you thrashing around, if you were in the teeth of a bad dream.’

Alabastian felt his limbs grow heavy and cold. Propping himself up on his hip, he turned to the window and parted curtains of heavy velvet with a long index finger. Moonlight streamed through, or at least Mhurghast’s grudging semblance of it. He winced nonetheless, his head suddenly pounding, then forced himself to look again through hooded eyes until the pane itself sprang into focus.

The large, arched window was smeared with dirt, weird fluids and streaks of blood.

‘Those are fingerprints,’ said Xarantine, leaning in close. ‘Look.’

As Alabastian squinted closer, he saw the unmistakable marks of human fingers left on glass. Not enough for a whole hand, but prints nonetheless.

Even in her paranoia, Mother had never fortified the upper windows with more than a sturdy lock. She had once told him that to shutter them altogether was to consign the topmost floors to perpetual gloom. The outer wall was sheer and well maintained, thirty feet from the forbidding barb-crowned perimeter of the garden, and a razor-sharp, glass-toothed overhang jutted out over six feet above it to see off the rope and grapnel of any truly determined thieves. It was a point of pride of the Valenth dynasty that their city mansion was a castle that had never been breached.

And yet it was plain to see there had been something outside his window, in the small hours of the night.

Something filthy, and hungry to get in.

‘Okay,’ said Maltratt. ‘Okay. First light-hour tomorrow, Xarantine and I go on the hunt.’

So early in the morning, the Necrai Bridge was all but deserted. It was cold, colder than Maltratt had expected. The chill was seeping through her thick furs, and the morning mists were thick and clinging. Wisps trailed from Xarantine’s legs as she trod the cobbles just ahead.

Not for the first time, Maltratt’s thoughts turned to childhood stories of the Illuminating Realm, where the sun always shone and the answers to every problem hung like ripe fruit on a low bough. Right now, she would brave a Realmgate to Hysh without a second thought. Even Aqshy, with its fierce people and burning-hot wastelands, would be preferable to the omnipresent gloom and chill of Shyish.

‘Why do you think the Valenths chose this benighted place as their settler-gains?’

‘Opportunism. Plenty of grave goods here for the taking, if you’ve the steel for it.’

‘If they had, it’s not carried down the generations. I’ll wager he’s hiding under his bed even now.’

‘Almost certainly. Why are we doing this again?’

‘Just so we can tell him we have. We don’t really know what this thing looks like, nor where it makes its lair. Very unlikely to be on a public thoroughfare with nowhere but the mist to hide.’

They walked the length and breadth of the bridge in sullen silence from that point, finding nothing but the occasional black-headed gull startled from its roost. Wherever the beggar-creature was, it was not on the bridge, that much was becoming clear.

As they were heading back towards the mansion, Maltratt heard a muttering in the fog ahead, a sing-song voice from a human throat.

‘Sally… Sally’s the word… Sally, out from the castle…’

Someone shuffled in the morning light ahead, a muddled black shadow. Xarantine marched straight up towards her, halberd held diagonally before her so one downward sweep could decapitate in an instant. Maltratt came in close behind.

‘Sally from the castle… Tell you a fine tale for a drop of aqua, my fine warriors.’

‘Tell us where the fingerless freak who haunts this bridge has gone,’ said Xarantine, ‘and you can have a whole phial.’

The madwoman leered, her yellow teeth on display. ‘Fingerless… She means the Haunter, I reckon. The Visitor. Sally, sally.’

‘Talk in riddles and you’ll get the side of my halberd,’ said Xarantine. Maltratt shot her a look, but she was too intent on her prey to notice. ‘Just tell us where he is, street-scum. I’ll know if you’re lying to me.’

‘Oh, such a fierce one.’

‘She means it,’ said Maltratt, stepping in to add her impressive bulk to Xarantine’s fiery presence. ‘You’ll tell us where he is, or though I hate to say it, it’ll be into the Hisset with you, my girl.’

‘Sally!’ she hissed. ‘Sally out!’

‘Stop saying that,’ said Xarantine, her jaw clenching, ‘or we’ll stop your gabbling for good.’

‘Oh, I’ve faced far worse than you, heaven-child.’ She puckered up her lips, offering a false kiss before her expression turned nasty. ‘Sally from the castle,’ she said slowly, ‘and leave the gates unbarred.’

Something clicked in Maltratt’s mind, a dusty lock opening a door to blackness beyond.

‘Nagash’s blood. Is Lassiter on duty this morning?’

‘Just Nimsk,’ said Xarantine. ‘And you know what he’s like. Still, the place is locked up tighter than a Chamonite’s hoardvault, isn’t it? He’ll be safe enough. He wouldn’t have dispatched us otherwise.’

‘That thing couldn’t get in the window, but it left enough evidence to get us out,’ said Maltratt. ‘To get us to sally from the castle, as it were. Could it already know how to break in, with the window smeared as a ruse?’

The talespinner’s grin flashed in the gloom, defiant madness glimmering in her eyes.

‘She’s cleverer than she seems, this one.’

Maltratt broke into a run back the way they had come, Xarantine close at her heels. The redhead soon overtook her, casting her halberd into a nearby gutter so she could make a proper sprint.

By the next corner, Maltratt ran on alone.

The hairs on Alabastian’s forearms had risen fast when he’d heard a thin creak and a flurry of muffled thumps come from the attic. Fear had driven him out of bed more than anger. More than that, it was the need to have an end to it, and sink into the blissful oblivion of proper sleep.

‘Nimsk!’ he called downstairs. ‘Nimsk, come up here this minute!’

There was no answer. Stupid youth was probably still asleep.

He told himself it was righteous fury that drove him onto the landing and to the base of the attic stairs, the noble indignation of the man of the house who finds another on his land without permission. In his heart, he knew it was injured pride, frustration and a sense that if he cowered so long that someone else went up in his stead, he would never rise to be the man of the house. Not truly.

An idea struck him. Making his way to the craft room at the back of the second floor, he rustled around amongst the dust-covered bric-a-brac of Mother’s artisan supplies. It was nerve-twisting work, having his back to the door. Every moment he half expected the beggar-thing to jump on his back and sink its fingernails into his neck. His hands were shaking by the time he found what he was looking for: a large crystal phial of Aqshian printer’s vitriol, potent enough to etch metal.

Face your terrors, little darling, or live forever in the shade.

With a sigh of leather, Alabastian’s shortblade slid from its sheath. He made his way up to the attic. Only his bullseye lantern and thin shafts of moonlight illuminated his path.

A ray of light gleamed from something wet on the third stair from the top. He stooped, looking closer at the bubble-dotted liquid. Phlegm, by the look of it, spattered on the threadbare carpet strip that was pinned to the centre of the mahogany stairs. It was cloudy and discoloured with black streaks.

Alabastian was suddenly conscious of the sweat on the ribbed leather grip of his heirloom sword. He had a terrible feeling that the tighter he clutched it the more likely his hand would cramp at a critical moment. Teeth clenched hard, he made it up the last few steps, one of which gave a slight creak. The curve-topped door to the attic was closed.

It was never closed.

A bead of sweat tickled the nape of his neck despite the chill. The air smelt somehow danker than he remembered, as if the door to the earthy maze of the cellar below had been left open all night.

He found himself longing for Xarantine, imagining her going up before him with the point of her halberd leading the way. He would have dearly loved to watch either of his armed retainers take down the freakish thing that had stalked him over the last few days, but by the time they got back, it could well be too late. After dispatching them to hunt the creature on the bridge, he either had to investigate the thumping noise himself, or cower under the covers like a craven child with Mother’s voice ringing in his ears.

Are you a man at all, Bastian? Are you truly cut out to live in Shyish, to inherit our dynasty, if you are so petrified of gheists and phantom noises?

His father would have put it more bluntly. Better to hunt than be hunted.

‘Sword out, strike first,’ he said quietly to himself. ‘Jab, then run.’

He pushed open the door, a slight squeal from its hinges making him jump.

The attic was lit by wan light coming through the shattered window over the square, broken glass glinting jagged as he placed his bullseye lantern carefully on the floor. It cast stark shadows across the sheet-covered boxes and statues of his father’s abandoned possessions. More than ever they seemed to him a horde of gheists frozen in time, eyeless faces craning to see who was foolish enough to trespass amongst their unquiet graves.

‘Come out, bastard!’ he shouted. His voice was a throttled yelp a full octave higher than he intended. He cleared his throat. ‘Come out, and get what’s coming to you!’

A hiss, somewhere in the back of the attic. Then silence.

The thing came at him with shocking speed. It was gangling and covered in sores. Alabastian screamed and jerked his arm, the contents of the phial of vitriol glittering in the light as he flung it. The creature grabbed a sheet from a covered mannequin and whirled it in front of itself, catching most of the etching vitriol and dashing it to one side. Droplets sizzled on ancient wood, the sharp scent of acid filling the air over a nauseating stink of rotten meat. Alabastian caught a glimpse of the thing, all sunken eyes and gaping mouth. He broke and ran for the stairs.

His flight down to the landing below was clumsy, feet slamming flat down three steps at a time as his back and neck tingled with the hideous feeling that plague-crusted teeth or fingernails would rip into him at any moment. His sword wobbled before him, more a liability than a weapon. There was no way his panic would let him use it. He saw something coming up from the hall below, his heart leaping into his mouth before he recognised the shock of red hair. Thank Sigmar. It was Xarantine, sword drawn.

‘Kill it!’ he screeched. He barged past the guardswoman’s shoulder, making for his bedroom. It was like running into a wooden post. He was sent spinning in a half-turn, and despite himself, he looked back.

Xarantine lunged at the creature as it scrabbled on all fours down the stairs. It darted left, sickeningly fast. She whipped her blade after it, the edge thunking into its shoulder. It twisted away – no blood, just a spatter of dark, silty fluid – and launched itself into her chest with such force it bowled both of them over.

They went down the stairs in a jumble of limbs. Xarantine’s sword clattered to embed itself point first into the banister as she and the grotesque creature tumbled in a killing embrace. As one they landed heavily onto the mosaic floor in a sudden halo of blood.

Xarantine’s neck was bent. Her tongue lolled. The creature was folded over her, head buried in her neck.

Then the beggar-thing looked straight up at him, one eye white, one black, and clacked its bloodstained teeth.

‘Please…’ it said, grinning. ‘Please…’

It came fast up the stairs on all fours, more like a hound than a man. Gone was the shuffling, bent-backed slowness of the cripple he had seen on the bridge. Here was a predator clad in rags, many of its claws missing but its teeth and eyes shining bright. It rushed towards him, the staccato thumping of its feet setting his mind aflame.

Alabastian staggered away, instinctively backing into his bedroom. His heart was pounding. Defend the door, he thought. Cut anything that comes through.

He looked back. That awful face leered up over the last few stairs, gore dribbling down its chin.

‘Please…’ it hissed. ‘Please. Just a drop…’

He stood en garde, as Mother had taught him. The tip of the blade was steady.

The beast halted, eyeing the sword. Alabastian felt a fierce, killing elation. He stepped backwards to put some more room between them, then felt something pierce his foot. He howled, his off-hand clutching at the knife of Azyrite glass that protruded through the meat of his instep.

In a flurry of black rags the creature was on him. He tried to twist away, but it bore him down. It pulled itself up onto his back as he scrabbled in the scattering of broken glass. Fear took him, and on instinct he sent a sharp elbow back into the thing’s jaw. It connected with a crack. He scrabbled for a shard of the water clock, pain slashing his nerves as his fingers were opened on the sharp, bluish glass. Reversing it, he whipped it back around and stabbed it into the creature’s ribs. He felt it sink in.

Then a dozen needles sank into the back of his neck at the same time, a fiery ring of pain that pulsed so hard it was impossible to think. Black rags, encrusted with filth, draped over his face. A half-hand clasped itself down over his forehead. One of the missing fingers smeared lukewarm, peach-coloured fluids over his eyebrow, the awful substances trickling over his eyelid as he shook his head as violently as he could. Still the pulsing, throbbing agony spread from his neck. He pulled out his knife of glass, catching sight of it out of the corner of his eye before sinking it back into the creature’s ribs.

His vision swam now, distorted and smudged. One of his arms reached forwards for the leg of the bed, hoping for some purchase so he could pull himself away, maybe twist and kick himself free. The weight upon him was too much. He noticed with horror that the flesh of that arm was blotchy and covered with sores, the skin parchment dry and blackened as if by a year-long infection.

The creature reached out a limb of its own to grab his hand and force it back. Rags obscured his vision, looping and catching on his own arms as the thing shuddered and wriggled on his back. It was still latching its teeth into the nape of his neck, and seemed to be getting heavier, or else he was getting weaker. Perhaps both. For a moment he could have sworn he saw one of its limbs, hearty and clean, with all five of its fingers grasping after his own.

The reaching digits closed on his hand, and with a vile, nerve-shredding crack, his own fingers broke and came away in a slurry of rancid blood and deliquescing flesh.

There was a shout from the hallway below, the voice broken and of anguish.

‘Xarantine! No!’

Heavy boots thumped on the stairs, coming fast and with a deadly, solid purpose. ‘Whoever you are, I’ll kill you!’

Maltratt, thank Sigmar. Seconds away from salvation. Retribution, even.

Something gave in Alabastian’s chest, his ribs cracking and his lungs emptying in an awful, shuddering sob. Though his vision was stained red and black by fatigue and the nameless fluids smeared across his eyes, he saw the creature climb off him, looping rags and bandages falling away to drape themselves over his own sore-riddled arms.

The beggar-thing was no more. Standing before him, making its way carefully through the broken glass, was a tall, statuesque youth with unblemished, milk-white skin. He felt his innards clench, smelt the foulness of his own rotting form as it turned to look down over its shoulder at him. The creature smiled, perfect teeth glinting in the half-light. Its features were all too familiar.

‘It’s in here,’ the creature called out. It was a close analogue of his voice, albeit weirdly thin and phlegm-choked. ‘I have the measure of it.’

Alabastian’s eyes widened. He grasped out for the bed leg again, pulling himself hard to shuffle and wriggle underneath it in a cloud of dust and flakes of skin. Spikes of pain pierced him, but in his fear, he barely registered them.

He was halfway under when he felt a hard, solid grip on his ankles. As Maltratt hauled him back out, slivers of broken glass shredded his belly and chest. He tried to speak, to protest, but it came out as an inhuman moan.

The changeling that had taken his form leered down at him. It hawked up a gobbet of phlegm and spat. The wad of saliva spattered on his cheek, a final indignity.

Maltratt’s blade pinned him to the floorboards, and in a final shudder of wretchedness, he died.

‘Take it outside and burn it,’ said Alabastian Valenth the Second.

About the Author

Phil Kelly is the author of the Warhammer 40,000 novel Farsight: Crisis of Faith, the Space Marine Conquests novel War of Secrets, the Space Marine Battles novel Blades of Damocles and the novellas Farsight and Blood Oath. For Warhammer he has written the titles Sigmar’s Blood and Dreadfleet. He has also written a number of short stories. He works as a background writer for Games Workshop, crafting the worlds of Warhammer and Warhammer 40,000. He lives in Nottingham.

An extract from Dark Harvest.

When I awoke, the rain was pattering against the canvas overhead. The wagon smelled of ghyroch and gunpowder. My back ached, and my head was ringing like a duardin smithy. I could taste last night’s mistakes in the back of my mouth, and my skin had that greasy, gritty feeling that comes from too many baths in water barrels.

For a moment I looked around, wondering what had woken me. Then I realised that the wagon wasn’t moving. I cleared my throat and called out, ‘Have we stopped?’

No one answered me. Then, ‘Blackwood? That you?’

‘It’s me, Lucio,’ I said.

The drover leaned through the front flap and gave me a tepid smile. ‘I thought you’d sleep right through it.’

‘Right through what?’

‘Come up and see.’

I sat up and winced. Everything hurt, the way it always did when I slept rough, which was altogether too often for my liking, these days. Sometimes it felt as if I’d spent half my life sleeping in the backs of supply wagons or in tents. At other times, I realised that was a charitable estimate. I tried not to think about it too much.

I squinted against the gloom. There was no lantern, and for good reason. The wagon was packed to the canvas with crates and barrels full of guns and gunpowder, the primary exports of Greywater Fastness. If it belched fire or spat lead, it came from the foundries of the Fastness. Business was good, especially these days. The dead rested uneasily in their graves, and shot was more effective than prayers.

I wasn’t the only one sleeping in the back with the merchandise, though I was the only one awake. When they were off-duty, the drovers were allowed to rest in the wagons, if there was room. I made my way to the front as carefully and as quickly as I could, trying not to disturb anyone. I had enough problems as it was. The last thing I needed was an angry muleskinner trying to knife me.

I didn’t like leaving the city. Especially to go into the wilderness. I’d had enough of that to last me a lifetime. But sometimes you have to do things you don’t like. Life is like that. And then you die.

The buckboards were wet when I hauled myself out onto the front of the wagon. So was Lucio. He wore an oilskin cape and broad-brimmed hat, but neither had done him much good. He didn’t seem to mind. He offered me an apple. ‘We got us a right fine quagmire here.’ I didn’t bother to ask where ‘here’ was. I’d realised where we were as soon as I saw the gun-towers – Mere Keep. The edge of civilisation, as far as many inhabitants of Greywater Fastness were concerned; where Sigmar’s light faded, and the dark of Ghyran began.

The immense gatehouse-keep straddled the only road out of the city, its foundations set deep in the muddy ground the way only duardin stonemasons could manage. Built of heavy, black stone, dredged from the marshes centuries ago by labour gangs, it held a dozen wide portcullises within its sturdy frame. Each of these gates was closed at the moment, causing much consternation among the waiting travellers.

Above the portcullises, a long, reinforced parapet supported a battery of cannons and their crews. Greycaps, armed with handguns and fire-casters, patrolled the palisade walls and gun-towers that stretched out to either side of the gatehouse and folded back along the road leading to the city like the walls of an immense corridor.

Once, the road had been bigger and there had been others. Now there was only one thin snake of raised stone and packed earth, squeezed between two expanses of blasted heath and mire. One way in, one way out. Even that had cost a generation of blood and fire to keep, and annual sacrifices to maintain.

I rubbed the apple on my sleeve, trying to find an unbruised spot to bite. ‘So what’s going on? Why aren’t the gates open?’

Lucio shrugged. ‘Don’t ask me. I just drive the wagons. Scribe made a mistake somewhere, probably. Chantey is fit to be tied.’

‘I bet.’ Chantey was the master of the caravan I was hitching a ride with. He was unhappy at the best of times. Most caravan-masters were. It wasn’t the sort of job that attracted those of cheerful disposition. ‘Where is he?’

‘He and some of the other masters went looking for somebody in charge.’ Lucio leaned over the side of the buckboard and spat. ‘Good luck to them, I say.’

‘You get paid either way, right?’ I said, and he laughed. I bit into the apple and watched as Greycaps and scribes threaded their way among the line of covered wagons that waited to depart through one or another of the portcullises. The apple had a bitter taste, like much of the fruit grown in the city’s allotments. Something was wrong with the soil, but everyone pretended not to notice. Or maybe we’d all just grown used to it, like the rain.

I risked an upward glance. The sky was the colour of slate. Grey on grey. Some said the weather was proof that Sigmar had abandoned us, that he was angry with us for our crimes. Though just what those crimes were, no one really knew. Others insisted it was punishment from the Everqueen, or even Elder Bones. All I knew for sure was that I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen the sun, or felt anything other than damp.

‘Is it true you used to be a priest?’ Lucio asked me.

I laughed. ‘Who told you I was a priest?’

‘Just something I heard.’

‘Gossip is a sin,’ I said.

It was his turn to laugh. ‘I just thought it was funny is all.’

‘Why?’

‘On account of you breaking legs for Caspar Guno.’

I took a bite of my apple. ‘You shouldn’t say such things. You never know who might be listening.’

He had the good sense to look afraid. The truth was, I didn’t break many legs, if I could help it. A man who can’t walk can’t work. Arms were my speciality. And occasionally necks. But only rarely. Most people were only too happy to pay tithe to Caspar Guno. Those that weren’t… well. Guno employed men like me for a reason. In my learned opinion, working for him wasn’t much different to serving Sigmar.

Atop the palisade, Ironweld cannons began to boom. Lucio started in his seat, and the ghyroch pulling our wagon began to low. The great bull-like beast was covered in shaggy, moss-like hair and had a rack of branch-like horns that rose higher than the top of the wagon. Massive, stony hooves splashed mud everywhere as it stamped in growing agitation.

It wasn’t the only one doing so. Animals up and down the line of wagons began to bellow, squawk and whinny. I saw two Chamonian axe-beaks claw at the mud with their talons, their metallic feathers shimmering in the rain, and a half-grown demidroth drool acidic spittle and lash its scaly tail as its duardin rider tried to calm it.

Lucio extended his goad and scratched the ghyroch between its shoulders, soothing it. ‘There’s something on the wind,’ he said, softly. As if afraid someone might hear him.

‘Besides gunpowder?’ I said, as the stink of the volley washed back over us. Living in the Fastness, you got used to the smell quick, or your sinuses burned out. It was everywhere in the city, in every stone. It wafted across the Ghoul Mere in black banks of powder-fog, staining the trees and turning the rain to acid. Was it any wonder the sylvaneth hated us?

‘They say the treekin are on the march.’

‘Who says, Lucio?’

‘Greycaps,’ Lucio said.

‘How drunk were they?’

‘Less than me.’ He looked around. ‘Listen to that.’

I didn’t ask what he meant. I could hear it well enough – had been hearing it since I’d woken up. I’d thought it was just the rain at first, but it was the sound of trees. Of branches swaying in the rain and wind. Only there was no wind. The sound beat against the air with a constant pressure beneath the more bellicose thunder of the guns.

Maybe Lucio’s Greycaps were right. I wondered if I ought to cut my losses and go back to the city. But that wasn’t an option.

‘It’s nothing,’ I said. ‘Just a lot of noise.’

‘Doesn’t sound like nothing. I haven’t seen them this agitated since…’ He trailed off. I knew what he’d been about to say. Since the last time the treekin had decided to tear the Fastness down, stone by stone. They’d failed then, as they always failed. But we lost ground nonetheless. We always lost ground.

‘Guess I picked a bad time to leave the city.’

‘You after somebody?’

‘Why would you say that?’

‘Only reason I can think of that a man like you goes anywhere is if you’re after someone – or they’re after you.’ Lucio looked at me. ‘So which is it?’

‘Bit of both,’ I said, after a moment.

It had started with the coin. A message from a dead man. Or someone as good as.

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Warhammer horror

A Black Library Imprint

First published in Great Britain in 2020.
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ISBN: 978-1-80026-420-5

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