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Bird of Change – Richard Strachan

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An Extract from ‘The Accursed’

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BIRD OF CHANGE

By Richard Strachan

The moon was two days off Brimful when we went out to dig for changestone. We slipped from our beds and took care not to wake mother and father, dressing quietly and lowering the wick on our bedside lamp. Avaryn lit a candle and cupped it in her hand, although the night was very still and there wasn’t the hint of a breeze. The air was cool and fragrant, threaded with a faint scorched smell from the ferrous flowers, which tipped their heads to drink the sweet rays of the moving stars. A drift of clouds moved in to smother the moon, and Avaryn kept her candle high to light our way.

We whispered as we left the village behind us, following the silvery line of the brook up into the lower slopes of the hills. The sound would travel in air this still, and I didn’t want anyone to know what we were doing. I was embarrassed, I suppose. I was too old to be worrying about such things.

‘Do we need the candle?’ I hissed. ‘What if someone notices it and comes out to see what we’re up to?’

‘They won’t,’ Avaryn said. ‘Everyone’s abed, no one’ll be looking from their windows this night. But a loud voice in the air will wake even the deepest sleeper, trust me, Vemari.’

‘Sleeper…’ gurgled the other voice. Avaryn shushed it and cupped the candle again as we entered the grove of ironoaks.

‘Besides,’ she said, ‘changestone shows up best by candlelight, everyone knows that.’

‘Candle…’

Avaryn planted the candle on a rock at the edge of the clearing. Under its wavering circle of light, we spent the next hour or two digging and sifting the topsoil, probing with our trowels, our hands rusty with dirt while we searched for that telltale quicksilver glimmer. I found shards of pyrite and black crystal, flakes of rust-flower, little nuggets of blue mercury, but nothing that looked like changestone. I was on the point of giving up when Avaryn gave a stifled cry of triumph. She held something up, wiped the dirt from it with her thumb, a broad grin on both her faces. It glittered in the candlelight, soft and pale; like a frozen star.

‘Vemari, look!’ she said. ‘I think this is it, I really do!’

‘Do…’ the other voice said. Avaryn reached up to stroke its head until it was quiet. She scurried over with the stone in her hand. It glowed faintly as she passed it to me.

It felt heavy and cool in my palm. I could see the sharp white facets underneath the layer of soil, the ripple of light like a streak of oil deep inside it. My heart dipped and fell in my chest. It was beautiful, and it was almost certainly rare – but it wasn’t changestone.

Avaryn saw my smile falter. She reached up to squeeze my shoulder and then hugged me close.

‘I don’t know what you’re worrying about,’ she said, ‘I really don’t. You’re the most beautiful sister anyone could wish for. You’re perfect as you are.’

‘I just don’t want to look like this any more,’ I said quietly. ‘I want to look like everyone else. The changestone might have done it… You know Mylin’s sister found some, and a day after swallowing it, she was blessed with a third arm.’

Avaryn drew away and closed my hand over the shard of white stone. The ironoaks trembled around us, the breeze picking up and flowing down around the sides of the valley. The clouds began to unfurl and drift away.

‘Keep it anyway,’ she said. ‘Put it under your pillow tonight, and maybe it’ll bring you good luck, if nothing else.’

‘I hope so,’ I said. ‘It’s two days until Brimful. I’m never going to get picked at this rate.’

I slipped the stone into my pocket, drew out the little mirror I kept there while Avaryn covered up the holes we’d dug. It was a small oval of obsidian, polished as clear as glass. I looked at my reflection in the moonlight as the veil of clouds was pulled away. Long dark hair framed an oval face, two eyes staring back at me. I saw one nose, one mouth, two ears. I sighed and put the mirror back in the front pocket of my dress. I looked at my sister. She was a year younger than me, but already she had begun to change. At the side of her neck where it met her shoulder, a vestigial face was beginning to form. It was a sunken little thing with wrinkled blue eyes, a loose-lipped, slobbering mouth. It blinked and gurgled as Avaryn filled in the holes. I heard her talking to it sometimes, when we were lying in our beds at night, laughing and whispering. She would feed it little scraps of food at breakfast. It made me feel lonely, somehow. As if she were just beginning to look out onto a world that I couldn’t see, somewhere fuller and more beautiful, and more wonderfully strange. I was being left behind.

As the clouds fell away, and as the long sheet of night appeared in all its velvet mystery, a spark of light at the head of the valley drew my eyes. There, high above the village, the Crystal Tree emerged from the shadows. It was wreathed in emerald and cobalt blue, glinting as if decked in garnets and citrine. The trunk twisted in all its gleaming facets, the spirals and structures of its branches reaching up a hundred feet into the shimmering air. It made beggars of the stars, and even the moon was a pale imitation of its radiance and grace.

‘Can you see it, Avaryn?’ I whispered. ‘The Crystal Tree… It’s shining just for us tonight. What a blessing it is!’

I felt a tear press against my eye. When it fell, it shone like burning crystal.

We were turning to go when the Bird began to call. Long and ragged, its shriek broke against the night as if the Tree itself were screaming. There in its nest, deep amongst those mineral roots, it was beginning to stir. The Day of Change was nearly on us. When the moon was Brimful, then the Bird would wake. I felt as if the crystal of the Tree had entered my blood somehow and a chill feeling cupped my heart.

‘Let’s get back home,’ Avaryn said, ‘before mother and father wake up and realise we’re gone.’

She stowed the candle, needless now in the bright midnight. As she took the trail in front of me, I heard the face that was growing on her neck say:

‘Gone…’

Brimful came, and with it the Nine were picked for the Tree. It was a time of great festivities; the whole village participated. Feasts were prepared, icons of the Bird were set above people’s lintels, and everywhere an air of strange expectation fluttered through the lanes and the fields. The high, sloped walls of the valley on either side of the village felt like encircling arms, keeping us all safe. The Crystal Tree was the eye that kept a faithful watch on all of us. The Bird was waking, and it would need the Nine to help it rise from its year-long slumber.

I woke early, while Avaryn was still asleep. I could see the face on her neck sleeping too, the wrinkled pouches under its eyes trembling, a line of drool trailing from its mouth and wetting her sheet. I dressed quietly and looked once more in the obsidian mirror, seeing no change from the two nights I’d slept with the stone under my pillow. I tried not to let it bother me. The Change would come in its own time, as my parents were always saying. It couldn’t be forced.

Mother and father were through in the kitchen, cooking for the feast later that day. The thatch above our heads was wreathed in steam from the cooking pot and the grate, and there was a wonderful smell in the air of rustpepper and sweet thorn-willow.

‘Up before Avaryn?’ my father said, as he kissed my cheek. ‘She’s getting lazy, that girl.’

The third eye high on his temple blinked once and swivelled towards me. The pupil was a vertical slit, a line of black fringed with sparkling gold. I had always thought it looked like a jewel, like something precious dug out of the earth and embedded in his skin. When I was younger I would stare at it for hours, peering deep into the pupil and wondering what it was seeing in turn. My father said he could only see through it when he was asleep. It showed him strange, swirling dreams that he could never remember when he woke. The rest of the time it looked with its own sight, and it didn’t share what it saw.

‘She’s just got herself overexcited too early for the feast day,’ my mother said, smiling.

Unlike my father, my mother’s gift was in her hands and feet. Her fingers had fused into long birdlike claws, and her feet were scaled and pointed. She clicked across the flagstones as she took the peeled rustberries from my father.

‘Honestly,’ she said, ‘you’d think it happened once a decade instead of once a year!’

I sat quietly and ate my breakfast, pondering the day ahead. Before Avaryn could appear sleepily from our bedroom, I said, ‘I’ve put my name down for the lots.’

My mother and father exchanged a glance. After a moment, my mother said, ‘Are you sure, Vemari? It’s not that we wouldn’t be proud, beyond all measure, but…’

‘But,’ my father added, ‘being blunt, it’s not something that’s likely to happen. What if you’re chosen, and then the Bird…?’

‘“The Bird welcomes whomsoever is chosen,”’ I said, quoting the magister’s words at them. ‘“And all who are welcomed are Changed.” Isn’t that what they say? Well then,’ I said, stubbornly. ‘If I’m picked, then I’m picked, and that’s all there is to it.’

They couldn’t gainsay the words of the magister and I felt guilty for quoting scripture at them. But Change should be open to all in the valley. Everyone should be welcome in the light of the Crystal Tree.

In the square, they were setting up the stage and stringing the lamps between the eaves of all the houses. Icons fluttered from the gables and the air was full of laughter under the sapphire sky. The ironoak walls of all the houses shone with a dark, smoky lustre, and the scale-slate roofs were copper bright.

I met Mylin on the edge of the village, sitting at the banks of the brook as we waited for the lots to be called. He was pitching stones into the water, staring at its crystal depths with a pensive look on his face. Like me, he had not been blessed as everyone else in the village had been blessed. We had always been allies and friends, taking solace in our difference and spending long walks through the valley complaining about everyone who overlooked us. He glanced at me now as I approached and sat next to him on the grass. We were near where Avaryn and I had dug for changestone two nights before. I thought about telling him, but I didn’t want him to laugh at me.

‘You put your name forward then?’ I said. ‘Like we talked about?’

‘Yes,’ he said. He ran a hand through his silver hair, and continued staring into the chuckling surge of the stream. ‘For all the good it’ll do…’

‘Don’t say that. We’ve as much chance as anyone.’

‘You think?’ he said. He scowled. ‘Magister’ll probably see our names come up and declare them void, or pretend he can’t read our writing. We’re an embarrassment to them, don’t forget that.’

‘That’s not true,’ I said. I gave him a dig in the side with my elbow and grinned. ‘And so what if we are? The magister’s a pious man, same as everyone else. If Change is come upon us, then who’s to say otherwise? If our names get picked, then the Bird wants us for one of the Nine. End of story.’

He nodded thoughtfully and turned back to the stream, pitching another stone in.

‘Avaryn’s not going in for it?’ he said after a while.

‘No,’ I said. ‘Reckons she’s not ready. She wants another summer to go by before she takes the chance. Gives her head a little more time to grow.’

‘A head…’ Mylin said, with scorn. ‘What’s she ever done to deserve a head.’

I laughed; Mylin and Avaryn had hated each other since they were toddlers, but it was so all-consuming, it was a wonder neither of them had been able to recognise it as the love it clearly was.

‘It’s started talking now and everything,’ I said. ‘She’s delighted with it, obviously. Says it tells her secrets at night, when she’s dreaming.’

‘I had a dream last night,’ Mylin said hesitantly. He plucked at the grass on the bankside while I waited for him to go on. ‘A dream about the Crystal Tree.’ He glanced warily at me. ‘Both of us had been picked in the lots, but when we were taken up there, we saw that it wasn’t a tree at all…’

‘What was it?’

‘It was a mouth… Somehow, it had turned into a huge screaming mouth, with sharp teeth, and it wanted to devour us…’ He shook his head. ‘It probably means nothing, I know, but they say dreams are gifts from the Bird of Change, don’t they?’

‘They do,’ I admitted.

‘Where do they go, I wonder?’ he sighed. ‘Every year…’

‘They join the Bird in the roots of the Tree,’ I said confidently. I felt my heart swell at the thought, boundless with love and wonder. ‘They help it wake from its slumber, and then they praise it and worship it, and in its great and marvellous gift it makes them part of the Tree in return. Each of them becomes part of its roots and its branches, its trunk and the leaves that glint and sparkle when the sun rises in the height of midsummer. Every year, the Tree grows purer, until one day it will break apart and the crystal will fall away, and a flock of birds shall be released that will swoop down and change every one of us into something just as beautiful. Don’t you listen to the magister?’ I laughed. ‘He tells the same tale every year.’

‘I wonder why it’s always nine,’ Mylin said. ‘Nine picked every year.’

‘It’s the number of the Bird,’ I said. ‘It’s sacred.’

‘I know, but… why? Why nine? Why not… seven, or eight? Or ten?’

‘Well,’ I said, thinking back to my lessons. ‘Some say it’s because the Bird has nine eyes. Others, because it was one of nine eggs, and it misses its brothers and sisters. I’ve always thought that it’s because nine is the basic form of those not blessed with Change.’

‘How do you mean?’ he said, frowning.

‘Look, it’s simple.’ I sat up straight and pointed at each part with my finger. ‘One head, two eyes, one nose, one mouth. Two arms, two legs. Add them all up – nine!’

‘Huh,’ Mylin said. ‘I’ve never thought of that.’

‘Course you haven’t,’ I said. ‘You’re not as clever as me.’

There was a cry from the village square below us, the clamour of a glass bell. I could hear people shouting and laughing, could almost feel the tremble of expectation in the air.

‘They’re calling the lots,’ Mylin breathed. ‘We should go.’

‘We should,’ I said. I drew the obsidian mirror from my pocket and looked at my reflection. Nothing. The same brown eyes looked back at me from a face still stubbornly itself.

I looked up the valley, to where the Tree was wreathed in the sullen light of mid-morning. By the early afternoon, as the sun breasted the rise of the eastern hills, it would be lit with crystal fire. In the Brimful moonlight this evening it would be like a pillar of cold flame.

‘Come on,’ I said, getting to my feet. I felt a fluttering in my stomach. ‘We don’t want to be late.’

We stood in a circle around the square as the lots were called, and as the rising light filtered down between the peaks of the hills behind us to light the stage with crimson. The magister stood up there dressed in his simple teal robes, two hands holding the clay vessel, a third dipping in to pull out each marked shard of slate. I felt the fluttering in my stomach broaden and contract, like the wings of a bird desperate to fly free. I clutched Mylin’s hand. On my other side, Avaryn beamed at me with encouragement. Even my parents smiled to see me so nervous. The eye on my father’s temple blinked with a flurry of gold, the pupil glaring at me as if fascinated.

‘Kylavyth,’ the magister called out. He looked around the crowd. He was perfectly bald, and from the globe of his head rose the buds of two horns. There was a long, crooked mouth in the line of his neck, and as he spoke, it smacked its lips and emitted soft little fluting sounds. ‘Kylavyth?’ he said again, and a young man with a long, coiled tail detached himself from the circle with an abashed grin. He bounded up to the stage to join the magister with the others. Seven had been called now. They stood there mute with pride, looking on the rest of us, waiting to see who else would be joining them.

Friends and relatives cried in the crowd, with both pride and sorrow mixed. It was the greatest honour in our village to be picked as one of the Nine, but it was a serious undertaking too. You would not see any of your family again until that day the Tree finally cracked and the crystal birds came flying amongst everyone to bring them the gift of the Bird of Change too. It was not to be done lightly, and the pride of mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers, was balanced by an equal sadness. It was not death, but it was a life suspended. I had thought about never seeing Avaryn until that distant day came, or mother and father, and it wrenched my heart with grief.

But what other choice did I have? I remained unblessed and the only chance for me was to petition the Bird directly. I had to give myself to it, so that it could change me utterly. There was no other way.

The magister reached into the vessel with his third hand. I held my breath. He drew out the slate and looked up. After an interminable pause, he called out:

‘Mylin.’

Mylin’s hand jolted in my own, as if he’d been shocked. I could feel him shaking, could barely hear the words he whispered to me as he turned to go.

‘It’ll be you next, Vemari. I know it,’ he said.

I closed my eyes, felt his fingers slip away as he ran for the stage. I don’t think my heart was even beating any more. All I could feel was the kiss of the sunlight as it slipped over the line of the valley’s side and struck the back of my neck. All I could see behind my closed eyes was the burning crystal of the Tree, a million diamonds hurtling through the darkness of the Void, and the Bird of Change shrieking its welcome to all of us. To me.

I felt the intake of breath as the village waited for the final name. I thought of the cries of delight I had heard last year when the Nine were taken to the Crystal Tree, when the moon swelled to Brimful in the midnight hour and the Bird came fluttering from its nest.

Oh, grant me that chance, sweet Bird of Change. Please…

The magister spoke, and he called my name.

It was an hour before sunset when they took us to the Tree. After a day of feasting and celebration, of tearful farewells to parents and siblings, the magister made us don the feathered robes of the Nine over our ordinary clothes and prepared to lead us from the square.

‘You have been called to a rite that has been enacted here for generations out of mind,’ he cried. He held aloft his staff, and the jewel embedded in its tip glowed with a strange and lustrous blue flame. ‘Many years ago, our forefathers left their lands around the Copper Henge and sought safety where none could find or persecute them, where they could live in peace and contemplation and raise their families safely in the Light of Change. Here, in this sacred valley, the Crystal Tree stands sentinel and guards us from all harm. All it asks in return is that we give of ourselves to the Tree, in the sacred number once a year, there to change in the light of its purity and grace, and to strengthen its boughs and branches.’

Solemnly we bowed and he blessed each of us in turn. He walked from the square, and all of us followed in the order we had been called, from first to ninth. Zaharix had been called, I saw. Yazeyla too, with her bifurcated tentacle. She lived only two huts away from me and walked with her usual preening stride, as if all this were only her due. I was at the end of the line, the last of the chosen to leave. My robes of blue and yellow feathers, the colours of the sky and the sun on the clearest day of high midsummer, trailed in the ferrous dirt at my feet. I looked at the puckered ironoak walls of the little houses I had known all my life and glanced back at the faces of the people who had always known me. Some wept openly, my parents among them. And then my eyes met Avaryn’s, and I could see the pride and happiness there. I could almost hear the words she was thinking: I was right, wasn’t I? It did bring you luck in the end!

We walked in procession for an hour, leaving the village and its festivities far behind us, until the head of the valley emerged from a glistening afternoon mist. The Crystal Tree proclaimed itself before us in spangled shards of light. Tranquil violet and sharp, piercing yellow met us; midnight indigo and balmy green, the bloody fume of red spreading out onto the silver grass. The Tree in its graceful order of flattened planes and levelled parings, its branches reaching in a beautiful, harmonic lattice towards the sky, was overwhelming in its scale and power. Its bark was as smooth and reflective as glass, its leaves like hammered gold or polished jewels. A hundred feet high, it seemed to set itself against the mineral breeze that swept in from the outside world, the harsh world beyond the valley where we would not be safe. It stood there, our silent sentinel, lit with such holy wonder that none would dare to violate the border it commanded. I looked on the Crystal Tree and wept, and my tears were but pale imitations of the jewels that dripped from its branches.

It was forbidden for any but the magister to approach the Tree outside of this sacred moment. Long had I gazed on it from afar, but I had never been this close. I took Mylin’s hand and felt the tremble of his reverence through it, as the magister directed us to sit around the base of the trunk.

‘Sit,’ the magister commanded. ‘One on each of the nine sides of the Tree.’

I looked to Mylin and mouthed Nine sides…

The jewel in the tip of the magister’s staff began to glow again, and I wondered if it was in some way a shard of the Tree given new form. I saw that there were iron loops hammered into the base of the trunk, a length of heavy silver chain. I sat down as the magister had commanded and slowly he began to thread the chain through the loops, until each of us was secured in place. My arms were free, but the chain was tight around my chest, and I found I could only take a deep breath with some effort. The ground was bare of grass here, right up against the base of the trunk. The earth was dark and smelled of well-handled copper, oily and rank. I looked to the sun as it began to slip down the flank of the valley, a shelf of light stretching out towards us, falling like an axe-blade on the body of the Tree. If I concentrated, I could almost hear it humming behind me, some radiance in the crystal vibrating to the touch of the sun. It would not be long till sunset and then the Brimful moon would rise above the western hills, an ivory orb shimmering with magnesium light.

‘These chains,’ the magister said, ‘symbolise the chains of Fate, as your fate is tied now to the good of the village. Blessings unto you, my friends, my children, my neighbours.’

So saying, the magister looked at us in turn and smiled. But when his eyes met mine, I thought I saw something there that I was not expecting: a hint of sadness, a tremble in his lip like the tremor of grief. He looked away and leant on his staff as he took the path back down to the village. I watched him fade into the growing night as the light from the Crystal Tree morphed into something more gentle and subdued, biding its time until the pale moonlight could conjure up its mellow midnight fume. I could hear the joy and laughter rising from the village down in the valley, the scuff of dirt as those around the Tree shifted their weight and tried to settle themselves in their unease. How long would this night last? we all wanted to know. When would the Bird of Change appear, and with what shattering power would it overwhelm us?

The hours passed and the evening grew dim. Night crept across the valley, flowing like a tide. The shadows lengthened and were subsumed, and the stars began to glimmer softly in the sky above. The Crystal Tree hummed and vibrated behind us. The light that passed through its branches was cold, a wash of cerulean blue and pale amethyst.

We were all too apprehensive to speak to each other. Now and then, I heard the soft, moist click of someone’s jaw opening, but no words were spoken. I could see Mylin beside me if I turned my head, and although we often met each other’s glance, we didn’t say anything about how we were feeling. It was as if we had all come to a silent agreement that this was a sacred moment and shouldn’t be marred by speech. I wondered if the Bird of Change was a timid thing, more tentative than any of us had imagined, and that by speaking we would somehow frighten it away.

The moon dropped deeper into the night sky and the air grew cool. Soon my hands were numb with the cold, and I rubbed them together to keep warm. I could see Mylin shivering, his breath coming in a plume of steam. On my other side was Yazeyla, the first to be called. Her tentacle twitched and quivered from her shoulder, a slab of leathery blue muscle. I tried to catch her eye, to smile encouragement at her, but she looked away. I was beneath her notice, it seemed.

I shook my head, smiling. It’s strange the things we cling to, to make ourselves seem better than other people. Here at the base of the Tree, were not all equal at last in the sight of the Bird? When it came to change us, would we not all be changed equally?

The hours of night drew on. I must have drowsed. I dreamed of my parents, my father’s third eye peering out at me from his temple. It blinked and the pupil shivered, a blur of gold – and then I was awake, suddenly, and there was a noise on the air like ice cracking in the first thaw.

‘What’s that?’ Mylin whispered. ‘Did you hear it?’

‘Shh!’ Yazeyla hissed. ‘Be silent, we mustn’t frighten it!’

‘Is it the Bird?’

‘Be quiet!’ she hissed again.

There was silence for a moment; and then the crack of ice, a report as loud as an ironoak branch breaking in the forest. I felt my heart lurch.

‘It’s coming!’ someone said from the other side of the Tree. His voice sounded muffled, far away. ‘I think… I think the ground is opening, here beside me!’

I listened, trying to drown the hammer of my heart. Mylin’s breath came in ragged bursts of steam. Yazeyla’s tentacle spasmed and she reached out with her other hand to settle it. Another sound, like cracking twigs. The scuff of dirt.

There was a smell in the air then, slithering and rank. As the stench crept around the base of the trunk, I could hear Yazeyla start to whimper beside me. I shuddered, twisted against the chains and stretched my neck around to see. But there were only shadows, and the soft moonlight smothered in the veiling clouds, and the stench deepening around us.

‘What is that?’ Mylin said, his voice shaking. ‘It smells like… like death…’

Someone was crying now. The crackling noise continued. Beneath it, huffing and weak, there was a sound like some beast rising from the earth, dragging itself from a cankered prison of mould and rot and dirt.

The stench was so powerful now, I thought I would be sick. I could hear one of the other Nine calling out, ‘The Bird is here! It’s here, it’s come at last, it’s–’

A scream tore across the night, and it was like the scream entered the crystals of the Tree, the trunk vibrating madly behind me, the sound fracturing into a thousand broken shards. I struggled against the chains, could hear Mylin chanting a prayer, his eyes closed.

‘Oh please, Fate save me and protect me and take me from here, please, Fate, do not let harm come to me…’

Each silver link on the chain was as big as my palm, and they had been pulled so tight that I could barely get my hands beneath them. As I wriggled and pulled, the screams were rising on the other side of the Tree, all of them sinking into the resonant crystal and breaking apart into a weird kaleidoscope of sound. The buffeting of wings, the stink of corpses. The wet crunch of flesh and bone, the gurgle of screams suddenly silenced, the weeping and terror…

I had one arm under the chain now and tried to pull it up to my shoulder so I could get my head out. My legs kicked at the dirt. A cry, another cry, some bestial roar that turned my blood to water. Mylin looked at me – and then he was wrenched from the chains, whipped up into the branches of the Tree, into the cold darkness of the night.

I screamed, then. I gave voice to the terror that surrounded us, and the Tree absorbed it all and threw it back in a shrieking chorus that blistered through the air.

Blood spattered around my feet. I looked up into the branches, shaking with dread and terror, to see two red eyes glowering back at me, a monstrous distended mouth. The grave-stench of its foetid breath enveloped me, and the ragged wings unfolded like stinking sheets of leather.

I had a dream last night, Mylin had said. It was a mouth… Somehow, it had turned into a huge, screaming mouth, with sharp teeth, and it wanted to devour us…

I awoke on a rough stone floor. There were bars in front of me. Bars made of bone.

The ceiling was no more than an arm’s length above. It was so dark that, at first, I thought I had gone blind, but after a moment my eyes adjusted. Beyond the bars there was a rounded tunnel, curving away on either side and disappearing into the shadows. I was in some kind of alcove or cell, and the bone bars were lashed together with thick ropes of twine or sinew. I was under the Crystal Tree, I realised. I could see its roots in the ceiling of the tunnel. They glistened with a spectral green light, lit with tendrils of purple and red.

The alcove was no more than a few feet wide, less than that deep. I felt around in the darkness, fingers brushing against the rough, unworked stone of the walls. There were bones at my feet, scraps of cloth. I shuddered at the touch of them and wrapped my arms around my body, although the air was warm and sultry. My robes were tattered and torn, so I shrugged out of them. I was still wearing my tunic dress beneath. My bare feet were bloodied, and I think it was only the pain that kept me sharp and awake. I was so frightened. All I wanted to do was curl up on the floor of my cell and cry.

The smell of death was thick around me. It wafted down the tunnel, a channel of coarse, cloying air. Water trickled down the walls. Drips echoed in the distance. I could hear a shuffling, scraping sound somewhere down the tunnel to my right, but as much as I stretched to look, I couldn’t see what it was. I knew that I mustn’t call out, that only silence would keep me alive a little longer.

All I could remember was the darkness above me, those red eyes burning with death and hatred, the leathery clasp of those ragged wings. The screaming of the Nine, the wet sounds of tearing flesh…

I started to cry, crouching on the floor of the cell. I thought of my mother and father and my sister, their smiles of love and encouragement as I walked away. I thought of the look in the magister’s eye as he tied us to the Tree. Did he know what was going to happen? Was this what the Bird of Change did to everyone who was called?

Perhaps it wasn’t the Bird at all. Perhaps some monstrous beast had come along and scared it off, or harmed it in some way. That thought was almost more terrifying, and as I crouched there in the darkness, I pressed my hands together and prayed.

Fate, that governs all, sweet Bird of Change, be safe…

I must have slept again for a while, falling into tense and unsettled dreams. When I woke up the light had changed, as if the roots of the Tree were filtering down the sun. The dark green had become paler, the blues were lighter and more vivid. It almost felt as if I were underwater.

I peered up both ends of the tunnel again, trying to see around the bars of my cell, but I couldn’t see anything apart from the unworked rock and the smothering shadows. I could hear that shuffling sound once more, and then I realised that I still had my little obsidian mirror in my pocket. I stretched my arm out through the bars, the mirrored stone in my hand, and angled it towards the end of the tunnel. Stretching, turning it inch by inch, trying to see in that polished disc some sign of escape–

I cried out. There, reflected in its depths, I saw some hulking dark shape further up the tunnel, hunched and bat-like, with mottled skin and great clawed feet. There was a suggestion of furled wings, pointed ears; some snuffling, snarling muzzle. It was dragging something behind it, and as the mirror shook in my hand, I saw that it was a body. Two arms trailing in the dirt, a ravaged face half bitten away, a tangle of silvery hair…

Mylin.

The creature jerked its head around at the sound of my cry. I shrieked again and threw myself back into the shallow depths of my cell, weeping with fear. At any moment I expected the creature’s shadow to fall across the bars, for it to wrench them open and rip me apart, but the shuffling soon faded away into the depths of the tunnels. I was left with only the sound of dripping water, the panicked thunder of my heart.

I don’t know how many hours passed while I huddled there on the stone floor. All I know is that the light in the tunnel faded and grew dim and then slowly swelled again, and that I became so accustomed to the smell of rotting flesh and rusty blood that I barely noticed it. I slept and woke, fell into strange fluttering dreams. Thirst clawed at my throat, and so I licked the moisture from the walls to sate it. Would the creature keep me in here until I starved to death? Or was this some rancid larder, where it stored its food until its appetite returned from its last debauch?

I thought of Mylin, pulled up into the branches, the spatter of his blood. His face torn and savaged, arms trailing along the floor of the tunnel.

I wanted to cry, but I stifled my tears. What use were tears now? As the hours passed and the light grew dim again, I fixed my mind on the magister’s words as he had set the chains around us.

For the Bird of Change will bless you, and you will become one with the Tree…

The magister knew what was going to happen. He knew that those who were taken to the Tree were taken by the Bird in turn, dragged under into this chamber beneath it and ripped apart. Had Mylin been blessed, then? Is that what it meant? Had Yazeyla, and Zaharix, and everyone else who had been called as one of the Nine? Had I been blessed?

But no, how could I have been, when I was still here and all the others were dead?

I took the mirror from my pocket and checked my face for injuries, but apart from a smear of dirt and a scrape across my forehead where I had been struck, I was unwounded.

It took many long moments of thought while I turned this all over in my mind. The sweet Bird brought the Change, I knew that. It made you one with the Tree. Mylin had been changed, there was no doubt about it… He had met with the ultimate transformation, and he had given his life in service of the Bird. Is that what the magister had meant?

It was all so confusing, but focusing on these thoughts helped to calm me. I watched the light dim and strengthen, and then, when I was thirsty, I drank from the water that trickled down the walls of the cell. Hunger brewed in my stomach, but I tried to ignore it. I prayed, and I thought of my friends, and I tried to give thanks for the great changes they had undergone. And when the shuffling came again in the depths of the corridor, I made my decision.

‘My name is Vemari,’ I cried out. ‘Hello? Let me see you, please. Let me give thanks to you, if I can… Sweet Bird… Sweet Bird of Change…’

Shuffle and scrape; a low, choking growl. My hands shook against the bone bars, but I kept my feet. The stench preceded it like an aura: a rank, bloody smell of rot and death. I could not look on it as it crept nearer to my cell, as it filled all the spaces between the bars. I bowed my head, the tears slipping down my face. I felt a strange intelligence flicker over me – something both cold and frenzied, a block of ice in the middle of an inferno.

It was not the Bird. I knew that now. But it had brought such Change with it…

‘My name is Vemari,’ I whispered, sobbing. ‘Please… what are you? Who are you?’

I looked up slowly, straining every nerve to meet its gaze.

I stared at its grotesque, snarling face, the squashed muzzle flecked with blood, the dripping purple tongue that hung between a rack of yellow fangs. Its eyes, as red as raging fire, burned in its head. A crest of stiff, blood-encrusted hair ran down its spine. The wings, I saw, were the stretched membranes between its clawed fingers. It was more like a bat than a living man. It growled and slavered, and I knew it was only by some enormous effort of will that it was not tearing the bars apart and ripping out my throat right now.

‘Please,’ I said, as if mercy were something it would ever give me. ‘Please… If you are not the Bird of Change, then… what is your name?’

The scream that erupted from it threw me back to the floor of the cell, my hands over my ears. I sobbed with terror. The wings flapped and buffeted me with a gust of stinking air, and through my fingers I saw the eyes blazing with rage and hatred, and… something else. Confusion, maybe; a maddened, chaotic uncertainty. It scrabbled at the ground with its clawed feet and shook the bars, and then, with a last clatter of its wings, it was gone. I heard its howls echoing down the length of the tunnel, roaring and shrieking through the shadows, and a great darkness of dread and fear came over me.

Hours later, or perhaps even days, as I lay slumped on the rough stone floor in lethargy and sorrow, I heard the shuffling sound again. It came nearer, and the stink of death came with it. I prepared myself. I prayed to Fate itself to look after everyone I loved. I prayed that my Change would come on me quickly, and without pain.

The creature darkened the bars and looked down on me. The wings were furled behind its back, and its face was slack and strangely disturbed. The jaw champed and the tongue flicked, and then, in a voice hacked up from the very depths of its body, it said:

‘Krugar… My name is Krugar…’

It said no more to me that day. It merely turned and retraced its steps, hunched and creeping, wings furled, its dead, red-rimmed eyes lost in thought. Krugar, it had said, its foul necrotic lips twisting over the blades of its teeth as they formed the word. It was like the question had awoken something in it, something unexpected, and the name had risen up unbidden. And how long had it been, I wondered, since it had thought of that name?

The next day, it returned to stand in front of the bars and silently look at me, and it flung down the mangled corpse of a jackrabbit onto the floor of the cell. I fell to the cold meat, tearing it with my teeth despite the disgust I felt. I was ravenous. It had been days since I had last eaten.

‘Thank you… Krugar,’ I said when I had finished, my chin slick with blood. ‘You are not the Bird of Change, are you? And yet we are under the Crystal Tree…’

It frowned, the bat-like face contracting, the teeth bared. When it spoke, its voice was like something dredged from a swamp, thick and cloying, stinking of rot.

‘You… the village,’ it said. ‘I remember… feeding…’

It snarled again suddenly, and brought the knuckle of its wing up to its face. Pain or sorrow flashed across it; but after a moment it passed, and its face again became almost bewildered and unsure.

‘What else do you remember?’ I said. I crouched in the cell, staring up at it, trying to mask my fear with questions.

It closed its burning red eyes. It bared its teeth.

‘Krugar…’ it hissed. ‘And… the Change, my blood, the…’

‘The Change?’ I whispered. ‘What about it? Krugar, have you changed too? Were you once… once other than as I see you now?’

I stood and clutched the bars of the cage, and I could feel the stinking blast of its breath as it roared again. Its eyes danced with confusion. Blood dribbled from its lips and the crest of hair on its spine stiffened.

‘I was not… like this!’ it screamed. ‘I was… I was…’

‘What? What were you? What are you now?’

Again, the creature shrieked and spread its wings, and scurried off down the tunnel, howling with distress. I collapsed onto the floor, exhausted, my stomach cramping from the rabbit meat.

The Change… Krugar had not always been what he was now. In his way, he had been visited by the Bird of Change too… and it appalled him.

Days passed, and Krugar returned often to my cage. Sometimes he brought me food, a flask of water. He would stand there and stare at me as I ate and drank, as if trying to see in me some reflection of what had happened to him. Slowly, bits and pieces of his story emerged from the fog of his mind, shards of clarity that he held up to the light of his understanding, turning them this way and that as he tried to remember.

One warm evening, he crouched in the tunnel, his eyes level with mine as I sat on the floor and his leather wings tucked behind his back. The dark green light filtered through the roots of the Crystal Tree and fell across him like a shroud.

‘I was… I was a great lord,’ he said, ‘in a land far from here. There was… a castle, I remember. A great hall, with high battlements and deep dungeons… I had servants, soldiers, an army at my command. There was blood, so much blood…’

‘But you were not… like this?’ I asked.

‘No,’ Krugar said. His gaze was distant. ‘I was not…’

Sometimes he became enraged, as if the touch of the memories burned him like fire. He would shriek and batter the bars of the cell, and the tunnels would echo with his screams. The crystal roots of the Tree, breaking through the rock above us like shards of bone, would tremble with the force of his anger, and I was so filled with dread and horror that I felt it would choke me. He would be gone for hours or days, and when he returned there would be a butcher’s stink about him, a coppery tang of blood and flesh. He would settle himself down by the door of the cell and pick up the thread of his story, ravelling it in with more certainty and confidence, as if he had spent that absent time brooding on the past and knitting it all back together in his mind.

‘Blood, yes,’ he said, one dark, cold night. His words came easier to him now. He didn’t have to retch them up from deep inside any more. ‘My bloodline was noble and pure, and I was the head of a great house. Yes,’ he laughed. ‘I remember that. My scions always scheming beneath me… Such is the fate of those who command, while others follow.’

My heart swelled to hear the word.

‘Fate is ever fickle,’ I said. I tried to smile, to encourage him.

‘Fate has proved itself more cruel than fickle,’ he sneered.

‘Fate can be a wonderful thing as well, Krugar,’ I said.

His eyes flicked to mine, boiling in the darkness.

‘You will call me… lord,’ he hissed.

‘Yes, my lord,’ I said. ‘Lord Krugar.’

His mouth cracked open into a vicious, elongated grin. The yellow fangs gleamed with slaver. I backed away into the cell.

‘Lord Krugar…’ he said again, and I knew he was not talking to me, but to the shade of his memory. ‘The greatest of my name, the greatest of my house… A vampire lord of dread power, but…’

He shook his head.

‘Long ages I reigned over my kingdom. Centuries unnumbered, slaking my thirst wherever I pleased, conquering with my armies, enslaving all those who dared cross me…’

There was nothing of the animal in his eyes any longer. The wretched feral creature I had seen dragging Mylin’s body through the tunnel had receded in him. His form was still one of bestial savagery, but there was a dark intelligence in him now, a sense of arrogance and hauteur that was grotesque in such a frame.

‘I was not always as you see me, no,’ he said quietly. ‘When the long centuries and the dull millennia lay their weight against us, even the most exalted of my kind can fall prey to this… this degeneracy. Our appetites grow too strong. Our wills fracture, and we cannot keep the beast from enveloping us any longer. But you, my child…’

He stared at me, like he had never seen me before. He glanced around the ridged ceiling of the tunnel, the crystal lattice of the Tree’s roots as they broke through the stone, the bone bars of my cage.

‘I have been submerged,’ he whispered. ‘My mind and my will have drowned inside this thing, but now… now, I think I can reach the surface once more, the air, the light of the moon…’

He reached up towards the ceiling of the tunnel with his wing, the long fingers of his hand stretching out, the membrane stretching with them. In the flickering darkness underground, stained by those green and purple shadows, he looked more monstrous than he ever had before.

His squashed, bat-like face was still. The pointed ears twitched. He crept away again, silently, pondering all of this. I settled down on the floor of my cell, amongst the bones of the desultory meals he had thrown me.

He had been changing, I thought. Turning from the great lord in his high castle, to a beast that burrowed in the dirt and took the offerings of a frightened village. He had been on the very cusp of Change, and I had somehow stopped him, brought him back to what he had once been.

Mylin had changed. Yazeyla had changed. Everyone I had known was no longer as they once were. Except me.

When he opened the door of my cell, I thought my time was over. I had been stored in this larder for who knew how many days and weeks. At last, his appetite had returned, and I prepared myself for death. I was frightened beyond measure, but I was exultant too. My body and my soul would be transformed utterly, and pain would only be the barrier through which I would have to break, to meet at last with the Architect of Fate. If the Bird of Change had ever dwelled in the Crystal Tree, it was gone now; but I would become one with the Tree all the same. My screams would thread through its branches and through the jewels of its leaves. My blood would filter into the soil and bring richness to all that grew there. It would slake the thirst of Krugar and bring him one step closer to the new form he had fought against for so long.

‘You are free to go,’ Krugar said, as he unlatched the door. The bars swung wide, and the open tunnel was before me. He stood straighter, and though his outward form was unchanged, he seemed more like a man now than an animal. ‘Go back to your village, tell them the Bird has flown. You must consider yourself that rarest of things, Vemari – a victim of Lord Krugar who has lived to tell the tale.’

‘My… my lord, I don’t understand…’ I cowered in the cell, not knowing what to do.

‘You are a simple peasant of an inbred community so low that it shames me to have terrorised you for so long. I do not expect you to understand. But I have other concerns now, child. I have a castle to take back, a kingdom to rule.’ He grinned, and my heart near failed to see it. ‘I have the scions of my house to punish…’

He stalked off down the tunnel, walking between the sheets of sultry light that fell from the crystal roots. I was alone.

I tried to imagine the look on my parents’ faces when I staggered back down to the village and told them what had happened. I tried to picture the magister’s reaction, the grief and fury of the villagers when they discovered that their lives had been governed by a lie. That they had given their children, their friends, not to the wonders of the Bird of Change, but to the feral appetites of a base creature like Lord Krugar.

How could I do that to them? How could I force such an awful… such an awful change on them?

Tentatively, I stepped into the corridor of the tunnel. I moved through the wash of dark light, trying not to make a sound. I could hear Krugar’s scuffling footsteps somewhere up ahead. My feet crunched on scattered bones, on scraps of mouldering flesh and rags of discarded cloth. Feathers underfoot, some blackened with dried blood, others faded with the passage of time – feathers from the robes we had worn, when the Nine had been fastened to the Tree.

I found him in an antechamber at the end of the tunnel, a round, rough-carved room like a nest lined with bones and desiccated corpses. He was hunched over, rummaging through a pile of what looked like old clothes: jewelled waistcoats and doublets, long leather boots that were green with mould.

‘Lord Krugar?’ I said.

He didn’t turn to face me. There was something frantic in his movements as he tore through the pile of clothes.

‘What is it, child? You have been given your freedom, I suggest you take it before I rip you apart for your insolence!’

‘You were so close, my lord,’ I said quietly. ‘You cannot leave us now. Not when you were so near.’

He snarled deep in his throat, tossed aside scarves and cloaks, a jewel-encrusted belt. A whine escaped him, a whimpering despair that he strangled into a guttural, half-swallowed growl.

‘None of it will fit you any more, my lord.’ I stepped closer. ‘You are not as you were, and you never will be again.’

‘I will!’ he howled. ‘I will take back what is mine! I will rule again, I swear it!’

‘You rule over us now, sweet Bird,’ I said. ‘And we love and worship you for it. Please, Bird – turn around. Face me.’

Fear had gripped me like a physical thing, like the arms of my mother when she hugged me before sleep. She loved me, even though I had not been blessed. She still loved me.

‘Let me be blessed by you,’ I whispered. ‘I beg you…’

‘Damn you, child!’ he cried, turning on me.

I held up the mirror I had taken from my pocket. I showed the creature what it was, what it had become.

‘It is nothing to be frightened of,’ I said. ‘You have been so blessed…’

Its scream shot through me. Its mouth unlocked to show its cache of teeth, as sharp as butcher’s knives. The crest flared on its spine, and its eyes were like rubies burning in the snow. Its wings spread wide.

Before the end, I wondered if they would hear my cries down in the valley. Would the roots of the Tree take those screams and cast them out through its crystal branches, and transform them on the still night air into cries of joy and gladness? I hoped so – for the Bird of Change was with me, its teeth sunk fast into the meat of my neck, and I was at last no longer what I had once been.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Richard Strachan is a writer and editor who lives with his partner and two children in Edinburgh, UK. Despite his best efforts, both children stubbornly refuse to be interested in tabletop wargaming. His first story for Black Library, ‘The Widow Tide’, appeared in the Warhammer Horror anthology Maledictions.

An extract from ‘Imperator Gladio’
By Richard Strachan
in the anthologie The Accursed.

The night had been cold, and the smell of the salt marshes was still dormant as the twin suns rose, one casting a pale corona to wreathe the first with fire. In the distance came the sound of a desultory cannonade from the Basilisk batteries, and from the other side of the motor pool the battered tank platoons were turning over their engines, preparing the retreat. Captain Becherovka stowed the data-slate in the thigh pocket of his fatigues as he cut through churned and oily mud. Dread was coiled deep in his stomach. It was an old friend now, much missed when it wasn’t there.

He held out a trembling hand and gripped it with the other. Then, as he skirted a line of Chimeras, out of the mist it loomed, monolithic, the salt marshes fanning away behind it. Like an outcrop of rock, he thought, or stacked basalt slabs cooling on a volcanic plain. The camouflage paint had flecked away to reveal the brooding black metal underneath. He held his breath as he approached it, reverent, afraid.

Imperator Gladio… It was as if he were approaching a temple, a primitive homage to some appalling, vengeful god.

The main gun stretched out like a brandished sword, the squat muzzle of the Demolisher cannon beneath it glazed with afterburn. The Baneblade bristled with secondary weapons: lascannons, heavy bolters, heavy flamers, heavy stubbers. Nothing about it was light, or geared for anything other than total destruction. It was the most powerful weapon available to the Zentrale 77th Armoured Dragoons, but as Becherovka came near he felt only the wild stirrings of that dread in his stomach, the sense of fate lying heavily against him.

The Gladio… There wasn’t a super-heavy crewman in the regiment who didn’t fear that name.

‘We need to be certain that you’re up to the job,’ Colonel Radetzky had said to him the night before.

‘What he means,’ the lord commissar had drawled, ‘is will you break? The nightmares, the trauma – can we rely on you, captain?’

The command tent had been musty and close, the light stark from the lumen-globe that stuttered above the map table. Much revised, the map showed a front on the verge of collapse – troops’ positions overrun by suicidal cultist assaults, counter-attacking armoured spearheads shattered against impregnable defences. The Archenemy was rolling up the advance everywhere. The whole campaign was on the brink.

‘Yes,’ he’d said, with as much certainty as he could muster.

‘A recon team found it four days ago,’ Radetzky said. ‘It was recovered last night, refitted, rearmed. It’s in good working order, as far as we can tell. Throne knows we need every advantage we can get.’

‘The mission schematics will be cast to your slate,’ the commissar informed him. ‘Relieve, reinforce, resist. No retreat.’

‘I know the drill,’ Becherovka said, and inside he thought, Suicide mission. And the Gladio of all things. Well, it was going to come at some point. It may as well be now, when all else seems lost. A strange recklessness gripped him, and he said, ‘The Gladio. A cursed tank, for a cursed man.’

Six times the Baneblade had been dispatched in the campaign to pacify the Valgaast front. Each time it had returned with new rumours and legends accruing to it, like barnacles to a ship’s hull. Some said the first honoured lieutenant to lead it into combat had died in the command chair from an unexplained seizure; it was only when the mission was complete that the rest of the crew realised he had been dead for hours, even though he’d been speaking to them over the vox the whole time… Supposedly a reactor leak had killed the crew with rad-poisoning on its third mission, and there was a rumour that during one expedition the Gladio’s machine-spirit had turned on a supporting Leman Russ platoon and wiped them out, the gunners powerless to stop it. It was a cursed tank indeed.

‘Superstitious nonsense,’ Radetzky told him. ‘We’ve had men shot for less. The only curse is our dearth of reliable parts for repairs.’

‘Be careful, captain,’ the commissar hissed. ‘You tread on dangerous ground here.’

Becherovka strapped on his helmet and saluted. ‘Hadn’t you heard, lord commissar? I’m an expert in dangerous ground.’

He was aware of the figure he must cut as he approached the crew – diminished, faded, about a stone underweight and with a nervous tic in his eye. Lieutenant Kovar, the second-in-command and primary gunner, looked up and nodded. Stijn, the driver, her face permanently marked by the black frames of her goggles, gave a lazy salute. ‘Come to join us then, captain?’ she said. ‘The voyage of the damned…’

They all felt it, this accursed place, clawing at their minds – the endless wilds of marshland and dead mists and desolate fog. They tried to hide it with a soldier’s gallows humour, but they hated this front as much as he did.

They were a scratch team, about four short of what the Baneblade demanded. They lounged just outside its shadow, some playing knucklebones, others chaining lho-sticks and arguing the finer points of bootleg amasec stills. Kovar and Stijn he knew already; the engineer, Palivo, came recommended. The others were unknown to him, but the data-slate had given him their names: Zaj and Musil, wiry twins who would man the sponsons; Jezek, built like an ogryn and pulling double duty to load and fire the Demolisher. Becherovka himself would man the autocannon and the heavy stubber. It was a mess – it was worse than a mess – but it was what they had.

And every one of them would know him by reputation: Captain Halidar Becherovka, who’d spent four days at the bottom of the salt marshes breathing a pocket of stale air while his Stormsword’s crew drowned in the mud around him.

Under his breath he muttered the first words of the Dragoons’ battle prayer. ‘Facta non verba… Deeds, not words…’ Only deeds would kill his fear. And then he said, ‘Mount up!’

Sitting with their blank grins in the ossuary niche by the wall of honour were the seventy-three skulls of the men and women who had crewed Imperator Gladio before them – at least, the ones they’d been able to find. Becherovka touched his hand to the oldest skulls, the bone blackened with age, silty with a crust of engine exhaust. He primed the terminal by the command seat and scanned the uploaded schematics. The multi-fuel engines were brewing hard, the reactor cooking up a full-throated growl that rattled his teeth. Jezek, already shirtless, his muscled chest as thick as a flak jacket, was sweating as he settled himself by the munitions sconce on the lower gunnery deck. Zaj and Musil checked in from the sponsons; repairs had been hurried, and what was normally automated would require crewed input. Palivo confirmed the power plant was turning over smoothly, or as well as could be expected.

‘We have no tech-priest?’ he voxed. ‘No adept either?’ The network crackled, and his words were framed by a weird glissando. Becherovka squeezed the bud deeper into his ear, boosting the vox-suite on the command terminal. He glanced down the gangway from the gunnery deck to the engine room. Palivo raised a hand.

‘No,’ he confirmed. ‘Something went wrong, a neural burn-out when he tried to interface last night. The machine-spirit is truculent in this one.’

‘So they say… Well, we’ll make do,’ Palivo replied, uneasily. ‘It’s bad luck all the same.’

‘There’s no such thing as luck.’ Yes there is. ‘This is a venerable machine we have the privilege to command, but let’s not pretend it doesn’t have its… its issues.’

Stijn cheerily chipped in from the driver’s cell. ‘How many times has it been recovered now?’

‘Six,’ Becherovka said. ‘This is the seventh mission this deployment.’

‘My lucky number!’ she whooped as she gunned the engines. Then they all felt it; the implacable advance of the Gladio lurching forward. ‘At least we’ll get to find out what really happened to the other guys!’

‘That’s enough,’ Becherovka said. He measured the shake out of his voice. ‘Look, I don’t know any of you well, and some of you I don’t know at all. But we all have a job to do and I know we can do it. Trust in your guns, soldiers, and fear the Emperor’s grace. Facta non verba.’

He looked through the viewing cupolas and saw the mist curl across clean air, the cobalt sky surrendering to the cloud.

Not water, not mud, he prayed. Give me fire and thunder, but please, Emperor, don’t let me die like that again.

Click here to buy The Accursed.

WARHAMMER HORROR

A BLACK LIBRARY IMPRINT

First published in Great Britain in 2021.
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ISBN: 978-1-80026-743-5

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* 9. If any part of this license is illegal, or becomes illegal as a result of any change in the law, then that part shall be deleted, and replaced with wording that is as close to the original meaning as possible without being illegal.

* 10. Any failure by Black Library to exercise its rights under this license for whatever reason shall not be in any way deemed to be a waiver of its rights, and in particular, Black Library reserves the right at all times to terminate this license in the event that you breach clause 2 or clause 3.