The Deeper Shade - C L Werner Read online

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  Cover

  The Deeper Shade – C L Werner

  About the Author

  An Extract from ‘Hallowed Knights: Black Pyramid’

  A Black Library Publication

  eBook license

  The Deeper Shade

  C L Werner

  Mighty waves crashed against the craggy shore, splashing the luminescent boulders with a briny spray. Steam rose from the rocks as the salt evaporated, repulsed by the strange stones. Dun-coloured surf-spiders cast webs across the vapour, greedily drawing the dissolved mineral into their maws with clawlike mandibles. Overhead, flocks of winged lizards circled in search of the squamous molluscs cast up by the tide. Plantlike anemones slowly slithered along the beach, their stinging tendrils ready to stun any lizard that flew too near and their foot-stomachs ready to consume anything left helpless on the sand.

  The shores of Gharn were vibrant with strange life. All except one place. A great finger of luminescent stone that projected far out into the bay, curling in upon itself like the horn of a mighty ram. Such was the atmosphere of nameless dread that clung to the spot that not even the surf-spiders were witless enough to trespass there. Only men had so little regard for their own lives.

  Thalinosh of Charr ran his fingers through the turquoise feathers that coated his arms and studied the grim outcropping. The curving mass of rocks was just as he had seen it when he had cast the rune-bones and made his auguries. It was always a risk to seek wisdom from daemons, for there was invariably a maliciousness in such transactions, lies hidden inside truth and truth woven within a skein of lies. To gain power, a sorcerer had to quickly learn what to believe and what to reject.

  ‘There it is, my lord. The Claw of Mermedus.’ The words came in a low whine from the tortured wreck that had been Thalinosh’s apprentice until a few weeks ago. He tried to give his master an ingratiating smile, but his face was too mangled to manage the effort. ‘That is where I was attacked. I was fortunate to escape with my life.’

  ‘Yes,’ Thalinosh hissed. ‘Most fortunate. Even more fortunate that I found you before Carradras.’ The sorcerer’s hands tightened into fists as he spoke his rival’s name. Gratz had grown impatient and ambitious, seeking a master who would advance his knowledge of the black arts more swiftly than Thalinosh. Carradras had promised to meet those desires… for a price.

  ‘The dogs of Chaos always bite their own!’ A bitter laugh wracked the battered old man who lay prostrate in the sand at Thalinosh’s feet. His face was a mash of bruises and cuts, his once pristine robes now tattered and torn. There was a jewelled chain around his neck, but the symbol that had once hung from it was gone, stamped underfoot by Thalinosh’s followers. The Hammer of the God-King was not exactly held with fondness by the disciples of Tzeentch.

  The old man’s speech brought an angry snarl from the creature that stood over him. The fur-covered brute stamped down with his iron-shod hoof and smashed the captive’s thigh. Sharga grunted in amusement when the priest cried out in pain. The rest of Thalinosh’s warband echoed the beastman’s savage laughter.

  ‘No more games,’ Thalinosh said, raising one of his feathered hands and commanding his followers to silence. Human and beastkin alike, they knew better than to question the sorcerer’s orders. They had the recent example of the priest’s torture to remind them of what happened to those who defied Thalinosh.

  Thalinosh knelt beside the old man. His touch was almost gentle when he reached out and lifted the priest’s face from the sand so they might look one another in the eye. ‘This is the place I am meant to be. The place the Changer has sent me to find.’ The sorcerer’s sallow features drew back in a cold smile. ‘Tell me again why your people will not fish in this bay. Why they will not hunt along this shore.’ He looked out to the outcropping. ‘Why is it that nothing will dare those rocks?’

  The old priest returned Thalinosh’s gaze. For just an instant, through the mien of defeat and subjugation, the sorcerer detected a glimmer of triumph. The prisoner had let his guard down and now the captor would wrest the truth from his mind.

  ‘You… Will… Speak…’ Thalinosh’s eyes blazed with energy as he evoked his magic. Some of the feathers on his arms curled up and fell out, rolling across the sand as desiccated, withered things. He could feel the arcane power crawling through his flesh, seeking to transform still more of his body. He redirected that power into his spell, setting his mind against the priest’s will.

  Weakened by torture and doubt, the priest’s defiance was not equal to Thalinosh’s magic. Words came spilling off his tongue. ‘There is a cave beneath the water where dwells a ravenous phantom. Man or beast, it spares nothing that invades its domain. It pulls its victims asunder, leaving only ragged fragments to be washed in with the tide. The bones are always cracked, the marrow sucked out and only a black slime left within. No ship will dare these waters and no village has long stood upon these shores.’

  Thalinosh smiled at the priest’s recitation. ‘A phantom?’ he mused. ‘You claim it is some murdering ghost that has wrought such havoc? Yet what need would a ghost have for the marrow in a man’s bones? What revenant would squander its wrath upon fish and birds?’

  ‘It has been seen,’ the old man whispered. ‘Or rather the effect of its attack has been seen. Sailors brought up from the decks of their ships, screaming as spectral hands broke them apart, rending them limb by limb.’ He drove his fist against the sand. ‘I have seen it happen, watched as my own wife was taken by the accursed fiend!’

  The sorcerer laid his hand on his prisoner’s head. ‘I have seen it too. In my auguries.’ He glanced at the cowering Gratz. ‘My apprentice has told me something of it, how it tried to snatch him from his boat but instead only succeeded in taking from him the treasure he stole from me. A treasure that has been lost.’ Thalinosh gazed out at the bay, his eyes peering at the rolling waves. ‘Until now, that is.’

  Sharga cocked his goat-like head to one side and peered at Thalinosh with a bulbous, ophidian eye. ‘Cave is under water. Can not fight. You bring ghost out for fight?’

  Thalinosh scowled at his bestial underling. ‘It is no ghost,’ he told Sharga, making sure his voice was loud enough for the rest of the warband to hear. ‘And it would serve no purpose to lure our enemy to us. We must face it in its lair.’

  ‘How?’ the ebon-armoured Borir asked. The warrior rapped her gauntlet against the steel of her breastplate. ‘I have served under your banner for many years, but I did not do so simply to sink and drown.’ She turned her skull-masked helm and considered the rest of Thalinosh’s dozen followers. ‘We are none of us fish, sorcerer. We cannot march into this phantom’s watery grave.’

  Thalinosh gestured at Borir with a crooked finger. ‘We can and we will,’ he told her. He stared down at the captive priest. ‘With a bit of help from our new friend, we will find the cave.’

  The priest howled in terror when he saw the cruel gleam in Thalinosh’s eyes.

  The priest was a long time in dying. Thalinosh had counted upon that. Some rituals demanded copious amounts of blood, others could be performed only at certain junctures of the constellations. This spell, however, had demanded pain.

  Borir had done the cutting, plying the athame with the grisly facility of a butcher. Staked out on the beach at the shore of the bay, the old man was skinned and gutted like a fish, a red ruin of humanity that lingered on only because of the magical sympathy between himself and the pounding waves. With each wet, bloody breath the prisoner drew, a great torrent of water was drawn up from the bay and hurled back into the vastness of the sea. A rippling barrier of force ke
pt the waves from crashing down again, a spiral of eldritch power that defied the raging elements.

  Thalinosh gave the dying priest an almost affectionate glance as the bay was drained. Only the diametric opposition of the sacrifice could have endowed the ritual with the power to do what he demanded of it. The pious zealotry of a holy man matched against the profane ambitions of the sorcerer. It was almost beautiful in its poetry of antagonism.

  The other component of the sacrifice sat on the sands with his legs folded. Gratz, Thalinosh’s apprentice, had been oblivious to his true role in the ritual until much too late. The sorcerer used his former student as a conduit, a channel for the awesome magic he evoked. There was only so much power a frail mantle of mortal flesh could withstand. Gratz was past that limit now. His body had been reduced to a blackened husk, the skin sloughing away from his smouldering bones. Like the priest, the apprentice persisted only because of the ritual’s energies; without that his tortured wretchedness would have expired hours ago.

  ‘It is enough,’ Thalinosh decided when the bay was drained down to the very dregs. From where he stood on the beach he could see the black fissure that gaped on the opposite side of the emptied bay, at the base of the clawlike rock. The cave mouth stood exposed, a dark cavity in the luminescent stone. A litter of bones and wrecked ships poked up from the muddy floor, the oldest of them coated in thick encrustations of barnacles. The haunter of the bay had been quite busy over the centuries.

  ‘It is enough,’ the sorcerer repeated. He motioned to Sharga. The beastman swung his heavy cudgel and mashed the priest’s skull with a single blow. The last draw of seawater fell back into the bay, spilling across the mud and pooling in its deepest recesses as the prisoner’s pulse was silenced. Gratz howled even louder as the full force of the spell closed upon him. Thalinosh gave his apprentice an appraising scrutiny. There was enough left of the man that he should be good for a few more hours. After that, the barrier between bay and sea would vanish and the waves would come crashing back. Before that happened, his work needed to be finished.

  ‘Stay here and watch over Gratz,’ Thalinosh commanded two of his other acolytes. The robed cultists flanked the doomed apprentice, standing guard over him with bared swords. There was small chance of anyone or anything disturbing the ritual now, but it paid to be cautious.

  ‘You are going down to the cave?’ Borir asked, a trace of uneasiness in her tone.

  ‘We are going into the cave,’ Thalinosh corrected her. His gaze swept across the rest of his retinue. Erudite cultists, barbaric warriors and mutant beastkin, they all shrank before the sorcerer’s imperious regard. ‘What we have come here to find is in that cave,’ he stated. ‘And we are not leaving here without it.’ He pointed at Gratz’s withered body and drew their attention to the man’s fading vitality. It was a vivid way to impress on them the essence of urgency.

  The warband hastened down into the muck of the bay, sloughing through the mire of mud and sand. They picked their way across the field of skeletons and wrecked ships, drawing towards the black opening of the cave. A warm, evil smell billowed from the fissure, a cloying stench that made the skin crawl. The luminous rock was subdued here, cloaked in a black scum that dripped from the walls. Jumbled bones lay heaped around the cave’s mouth, splintered in some uncanny fashion that made them look twisted rather than cracked. Thalinosh paused to examine one. Just as the priest had said, the marrow had been extracted and replaced with a tarry sort of slime.

  Leading the way, one of the beastmen was the first to venture into the cave. His terrified bleats were heard a moment later. When Thalinosh reached the cave mouth, the cries collapsed into a sickening gurgle. All that could be seen of the creature were his horns as he was sucked down by a patch of quicksand.

  ‘Bind yourselves together,’ Borir ordered as she retrieved a roll of rope from one of the marauders. ‘Around the waist and in groups of three.’

  Thalinosh declined Borir’s offer to tie the sorcerer to herself and Sharga. He had his own methods of escaping the hazards of the cave if it became necessary.

  Their precautions taken, the warband resumed their advance into the rank depths of the cave. The layer of slime that coated the walls was patchy, exposing just enough of the luminescent rock to ease the gloom, casting everything in a mousy grey light. The profusion of splintered bones remained persistent, but now they were mingled with other debris. Rusted armour and swords were much in evidence, as were the decaying remains of chests and casks. Goblets and plates of obvious workmanship lay scattered about. Battered coffers rested amidst piles of coins. The gleam of gemstones shone from the mud and slime. All the treasures of sunken ships and demolished villages had been drawn into the cave.

  ‘Something is here,’ Borir whispered, her sword clenched tight in her hands. Far from evoking a sense of avarice, seeing the accumulated treasure had instead aroused an increased wariness in the warrior.

  ‘This predator’s lair,’ Sharga grunted. ‘Hunter live here. Bring prey here to eat.’ The beastman lifted his head and snorted loudly. ‘Cannot tell if smell old or new. Maybe hunter here. Maybe hunter gone.’

  Thalinosh made arcane passes with his hands, evoking a minor divination spell. ‘What I seek is deeper in the cave,’ he declared. ‘Whatever is here, be it beast, phantom or daemon, it will not stand in my way.’ He waved his hand at the leading group of warriors. ‘Onwards, or would you prefer to wait for the sea to come rushing back?’

  The threat overcame the misgivings of his followers. Warily, they probed further into the gloom of the grotto. Finally, the leading warrior called back to Thalinosh. ‘My lord, the way ahead is still flooded! The tunnel angles downwards and is filled with water.’

  Thalinosh moved forwards and inspected the scene. The tunnel remained wide enough to run a brace of chariots through side by side and the ceiling was still far above them. The floor, however, had taken a sharp decline, angling deeper than it had before. Ahead of them, all that could be seen was the reflection of light across still water. It was here in this flooded cavern, his sorcery told him, that the thing he sought would be found.

  ‘We go on,’ Thalinosh said. He pointed at his vanguard and slowly gestured to the flooded tunnel. ‘Do not fear. My magic will protect you from whatever waits in the dark.’

  Reassured, the warrior and those tied to him by the rope advanced into the ankle-high water. The second group of three followed after them. Thalinosh motioned to Borir and Sharga to wait. Let the others take the risk of drawing out the cave’s inhabitant. They could be replaced easily enough. More easily than the magic it would take to really cast protective wards over them.

  Thalinosh let the two groups of minions get twenty yards down the flooded tunnel before he ordered his henchmen to follow. The sorcerer kept behind them, his eyes glowing with arcane light as they adjusted to the increasing darkness. The walls here were thick with slime, almost utterly blotting out the luminescent rock beneath. Long strings of black mucus dripped from the ceiling, lending their reek to the clammy, stagnant air.

  ‘Bones under water,’ the bird-faced beastman leading the second group of three declared. ‘Toes feel bones.’

  ‘Hold your tongue, turnskin,’ the vanguard hissed. ‘Your racket might wake the phantom.’ The warning made the two cultists with him glance around in fear while the scraggly brays in the second group looked behind to gauge how far they would have to run if they had to flee the cave. The bird-faced tzaangor leading them grunted sullenly, but made no further comment.

  The cave pushed deeper into the earth. The water level now was chest-high for the warrior leading the way. The walls were so thick with slime that the intruders began slashing at them with their swords and axes to scrape away some of the encrustation and expose patches of luminous rock to provide them a little light.

  A sound from ahead stopped the vanguard just as he was swinging his sword to chop at the wall. A loud, wet plop
that echoed through the tunnel, it was unlike the faint drips and splashes caused by the mucus falling from the roof.

  Thalinosh’s magically attuned sight could decipher no more than the mundane vision of his followers. Stifled by the reek in the air, even the bestial senses of his more animalistic minions were unable to detect anything. All they had were their ears, and everyone was silent as they strained to draw some betraying sound from the darkness.

  The tense vigil ended in a blood-curdling shriek. The lead warrior screamed and flailed at the water. Before anyone could react, he was yanked under the scummy surface. The cultist behind him howled in terror as the rope grew taut and he too was jerked beneath the water. The last of the trio whipped out his knife and sawed frantically at the rope. He was also pulled under, but unlike his companions, he soon reappeared, gasping and floundering in the flooded tunnel. Freed from the drag of his doomed comrades, the cultist started swimming back towards Thalinosh and the others.

  Panicked cries filled the cave. The tzaangor and his brays were clawing at their rope, preferring to risk the quicksand than be drowned by whatever had taken the vanguard. Borir and Sharga had already slashed the cord that connected them, but neither strayed any deeper into the cave.

  Thalinosh raised his hand and muttered words of power. From his palm, a sphere of blue light flashed into being and went streaking down the tunnel. By its glow, the terrified cultist could be seen trudging through the water. Beyond him, a litter of torn flesh bobbed to the surface, remains so ravaged they scarcely could be recognised as human.

  ‘Hold fast!’ Thalinosh snarled at his minions. The beastmen gazed at him in confusion. The surviving cultist simply ignored him and continued to flee.

  By the magic light, Thalinosh could see the water behind the defiant cultist shiver, disturbed by something moving beneath it. The surface bubbled violently, as though the thing were rising. Yet still there was nothing to be seen.

  The cultist shrieked as he was suddenly jerked backwards. Thalinosh watched in wonder as the man was lifted into the air. He flailed about, suspended midway between the water and the dripping roof. The sorcerer could see nothing holding the man. There was a grisly rending sound. An arm popped from its socket and was then torn free. Then the opposite leg was pulled from the man’s body.