Gloomspite - Andy Clark Read online

  More great stories from the Age of Sigmar

  SACROSANCT AND OTHER STORIES

  Various authors

  MYTHS & REVENANTS

  Various authors

  GLOOMSPITE

  Andy Clark

  THE RED FEAST

  Gav Thorpe

  RULERS OF THE DEAD

  Josh Reynolds and David Annandale

  Contains the novels Nagash: The Undying King and Neferata: Mortarch of Blood

  SOUL WARS

  Josh Reynolds

  LEGENDS OF THE AGE OF SIGMAR

  Various authors

  Contains the novels Fyreslayers, Skaven Pestilens and Sylvaneth

  THE REALMGATE WARS: VOLUME 1

  Various authors

  Contains the novels The Gates of Azyr, War Storm, Ghal Maraz, Hammers of Sigmar, Wardens of the Everqueen and Black Rift

  THE REALMGATE WARS: VOLUME 2

  Various authors

  Contains the novels Call of Archaon, Warbeast, Fury of Gork, Bladestorm, Mortarch of Night and Lord of Undeath

  GODS & MORTALS

  Various authors

  SCOURGE OF FATE

  Robbie MacNiven

  • HALLOWED KNIGHTS •

  Josh Reynolds

  Book 1: PLAGUE GARDEN

  Book 2: BLACK PYRAMID

  HAMILCAR: CHAMPION OF THE GODS

  David Guymer

  BLACKTALON: FIRST MARK

  Andy Clark

  SHADESPIRE: THE MIRRORED CITY

  Josh Reynolds

  CALLIS & TOLL: THE SILVER SHARD

  Nick Horth

  THE TAINTED HEART

  C L Werner

  OVERLORDS OF THE IRON DRAGON

  C L Werner

  EIGHT LAMENTATIONS: SPEAR OF SHADOWS

  Josh Reynolds

  THE RED HOURS

  Evan Dicken

  HEART OF WINTER

  Nick Horth

  WARQUEEN

  Darius Hinks

  THE BONE DESERT

  Robbie MacNiven

  Audio Dramas

  REALMSLAYER

  David Guymer

  EIGHT LAMENTATIONS: WAR-CLAW

  Josh Reynolds

  SHADESPIRE: THE DARKNESS IN THE GLASS

  Various authors

  THE PALACE OF MEMORY AND OTHER STORIES

  Various authors

  THE IMPRECATIONS OF DAEMONS

  Nick Kyme

  Contents

  Cover

  Backlist

  Title Page

  Warhammer Age of Sigmar

  Prologue

  Act 1

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Act 2

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Act 3

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  An Extract from ‘Myths & Revenants’

  A Black Library Publication

  eBook license

  From the maelstrom of a sundered world, the Eight Realms were born. The formless and the divine exploded into life.

  Strange, new worlds appeared in the firmament, each one gilded with spirits, gods and men. Noblest of the gods was Sigmar. For years beyond reckoning he illuminated the realms, wreathed in light and majesty as he carved out his reign. His strength was the power of thunder. His wisdom was infinite. Mortal and immortal alike kneeled before his lofty throne. Great empires rose and, for a while, treachery was banished. Sigmar claimed the land and sky as his own and ruled over a glorious age of myth.

  But cruelty is tenacious. As had been foreseen, the great alliance of gods and men tore itself apart. Myth and legend crumbled into Chaos. Darkness flooded the realms. Torture, slavery and fear replaced the glory that came before. Sigmar turned his back on the mortal kingdoms, disgusted by their fate. He fixed his gaze instead on the remains of the world he had lost long ago, brooding over its charred core, searching endlessly for a sign of hope. And then, in the dark heat of his rage, he caught a glimpse of something magnificent. He pictured a weapon born of the heavens. A beacon powerful enough to pierce the endless night. An army hewn from everything he had lost.

  Sigmar set his artisans to work and for long ages they toiled, striving to harness the power of the stars. As Sigmar’s great work neared completion, he turned back to the realms and saw that the dominion of Chaos was almost complete. The hour for vengeance had come. Finally, with lightning blazing across his brow, he stepped forth to unleash his creations.

  The Age of Sigmar had begun.

  Prologue

  ASHES

  Hendrick Saul was surrounded by a whirling storm of faces, transformed from meek villagers to twisted gargoyles by their fear, their anger and their hate. They pressed around him on all sides beneath a dark and clouded sky, the cadaverous walls of Stonehallow looming at their backs.

  ‘Varlen!’ he heard Romilla Aiden shouting. ‘Varlen, stop! Please, you have to stop this!’

  She was answered by an inhuman scream, a sound that seemed ripped from several throats at once, not all of them human. It pierced the torch-lit darkness and rebounded from the towering walls of ancient ruins.

  ‘It brings death!’ screamed the awful tangle of voices, the words so mangled they were barely decipherable.

  ‘Get out of my way!’ roared Hendrick at the crowd around him, and for a moment he was tempted to swing his heavy warhammer, Reckoner, into their midst. His fierce temper surged, its flames stoked by fear of his own.

  Fear of what was happening to his brother.

  Fear of what Varlen had become.

  He controlled himself with supreme effort, reminding himself these were good people who had not asked for this horror to be thrust upon them. Holding his warhammer two-handed like a quarterstaff, he thrust at the townsfolk around him rather than swinging for them with its weighty head. Ignoring the farming implements and rusty daggers they held. Ignoring their outraged cries of pain and their furious demands that he stop fighting them.

  ‘What did you people bring into our home?’ the village headman cried. Hendrick had already forgotten his name. In the midst of this horror, he had forgotten everything but his brother.

  ‘Varlen!’ he yelled, shoving his way through the jostling mass of angry townsfolk. ‘Varlen, you have to stop this! You have to fight it!’

  Bedlam surrounded Hendrick. The dark of night was full of panicked bodies crashing and grinding together like the bone-jarring confusion of a battlefield rout. Blazing torches threw hard light that danced wildly. One moment, screaming faces were lit in hellish hues, the next they were but dark silhouettes, limned by fire.

  ‘That monster was your brother,’ screamed an old woman, her eyes bulging and her spittle spattering his face. ‘For Sigmar’s sake, kill it!’

  ‘Enwin…’ another babbled, tears streaming down her face. ‘It tore… It tore his head off.’

  Hendrick stumbled over sprawled bodies and crashed down onto the cobbles, where he slithered in blood.

  Varlen had done this, he thought wildly. His brother, his garrulous, good-hearted, courageous brother, the leader of the Swords of Sigmar. H
e had transformed into… something. Some monstrous abomination had burst from within Varlen Saul’s flesh as the crown on his brow pulsed with eldritch power. It had ploughed through the mercenaries of Varlen’s company, battering Bartiman Kotrin aside with the tumorous flesh-mass that had been its right arm, gouging the flesh of Romilla Aiden with the thicket of talons sprouting from its left hand.

  It had rampaged through ruined corridors and echoing chambers, and as it had come across knots of shocked townsfolk it had torn into them like a bladed hurricane. All the time its flesh ran like wax. All the time, that awful cursed crown upon its brow had pulsated with unclean light.

  Hendrick and the others had pursued Varlen, or rather the thing that Varlen had become. They had gaped, appalled, at what their leader had done to the folk who had offered them sanctuary. They had chased it out onto the wide, grassy gathering space before the ruins that housed Stonehallow – but so had the townsfolk.

  Filled with religious terror at the horror stalking their halls, the mob had flowed down upon Varlen. Hendrick’s group had tried to intervene, to slow their cursed leader’s rampage and subdue him before the mob could do so. Bartiman had cast an entropic curse upon Varlen that had made the monster stumble but had not slowed it. Romilla had compelled its taint to be gone in Sigmar’s name, but though white fire had leapt at the priest’s words, whatever power she could bring to bear could not overmatch that pouring from the cursed crown.

  In desperation, Eleanora VanGhest had shot Varlen through the leg, hoping perhaps to slow or stop him. For her troubles she had been smashed aside by Varlen’s mutating nest of appendages and only just escaped a messy evisceration. Hendrick had even struck his brother, more than once, and that at last had slowed the monster, though it had felt to Hendrick as though he struck himself with every blow.

  Though more than two dozen of them had died in the act, the Stonehallow mob had bludgeoned Varlen to his knees and collared him with the long catch-poles they used for wrangling their gheln-hounds.

  The Swords of Sigmar had tried to intervene, to protest that it was not Varlen’s fault and explain that it was the cursed crown he had placed, all unknowing, upon his brow.

  The folk of Stonehallow did not care.

  Now Hendrick squinted against a sudden flare of light from ahead. Heat beat against his skin and a great whoomph filled the air.

  A pyre, he realised, and his lips skinned back from his teeth in a desperate snarl.

  ‘The Moonshadow brings death!’ screamed his brother in a cacophony of ever-more-monstrous voices. ‘The Moonshadow brings death to Draconium.’

  ‘Don’t you dare!’ bellowed Hendrick as the crowd surged and he saw a mass of terrified-looking villagers forcing his mutant brother towards the flames. The sight of Varlen knocked the breath from Hendrick’s lungs. His brother’s fine clothes had been torn to shreds by the masses of chitin and writhing muscle and quivering fat that had sprouted from the warped trunk of his body. He staggered on an uneven thicket of foul limbs that seemed ripped from a dozen species Hendrick couldn’t even have named. Yet it was Varlen’s face that filled his mind with horror, that stole his wits and made him howl with anguish. It was monstrous, deformed, the dark metal of the crown seared irreparably into the molten flesh of its forehead. Yet they were still Varlen’s eyes that stared back at Hendrick. He saw fear and frustration in his brother’s gaze, his true self thrashing frantically to stay afloat amidst the tide of revolting madness in which he was drowning.

  Varlen.

  They were going to burn Varlen.

  ‘No, no,’ shouted Hendrick, and now he did heft Reckoner. He would pulverise these superstitious fools. He would batter a bloody path through them to reach his brother and somehow, somehow, he would tear that damned crown from his head and –

  Then Romilla was next to him, appearing from amidst the crowd to place a hand upon his arm. She stared at him with furious intensity, her eyes boring into his.

  ‘Hendrick, you cannot. These are Sigmar’s people. They are terrified, and Varlen has… Varlen has killed so many of them. Look at him, Hendrick. Look at him and see that is no longer your brother.’

  ‘It’s Varlen, Romilla,’ snarled Hendrick, throwing her hand off. He dwarfed the priest but still she stood in his path and placed her hand on his arm again.

  ‘It is not. Varlen is gone, lost to damnation, and these people are burning that which destroyed him. I am sorry, Hendrick, but they do Sigmar’s work, just as we do.’

  He stared down at her, the blood hammering in his temples, the screams of the crowd beating against him like storm waves. He saw, at last, the anguish in Romilla’s face, the tears threatening to well in the corners of her eyes, and the strength went out of him.

  Hendrick fell to his knees amidst the surging crowd. Reckoner slipped from his hands and hit the blood-wet grass with a thump. Romilla stepped close and placed a hand on his shoulder.

  ‘I am so sorry, Hendrick,’ she said.

  Other sounds came after: sounds of a crowd baying and a monster burning; the inhuman howls of something that had once been human as it ranted and raved of a moon, and of danger, and of death.

  Hendrick heard none of it, and yet he heard it all. When it was over, he knew for sure that, though he might still walk and breathe and see, he was every bit as dead as the brother he had lost.

  Hendrick sat on the corner of his stone bed-pallet and watched dawn creep back into the world. Rosy fingers of light caressed the ancient stonework of the monastery, spilling through an ancient archway then diffusing across the silk hangings in Hendrick’s chamber. It limned the screens with soft gold and seemed to halo the depictions of Sigmar, acting out his great deeds of myth across their swaying surfaces. It was a beautiful sight, especially when accompanied by the soft sigh of the breeze through old stonework and the faint scent of the incense that the villagers burned to ward off evil.

  Hendrick knew that it should have stirred something inside him. All he felt was hollow.

  No, he realised. Not just hollow, he felt resentful. How could the light of Hysh return after what had happened the night before? How could it show its face in the skies above after witnessing such horrors? How dare it? How could the realms continue with such a gentle and lovely dawn when his brother was dead?

  The first dawn without Varlen.

  It should have been grim and grey as a dead crone’s hair. It should have been dark as damnation. But no, the light bled back into the skies just as it had for all thirty-seven years of Hendrick’s life, and the absence of his older brother gave it no pause at all.

  A shape moved beyond the screens. Hendrick’s hand twitched towards Reckoner. He found himself hoping that the townsfolk had reneged upon their agreement, that they were coming to take him now. It was only because the Swords of Sigmar had seemed to renounce their leader in the end that the villagers had permitted them a night’s refuge before casting the mercenaries out. That, and the fear in their eyes at what they thought the Swords might be capable of if pushed.

  He relaxed as Aelyn slipped between the screens and stopped, ­staring down at him. The aelf stood silent and unnaturally still. She regarded him with black-and-amber eyes that most humans found disturbing, but to which Hendrick had long ago grown accustomed. The two stared at each other in silence, long enough for Hendrick to draw and release a heavy breath.

  ‘Have you slept?’ Aelyn asked.

  ‘Have you?’ he challenged. A muscle twitched in her right cheek, a minute tell that Hendrick knew indicated her displeasure.

  ‘You sat there all night, hmm?’

  ‘And if I did?’ He could hear his own belligerence, knew it was ill directed at this, his oldest friend. He knew, too, that she wouldn’t take it personally.

  ‘You’ll be stiff, tired, sluggish,’ she replied in a matter-of-fact tone. ‘If they turn on us, you’ll be damn all use.’

  ‘
They’re not going to turn on us,’ he said, feeling the truth of her words as he rolled his neck and winced at the ache that had settled there. ‘We’re too many, and, Sigmar help me, they saw last night what we can do. Besides, we have Romilla.’

  Aelyn inclined her head slightly, a gesture of tacit agreement.

  ‘We ought not linger,’ she said. ‘If you’re not sleeping then get up off that palette. We’ve choices to make.’

  Hendrick ground his knuckles into his sore eyes, achieving little other than triggering a dull pain at the backs of their orbits. He blinked and took another breath against the tight weight he felt in his chest. He ran a hand over his bald scalp, felt a few days’ stubble rasp at his callused palm.

  ‘Aelyn–’ he began, but she twitched her fingers to cut him off. For a moment he saw the ghost of something like sympathy cross her sharp features. The surprise of it came close to unmanning him.

  ‘I know, Hendrick,’ she said. ‘It was horrible. We all lost him, but you lost the most. You will mourn. We all will. The fact remains, we have choices to make.’

  ‘And with Varlen gone…’ his words trailed off. It was the first time he had voiced it out loud, the first time he had made it real.

  ‘You alone lead our mercenary band, now. You alone lead the Swords of Sigmar,’ she finished for him. ‘So. Lead.’

  Hendrick closed his eyes and ordered his thoughts. He took a tight grip upon the leash of his temper, the same temper that had propelled him and Varlen into this life in the first place. He wouldn’t let it flare now, not when it might endanger his friends.

  He’d lost enough in this wretched settlement already.

  ‘Are you centred?’ asked Aelyn. Hendrick opened his eyes, looked at her, nodded. She returned the gesture then turned and slipped through the screens, the muted browns and greens of her waywatcher’s garb vanishing through the gold and silver curtain.

  Hendrick took a firm grip of Reckoner and rose.

  ‘I am centred,’ he muttered, hands tightening on his hammer’s leather grip until it creaked. ‘Just pray, Sigmar, don’t let them give me cause.’

  With that, he followed his second-in-command through the silk screens and out, into the settlement of Stonehallow.

  Hendrick followed Aelyn down a corridor whose alcoves had been turned into small shanty-dwellings, all empty. She turned through a stone arch daubed in gaudy fire-hues, then into a high circular shaft that had once housed a corkscrew stair. The two mercenaries had to clamber up a haphazard arrangement of wood-and-metal scaffolds that had replaced its crumbled ruins, pushing up through draped curtains of red and orange silk.