A Tithe of Bone - Michael R Fletcher Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  A Tithe of Bone – Michael R. Fletcher

  About the Author

  An Extract from ‘The Rise of Nagash’

  A Black Library Publication

  A Tithe of Bone

  by Michael R. Fletcher

  A single ox-fat tallow candle lit the room with a flickering yellow light. It stank like burning hair.

  Chaos Lord Markash, Champion of Tzeentch, paced the confines of his chambers, the floorboards groaning beneath him with each step. At eight feet tall, clad in monstrous plate armour with jagged barbs of razor-edged steel jutting at every angle, he towered over the sitting scribe, Palfuss. Wisps of black flame flickered about the armour, guttering and surging. Palfuss had heard that they changed colour based on Markash’s mood, but in the year he’d followed the colossal warrior, he’d never seen anything other than deepest sable.

  Each inhalation rumbled like an iron forge; each exhalation twisted the air before the lord’s closed helm with its heat. Palfuss had never seen the man – if that’s what he still was – without his armour, and was well prepared to believe he slept in it.

  If he slept at all.

  Curls of gritty smoke leaked from the armour’s joints. Palfuss was once told that Markash lit campfires by breathing on the wood. At the time he had laughed. Now, sitting in the great Champion’s presence, nothing was funny.

  ‘Destiny,’ Markash said. His voice was like the deep bone-rattling bass of an avalanche, the crunch of dry snow beneath an elephant’s foot.

  Scritch scritch went the sound of a sharpened quill on parchment as the scribe wrote the single word and hurried to describe the voice.

  ‘Tzeentch, the Raven God,’ said the Champion. ‘The Changer of Ways. The Architect of Fate. Chaos solely for the sake of Chaos. Beautiful seething potential, free of shackles. Lord of Destiny, God of Change. My god. He is always different, ever-shifting, never the same twice. To see him is to lose yourself to the glory of madness. He is the unpredictable dance of flame, the crash of ocean waves. They call him Ruinous.’

  Scritch scritch scritch.

  ‘The philosophers say,’ the Chaos lord continued, sunken eyes of red fire glaring out from within the cavernous depths of his helm, ‘that destiny is nothing more than an idea, that it has no basis in reality.’

  Scritch scritch scritch.

  ‘Delusion, they call it.’ The bloody eyes blazed bright as an armoured hand curled into a massive fist.

  Markash laughed, or maybe grunted in scorn. Palfuss couldn’t tell. Was the knight even capable of such human emotion?

  ‘The philosophers are wrong,’ said the lord. ‘Destiny is real. Tzeentch makes it real. He decides. He shapes. He destroys.’ He gestured to where his sword, Ktchaynik, a daemon-bound blade too heavy for a mortal man to lift, rested against the wall. Ktchaynik breathed violence, tainted the air with hunger. ‘Is it not beautiful?’ asked the knight.

  Palfuss dared say nothing.

  ‘Iron purpose,’ continued Markash, ‘wrapped in destructive rage.’ Slick smoke coiled like writhing snakes from the gauntleted fist. ‘The feel of that blade, cleaving through flesh and bone… That is the feel of destiny. Blood, painting the air…’ he drew fine traceries with his other hand, leaving dissipating lines in the silken haze. ‘The look. Torn bodies, gutted opponents. The stench. The feel of Chaos working within your veins, twisting you, writing the god’s plan in your very soul. These things are destiny.’

  Palfuss wrote fast, dipping the quill in the ink pot when the characters grew faint. A score of already sharpened feathers lay ready and waiting. He would not miss a single word.

  Markash focused on the scribe, and Palfuss felt his bladder loosen.

  ‘What do you think, scribe?’

  A direct question. He had to answer. Swallowing, he stuttered, gathering his thoughts. ‘Philosophers speaking of destiny are like deaf people discussing music, or the blind critiquing art. They are ill-equipped to grasp the concept.’

  Markash stopped pacing. Blazing orbs of fire dimmed to slitted embers as the lord studied the scribe. ‘Indeed.’

  Palfuss felt the utterance shake his ribs.

  ‘Is one born with a destiny,’ continued Markash, ‘or is it something only the gods can create? Is it nothing more than potential, something anyone might possess, or is it rare, something special?’

  Head down, Palfuss wrote fast.

  Markash resumed pacing, the heavy planks of the floor bowing beneath his weight. ‘One man destined to be great while another is destined to be a farmer. Yet does destiny – one not derived from the gods – care about scale? Can one be destined to step in a puddle or stub a toe?’

  Unsure if the Champion joked or asked a valid question, the scribe remained silent.

  ‘You’ve heard of Ammerhan,’ said Markash.

  Palfuss nodded without looking up, quill scritch scritching against the dry parchment. Ammerhan, a legend among Tzeentch’s Champions, had come this way two years ago. With an army at his back, he’d been commanded to conquer Knazziir, drive out Nagash’s influence. He hadn’t been heard from since.

  ‘He was a great man,’ said Markash. ‘I would have said he had a great destiny, a god-granted destiny.’ He almost sounded wistful, as if remembering a better time. ‘He taught me to fight. He carved the weakness of humanity from me, cut holes in my soul and filled them with the eternal glory of Chaos.’ The Champion glanced at the scribe. ‘Was it Ammerhan’s destiny to die out here on the edge of Nagash’s domain?’ The lord grunted a deep laugh. ‘It matters not. It is my destiny to succeed where my teacher failed.’

  Palfuss wrote, capturing every last syllable, throwing in occasional descriptors when the lord paused.

  ‘Nagash thinks death is everything,’ continued Markash, ember eyes scanning the room as if searching. ‘He believes all things end in death, and that this means his triumph is inevitable. He’s a fool. His very nature – his dependency on necromancy – blinds him to the reality. Death is nothing more than another aspect of change. And Chaos is change personified, the gorgeous manifestation of impermanence. Not everything dies. Gods are proof of that. But even gods change. In the end, there can be only Chaos.’

  Approaching Ktchaynik, Markash reached out a massive fist to grip the pommel. Hefting the blade, he examined the daemonic runes inscribed there, tracing them with the armoured fingers of his other hand. Sparks arced between sword and man, leaving purple slashes across Palfuss’ vision. The scribe had heard that a thousand souls had been sacrificed to bind that daemon. The stench of burnt meat and sulphur filled the room.

  ‘It is,’ the Champion mused, ‘an interesting conundrum. No matter what destiny is – outside force, something built by strength of character, or sheerest delusion – in the end it means nothing.’ He sheathed the daemonic sword, and Palfuss’ ears popped as the pressure suddenly changed in the room. ‘Ammerhan had a destiny and yet he is gone. And so destiny, like all things, answers to change. Chaos is everything!’

  Nodding, the scribe scribbled the last few words and waited, pen poised, for the knight to continue.

  Markash stood silent, motionless like a statue, smoke snaking from his armour in sinuous coils.

  The scribe wondered if he’d been forgotten. Sweat dripped from his brow, stung his eyes. His lips tasted of salt when he licked them nervously. Had he been dismissed? Should he leave? But he hardly dared breathe, much less rise and let himself from the Champion’s presence.

  ‘As a boy,’ Markash finally said, voice barely a whisper, the raw sc
rape of granite on granite, ‘I dreamed of holding a sword. As a young warrior I dreamed of being a Chaos Knight. As a Chaos Knight I dreamed of being Tzeentch’s greatest Champion. And now I dream of–’

  Someone banged on the door, interrupting him.

  ‘Something odd, my lord,’ came a voice from the hall. Palfuss recognised it as Stayn Lishik, the highest ranked Chaos Knight in Markash’s retinue.

  Ember eyes blazed bright as if fed by a gust of fresh air from a forge bellows.

  Palfuss darted a look at the sole window in Markash’s quarters. Darkness. Morning was still hours away.

  ‘Odd?’ rumbled the Champion.

  ‘The dead have come, my lord.’

  Palfuss blinked. That was hardly odd. The corpses returned every week, as if begging for punishment. Out beyond the walls of Knazziir, this reeking dung-heap of a city Markash had conquered in a single evening of glorious war, great heaping piles of bones swarmed with crows and fat flies. Sometimes the men would leave one of the animated dead semi-functional and then bury it in corpses, taking bets on if and when it would manage to struggle free.

  You had to pass the time out here on the frontier somehow, Palfuss mused, and it seemed harmless enough fun.

  Markash nodded and his eyes returned to their usual smouldering burn. ‘Then we’ll kill them again. Re-kill them.’ He turned on Palfuss. ‘What do you call it when you kill something that’s already dead?’

  ‘Uh…’ offered Palfuss. ‘Destroy?’

  Raging red rage eyes studied the scribe, and he swallowed a lump the size of those bulbous toads you found out in the swamps. The voice beyond the door saved him.

  ‘My lord, these aren’t normal dead.’

  ‘Are they any better with words than my scribe?’

  ‘Actually,’ said Stayn Lishik, ‘yes, they are.’

  Markash strolled to the wall so he might see these ‘odd’ corpses. Stayn Lishik followed a step behind, his plate armour clanging and squeaking where Markash moved in perfect silence.

  There was, Palfuss saw, something in Stayn’s eyes, a soul-deep anger. He hurried to keep up.

  Markash cut through the courtyard by the city gate. Over one hundred Slaves to Darkness gathered there, checking arms and armour with the grim confidence of hardened veterans. No cowards here. Over and over, through countless wars and campaigns, the Champion’s followers had proven themselves among the very best Chaos had to offer. Under his leadership, these warriors had cut their way through ten thousand dead in the last month.

  Palfuss checked the horizon and saw no hint of morning. Hours from dawn, and already the damp air stank of sweat and leather, oil and steel. Another hot one, no doubt. The muted clank of iron echoed off stone walls. Out here he couldn’t write, but made note of everything, every sound and smell committed to memory. For the last year the scribe had followed Tzeentch’s Champion, chronicling his exploits. Palfuss did his best not to wonder what had happened to the woman he had replaced. There were rumours. Torn apart by ravenous corpses, limbs ripped free and brandished as if prized trophies. Eyes plucked forth by some twisted dead thing that immediately popped them in its own gaping sockets, as if one might harvest the living for parts.

  Shaking the thought off, Palfuss recalled how some had – quietly, and never when the Champion was within earshot – called Markash crazy when he had announced that he would take Knazziir, claim it in the name of Chaos. It’s too close to Nagash’s domain, they had said. He’ll never hold it. You’ll die there, they had told the young scribe.

  Palfuss had shrugged. If that was what it cost to be this close to greatness, to get the chance to chronicle even a brief moment of the Champion’s life, he would gladly pay it.

  Not only had Markash taken Knazziir in a single night, putting the city’s rulers to the sword and bringing the shining beauty of Chaos to these broken peasants, he’d held it for a month since.

  Not a week after that first bloody night, a corpse, unusual for its expensive finery, strode towards the city. Terrified, the newly appointed town-master, some fat slob stinking of the weird food they ate here, had claimed it was a collector coming for bones. Or something. The Knazziiri spoke some strange dialect. Palfuss spoke the language, but not well.

  ‘What kind of bones?’ he’d asked the town-master.

  The answer had something to do with soup. The scribe had done his best to explain it to Markash, who’d grunted, uncaring and disinterested. Either way, it hardly mattered. Talast, the Champion’s pet sorcerer, had burned Nagash’s undead servant to ash before it reached the gate, and everyone had gone back to killing and otherwise spreading Chaos.

  ‘Where is Talast?’ Markash demanded.

  ‘Busy, my lord,’ said Stayn Lishik, darting a glance at Palfuss.

  The sorcerer often imbibed huge quantities of mind-altering substances as he clawed at the fabric of reality in his search for power. Even Markash would hesitate to interrupt one of his experiments.

  Reaching the top of the wall, Palfuss stepped forward to peer through the murky night air. There, at the gate, stood a host of the dead. But where most of Nagash’s creatures were shambling ruins, these were thick and strong, comprised of clean bone. Leaning forward, he squinted down at them. A legion of warriors stood with foul swords clutched in fists of raw sinew. Broad shouldered, bones thicker than Palfuss’ thighs, they wore armour that looked suspiciously like a mockery of Markash’s Chaos plate.

  Having seen more than his share of corpses, Palfuss had a pretty good idea what a man looked like if you peeled away the flesh and muscle. And this wasn’t it. Twisted bones were knotted, as if someone had skilfully knitted them together. Like ivy. The joints were wrong, too. Bulbous. Insectile, almost. He locked the scene in his memory so he might later capture it.

  Behind the corpse warriors stood a monster constructed of bone and steel all melted together like some metallic corpse-beetle. Long scythes, polished bright, had been melded to misshapen limbs. It had too many damned legs, each one backwards-jointed like a spider, or a chicken twisted inside out. Flesh hung in raw ropes, glistening as if pulled from a fresh corpse. The thing bore huge baskets upon its spine and ribcage, strapped down with coils of hardened cartilage. Black crows and fat green flies swarmed the baskets. Every now and then something wet and pink stabbed out from somewhere within the torso of the creature to snatch a bird from the air. Flesh and feathers were stripped away in a heartbeat, and the dripping bones either tossed into one of the baskets or thrown aside. More dead things lurked behind the beasts, hidden in the dark.

  ‘What in the name of–’

  Markash raised a gauntlet, interrupting his chronicler.

  The Champion stared down at the dead, and they stared back up at him, empty eye sockets like holes in the world. There were clearly several types of dead here. Some stood with strange weapons held at the ready, while others, apparently unarmed, scanned the gathered living as if judging their value. A cancerous grey-green smoke writhed around a pair whose faces, stretched as if in horror, bore only smooth bone where their mouths should have been.

  All this the scribe memorised.

  For once, the fat flies were silent. No scree scree echoed through the night.

  For one mad moment Palfuss was glad he was up here and they were down there, with a good thick wall in between. He shook it off. There was nothing Markash couldn’t kill. He was Tzeentch’s Champion, a man of destiny.

  The tallest of the dead stepped forward, a gaunt corpse of indeterminate sex cloaked in robes of bright jade at odds with its pale bone. It bowed low, arms crossed, almost curtseying. Sparks of sickly green fire glowed from deep within its skull.

  ‘We have come,’ it said, voice deep like the grave, damp like putrescent flesh sloughing from a bog-drowned corpse, ‘to collect.’

  ‘Collect?’ Markash called down, sounding more curious than anything.

 
‘Bones,’ said the corpse, drawing the word out, turning its spectral gaze up to examine those on the wall.

  That putrid town-master had said something about this. Why would the dead want soup bones? Did they eat? Were these the chefs for some deranged necromancer?

  Markash waved at the piles of shattered bones littering the killing field beyond the wall. Countless thousands of dead had been broken there. Splayed ribcages, denuded of flesh, clawed at the sky like reaching fingers spread in supplication.

  ‘Bones.’ He almost sounded amused, though Palfuss had trouble attributing such human emotion to the Champion.

  The corpse in green hesitated, and the scribe could have sworn its brow, skin chafed to bleached bone, wrinkled.

  ‘For the tithe,’ it said, bowing again, as if in apology, though it was the sort of overly polite apology of someone embarrassed for you. ‘Fresh bones,’ it said. ‘Bones for the tithe.’ Long fingers, those of an artist, drew graceful circles as if the thing sought to sketch its intent in the air.

  Palfuss stole a glance at Markash, wondering what he was thinking.

  ‘Stayn,’ said the Champion, ‘you have the city until I return.’

  A dark greed crossed the knight’s scarred features, gone before the scribe was sure he hadn’t imagined it.

  ‘Open the gates,’ commanded Markash. ‘We’ll destroy them all.’

  Again the corpse bowed, though this time as if in thanks; as if it was somehow getting exactly what it wanted. ‘Good bones,’ it said, studying Markash. ‘Good bones.’

  Trooping back down the steps, his Chosen warriors falling in as he passed, Markash marched to the front gate, waving at the gatekeeper.

  Stayn remained behind, standing on the wall, gazing down upon the dead with a measuring look.

  Wood and iron rose as Markash approached. The rattling clank of metal, the groan of damp wood and the grunt of men cranking the wheel. Palfuss slowed as he approached the gate, hesitant to leave Knazziir’s safety.

  ‘Come,’ Markash called over his shoulder. ‘Bear witness.’