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Astorath: Angel of Mercy - Extract

A Black Library Publication

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Chapter One

far from the high towers

The warp, three weeks ago [nominal]

They were things of the warp as much as they were things of the worlds of dust. In that, maybe they were unique. Maybe they were not. Once, perhaps, there had been more life forms that straddled the barrier. They survived where these others were gone, and even that did not matter to them. They lived. They were. They survived the great storms of the past and they would survive the storms of the present, for as much as the turmoil of the empyrean battered at them and winnowed their numbers, it granted opportunity. As storms clear the ocean bed of debris, as fires scorch the forest of dead wood, the rift opened new opportunities for the strong to prosper.

They drifted in the raging currents of the immaterium. Against all the odds, they remained whole in the vortexes of unmaking, bulbous air sacs crusted over and their tentacles wrapped tight against their bodies within the confines of their bio-fields. In the warp they were scavengers, siphoning shreds of soul energy from the recently devoured, darting away when threatened by the daemonic things they shared their feeding grounds with.

In the materium they preyed on flesh.

Solitary, alone, racing along currents from one part of nowhere to another, Third One lived a life no human mind could comprehend. It thought, but its thoughts were alien to any sentient being. It felt, but its emotions had no analogue. It had no name or age or identity as a being of the materium would recognise it. Third One was not its name. Third One was not what it was, but it knew, in its alien way, that Third One was what it must be, and soon.

It was time to breed.

Instinct drew Third One towards the great roar of the warp-materium interface. The Great Rift resembled an endlessly breaking wave seen from within. Souls and half-beings and things that never were rolled over and over in its curl. Light flashed and sounds howled. The pull towards it was irresistible. Worlds from the materium fell into the maelstrom and were torn apart. Vessels traversing the warp were dragged to their doom. Yet Third One knew where to stop. It knew where to wait. It drew to a halt at the edges of the interface, where the conflicting currents of reality and unreality were at their weakest, and a creature of its sort might best profit.

It waited eternities. No time at all passed. Seconds and centuries meant nothing there, and so they meant nothing to Third One.

Second One was already there. Second One arrived after Third One. There was one, there were two. They approached one another, colours racing over their gelatinous bodies. Tentacles rose up in elaborate threat displays. Their float sacs pulsed angry reds and blues. They poised on the edge of battle, there at the soul-falls at the end of the world, their bio-fields shimmering.

Third One reached out a pseudopod. Second One recoiled, then reached out in turn. Colours of aggression changed to appeasing pinks and yellows. Nests of eyes regarded one another, and shimmered assent.

Their tentacles twined, the hooks upon the underside piercing the other’s tendrils to drag them closer. Lesser tentacles waved forward. Their bio-fields merged, becoming stronger, shutting out the daemonic, making them an island of reality.

More of their kind gathered and formed their own binaries of Second Ones and Third Ones. Last to come were the First Ones, the largest sort, and they descended into the growing swarm. Violence broke out as First Ones vied with one another for the most promising binaries and binaries fought off First Ones they rejected.

Third-Second One repelled two First Ones’ attempts to join. One they killed, and ate its remains while they showed their colour songs to more suitable suitors, until, finally, one approached they did not reject, and with complex patternings of welcome they came close to each other.

The agreement was made quickly. Third-Second One further integrated with themselves and First One, until the three were an indivisible triad.

Other ones, twos and threes merged. The unsuccessful washed back and forth in the shallows of the warp. The last First Ones joined, or fled, or died, and then all were triads.

With many eyes directed by conjoined souls, First-Second-Third One peered through the rift and watched the shores of reality.

Lights shone on the far side. Prey light. Food.

The enslavers started to move.

Far from the high towers, Esmera felt a fight coming.

‘Give me that.’

Esmera followed the youth’s pointing finger to her bread. She gave him a mild look.

‘Why?’ she said.

They were walled in by crowds. By then the news had spread, and everyone was in the main square looking eagerly to the skies. Dulcis was a hard place to live. No one paid the street people any attention. The youths could knife her right there, and no one would care.

‘Because if you don’t I’ll smack you into the dirt, then I’ll let my friends have a go at you,’ said the youth.

The youth was like most bullies, supported by two smirking accomplices who were too cowardly and weak to survive on their own, but dangerous under the direction of their ringleader. One was fat and strong, the other small and wiry with a vicious face. He smelled bad, and had dead eyes. Esmera had seen this configuration before.

‘Come in from the villages, have you, swampies?’

‘How can you tell?’ said the fat one.

‘Because I’ve lived here all my life and I’ve never seen you before. You’d be hard to miss, you’re so fat.’

‘I’m going to take time cutting you,’ said the fat boy. He moved forward. The leader shot out his arm and caught him hard in the stomach.

‘You don’t get to say what’s what. I do.’

‘Right, yeah, sorry, Cen,’ said the fat boy. Boy was about right. He was younger than the others. His face flushed and he looked like he was going to cry.

The skinny one scowled. ‘Tougher than you for it.’

‘Now you’re catching on.’ Esmera smiled. ‘You don’t know me. How can you say that? I might be the most dangerous girl in this town.’ She used ‘girl’. It was lesser than woman, less threatening. She was a woman though, older than they, and better than they were in other ways too.

The fat boy and Cen laughed. The skinny one licked his lips. He had a fluffy moustache coming in. So young yet already a killer. The others were engaged in the malicious play of thugs that may or may not end in violence. The skinny one just wanted to hurt her. He had a knife. She could feel his need to use it, real as his bad breath in her face.

‘How old are you?’ said Cen.

‘Older than you.’

‘Then wise enough to know if you give me that bread you might walk away from this.’

‘No,’ she said. Giving no warning, she turned on her heels and fled, pushing her underfed body between two townspeople gawping up at the sky. There was a roaring coming from up there. Atmospheric engines. A ship was approaching from the void. That was remarkable, but she didn’t have time to look.

The youths were after her a fraction of a second later. She’d wrong-footed them, as she knew she would. She knew town; they didn’t.

She sprinted through the crowded main square of the upper fort, dodging past market-day stalls and piles of cages holding waterfowl from the marsh. Fat Boy blundered into them, breaking the wicker and bringing a retributory cudgel swinging at his arm. Esmera glanced over her shoulder to see him beaten while aviforms scattered and his friends tore past. Cen was angry. Skinny Boy looked ready to kill.

She flew down the main ramp, past the rusted teeth of the top gatehouse and the grim metal skulls housing the spirits that commanded the gates. The road was caked in dung and rushes, a good surface to run on. The ramp switched back on itself, but she knew the short cuts. She jumped, landing on the roof of the mechman’s tech shack. He only yelled at her. He knew her. He didn’t know the youths that tumbled after. She got shouts; they got shot at.

She led them into the Warren, the part of town where hundreds of small shops and businesses crammed the old roads and throttled alleys. It stank of breweries, chemicals, dyes, and worst of all, the eye-watering reek of the tannery district and the open-gut stench of the abattoirs. All of it was in there. It was no place to live, but this was her territory. She grinned as she panted. She’d lose them in the Warren, no problem.

She skidded sharply round a corner, wrong-footing them again, hurtled down an alleyway no wider than her outstretched arms, and dived under a curtain that divided the alley from a stall on the other side.

‘Esmera! Watch it!’ shouted the stallholder after her. They all knew her in the Warren. She was tolerated there – she’d made sure of that. She was useful to them, occasionally.

She slowed to a jog. There was no sign of pursuit. Low buildings of hardened mud hemmed her in, all squat, no more than three storeys tall. She was moving away to the edge of the Warren, nearer to the Clara Flumine river and the high towers of the Administratum district on the far side.

She’d barely broken a sweat. She was used to running away.

The smell of the river came up the alley. Most of the setts on that street had been prised up by the city folk to build their homes, and the road surface was little better than mud and rubbish compacted over the bedrock. The alley joined a lane. An open sewer ran down the middle, pouring chemical-tainted filth into the river. She could see the river now. The wide, muddy waters swallowed the sewer discharge, diluting it to nothing, but in the city the shit stink was heavy on her throat. Huts made of sodden fibreboard and cast-off metal scraps slumped together, drowning in the mud. On the far side of the water were cliffs of stonework, topped by crenellated walls, and behind those the grand buildings of the Imperial government. The district was a tiny part of sprawling Tywell City, but its offices and cathedrum lorded over all parts of the settlement save the citadel itself.

She was walking now. She crammed the bread into her mouth, eating it quickly before someone else tried to take it off her.

Meat-barge horns wailed from the docks further downstream. The ripe odour of marsh eel wafted over on the breeze. A baby cried in a hovel nearby. A stray canid nosed at a pile of rags and pulled out the scaled corpse of a dead marsh lizard. No one was about.

The sounds of the crowds carried over the Warren down to the river district. There was a boom in the air, and she turned to look back to where it had come from, up at the citadel, dry on its hill.

A small red-and-white ship was landing. The citadel was a stacked cake of fortifications, four rings of walls atop each other, and the ship came down towards the highest landing pad. The sound of the crowd’s excitement grew louder as it approached, only drowned out by the last, thundering roar of braking jets as it put down upon the pad. A wash of grey smoke bled off into Dulcis’ clouds.

She resented the boys for chasing her down here. She’d wanted to see the off-worlders land. Some fool had said they were the Emperor’s men, the Angels of Death, but she hadn’t believed that. But now, as she watched the ramp at the front of the ship open, she wasn’t so sure. The ship was a compact thing, covered in guns. She’d never seen the like before.

Tiny figures came out of the citadel and waited. Larger figures emerged from the ship. Her mouth hung open, the bread forgotten on her tongue. The Angels of Death had come! They were giants, towering over the welcoming party, clad in shining armour that winked in the weak sun. She took a few involuntary steps forward, their presence drawing her in.

She heard a noise behind her, and turned in time to see Skinny Boy launch himself off the top of a shack, so full of the need to hurt her he leapt with little consideration for his own safety. His chin connected with her head, his elbow drove the air from her lungs, and together they went down into the stinking mud. The remains of the bread bounced off and rolled to a halt at the edge of the sewer.

‘Got you,’ he breathed into her ear. His ripe breath choked her. She tried to escape, but he wrestled her to a halt, his thin fingers gripping her wrists painfully.

Cen and Fat Boy came out of a side alley.

‘Got her!’ Skinny called triumphantly.

Mud soaked through the back of Esmera’s smock and trousers. She bucked under him, but he wouldn’t budge.

‘Get off me!’ she said.

‘Shhhh,’ said Skinny Boy. He forced her wrists together so he could hold them in one hand, and pressed a filthy finger to her lips.

Cen came towards them. Beside him, Fat Boy was limping. He had a black eye, and he clutched his right arm with his left.

‘Get her up,’ said Cen.

‘Let’s make her pay,’ said Skinny Boy. ‘Let’s hurt her. Let’s make her sorry.’

‘Should have given us bread. Shouldn’t have run!’ Fat Boy shouted. ‘We’re going to gut you and chuck you in the river.’

‘Not for a little while,’ leered Skinny Boy. ‘We’ll bleed you first.’

‘Let me go,’ Esmera said. ‘I don’t want to hurt you.’

They all laughed at that.

‘Get her up!’ shouted Cen.

Skinny Boy dragged her to her feet.

‘Get her down there, by the river,’ Cen said. ‘Where no one can see.’

Esmera looked where he pointed; he meant an alley leading to the muddy riverside. If she went down there she’d never come out again.

‘Me first,’ said Fat Boy. ‘Pay her back for this!’ He pointed angrily at his face.

She closed her eyes. All it would take would be a little push. Skinny Boy was thirsty for blood. Fat Boy was angry.

Touching Skinny Boy’s mind made her sick. It was an oozing place full of hurt, a jagged landscape of abuse and pain he wanted to turn outwards against the world.

‘Who said you should cut her first?’ snarled Skinny Boy.

‘What?’ said Cen. ‘I get to decide. Get into the alley, before we’re seen!’

‘No,’ said Skinny Boy. ‘I want a word with fatty here about his manners.’

He shoved Esmera at Cen. She made no move to fight, playing the role of the pliant victim. She’d seen so many people freeze in times like this. Everyone thought they’d fight. So few did.

Cen grabbed her round the throat.

She pushed a little harder at Skinny Boy, stoking his anger and his lust to kill.

‘I’m sick of your whining, you pig-faced sack of crap,’ Skinny Boy said, getting right up into Fat Boy’s face. ‘I should gut you instead of her.’

Fat Boy’s mouth hung open. ‘I didn’t mean nothing. You cut her. I don’t mind.’

‘How about I cut you?’ said Skinny Boy. He slashed across Fat Boy’s stomach with a knife Esmera drew for him.

Fat Boy made a tiny choking click in his throat. Both he and Skinny Boy looked down at his gut. Blood spread out across his clothes.

‘You’ve killed me, Gris,’ said Fat Boy. ‘You’ve killed me.’

So Skinny had a name. That made it easier.

Esmera pushed harder at Gris. He was resisting unconsciously, but she had him, because he was a violent piece of work, and it didn’t take much to wipe the surprise off his face and make him see what a brilliant idea it would be to ram his knife into Fat Boy’s neck.

‘Gris!’ shouted Cen. Out-of-towners saw a lot of awful things in the marshes, but he looked genuinely appalled. ‘What are you doing?’

Esmera pushed again.

‘I’ve had it with you too,’ Gris snapped.

‘Wait!’

Cen pushed Esmera at Gris, but he shoved her down. Her head banged on the ground, making it ring. Gris might be scraps of flesh on bone, but he was full of rage at life and that made him strong. Cen got in a couple of blows but didn’t even get to draw his knife. Esmera’s mental influence dissolved what few inhibitions Gris had. They were mostly made of fossilised fears, and were easy to overcome.

Gris stabbed and stabbed at Cen, until his front was a mess of slits and blood. He went down into the filth, and Gris kept on stabbing. Cen had stopped fighting and lay there already dead, blood trickling from his mouth, his eyes wide.

Esmera got up onto her knees. She didn’t have much strength left to finish this, so she had to end it soon. Her hand closed on a rock. She always made sure to throw a stone when she pushed someone hard enough to kill them outright. She had to leave a physical mark, one that looked bad enough to kill. If he went down untouched on the outside, someone would notice, and she’d no desire to be burned as a witch.

Gris was slowing, tired by his frenzy, his knife skidding off Cen’s ruined chest rather than penetrating. The point made a sound like a shovel biting wet earth.

‘Hey,’ she said.

Gris looked up at her. He was dazed, but that’d wear off in a moment, and that was another reason to be quick. She threw hard. The rock hit his forehead with a thud – nowhere near hard enough to cause him to collapse, but hard enough to cover her tracks. Blood welled from the wound. He rocked with the impact, then blinked in confusion, a sleepwalker’s look she knew very well. His eyes cleared and he looked at his hands and the knife. So much blood covered both they were the same colour, indivisible, like the blade was a part of his body. He looked at the bodies of his friends, then at her. Now he knew what she’d done.

One last push, that’s what he needed. Nothing too much. Make it look like the rock did it. Blood ran from the wound on his head.

‘I’m going to make you pay for that, witch,’ he snarled.

‘No, you’re not,’ she said.

She pushed hard. Thoughts were easy, bodies trickier, but she could do it, and she did, imagining a pulsing bit of his brain pulsing a little too hard, and bursting.

Gris got to his feet. The blood of his friends dripped from his knife.

‘This–’ he began. His eyes rolled back in his head, and he fell limp as a wet rag into the muck.

Esmera stood. She was close to collapse herself. Blood leaked from her nose. That many pushes in one day was a lot. Too many. She needed to retreat and recover.

First, she looted their bodies, then she retrieved her bread from the dirt.

Her head spinning, the bread clutched tightly to her chest, she staggered back to her den.

Click here to buy Astorath: Angel of Mercy.

A Black Library Publication

First published in Great Britain in 2020.
This eBook edition published in 2022 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

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