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Archaon: Everchosen – Extract

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PROLOGUE

‘O’er those unborn, whose ruin the light will grieve

wing’d harbingers sit to receive

and set such servants the world to cleave.’

– Fliessbach, Tales Untold

The Republic of Remas – Tilea

The Lands of the South

The Year of Light and Law (IC 1586)

‘You shall know me by my works,’ the prognosticator howled.

They knew him by his pain. The agonies erupting from his ruined face. The gasps of relief and hope – both sweet and dangerous – that escaped his broken body in between tortures. They called it the Cracker. An ugly name for an ugly contraption. With the victim’s head braced between the unforgiving metal of a chin bar and a closing crown-cap, the two were drawn together by the slow turn of a handle screw. It had earned such a name for both its effectiveness in producing confessions and the splinter of skulls that echoed through the republic dungeons.

‘Battista Gaspar Necrodomo,’ a priestly witchfinder read from a blood-spattered scroll, ‘his holy vengefulness, Solkan – God of Light and Law – has judged you witchfilth and false prophet, denying the poor and ignorant of this republic the comforts of his guidance.’

‘You will know me by my works,’ Necrodomo spat. His words escaped the clenched mantrap of his own jaw in a hissing rasp. Bloody lip-spittle sprayed the interrogator sitting opposite. One of the priests milling in the dungeon-darkness beyond tore a strip from his ragged grey robes.

‘Grand inquisitori,’ he mumbled, kissing the rag and handing it to his spiritual superior. The interrogator dabbed his speckled cheeks and the whiteness of his beard.

‘Again,’ the grand inquisitori said.

‘No,’ Necrodomo groaned, his pleadings pathetic and palsied. A priestly servant of Solkan turned the screw and fresh agonies filled the dungeon chamber. Necrodomo’s screams were muffled shrieks of gargling desperation. As the turns of the screw abated, the freshly blinded seer sobbed and moaned.

‘You are a charlatan,’ the grand inquisitori said slowly, his voice threaded with the certainty of his age and station. He was the Avenger’s high hand in these low dealings of the world. ‘You are the herald of lies. You are an artist of nothings. You read the eye, the lip, the face and write false prophecy on the stars. You tell gullible widows what they want to hear, no? A sayer of soothings. Saw you this coming, prognosticator?’

‘No…’ Necrodomo managed through his shattered jaw.

‘If you had stuck to prattlemongering,’ the venerable inquisitori told him, ‘you just might have escaped the attentions of the brotherhood. Though Avenger knows, your professed haruspexery would have been known to him – he who sees all and judges all. Your time would have come, Necrodomo. Necrodomo the foreteller. Necrodomo the skygazer. Necrodomo the reader of futures dark. Now to be known – if known at all – as Necrodomo the Insane. By my order.’

‘No…’ Necrodomo whimpered. ‘Know…’

‘This, however,’ the grand inquisitori continued, picking up a bony fistful of pamphlets that littered the table, ‘this goes beyond the pilfering of credulous coin. The Celestine Prophecies. Signs and Wonders. Transcendentia. The Days of Doom to Come. The End Times. This is heresy in our midst. This is demagoguery, spreading fear through the people. It is a challenge to the Republic. It is a corruption advertised and an invitation of vengeance. It is what brought us to you, Necrodomo. It is what brought you to this.’

The grand inquisitori gestured at the quill and pots of ink on the table and the thick, unmarked tome that sat before the groaning Necrodomo, its pages clean and waiting for his confession. ‘Help me by helping yourself, Necrodomo. Confess your crimes to the brotherhood. Allow Solkan into your heart and I promise a death swift and clean enough to take you to his judgement. Why dally here in the meaningless filth of lies and conspiracy? Why suffer here as well as before the Lord of Light and Law? Commit your contrition to these pages and let me grant you the relief of death.’

‘Forgive…’ Necrodomo begged through shattered teeth.

‘It is not for me to do so. Only the Avenger can grant you that. All I can grant you is an unburdened conscience and free passage. Your crimes are grievous. These bold pronouncements of coming apocalypse, printed and passed between the people. We are the light in the ignorance you sought to spread with your writings of the trembling world and the End Times you profess are to come. The world already trembles, Necrodomo. It trembles with the vengeance of Solkan the Mighty. It trembles with his judgement on the unnatural and the wicked. This is the greatest of your sins, false prophet. Fear is not your weapon to wield. It is ours. Armageddon is not yours to portend. The world is the Avenger’s to destroy at a time of his choosing. If his servants fail, if the land can bear no more evil and the filth of corruption floods the–’

The oratory was shattered by a single clap. Followed by another. And another. Like the grand inquisitori, the witchfinders and priestly torturers of the chamber turned to the entrance. Stepping down from the rusted ladder that led from the trapdoor in the dungeon’s ceiling, a lone priest in the hooded, ragged robes of the Avenger stood in slow applause. Sallow clouds of brimstone drifted down from the chamber above and descended about the interloper.

‘How dare you interrupt the holy work of–’ a priest began.

‘Enough,’ the interloper said, the word drenched in the sickly, mellifluous urgency of an infernal order. The final clap was louder and more insistent than the caustic applause that had preceded it. With the sound echoing about the dungeon like a thunderclap, the priests and servants of Solkan proceeded to untie the ropes about their waists and disrobe.

‘What do you think you are doing?’ the grand inquisitori barked at them. As he stared about in righteous incredulity, the witchfinders and interrogators crafted swift nooses from their belts. The grand inquisitori was out of his seat, his beard shaking and his eyes screwed up with rage. ‘Stop this madness at once. The Avenger compels you.’ He turned back to the priest standing at the ladder. Within the darkness of the interloper’s hood, the inquisitori could make out the pin-prick glow of eyes ancient and burning like the embers of eternity. The priest hadn’t realised that he had soiled himself. A pool of urine was gathering on the filthy dungeon floor about him. ‘Guards! Guards!’ he roared. Above he could hear the clink of the plate, helms and halberds of the Reman Republican Guard.

The interloper looked up through the open trapdoor entrance. Something like a momentary storm passed through the chamber above, the influence of the sudden tempest felt on Necrodomo’s apocalyptic pamphlets, which were blown from the table. The screams were brief. With the interloper still staring through the dungeon opening, it began to rain blood. The Republican Guard gaolers were now nothing but a cruel drizzle drifting, dripping and dribbling from the trapdoor entrance. The interloper allowed the downpour to blotch his robes to a gory crimson. As his ghastly gaze returned to the grand inquisitori, the trapdoor slammed shut and thundered with heavy chains securing the dungeon entrance.

The robed thing moved across the chamber with the dread purpose of something unreal. As it passed them the servants of Solkan dropped from stools and improvised furniture to dance a spasmodic jig from their belt-nooses and the rings set in the dungeon ceiling. The interloper drifted through the forest of hanging priests.

‘Sit,’ it commanded.

The grand inquisitori wailed as his knees gave way, causing him to fall back into his interrogator’s throne.

The interloper moved towards the throne like an ancient evil. It pulled back its hood, revealing the full, unspeakable horror of its daemonic visage to the chamber. The robes fell like a fearful whisper from its barbed unflesh. It grew with each flagstone-pulverising step of its taloned feet, twisted bones blooming with muscle that ruptured into existence about them, lending the beast a glorious brawn and sinew. It dragged a serpentine tail, shot through with spikes, behind its infernal form, while both the daemon-crown of horns warping their way out of its head and the thumb-claws erupting from the dreadful magnificence of its wings, scraped the dungeon ceiling.

Like a nightmare, it lowered its sight-curdling skull and moved up behind the interrogator’s throne. Necrodomo, still clamped between the bar and crown-cap of the torture device, had no eyes with which to behold the beast. The grand inquisitori found, with his heart in the grasp of terror, cold, dark and despair, that he could not move. As the daemon brought its unseen face forward, both the venerable priest and the prognosticator found their cheeks bathed in the radiance of infernal royalty. A princely power of hellish birthright; a creature of unimaginable darkness; horror incarnate.

The grand inquisitori felt the thing touch him. At once all that had remained pure and noble in the man shrivelled within his soul. Darkness blossomed within the priest. Every ill-deed committed in the service of selfish weakness and temptation grew through his being like a rampant cancer. His eyes turned to inky twilight as his face became a cadaverous mask of ghoulish anticipation. The daemon clasped the grand inquisitori’s head in its claws.

‘You search for darkness in wretched madmen,’ the daemon prince whispered to the venerable priest – every word falling on the afflicted ancient with the force of a furnace, ‘when you should have been searching for it within your own ranks. No matter… You are mine now and have no need for this vessel of flesh. Before I take your soul, there is something you should know, priest. A gift for the journey you are about to take.’ The daemon leant in closer. ‘Your. God. Is. A. Lie.’ With that, the daemon prince crushed the grand inquisitori’s skull between its claws with effortless ease.

Slashing both the headless body and the back of the throne from the seat with a swoosh of its serpent tail, the daemon prince took a seat before Necrodomo. Necrodomo the foreteller. Necrodomo the reader of futures dark. Necrodomo the Insane. The thing drummed its talons across the desk, prompting the torturous contraption known as the Cracker to rust to disintegration about the blind prisoner’s head. Necrodomo pulled away immediately. The prognosticator was out of his mind with pain, but something spiritual and instinctive told him that he was in the presence of a dangerous evil. He felt fear without sight. Dread without sanity. Being contorted within the vice for so long, Necrodomo found that his legs no longer supported him. Crashing to the filthy floor he scrabbled away from the daemon prince like an animal until he felt his back against the cold stone of the dungeon wall.

‘Do not fear me,’ the beast told him. ‘I am your saviour – as you are mine. My name, for all it matters to you madman, is Be’lakor.’ The monster allowed the ‘r’ of its name to hang like a forlorn echo. ‘I am known by many titles: the Harbinger, the Herald and the Bearer. To the northmen, I am the Shadowlord. In the Empire and the civilised lands of the south, I am the Dark Master. To you, mortal, I am simply Master.’

Necrodomo curled up in agony. He was rocking, shaking and whimpering.

‘You are Necrodomo. Though your heretic name shall be whispered in the shadows, your work shall echo through eternity.’

Be’lakor looked down on the pamphlets decorating the desk. ‘I am an appreciator of your work – charlatan or not. Now I wish to become facilitator. Your masterpiece is yet to be written.’

The beast laid its claw on the empty tome intended for the prognosticator’s confession. Under the touch of its talons, the leather of the cover moaned and warped to a gruesome ghastliness. Its spine became as barbed bone and the bronze lock-clasps holding its pages closed melted into sets of jaws that snapped open. The cover smoked as hellfire scorched fresh lettering into the leather. As the tome writhed to stillness and Be’lakor removed his talon, the words LIBER CAELESTIOR afflicted the cover in the dark tongue of his Ruinous masters, accompanied by the name BATTISTA GASPAR NECRODOMO.

‘We shall wield your prophecies like a weapon,’ the Dark Master told him. ‘We shall make history together, you and I. We shall unite the gods and harness war, famine and plague in honour of a champion of ultimate darkness. We shall craft through destiny, a warrior worthy of the challenges to come. Worthy to bear the blessing of each of my Ruinous masters in equal measure and be called Everchosen of Chaos. He will be the key, as I am the keeper of the coming apocalypse. Between us, we shall herald the coming of the End Times – the doom you spoke of, my friend. Rejoice soothsayer. They are coming. When we do… when I have no more need of your words or his deeds, I shall assume the Everchosen’s flesh in true coronation. The flesh your prophecies shall exalt to the status of legend – and I shall take my rightful place as Lord of the End Times. Once more the world will be mine to plunge into darkness and ruin.’

Necrodomo groaned and shrieked. If the pain of torture hadn’t driven him into the embrace of insanity, then the daemon prince’s words had. He was gone – a willing host to oblivion that, like a leech, sapped him of the last of his mental strength. The prognosticator moaned insensibilities. He laughed at his agonies and shrieked at nothing. Necrodomo let go and Be’lakor let him.

‘No matter,’ the daemon prince said to the madman. He opened the tome to its first blank page and selecting a quill, dipped it into the ink on the table. ‘I will assist you. I will transcribe. I have a name already. The name I shall bequeath my champion. The name I shall eventually take, with the body of the Everchosen I shall possess and assume. A name of your southern tongue, prognosticator, honouring both the ancient I have been and the eternity I have yet to become. We shall be known as… Archaon.’

‘There comes to the Emperor’s shores

one night, driven before a storm,

a gift in the guise of a child

unknowing, unknown and unsought.

‘From womb to sea he is returned,

a victim of the churning surf –

to be saved by a fisherman

who sees the gift and not the curse.

‘The error of the innocent –

a commoner baseborn and bred,

will never cost the land so dear

or put its people to the test.

‘If murder comes more easily –

or rude compassion shows its heel,

then worlds old and new will be saved

from the coming catastrophe.

‘For despite early clemency,

and the God-King’s watchful gaze

The child finds its path to darkness

and returns not man but plague.’

– Necrodomo the Insane, The Liber Caelestior
(The Celestine Book of Divination)

CHAPTER I

‘–Art thou some darknid thing?

Wielding accident and advantage from the shadows?

Some spirit, some fiend, some godless fury from afar, that stays the dice and winds the thread of life about its claws,

that turns blood to ice and shivers the spine,

With dark providence and blessed tragedies?

Tell me devil, what thou art.

– Geisenberg, Destinations

The village of Hargendorf

Nordland Coast – The Empire

Dunkelstag, IC 2390

The north. The north. Always the north. Out of the north they came, riding the storm. The rough wool cloth of their sails knew it. The rotting timbers of their clinkered hulls knew it. The marauders knew it in their hot bones and salt-stained flesh. This was no natural tempest. A wretched squall that had slammed the northmen from their bloody course and swept them south before gales serrated like their weapons, and rain fell like pellets of frosted iron. A blessing from the north. From the Wastes. From the Powers allowed to be.

Vargs, far from home. Like fire on the water, they lived for the basest expression of their miserable existence. War – wherever it could be found; women and the favours that could be ripped from them, and the cruel laughter that could be drawn from their bellies in the face of calamities wrought. When not engaged in such mordant pursuits, the northmen might have remembered to eat or sleep or attend to their weapons, their vessels or the monstrous darkness to which they had pledged their lives. Their names were made up of consonants that cut the mouth and their hearts were hollow and black. Some bore the ghastly afflictions of their calling but most were ugly enough before – being grizzled of limb, scarred of flesh and ragged of beard. They cursed the elements and spat in the face of Manann, god of the seas for his free passage. They honoured their patron Powers with action. They honoured them with the wolfish howls they roared at the tumultuous skies, as their boats cut through the range of mountainous waves before them and revealed the glint of torches and lanterns. The coast of some victim nation. The darkened shore.

As the storm smashed them on, lightning seethed through the sky. The world was fit to break. The furious flashes revealed a shale beach. On the shore sat a collection of beached fishing boats, rocking in the storm. Beyond lay a fishing village. Innocent. Provocative. Vulnerable. The barbarians stood in their dripping furs and spiked armour. They could already feel the spray of hot blood across their faces. The screams and the begging that aroused them so, soothing the mind and ear. The ache of omnipotence flooded their being. Hands stain-speckled with death reached for the tools of their trade – wicked blades, slender axes and spear shafts of saturated gore. They were the storm. The sudden and sickening eruption of forces unknown upon the helpless and afeared. The stinking and smoking ruin that their progress left in its path – the northmen’s advertisement to the world. They were there. They robbed. They ravaged. They murdered. And they lived.

The hovel’s roof flashed white in the storm. Rain lashed the windows clean and the shrieking north wind battered the door with the insistence that it be admitted. As the oldest homestead in Hargendorf and one of the closest to the beach, the hovel bore the full fury of the coming storm. Within, a fish broth bubbled above the fire, both being attended by Viktoria Rothschild. It was cold for the time of year but storms didn’t bother Viktoria. She was a fisherman’s daughter and a fisherman’s wife. The north winds warranted nothing more than a shawl. She had nets to mend and three young boys to tend to.

Otto pretended to be asleep in his bunk. He had never liked the Nordland storms and his father feared for the kind of fisherman he would make. His brother Dietfried, on the other hand, pushed his face to the window, feeling the drum of droplets through the glass and his nose. As thunder shook the hovel and lightning bleached the young boy’s face, his mother called him away. Dietfried retreated. A little. Only Lutz seemed oblivious to the tempest, sitting with his mother by the fire. He had no intention of helping her. With a stomach like a grotto or sea cave, the boy merely waited for his broth and the salt bread that would go with it.

Viktoria sighed. Lutz’s stomach was usually a good indicator of when her husband Roald was due to return. In weather like this she expected him even earlier but reasoned that the boats would need dragging further up the beach and securing in the storm. Between the claps of thunder she heard the sound of boots on shale. Roald was home. She handed bowls and wooden spoons to Lutz from the shelf.

‘Set the table for your father,’ Viktoria told the boy. ‘Dietfried, help your brother.’

When Dietfried didn’t reply, the fishwife turned on him with a face like the squall. ‘Dietfried,’ she carped, heading to unbar the door, her hands busy with salt bread. The boy was staring out of the window. He looked back at her, his face cast in shadows of concern by the flashing outside.

‘Mother…’ he began, turning back to the window.

There was shouting. Course and guttural. With bread in hand, Viktoria approached the window. Shadows passed before it in quick succession. The shadows of men in the village, but instead of nets and boat hooks and buckets, their hands glinted with the metal of blades, spear tips and axes.

Viktoria dropped the bread.

She grabbed Dietfried and went to pull him away from the window. The horror held them there, however. There was screaming now. Hedda Molinger was dead. Viktoria heard it. She had probably gone out to greet her husband, Edsel. The Rodeckers’ dog was barking and then promptly stopped. Old Mother Irmgard was suddenly out in the street, the centre of a mob of kicking and stamping. Bertilda’s boys Gelbert and Jorgan were straight out into the unfolding havoc but within moments were on their knees and pleading for their lives. Their entreaties went unheeded and seconds later their blood splashed up against the Rothschilds’ window, streaming down the glass with the rain.

Viktoria couldn’t quite catch her breath. She hauled Dietfried back and found both Lutz and Otto – awake and out of bed – clutching at her skirts. She looked about the hovel. They were fisherfolk and had little coin to spend on weapons like swords. She wouldn’t know what to do with it even if she had one. The best they had was a wood axe but it was wedged in a log amongst the firewood piled outside the door.

She felt her heart hammer in her chest. As the shadows continued to flash by the window and she could hear the crunch of boots up the beach and into the village, she felt the hammering accelerate to a lightheaded flutter. She went to say something to her children but the words wouldn’t come. A silhouette eclipsed the storm at the window. It was a man. Big in his furs and spiked armour. He wasn’t running into the havoc unfolding in the centre of Hargendorf like the others. He had stayed to finish Old Mother Irmgard, while his barbarian battle-kin had surged on to pillage and slaughter children and womenfolk.

He stood still like a predator, the wind and rain whipping about him. The shape of a woman tore by shrieking the name ‘Brigette’. Through the glass, Viktoria saw it was Carla Vohssen. The marauder sprung like a trap, snatching the screaming woman by the hair and pulling her into the hovel wall. His shadow held hers there. She fought but the barbarian stood like a statue above her. Viktoria heard the slow sound of a blade escaping its scabbard. Carla Vohssen’s voice was a strangled whisper. She alternated between begging and praying but the marauder silenced her with a single ‘Sssshhhhhhh’ from behind his helmet. As the tip of his broad blade dimpled her flesh, Viktoria heard Carla fall once again to screaming and struggling. Her elbow crashed through the hovel window, allowing the storm to scream inside. Viktoria clutched her children to her and retreated further into the hovel as she heard Carla’s shriek turn to moan, moan to whimper and whimper to silence.

Viktoria felt her children cling to her. In the distance the shrine bells were ringing. The temple. It somehow calmed Viktoria. She knew she had to act. Pushing Dietfried, Otto and Lutz to the corner of the hovel, she lifted the mound of fishing nets waiting for her attention there. There was no time for words, even ones of maternal comfort. They were all too scared. The boys instinctively understood what their mother wanted and crawled beneath, Dietfried’s hand lingering on Viktoria’s as she positioned the netting over them. An impact on the hovel door sent the child’s hand shooting back beneath the material. Viktoria stood bolt upright.

The shadow was missing from the window. Poor Carla’s corpse had slipped down the wall and her elbow from the shattered glass. The marauder’s armoured boot slammed into the door but it was barred against the storm and held. Viktoria slipped the knife she had been using to gut the fish off the table. She backed towards the fire, the stinking blade behind her. She watched. She waited.

The third impact splintered the bar in two and the smashed door was battered aside, allowing the maelstrom in. Framed in the doorway, in the flaring storm, in her nightmares, was the marauder. Rain cascaded from his furs and the urchin-like outline of his armour. Where leather, mail and plate failed to contain the northman’s brawn, his flesh was tattooed and scarred. Centred about his heart and crossing one great pectoral muscle, the warrior had a rough tattoo in the shape of an eight-pointed star. Viktoria felt both drawn to and despairing of the symbol but decided that it would be the best place to bury her knife when she had the chance. The warrior’s helm was horned and covered his face. Light was admitted by a number of rough puncture holes in the faceplate that, for all Viktoria knew, afflicted the marauder’s hidden face also. The tempest whipped Carla’s lifeblood and gore from the huge blade of the sword in the marauder’s mailed fist.

He entered. Slowly. Like his knife had the girl outside. His sea-drenched boots carried him calmly across the hovel. There was no frenzied attack. Nothing like the butchery behind him as marauders moved through the village like a pack of wolves, slashing, tearing and sharing. Viktoria picked up a plate and threw it, and another, but they bounced uselessly off the marauder’s chest. He kept coming. Slow. Deliberate. His blade held in casual readiness. He reached out for her but she retreated, grabbing the pot of fish broth by one burning handle and flinging it awkwardly at the warrior. As the heavy pot clattered to the floor, the boiling broth steamed off the marauder’s scalded flesh and armour. If he felt pain, the warrior didn’t show it.

Viktoria backed away. She felt a sob erupt from her. Futility and frustration. She was about to die and she knew it. At the sound the boys beneath the fishing net stifled their own terror, as the marauder’s helm drew around to the corner of the hovel. The action turned Viktoria’s stomach to stone. She reached into the fire for a partially burning log. She would torch the northerner. His mailed fist snapped around her wrist like vice. She strained but the warrior held her there. She felt his balance change. The tip of his sword was up and resting on her stomach. He intended to skewer her like he had Carla.

And the marauder would have done, but Viktoria brought the knife from behind her back with her other hand and thrust the blade at the tattoo of the star across the monster’s heart. The tip of the knife punctured the skin and slipped partly into the warrior’s flesh. The marauder was no fish, however. Muscle, bone and whatever protection the unholy symbol offered barred the way to his heart. As Viktoria stood there, frozen with horror, an instant of dark connection was made between their two souls, their two bodies. Shocked and sickened, she released her grip on the weapon, and tried to pull away.

He looked down at the knife protruding from his flesh, then back at Viktoria. She thought she saw his eyes, the light of the fire penetrating the helmet and revealing the jaundiced, bloodshot peace of his gaze. He released her wrist but backhanded her away from the fire. The mailed palm took several of the fishwife’s teeth and she hit the wall with an ugly, head-gashing crack. The children squealed from beneath the netting.

‘Stay where you are,’ Viktoria called to them. ‘Mummy’s all right.’

The knife clanged to the floor as the marauder swept his own weapon around, smashing the handle down and the blade tip from his flesh. He turned towards the mound of nets but Viktoria called, ‘No’. She spat blood. She sobbed. ‘Here. Here.’

She backed into the hovel’s only other room. The bedroom. She was crying. The marauder stopped. He considered. Finally he slid his sword slowly back its scabbard. The marauder advanced. Viktoria retreated. She cried out as the back of her legs hit the bed. She fell back into the blankets. The marauder entered. In his armour and helm he seemed to fill the tiny room. Thunder crashed. The wind moaned. The skies wept.

Viktoria lifted her back from the covers.

‘No,’ she wept.

The marauder brought his mail fist up to the helm and extended a finger. ‘Sssshhhhhhh,’ he told her.

Someone was behind him. The warrior went for his sword and turned. The boat hook smashed through the side of both his helm and skull. Roald Rothschild held him there for a moment, the fisherman’s weapon keeping the marauder in place as he began to tremble and shake. Rothschild had no warrior skill. He had been fortunate in both his approach and the hook’s destination. Fear had driven him on. A husband’s wrath had carried him through doubt. The ungainly wickedness of his improvised weapon had done the rest. Lowering the warrior to his armoured knees, Roald shook the hook loose from the twisted metal of the helm and allowed his victim to fall. The marauder crashed onto the floor and fell into a brief fit, the insides of his head leaking out of the side of the helmet, before finally falling silent and still.

All Viktoria could see was her husband. His beard hid the grimness on his lips. Dietfried, Otto and Lutz were suddenly about his legs, crying. He put his finger to his lips and bid them be quiet before extending a hand to his wife. Viktoria took it and the family fled the hovel, heading into the storm – Roald’s fishing boat waiting for them, a little way up the rain-lashed beach.

Legends are not made in this way…

The Dark Master will not be thwarted thus. What is a prophecy if not a truth promised to be? The skill is knowing where to exert force. It is true that with so many competing forces in the world, so many invested entities and powers, with so many destinies at odds, it is nigh but impossible to change the great happenings of the age – any age – directly. There is balance, except when there is not. With a lever long enough, however, I could balance it across the great mountains of the Worlds Edge and prise mighty Morrslieb from the night sky.

This world was once mine. A glorious ruin of ash and flame. It will be again. And so like the pages of a book, flicked back to read again that which was missed the first time, I bring forth my instrument of destruction. He, who is destined for Armageddon’s crown. He, whose anointed flesh is destined to be my own. Archaon… will be.

Small changes can make a big difference – sometimes, all the difference.

Which is why this time the shrine bells of Hargendorf never rang.

CHAPTER I

‘Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end.’

– Senectra the Younger, Dialogues

The village of Hargendorf

Nordland Coast – The Empire

Mitterfruhl, IC 2391

The water was cold, as was her purpose. Viktoria Rothschild stood in the shallows. She had been crouching there for some time and her legs were numb. The waters splashed up against her knees and swollen belly and on up along the shale beach. She looked out across the bay. Beyond extended the Sea of Claws and beyond that, only the gods knew what. The sea had been good to her family. To her father. To her father’s father. To herself, Roald and the boys. It was a giver of life. Dietfried, Otto and Lutz had grown strong and healthy on whatever the sea had provided for them. Roald had his boat. She sold the fish he caught. The sea had been good to them.

Manann’s realm could be fickle, however. As well as giver it was also the taker of life. Isolde Altoff’s boy Hanke had drowned off Stukker Nook. Viktoria’s cousin Gretel had been taken by a wyrm on the beaches of Lugren when Viktoria had been just a teenager. Three generations of the Lassowitz family had been lost in one night during a squall on the Hunderbank. The sea would take another that morning.

The slosh of the waves and the offshore breeze stole her grunts and exertions. She was a mother of three fine boys. She had done this before. About her the water was a murky crimson. She cried for the last few minutes. Above, dark clouds were gathering and the wind turned.

‘Viktoria!’

It was Roald. He had been running up the beach calling her name. His boots took him into the shallows. ‘Gods woman, no,’ he said, swirling about the bloody waters with his big hands. ‘Viktoria, no.’

She turned to him and staggered. He caught her and held her for a moment. He looked out to sea while she peered back up the shale beach to the hovel. It was one of the last standing after the terrible night of slaughter nine months before. The hovel that had admitted the marauder and borne witness to the dark gift he had bestowed on Viktoria Rothschild. The gift of a child unwanted. Viktoria blinked the salt from her eyes. If only there had been a warning. If only the shrine bells had rung. If only Roald and the fishermen had returned earlier. But they hadn’t and Viktoria had bought herself and her children time with her miseries.

‘We shall be punished for this,’ Roald told her. ‘The gods will punish us.’

Viktoria held him a little longer.

‘We’ve been punished enough,’ Viktoria said bleakly, before wading out of the shallows and back up the shale. Otto and Lutz were playing outside, while Dietfried watched them from up the beach, from where he had been helping his father with the catch.

Roald Rothschild remained, the waves rising and falling about him. He looked but saw nothing. The sea had taken the child. It was one with the depths. He cast his gaze up at the haemorrhaging sky. There would be another storm. It was the season. The fisherman’s lips moved silently. Roald Rothschild prayed. He prayed to Manann. He prayed to Sigmar. He prayed to any and all that were listening. Little could he know that a force dark and powerful had indeed heard his fearful prayers.

You would consign fate, crafted in flesh and blood, to the depths? The gifts of Chaos are not to be refused. They are not demanded or earned, they are visited upon mortals at the pleasure of Dark Gods and the princes of ruin.

This story cannot be untold. The will of daemons cannot be undone. It is decided. Doom lives on. Damnation endures. From the darkness of the depths to the darkness of the womb, the gift shall be returned.

And so I petition the moons and turn back the tide. The black depths reject that which has been rejected. Once more the fruit is swollen with the seed of doom. This child shall live and in doing so bring about the death of all the world. Consider this already done. Done in the name of god-thwarted Be’lakor.

CHAPTER I

Now it is the time of night,

when fears surmount their mighty sum,

and the grave gapes forth its welcome.

– Nelkenthal, The Raven’s Call

The village of Hargendorf

Nordland

Nacht der Kranken, IC 2391

Viktoria sent Dietfried for the midwife from Shlaghugel. Gunda Schnass had brought all three of her sons successfully into the world and Viktoria would have no one else for the fourth. Although a lapsed follower of Shallya, Gunda made her offerings to the God-King at Dempster’s Rock. The temple was nearer and according to Dietfried – who she had also delivered – there was little time. Gunda didn’t even know Viktoria was expecting. It seemed strange after the tragedy that had befallen Hargendorf. There was so much work to do in rebuilding and managing the catch alone that another child – so soon – struck Gunda as an extra burden. Asking for Sigmar’s blessing on her work and strong sons for his Empire, the midwife made her way to Hargendorf with Dietfried Rothschild walking miserably behind. She tried to prise some conversation from the boy on their journey but he would not be drawn. He had turned into a serious child, hard of face and burdened by his thoughts. The midwife expected little else from the youngling: he had been taken by the heel and dipped in tragedy head first. He had seen things no one was meant to see.

Gunda had had no reason to visit the fishing village in the past few months. The marauder attack had been swift and brutal. Hovels and boats had been put to the flame while men, women and children had been put to the sword. Gunda waddled through the ash-drowned ruins, the slaughter and decimation evident everywhere: in the torched timbers, in the stains of old blood on the cobbles, in the absence of gossip and children’s laughter on the air.

She found the Rothschilds’ hovel at the edge of the shale where she had left it four years before, after bringing the angel-faced Otto into the world. It was easy to find. It was one of the only buildings left standing. The Rothschilds had been fortunate that terrible night. Roald had got Viktoria and the children out and to his boat, the family taking refuge in the storm-mauled bay while the village burned on the shore. Few others had been so fortunate. Others who had survived had left, leaving the atrocities at Hargendorf behind – though as a survivor of life’s myriad misfortunes herself, Gunda knew that you could walk to the other side of the Empire and never quite escape the darkness of your past. It waited for you behind the closing of each eye, to be relived each night.

She didn’t bother to knock. Viktoria’s suffering could be heard up the empty street. The hovel was dark and muggy. Roald stood by the fire. He was impassive, like one of the wooden statues lining the temple at Dempster’s Rock. He said nothing. A pot of water boiled over a spitting fire. The children were seated at the table, tearing material into the rags Gunda would need. There was no greeting from the younglings either. Dietfried joined them. Their eyes were directed through the bedroom door, on their mother and her pain. The last time they had heard their mother scream had been nine months before, on the night of the attack. The night the marauders arrived. The night the marauder crossed the doorstep and entered their lives.

‘Well, let’s get started then,’ Gunda said, rolling up her sleeves. She thought she should say something. In reality, Viktoria was well on her way but it was proving to be a troublesome birth. The midwife washed her hands. She told Viktoria that everything would be all right. Roald and the children just stared, as though seeing something far off. Gunda wasn’t happy. Viktoria’s cries were unnaturally harsh for a mother already of three. The tide came in. The sun went down. The midwife pressed on with the difficult birth. Viktoria reached out for Roald but the fisherman stayed by the fire, sending the children across the room when Gunda needed something. Viktoria’s suffering went on into the night. She became weaker and more frightened and Gunda felt the woman slipping from her grasp.

The baby was born to silence. It was a strong little thing, Gunda had to admit. A boy. Few children she had brought into the world had endured such a delivery. It had fought its way through the first trial of its life and emerged bloody, bonny and full of fight. Its screams seemed to produce a reaction in the family. The children too fell to sobbing but they were not tears of joy. No thanks were offered to the gods and so it fell to Gunda to mumble a prayer to Sigmar – as she had done in his temple some hours before – acknowledging that another son of the Empire had been born.

With the child wrapped in swaddling and placed on the bed, Gunda turned her attentions back to Viktoria. She told her how brave she had been. How well she had fought to see her son into the world. That she had attended few births so difficult. She lifted water to her lips from a ladle but Viktoria would not take it. Her eyes fluttered and her head fell to one side.

‘Don’t do this, lassie,’ Gunda said, but then the convulsions started. Viktoria was experiencing some kind of violent fit. Arms flew out and her legs kicked across the bed. ‘The baby!’ Gunda cried out. ‘Get the baby.’ Roald and the children just watched. Moving the child to the floor and away from the violence of his mother’s passing, Gunda attempted to hold Viktoria down. Bracing a wound rag across her mouth like a bridle, the midwife tried to stop her biting down on her own tongue. ‘Roald,’ the midwife called. ‘Get over here and help me.’

Putting one horrified foot in front of the other, Roald made it across the hovel and into the bedroom. The children, now descended into a sobbing mess, followed him. The four of them joined Gunda by the bed. Together they held their mother down. They felt the heat of her skin and the last of the fight within her, until finally she fell still. The children wept into the blankets. Roald bawled his grief at his wife’s silence. The baby cried for attention it would not get. Gunda felt her own tears come. She backed away from the bed feeling like an intruder, knowing that the family needed this moment alone.

‘I’m so sorry,’ she murmured before making for the door. It seemed to take an eternity to reach it.

‘Take it with you,’ Roald managed, snatching a breath.

‘Roald, no,’ Gunda said.

‘I beg you,’ the fisherman cried, his sorrow cutting through him like a sword. His face was a contorted mask of unbearable woe.

‘He’s your son, man,’ Gunda implored.

‘He’s not my son,’ Roald barked, his anger driving his whimpers away. ‘He’s not my son.’

Gunda stared at them all. The inconsolable younglings. The fisherman, his shoulders broad and taut, as if under some fresh burden. Viktoria Rothschild, bloody and broken on the bed. She came to understand how tragedy might have intruded on the household that dreadful night nine months ago. How the Rothschilds might not have been as fortunate as gossip had supposed. ‘Take it,’ Roald hissed through his pain and gritted teeth. ‘Or I will see to it that the tide will.’

The midwife nodded, picked up the child and held the swaddling to her chest. She opened the door. It was the dead of night. The sky was open and a chill breeze felt its way through the layers of her clothing.

‘I’m truly sorry,’ the midwife said, tears rolling down her rounded cheeks.

Gunda settled into her hood and, pulling the babe close to the warmth of her body, set off into the Nordland night.

CHAPTER II

‘Thus Gerreon’s blade found its way to Pendrag’s heart and love,

and the winds took its wielder north to the realm of bear and wolf,

Sigmar followed with a sword-brother’s rage – eager to avenge fair Pendrag’s blood,

He searched for dark Gereon through mount and wood,

But vengeance turned to calling with Sigmar crushing the Norsii beneath his boot.’

– Hollenstein, Chronicles

The Schlaghugel Road

Nordland

Pendragstag, IC 2391

The Schlaghugel Road was a ghoulish ribbon winding its way between the gurgling darkness that was the River Demst and the dread of Laurelorn Forest. Road was a charitable description for the channel-hugging pathway that couldn’t decide whether it was wagon-hardened earth, moss-threaded gravel or the occasional lonely cobblestone. It was the small hours of the night and there were no merchant wagons travelling the road. Not a messenger. Not a mail coach. Not even a footpad or highwayman. Both Swift Nikolaus and ‘Six-Fingered’ Dirk were regular sights on the route. Killers both, Gunda Schnass would even have welcomed the company of such robbers on the Schlaghugel Road that night. The breeze hissed like a serpent through towering treetops, which drooped like closing jaws over the miserable path.

Gunda would never ordinarily have left a birth. Traditionally a midwife would remain until morning. Both mother and baby needed care, comfort and advice. The passage was safer during the day and with their wives resting, husbands were sometimes reticent about payment for the midwifery services rendered. The Rothschilds’ tragedy did not allow for such luxury, however, and Gunda found herself out on the open road, late into the night with a mewling child drawing the attention of every wretched thing that haunted the edge of the forest. Gunda saw shapes moving through the brush and the glint of eyes in moonlight.

It was cold. The heavens were cloudless and the constellations hung above the forest like secret signs and indecipherable symbols. Gunda wasn’t much of a reader as it was and her talents certainly didn’t extend to interpreting the stars. The midwife peered up into the depths of the heavens with ignorance and suspicion. The sky didn’t look good, whatever it said. It wasn’t helped by the moons. Mannslieb’s great disk was settled amongst the treetops, staining them a sickly yellow. Morrslieb was in the ascendant, rising high overhead, throwing its dread radiance down upon all that might walk, crawl or creep through the Laurelorn Forest.

Gunda hugged the child close to her. The boy was wet and hungry. His bawling left the midwife in no doubt of his displeasure. Although she had taken the child at Roald’s insistence, she had little idea what she was to do with him. She was too old to raise him herself. She was a midwife but her husband Ambros had long passed. Her daughter was a wet nurse in Beilen and there was an orphanage in distant Dieterschafen – but neither would take the boy if they knew the circumstances of his conception. The reavers and marauders of the north were known to be polluted from their compacts with dark forces and enjoyed visiting that pollution on others.

Gunda found herself singing a low tune. Something her father had taught her as a child – The Knight’s Dalliance – about a knight’s encounter one night with a beautiful elfin stranger on the empty roads of the Laurelorn Forest. It was a deceptively cheerful tune but did not end well. Despite the comfort it gave her, Gunda allowed the song to trail off on the breeze, lest it attract the attentions of some lonely member of the elder races, whose villages were rumoured haunt the depths of the forest hereabouts.

She heard the growls first. Low, predacious rattles from the back of blood-slick throats. As she crunched her way along the Schlaghugel Road, Gunda couldn’t help looking behind her – hoping for a farmer on a cart of hay or a fellow traveller on foot. Instead she discovered dark shapes that dribbled from the shadowy treeline, like an ink blot running on parchment. Ulric’s children. Wolves drawn from the forest by Morrslieb’s boldness. They snapped and snarled. They skulked up behind her in a loose pack, waspish in their wasted want. Their eyes glinted with craven hunger.

Even if the child’s mewling hadn’t drawn their ragged ears, the pack could probably smell the baby’s unwashed body. Holding the babe to her bust, Gunda snatched a rock from the road and tossed it at the beasts. The crack of the stone off the road shot through the night. The wolves kept their distance, hugging her scent along the river. Their numbers grew and the midwife’s heart sank with every step. The forest fiends would soon tire of their fearful game. Their number would overcome their feral caution with baying and the baring of teeth. They would attack. Before long all Gunda could think of was the sun rising over her bone-picked corpse. Darker thoughts still were prompted by the snapping of the emboldened monstrosities at her heels. She would not die for this child. This screeching orphan. This northman’s mongrel.

Morrslieb, full and furious, leered over the treetops at her. With each of the midwife’s prayer-mumbling steps, however, a silhouette rose from the canopy. Framed in the moon’s lurid glare was Sigmar’s glorious form. Cut out of the moon’s surface like a shadow, the unmistakable outline of the Heldenhammer rose to greet her. It was the temple. It was Dempster’s Rock. Sigmar’s statue stood proud atop the tower-dome crowning the rugged brickwork of the temple. The pitch outline of the forest broke for the tree-sparse hillocks amongst which the temple nestled. Gunda Schnass had never been so pleased to see the God-King’s bronze form. As her waddling step and the roll of her ample hips took her towards the tall temple doors she felt the wolf pack fall away. She could hear the hackle and snap of their frustration. The God-King was an imposing sight, even for the mindless, savage beasts of the world. The fearful power of Sigmar’s image held sway even over them.

Under the temple’s great archway, Gunda found the mighty doors closed and barred. Given the hour, this did not surprise the midwife. It was not unusual to find Father Dagobert late at study but it was the dead of night, when most god-fearing folk were wisely in their beds and not in need of a priest. Unlike Gunda. Unlike the child. Huddled beneath the protective stonework of the small temple, Gunda’s tired, dread-addled mind came to a conclusion. She could not care for this child. She could not ask her daughter Ada or Mistress Buttenhauser in Dieterschafen to care for it either, not knowing where he came from. What if his father came for him one day? What if the child himself harboured an unknown darkness? He was safest there, Gunda realised, under Sigmar’s unflinching gaze. The God-King would see the child right. Gunda – a humble midwife – had seen him safely to Sigmar’s door. She had done her best. His fate was in the God-King’s hands now.

Pulling the child away from the warmth of her breast and laying the swaddling package in the nook of the arch, Gunda laid a kiss on the boy’s forehead with her cracked lips.

‘Gods forgive me,’ the midwife told him as the child’s screams intensified. Gunda did not want to be seen and with heavy heart and tears on her wrinkled cheek, she hurried away – the shame of her steps carrying her off towards Schlaghugel and the hovel she called a home.

As night wore on and the child screamed, the fell radiance of the witchmoon probed the temple archway. The great disk of Morrslieb – like a great bauble in the sky – peered from behind the temple stonework and soothed the babe with its brilliance. The child stared up in infant wonder, its eyes wide and its cries stifled. Moonlight reached through the forest also, calling to its bestial acolytes. The ill-light of the moon eclipsed Sigmar’s statue, shielding the coward-hearts of forest savages from the reproach of the God-King’s gaze. The treeline bled its gathering darkness and soon the hillocks of Dempster’s Rock were swarming with their vicious kind, baying to the moon and drooling their intention to tear and shred. What the sordid effulgence did for their night eyes the unchanged swaddling did for their empty bellies. The forest was saturated with the baby’s smell. Its tender flesh called to them.

As the most brazen and ravenous of the wolves ventured before the great doors and into the arch, they snarled and snapped their claim, streams of slobber tossing this way and that as each advancing beast attempted to secure the prize for itself. They nipped experimentally at the swaddling, dragging the babe from the archway and down the steps. Again the child’s screams shattered the night, as it became the object of a tug-of-war between two great black beasts.

The first barely managed a half-yelp before its skull was smashed into the ground. The second was allowed a fleeting moment of wide-eyed panic as it released the child. The spiked metal ball that had demolished its competitor came up on a chain. It accomplished a moon-scraping orbit before coming crashing down on the wolf with equal fervour. A second smash pulverised the beast and finished it.

‘Get out of here!’ the weapon’s wielder roared. Father Hieronymous Dagobert’s vestments hung down about his waist; the hairy belly that wobbled generously with every swing of the twin-entwined chains was pale in the moonlight. He had been woken by the cries of a baby before his temple’s doors and had hurriedly donned his robes and his boots. The morning star clutched in his pudgy fists was in fact the temple censer, streaming incense from the heavy ball of its spiked thurible.

‘Back, beast,’ Dagobert compelled the pack savages, his boots kicking teeth from the jaws of skulking scavengers and breaking the backs of the fleeing creatures. ‘Back, I say! In the name of Sigmar back, or you’ll get a taste of the Herald.’

Dagobert swung the spiked ball about his great body on its twin chain, the gust-fed incense within glowing like a comet through the sky.

Within moments of the priest erupting from the doors of his temple, the ravenous pack recovered. Lurkers slinked in under the Herald’s arc to snap at the child, who once again had become transfixed – this time by the streaming afterglow of the priest’s Herald. Beasts left the ground and snapped for Dagobert’s own ample flesh. He pounded them back with bloodied fists and tight swings of the chain. A rumble built within the priest’s belly that became a growl of his own as he smashed the children of the night out of the air and into the ground. With his chest rising and falling, and the Herald burning bright at its chain-end, the pack broke off. Enough of the scavengers were dead to shake loose the moon-fuelled confederacy of their number.

‘Back, you beasts,’ Dagobert said finally, spitting his derision down on the mashed carcasses of wolves that had incurred the wrath of Sigmar’s Herald. Beside him, the baby stared up in blood-speckled wonder.

‘Now who are you?’ the priest put to the child, ‘abroad on such an evil night.’ He looked about for any sign of who had left the infant before shrugging. ‘You’d best come in with me then,’ he said, the kindness of his words labouring against the catching of his breath.

With the babe in one hand, held against his rounded belly, and the Herald coiled in the other, Father Dagobert made his way back towards the temple. Beneath the bronze gaze of Sigmar he nodded silently, before stomping in under the archway and kicking the great temple doors closed behind him.

CHAPTER III

‘The corn is cut and the crops are reap’d.

Taal is praised and the gathering heap’d.

Thanks are given for the kindly skies,

And that fruit was not taken before it was ripe.’

– The Reaper’s Danse (Anon)

Dempster’s Rock

Nordland

Vigil der Erntezeit, IC 2399

Hieronymous Dagobert’s footfalls were heavy on the scullery steps. The kitchen fire was roaring but there was nothing cooking on it. The priest was silent as he reached the basement flags.

‘Father,’ a voice came, just audible above the roar of the fire. It was tender with age. Young, fragile and broken. More of a devastated whisper than a voice. The word rattled off into a coughing fit, which prompted the priest to close his eyes. ‘Hieronymous, is that you?’

Dagobert stood with his broad back to the child. His hand had formed a fist. He bit at his knuckle absently. His eyes were rheumy and his cheeks flushed but Lady Magdalena of the Salzenmund Hospice had assured him that it wasn’t the pestilence and that he was merely overwrought in his tending to the child. She could not say the same of the boy, however. Worse, the priestess of Shallya told him that the disease was not known to her or her order and the best she could do was make him comfortable for the coming end.

‘Father?’

‘I’m here, my son,’ Dagobert assured the young boy. He opened his misery-clutched eyes and walked to the scullery side where a pot of medicinal tea had been cooling. Ravenswort and ground Staffroot, Magdalena had told him. Something to help the suffering. If taken in quantity, something to help the sufferer slip away. ‘You should take some more of your tea,’ Dagobert called over the fire. ‘As Lady Magdalena instructed.’ He picked up the fire-burnished pot and poured the foul-smelling infusion into a wooden mug. He stopped. His hand was shaking. The misty liquid sloshed about the cup. Dagobert slammed it back down on the tabletop. ‘No,’ he said to himself. ‘Sigmar forgive me. One more night.’ Leaving the concoction, Dagobert crossed the scullery to where he had positioned the boy’s bed before the fire.

‘Oh, Little Diederick,’ Dagobert said. The youngling looked terrible. A veritable corpse. He was shaking – his frame continually wracked by shivers that even the most furious fire failed to combat. Dagobert had called the boy Little Diederick, but for eight he had been quite tall and brawny. The pestilence, however, had wasted him to a husk. A field mouse could have lifted him from the bed. His young flesh was threaded through with a canker that opened up splits and welts that would not heal and in turn gave breed to a pox that had turned his skin to scab and scale. His fine, blond hair had fallen away and his sockets were bruised brown with corruption. The eyes within had clouded over and consigned the boy to darkness. Worst of all, a bloody and black treacle continually leaked from the corner of the youngling’s mouth, proceeding from both his chest and his stomach, making it difficult for him to breathe and almost impossible for him to eat.

Despite the boy’s myriad sufferings, the priest hardly ever heard him complain. He had a strength of body and mind that Dagobert both admired and dreaded. The more Little Diederick fought and the longer he endured the more he would suffer. Lady Magdalena told Dagobert that despite the boy’s undeniable spirit, he was finished. Dagobert had wept before the priestess. He had raised Little Diederick at the temple. They had not been apart for eight years and Dagobert – who had no children of his own – discovered that the boy had brought meaning to his life he had not expected. The act of charity in saving him that fateful, moonlit night and taking him in had turned into an act of love. He was both a spiritual and substitute father to the child. He had named him, for Sigmar’s sake. The truth was that the tears Dagobert shed were tinged with relief as well as sorrow. It was almost over for the poor boy. A day at most, the priestess had given him. Then she had given Dagobert the tea to ease both the boy’s suffering and the way to Shallya’s bosom.

‘Father,’ Little Diederick wheezed. ‘Am I dying?’

‘Yes, my boy,’ Dagobert answered. The words came fast and easier than he expected. ‘Not long… Not long. Your trials will soon be at an end and you will be free. Do you suffer, Diederick?’ Dagobert asked.

‘I don’t feel much,’ the boy said. Dagobert nodded. Lady Magdalena’s concoction had been successful in cushioning her patient from the worst of his agonies. ‘I’m frightened,’ the boy admitted.

Dagobert took the small, silver hammer he wore about his fat neck in reverence to his God-King – the emblem of his holy office – and draped it about the child’s neck. The boy didn’t even feel it.

‘Don’t be,’ Dagobert said. ‘I’m here. I’ll always be here – at your side.’

The boy was still shivering, despite the fire. Dagobert sidled around the bed and lay down behind Diederick. He put his arm about the child, trying to warm him further. The pair of them lay still awhile, staring into the raging kitchen fire. Minutes passed. The boy’s breathing grew increasingly laboured. Dagobert held him through a savage coughing fit that shook the delicate child until he was almost insensible.

As he rescued his breath and returned to solemn silence, Dagobert spoke.

‘Diederick?’

‘Yes, Father.’

‘Do you think you might ever find it in yourself to forgive me?’ the priest asked, his voice strained with emotion.

‘For what?’ Little Diederick hissed, his words reedy.

‘This is my fault,’ Dagobert admitted. ‘I don’t think you caught this pestilence in the forest or from the river. I don’t think a visitor to the temple brought it to us. And neither does Lady Magdalena.’

‘What’s wrong with me?’ the child asked with a chilling directness. Dagobert turned his eyes from the blinding flicker of the fire.

‘I sent you for the books,’ he told the boy. ‘I was distracted. I left the vault door open. I never thought that…’ The priest caught himself. ‘These things are all my fault.’

‘I don’t understand,’ Diederick said, moving his head, causing more black ooze to roll from the corner of his mouth.

‘The vault is a special place,’ Dagobert said. ‘A secure place, where I am required to keep special things.’

‘Special things?’ Little Diederick asked.

‘Tomes. Manuscripts. Works of great age.’

‘Books?’

‘Yes, but not the ones I sent you for. Those would never be found in such a place. The vault contains tomes of dangerous knowledge and ideas,’ Dagobert said. ‘Knowledge that can hurt people. Understanding for which the world will never be ready. Each temple has a vault of such heresies stored securely beneath the holy ground of its flagstones.’

‘Why do you keep such things, Father?’ Diederick asked, devolving once more into a horrible coughing fit. Blood, fresh and raw from the lungs appeared on the boy’s lips, prompting Dagobert to wipe it away with the tails of his priestly robe. Little Diederick appeared to be in greater discomfort. Every breath was an effort.

Dagobert thought on the question as the boy grew still once more.

‘In order to better protect ourselves from the enemies of Sigmar,’ the priest said, ‘and the God-King has many, we must know what they know. We study and translate them to know how the servants and darkness might be stopped. Sigmar entrusts such a solemn and hazardous task to a chosen few.’

‘Who?’ Little Diederick rasped.

‘His priests,’ Dagobert said. ‘His templar knights. You remember meeting Sieur Kastner, yes?’

‘Yes…’

‘He came searching for such a tome,’ Dagobert told him. ‘That was why the vault was open. You have to know, Diederick, it was a mistake. I would never have exposed you to such dangers intentionally.’

‘I never found the books you asked for,’ Diederick said.

‘But you found others,’ Dagobert pressed tautly.

‘Yes…’

‘Did you read them?’

‘I knocked over a pile,’ Diederick said, his face creasing with further pain and discomfort. ‘One lay open. I leant in to look. It was covered in strange symbols. I did not understand.’

‘Lady Magdalena and I found the toppled books in the vault,’ Dagobert said.

‘Does Lady Magdalena think I got this for reading one of the dangerous books?’

‘No, my child.’

‘Is Sigmar angry with me,’ Diederick said, bloody tears welling in the mist of his eyes. ‘For reading the book?’

‘No, Little Diederick,’ Dagobert told the boy, ‘he is not. The God-King could not be prouder of your hard work in the temple and in your studies. Lady Magdalena thinks that you might have breathed something in: some ancient pestilence or contamination. Something left there a long time ago by one of Sigmar’s enemies. The God-King is not angry with you. He is angry with me. I am the one to be punished.’

Diederick began to cough. This time it took several minutes to stop. Dagobert held him, lest the fragile boy shake himself to ruin. As they lay there, before the fury of the fire they both became still and silent.

‘Father?’ Diederick said, his voice but a strangled sigh.

‘Yes, my dear child?’ Dagobert dared to answer.

‘I forgive you,’ the boy mouthed.

The priest read the words on his dry, blackening lips. Tears rolled down the priest’s fat cheeks. He laid the child on his back. It was time.

‘The God-King waits for you,’ Dagobert told him.

‘There is something there,’ Diederick hissed. ‘In the darkness.’

‘It is He,’ Dagobert said. ‘Don’t be frightened. Go to him.’

The boy’s face contorted with sudden horror and disgust. ‘It’s not the God-King…’ Diederick said. The words were still on his lips as his last breath escaped him.

The Lord of All enjoys the songs, the chanting of children at play, holding hands and dancing around. They sing of flowers, of his plagues that sweep through the land and the ashes of bodies burned. They celebrate this life of death, for he is both the cause of their suffering and he who would save them from it. He defines the times with the pain and fear he brings into mortal lives. Though they would not know it, they sing and dance to the tune of the Great Pestilence’s calling.

He takes so many souls in this way. Like the harvest, they are weighed and measured. They are his tithe. His reward for the architecture of agony that is his contribution to their mortal failing.

Like the scythe, the Lord of All does not choose between the one stalk and the other. With so many souls feeding his eternal appetite for affliction and end, he will not miss the one stalk. Does the mill miss the single grain? The bread bereft of flour that dusts the floor with its forgotten bounty? The mouth the crumb that falls from the lip?

He will not miss the one soul unpromised to him. The one soul destined for more than his plague or pestilence. For this one grain re-planted will yield a reaper’s harvest. A celebration of death and suffering the like of which the world has never known. He will be a scourge, a disease all of his own. A plague from which the world will never recover. And so I release this soul from its suffering and send it back so that it might be a worm in the rotting carcass of the world. And not a carcass in itself.

Click here to buy Archaon: Everchosen

A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION

First published in Great Britain in 2014.
This eBook edition published in 2014 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd., Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

© Games Workshop Limited, 2014. All rights reserved.

Cover by Raymond Swanland.
Map by Nuala Kinrade.

Archaon: Everchosen © Copyright Games Workshop Limited 2014. Archaon: Everchosen, GW, Games Workshop, Black Library, Warhammer, and all associated logos, illustrations, images, names, creatures, races, vehicles, locations, weapons, characters, and the distinctive likenesses thereof, are either ® or TM, and/or © Games Workshop Limited, variably registered around the world.
All Rights Reserved.

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN: 978-1-78251-490-9

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

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Find out more about Games Workshop’s world of Warhammer and the Warhammer 40,000 universe at
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