Contents

Cover

Bonereapers – Extract

A Black Library Publication

eBook license

Prologue

‘I’m scared, Ness.’

Nestira put her arm around her brother, Seben, and drew him close. The wagon had been still for about a minute. The wind snuffled around its canvas roof like a mordant exploring a gift, wan fingers of amethyst light reaching in between the seams. Thirty children of tithing age sat still, pale faces stroked with purple, too frightened to breathe.

‘It’s going to be all right,’ she said, the same confiding whisper with which she had once explained how grots would take the teeth he left under his pillow, or that the Arbiters would scare away monsters. ‘We’ll be allowed to go home soon. Mother will tuck you and Darsil into your own beds. She and Father will sit with you until you fall asleep.’ She stroked his hair as his head sank into her chest. ‘And in the morning there will be a breakfast feast.’ She smiled. ‘And gifts. There will be no chores. The margrave will tell Father that Sigmar has no duty for him today. The Exalted of Sigmar will come down from the temple in Arbiters’ Keep to bless us, and he will thank us for keeping Arbitrium safe for another nine years.’ She scratched his temple to make him open his eyes and look at her. ‘And if we are good then there will be more gifts.’

‘Will it hurt?’ he asked, voice buried in the weave of her sleeveless tithing smock.

‘No,’ she lied.

Seben was younger than her.

Nestira herself was almost eighteen.

‘We’ll be all right if we stay together,’ she said, speaking loudly enough to address them all, without speaking over the wind. ‘Think of Sigmar, as the priests say. And say nothing. Try not to be afraid.’ Comforting Seben in one arm, she turned to Darsil and squeezed his knee. He did not seem to notice. He stared up at the roof in silence, starting at every whinny from the horses and every piercing scream.

Something ripped the canvas flap aside.

The children seated towards the rear spilled into the central aisle in their haste to get away, and to her shame even Nestira screamed.

‘It’s me,’ said Mother, holding back the open flap with the stump of her right shoulder. ‘It’s only me. I’m sorry.’ She held up her one hand to show that she meant no harm. The night made it ethereal, darkened the knotwork of scars even as it turned the flesh of her hand pale, a ghost bound in threads of cruel fate. ‘Come on,’ she whispered, beckoning. ‘We mustn’t keep them waiting.’ In spite of the terror that Nestira could see written into Mother’s face, the emerald-green gambeson, padded greaves, mail coif and steel boots of a Freeguild soldier made her seem reassuringly solid. Her presence consoled the children as Nestira only wished she could.

Nestira left the wagon first.

Doing her best to ignore the screams, she stood with one foot on the tailboard to help her younger siblings, and then the rest of the children, down. Mother gave her a smile that Nestira could not read: pity and pride and exhaustion, all mixed up.

More wagons continued to grind up the path behind them. Others, already empty or in the process of being emptied, were drawn up further ahead. A stream of children, all of them garbed in tithing smocks, passed, weeping as they were herded towards the abandoned farmhouse. Not so abandoned. Tired stacks of grey stone stuck out of the ground in the vague shape of a ruin, furry with grave moss, witch-lights twinkling on weathered crystal like earth thrown over a casket. It was too dark to count. A thousand children, she guessed. Maybe more. And of course, more still coming. She turned on the gravel to look back the way they had come, glimpsed something colossal and creamy white that had to be a statue. She looked away quickly, heart beating in her mouth.

‘Don’t look at them,’ said Mother. ‘Everyone take someone’s hand.’ She squeezed Darsil’s until the young man cried. Nestira took Seben’s, and in her other hand that of a girl from their street who, in her panic, she could not recognise. It’s happening, she thought. It’s actually happening. ‘Now, follow me. And remember, say nothing. Please them with silence.’

It was a request that Nestira did not think many of them met. Muffled sobs and cries rang from the forsaken stones of the old farmhouse. Nestira was unsure if she, too, was one of those who failed to be brave.

‘Ness?’ whispered Seben.

‘Shh.’

No one else spoke, though they struggled to stay silent. Even the soldiers in livery.

They reminded Nestira of the cattle that the drovers brought through Justice Gate for market on the last Sunsday of the Celestial month. The same inexplicable obedience in the face of what they had to know was coming. Why does no one fight? Arbitrium was a great city, whatever old soldiers like Mother muttered to one another when they drank too much and thought their children asleep, talking only half in jest of escaping for Astronica or Glymmsforge or far Lethis. Why does no one fight?

She looked up. She was not sure why. A distant memory of hope. No stars pierced the boundaries of the Penultima underworld. No light escaped the pull of the Nadir.

Where are you?

What do you do with all of our prayers?

Periodically, the herd slowed, lingering long enough for the screams from the farmhouse to reach them before the soldiers got them moving again. Nestira thought they looked more frightened than the children. As they moved, the screams got nearer. Or rather, they got nearer to the screams. Purple witch-light flickered over the drystone stumps of what, decades past, had been outbuildings, the shadows wavering, stretching, fleeing on hands and knees from a nightmare that Nestira could hear but not see. And through the screams, constant, was another sound. It was a chewing, but faster – mechanical, like the steam looms that had used to work in the docks before the last Ironweld company abandoned Arbitrium for good. Nestira found that she was shivering. She tried to make herself stop, but couldn’t. Not even for Seben’s sake. Her gaze flicked to the tumbledown columns and moss curtains that flanked them.

Why does no one run?

‘Ness…’ said Seben.

She squeezed his hand and blinked hard, made herself face forwards. ‘Close your eyes,’ she said. ‘Don’t look at them. Don’t listen.’

The screams grew louder, and more frequent.

Creatures began to appear at the edges of her sight. As much as she tried to avoid looking at them, averting her gaze from one only seemed to set her eyes on another. Imps of glossy bone and shrouding cloth. No two were similar. Some had grossly distended hands, multiple arms, or long claws with which they carried ornate bundles of scrolls. Others possessed vestigial wings for the conveyance of written messages, and this task they accomplished in a manner that was surely calculated to evoke horror, fluttering through the ruined farm like bats pieced together from the bones of higher creatures. Hunchbacked scribes perched at long tables, birdlike skulls bent over endless rolls of skin-pink vellum, scratching with bone-tipped styluses. Nestira wondered what it was they wrote down and arrived at the answer herself.

Everything.

Her skin crawled as, unable to look away as she knew she ought, she watched one of the creatures look up from its eternal monograph to regard her with overlarge sockets. Female, she imagined the string of hieroglyphs saying as the imp bent down and continued to write. Seventeen. Five and a half feet tall. One hundred and twenty pounds. Black hair. Amethyst eyes. One bone broken in the left foot, adequately healed. Otherwise of good health. Without mark or mutation.

The human cattle moved on, and like that Nestira Suthura was immortalised forever in the great biblios of the Kingdom of Ossia. She felt as though she had lost something indefinable that she could never reclaim.

Innocence before the gods.

‘Ness,’ Seben whimpered.

‘It will be over soon,’ she murmured back. ‘Mother and Father did this when they were our age. And remember,’ she gave his hand another squeeze, ‘I will be there with you.’

‘Hold.’

The voice was the sound of a lonely death, bone dust rasping on dead air.

Like whipped mules, they held.

Nestira stared up, all pretence at not seeing broken by the gigantic figure who stood across their path. It was a skeleton, but the resemblance it bore to the corpses she had seen shambling out of the river, or in mordant-disturbed graves, was less than superficial. To describe this warrior as skeletal was like describing herself as angelic. It was ten feet tall and encased in black iron, its bones as perfect and as hard as marble. The priests said that the skeleton was a sacred form to the Undying King, and this was why he made his champions thus. They reminded Nestira more of the bits and pieces of fresco that were still legible on the ceiling of the High Temple, the Stormcast Eternals depicted in starlight and brightstone, than they did of the common dead.

Seben moaned in horror.

Why does no one fight?

Again, Nestira answered her own question.

This was why.

The Mortek Guard turned its skull-face towards Mother. The purple lightning of Shyish flashed in deep sockets and Mother averted her gaze. It was not an action that she considered. It was something that was just done. ‘Your debt to the empire is paid,’ it said in the archaic diction of the Elder Counts, the dead lords who had ruled Arbitrium before the storm of Sigmar, tilting its immense spear slightly to indicate the stump of her right arm. ‘You are not needed. Go. Return later to collect your offspring.’ Its terms were measured, its instructions precise. Its superiority was so pronounced that it did not even invest the effort needed to be cruel.

‘I assure you, praetorian, that–’

‘Your assurances are as grains of sand in an hourglass without bottom,’ said the Guard in the same, crushingly dispassionate tone. ‘Promises shall tilt the Soulmason’s scales not at all.’

Mother stepped back from the Guard, not even pausing to bid her children farewell as she slipped her hand from Darsil’s and fled.

A tearful murmur passed through their group.

The Guard raised its spear the fraction of an inch back towards vertical. ‘Be silent.’ It stepped from the path. ‘Proceed.’

Nestira tugged on Seben’s arm, but this time he refused to move.

‘Come on,’ she hissed.

Mutely, he shook his head.

She pulled harder. He pulled back. He was the same little brother that she had looked out for and quietly commanded for all the years of his life, but he had, entirely without her noticing before this moment, been turning into a man. He had allowed his sister to push him through life until then because, deep down, he had wanted to be pushed. Now, he refused, and to Nestira’s horror she found she did not have the physical strength to compel him.

‘Come on,’ she said, tears beginning to spring from the corners of her eyes. ‘You heard the Guard. Mother will be waiting for us here when it’s all over.’

‘No.’

Seben pulled back and this time he dragged his sister with him. The small contrary act sent shivers of unease through those still trying to walk forwards. Nestira felt the Guard’s eyes, unseen behind her, flicker across them. Like falling under the shadow of an endless cloud, seeing the horizon blacken.

‘Please. For me.’

His voice was plaintive. ‘I can’t.’

Children screamed as the Guard’s head ground on a dry and fleshless neck towards Nestira. Some cast themselves to the ground, prayed for the mercy of Nagash. Others hurried to rush past. Nestira had eyes only for the Guard, so much so that she allowed Seben to slip through her fingers. Her brother stumbled to the ground, scrambling immediately onto hands and knees, and with a whimper turned to flee.

‘All must pay the tithe,’ said the Guard.

Nestira would tell herself in later years that the spear moved with such vicious speed that she had not even seen it before it was too late, speed of such degree that it was barely distinguishable from the stillness that had preceded and followed it. It was a lie. One she would never fully sell to herself. There had been a moment, the briefest moment in which she might have acted. But she froze, and Seben choked on disbelief as the huge spear’s nadirite tip punctured his back, burst from his chest and skewered him to the ground.

The screams redoubled.

‘All are one in Nagash,’ the construct intoned.

‘All are one in Nagash,’ Nestira sobbed.

‘The Free City of Arbitrium is bound in vassalage.’ It laid a contemptuous accent and the full weight of eternity on Sigmar’s granted title, Free. ‘Resistance is not permitted. The sanction for disobedience is harsh. See that this example is not repeated.’

A pair of hooded serviles pattered from the ruins, converging on her brother’s remains. Nestira crunched her eyelids shut, but before she could turn her head away, Mother was there.

‘Don’t,’ she said, throwing her one arm around her daughter. ‘Don’t grieve for Seben. He pays his tithe in death.’ Nestira wept and fought to look away, but Mother held her tight. ‘Don’t,’ she said firmly. ‘Look. Look at what happens when we fight.’

She opened her stinging eyes, just as the imps drew Seben’s body into the shadows, one on each arm, a trail of warm heart-blood smearing the ground behind them. The Guard lifted its spear. The herd began to shuffle past her.

‘Look,’ said Mother.

And so Nestira looked. She looked. And she remembered.

Click here to buy Bonereapers.

A Black Library Publication

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

Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.
Cover illustration by Mark Holmes.

Bonereapers © Copyright Games Workshop Limited 2020. Bonereapers, GW, Games Workshop, Black Library, Warhammer, Warhammer Age of Sigmar, Stormcast Eternals, 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: 978-1-80026-416-8

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.

See Black Library on the internet at
blacklibrary.com

Find out more about Games Workshop’s world of Warhammer and the Warhammer 40,000 universe at
games-workshop.com

eBook license

This license is made between:

Games Workshop Limited t/a Black Library, Willow Road, Lenton, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, United Kingdom (“Black Library”); and

the purchaser of a Black Library e-book product (“You/you/Your/your”)

(jointly, “the parties”)

These are the terms and conditions that apply when you purchase a Black Library e-book (“e-book”). The parties agree that in consideration of the fee paid by you, Black Library grants you a license to use the e-book on the following terms:

* 1. Black Library grants to you a personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable, royalty-free license to use the e-book in the following ways:

o 1.1 to store the e-book on any number of electronic devices and/or storage media (including, by way of example only, personal computers, e-book readers, mobile phones, portable hard drives, USB flash drives, CDs or DVDs) which are personally owned by you;

o 1.2 to access the e-book using an appropriate electronic device and/or through any appropriate storage media.

* 2. For the avoidance of doubt, you are ONLY licensed to use the e-book as described in paragraph 1 above. You may NOT use or store the e-book in any other way. If you do, Black Library shall be entitled to terminate this license.

* 3. Further to the general restriction at paragraph 2, Black Library shall be entitled to terminate this license in the event that you use or store the e-book (or any part of it) in any way not expressly licensed. This includes (but is by no means limited to) the following circumstances:

o 3.1 you provide the e-book to any company, individual or other legal person who does not possess a license to use or store it;

o 3.2 you make the e-book available on bit-torrent sites, or are otherwise complicit in ‘seeding’ or sharing the e-book with any company, individual or other legal person who does not possess a license to use or store it;

o 3.3 you print and distribute hard copies of the e-book to any company, individual or other legal person who does not possess a license to use or store it;

o 3.4 you attempt to reverse engineer, bypass, alter, amend, remove or otherwise make any change to any copy protection technology which may be applied to the e-book.

* 4. By purchasing an e-book, you agree for the purposes of the Consumer Protection (Distance Selling) Regulations 2000 that Black Library may commence the service (of provision of the e-book to you) prior to your ordinary cancellation period coming to an end, and that by purchasing an e-book, your cancellation rights shall end immediately upon receipt of the e-book.

* 5. You acknowledge that all copyright, trademark and other intellectual property rights in the e-book are, shall remain, the sole property of Black Library.

* 6. On termination of this license, howsoever effected, you shall immediately and permanently delete all copies of the e-book from your computers and storage media, and shall destroy all hard copies of the e-book which you have derived from the e-book.

* 7. Black Library shall be entitled to amend these terms and conditions from time to time by written notice to you.

* 8. These terms and conditions shall be governed by English law, and shall be subject only to the jurisdiction of the Courts in England and Wales.

* 9. If any part of this license is illegal, or becomes illegal as a result of any change in the law, then that part shall be deleted, and replaced with wording that is as close to the original meaning as possible without being illegal.

* 10. Any failure by Black Library to exercise its rights under this license for whatever reason shall not be in any way deemed to be a waiver of its rights, and in particular, Black Library reserves the right at all times to terminate this license in the event that you breach clause 2 or clause 3.