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Beasts – Extract

A Black Library Publication

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BEASTS

By John French

Cado came to in darkness. Sensation tingled in his fingers and up his limbs. Red hunger screamed from the back of his thoughts and blended with rage. He forced thought and instinct to silence, and lay still. He did not know where he was, or what was close. Moving before understanding was a mistake. Wait, and remember; that was what he needed to do. His instincts snarled against the leash of his will. He let them. He had outlived demigods and empires by learning the lessons of being both hunter and prey. And at this moment he was prey. He could feel it. How this had come about – that was the question.

He had gone to one of the sacred streams up in the mountains above Glimmerheart. It had been an uneventful journey. The priests had frowned over burnt ruins, and pulled broken statues from the streams. They had found the body of one of the guardians of the high water pinned to the rocks, its feet dangling in the ice-crusted flow. It must have been there for decades. The snow and cold had turned the flesh and skin to leather. There had been debate about how to treat the boy. It had lasted several hours. Cado and the other guards had watched the nearby crags. Nothing had come. In the end, the worthies had decided to take the bones back to Glimmerheart. Cado had waited in silence. He had come on the expedition because the shape-shifters he had killed in Glimmerheart three weeks past had been priests of the sacred waters. He had hoped there would be signs in the snow melt that would lead him to the rest of their nest. The spawn of the Burning Hand were still there, he was sure, lurking under the skin of the city. But he had found nothing amongst the water channels and ice. Time was running out.

The trail of the Burning Hand had led to Glimmerheart but had ended with three of the sorcerer’s disciples dead in the snow and no threads to follow. He had concealed his kills, milked their corpses of blood, and let the persona of a vagabond sellsword settle over him. He had taken work, in part to allay suspicions, in part to cover his hunt for the servants of the Dark Gods in Glimmerheart. That shroud was becoming thin. Word and rumours spread. They always did. Things that were nothing to do with him were beginning to accrete into stories. He had heard them told with grim laughter in the inns: there were things taking people on the roads. The night was eating people who walked alone and leaving chewed bones. Half a dozen souls vanished trying to open the mines lower down the mountain. He had noticed a few people casting looks his way, and paymasters eyeing him carefully. He had to find the trail of his prey and move on before those looks became swords. Joining the expedition up the headwaters had been one of his last options.

The council of Glimmerheart had decided to try and clear the marks left by the servants of the Dark Gods from the sites that were important to those souls who had not arrived with the crusades of conquest.

They did not think of it as conquest, of course. Not in Glimmerheart, not in any of the other settlements created or taken by the Sigmarites, but that is exactly what it was: another conquest and occupation to take the place of those that had come before. The priests and fanatics and their Stormcast killers saw what they were doing as salvation. They were, they proclaimed, bringing Order, hope and life to realms that had become places of madness and pain. They were right to an extent, too; places like Glimmerheart were fragile candles burning in an infinity of night. Monsters and horrors filled the lands around them. Armies of other, crueller empires marched just beyond the horizon, and Chaos bubbled at the edge of sight. Sigmar’s conquests had reason. They were better than what had come before, but they were still just another dominion created from carrion. And, like all the rest that had come before, it would fall to ashes.

Lying in the dark, the clear truth was that something had gone wrong. He had misjudged, and survival now replaced any other concerns.

Cado felt something touch his hand in the dark. He stayed motionless. Another touch, light, like a finger brushing a child’s cheek. Another, dancing and tapping his skin, and another. Something climbed up his hand. He could feel its weight, and its legs. Feelers danced across his chest. Still he did not move. His eyes were open, but the darkness had not faded. Night was his realm and the dark his home, but this was blackness beyond blackness.

The legs and feelers skittered up his chest. He felt them touch his cheek. They hesitated, as though trying to understand what they were sensing. A hiss broke the silence. The legs skittered. Cado’s hand flashed up to his face as the tips of fangs touched his cheek. His hand closed on an abdomen. Another hiss split the air. His fingers clamped shut. The hiss vanished. Liquid sprayed out. A scent like dank water and mould filled Cado’s nose.

Pale light glowed from his hand and spotted the ground. Luminous fluid dripped from the crushed body of the spider in his grasp. Its body was the size of a child’s head, and its legs were as long as a human arm. He watched a glowing bead of its blood form on one of its fangs. Carefully he felt along his belt. His knives and pouches were still there. He pulled an empty vial out, held it under the spider corpse and squeezed. He stoppered the vial when it was full.

He stood. His sword lay on the ground nearby, still in its sheath. The wan light from the vial showed that he was in a cave. Pale stalactites jabbed down. Mould and damp covered the walls. Fungus sprouted at the edges of the floor. Cado noticed that the mushroom caps seemed to stretch towards the light as he moved. They began to glow in turn. Gills and stems flexed. A fine cloud of spores puffed into the gloom. He tasted them as they touched his tongue. Lights exploded in his eyes and faded. Blurred images burrowed into his thoughts – bloody grins and wide eyes.

He stopped breathing. The images faded. A thin strand of air touched his cheek. He looked up.

A shaft opened in the roof above. It was narrow and burrowed up to darkness but was wide enough that he could have climbed down it. Or fallen. He braced and leapt. The jump carried him to the ceiling. His hands clamped onto the rock, and he hung on the edge of the shaft, bat-like, looking up. There was no way out that way. Blocks of heavy stone jammed the shaft further up. Someone had overcome him, dropped him into this pit and then sealed the entrance. Maybe they thought him dead, but that was unlikely; someone who, or something that could overcome him and steal his memory was something that would know he was not alive enough to die.

He dropped down. The fungus was glowing more brightly now. It looked as though it had grown in the intervening seconds too. Cado looked down at the iron rings on his fingers. He touched one and silently spoke the summons. The spirit-light unfolded behind his shoulder. As soon as it did, he knew something was wrong. It was dim, fizzing and pulsing.

‘Solia?’ he said aloud. His voice echoed, then faded as if the gloom had inhaled the sound.

~My prince,~ came the reply, faint and thin as though coming from far away. ~There is something…~ Her voiced trailed away, then returned. ~Something here it… is pushing against… my… being…~

‘What is it?’ he asked.

~I… don’t… know…~ The light of her presence pulsed suddenly low. ~I can… feel it… breathing…~

Then her light shrank and went out. The fungus caps flexed, glowing brighter. Spores danced in the air. Cado drew his sword. He could see an opening in the cave wall. He moved towards it, slow and silent. There were marks on the floor, he realised: footprints from something large. He reached the opening and paused. Soft discs of fungus framed the opening, and beyond he could see more passages branching off. He went forwards, following the footprints.

The passages went on, coiling through the rock as though they were the burrows of a great worm coiling back on itself. Then the pit was there, in front of him, looming under his next step. He froze. He had not seen it. His senses had passed right over it. It was a blot of complete darkness, ragged-edged. It went down. A long way down. Even without being able to see into it, he knew that.

He lowered the step that he had been about to take. At the edge of his sight, the glow of the fungus pulsed brighter then dimmer, brighter and then dimmer, sucking light in and out of the air. Cado took a step back.

A rumble ground up from behind him, a rising rhythm like the grind of falling mountains. He raised his sword and opened his mouth to breathe a spell into the air. Spores poured into his mouth. The glow of the fungus exploded into rainbow smears. His sight split into shards. Scents of broken stone and dank water filled his nose. He felt something prickle his skin, an instinct pushing through his suddenly spore-clouded senses.

Behind him a shape rose.

Colonies of petrified fungus clung to shoulders the width of a cart. Shards of rock tumbled from cracked skin as a cavern of a mouth cracked wide. In Cado’s colour-smeared vision, the teeth were the shattered pinnacles of mountains. Lids peeled back from fist-sized eyes.

Cado lunged, but the blow was too late before it began. Boulder knuckles crashed into his chest. Armour buckled. Bones cracked. He struck the wall and was falling to the floor as the nausea colours stole the present.

‘I’ve got a job needs doing.’ The man had stepped out as Cado turned up the darkening alley towards where smoke wound from the chimney of an inn. Heavy grey sleet was falling from the sky, and the wind was whipping down Glimmerheart’s streets. The winter light was draining from the sky and the shadows thickening. Down the mountain slopes, you could see wild ghost light flickering in the mist. Cado had seen no one on the streets since he had crossed the bridge back into the city. It was a time to be inside, close to fire.

The man who had stepped into Cado’s path was heavy, fat layered over muscle. A thick, fur-edged cloak hung from his shoulders. He carried knives rather than a sword, Cado could tell, but he knew how to use anything with an edge. This was a hard man, one of the types that thrived in this new age – strong, ruthless, clever enough to keep himself alive, and able to fight and win when he needed to. There were lots of them in every desperate settlement and free city. Sometimes they called themselves merchants, or caravan bosses or guard captains. No matter the title they were all the same. The followers of the God-King might think that they were making a new age of faith and Order, but all they were doing was handing the rule of the living to people like this.

‘I am not interested,’ Cado said and kept on walking.

‘There’s a lot of ways to be paid for decent work,’ said the man. ‘Wealth, safety… blood and secrets.’ Cado stopped. ‘Might be that I know something about where you can get what you need. That is, if I get what I need.’

Cado turned. The man was smiling, picking his teeth with a long fingernail.

‘There’s lots of ways I can be helpful to you. All you need to do is be helpful to me in return.’

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A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION

This eBook edition published in 2021 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

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ISBN: 978-1-80026-714-5

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