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Conn Crowhand’s Last Oath – Extract

A Black Library Publication

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CONN CROWHAND’S LAST OATH

Graham Thomas Wilcox

I

One Godstide Eve, when brightest burned the triple moons, Conn Crowhand demanded an impossible quest from his proven. This was in the days before the Everchosen rallied the clans of Aqshy, and lost them. Thence drew down my people’s doom. It began thus.

In the hall of Balor Bres, Syve and I feasted. Servants brought us pork and ashenhoney and horn after horn of cindermead. Balor Bres brought over his newest bairn – a chomp-cheeked little lad whom the gods had blessed with a wolf’s fangs – and we cooed over the child and drank a horn to his name and sang, and all this was good. We killed no one, which was neither here nor there.

Then, a dog I knew trotted to our trestle. He licked my hand and growled to me in his native tongue, which I – alone of all men I’ve met – speak:

‘Crowhand summons you.’

I scowled. The dog’s head cocked.

‘You do not wish to see him,’ he said.

‘You see much.’

The dog’s tail thumped. I spitted him with my least charitable gaze.

‘Calm yourself, hound. I grant you no praise.’

The dog thumped his tail harder. I rolled my eyes, then tossed him a hank of rib. Much crunching followed.

‘You are joyous,’ said I, ‘for a scrap muncher and a bone beggar.’

The dog waited. His eyes were amber and void. Black iron collared his wrinkled throat. A moment passed, and his withers twitched.

‘Why do you not want to see Crowhand?’ he asked.

‘He is a bad chief.’

Again, the dog’s head cocked. ‘Chief?’

I sighed. ‘Master.’ The word unstuck itself from my tongue like a thirsty dagger from a full gut. The dog waited a breath (which is a deep courtesy, among dogs), then said:

‘You shall see Crowhand?’

Again, I sighed. ‘Aye. He is a bad chief now’ – I drained my mead horn, and wiped clean my beard – ‘but he was a good chief, once.’

The dog regarded me, and his eyes spoke greater sorrows than men may feel. ‘That too is the way of dog.’ Then away he padded, and shadows brambled anew the smoke-fogged hall.

In that moment, Syve turned to me. ‘Did you say something?’

I rose. ‘Crowhand summons us.’

She frowned and stood and kissed me, and then we were away, our cloaks drawn tight, our swords loosened in their scabbards.

II

We entered Crowhand’s hall while he spoke to the daemons.

Syve cursed and sketched upon the air the skull sign of the Red Hound, which wards off all druidry. I touched the iron of my greatblade’s hilt, then the gold of my torc. The words of daemons were slick as lust and solid as smoke, and to them, I bent no knee. Such was mine and Syve’s oath.

Crowhand felt otherwise. On this, we’d quarrelled. Quarrels among we Darkoath of Aqshy – as among all true men – oft drew blood. But Crowhand was yet my chief, oathsworn and blood-pacted. And so I almost left his hall straight away, for I did not relish the thought of slaying the man who held my fealty.

Syve halted me with a look, and a hand upon my chest.

I scowled. ‘Crowhand knows what he does by summoning us here, now. An insult. A patent insult.’

Syve shrugged away my words with that nonchalance common to the beautiful and the brave. ‘We’ve harnessed the chariot,’ she said, ‘let us take the ride.’

‘It’s a poor charioteer who wheels his way along a treacherous path.’

Syve threw me another look. ‘The best charioteer wheels his way along whichever path presents itself, and spares no thought for its quality. If truly he is the best, he shall win through regardless. Thus runs the oath of all who stride the Path to Glory.’

My jaw clenched, but I suspected she’d the right of it, as she so often did. ‘You speak only half so well as you fight, Syve Fhorranach.’

This, she considered.

‘I sleep well knowing that’s still twice better a speaker and thrice better a fighter than you, Nuatha son of Noisiu,’ she said.

My lips curled back. Syve riposted with a snarl of her own and there we stood a moment, our eyes narrowed as blades in the dark, our teeth set.

Then, Syve stuck out her tongue at me. Together, we dissolved laughing, merry as ghouls with a bone. Syve squeezed my arm, I kissed her cheek, and on we walked into Crowhand’s hall.

Above a cauldron boiling with the blood of Sigmar’s men, Crowhand stood. That cauldron had once been, so Crowhand boasted, one of the ritual artefacts wielded by Hag aelves of the Shadow Queen. Crowhand boasted loudly, and often, and I knew many of the boasts for lies – but this was, perhaps, one of his few remaining truths. Syve and I had wrenched that bitter cauldron, by the strength of our hands and the iron of our blades, from one of the dagger-arched temples of the aelf queens. At night, I sometimes woke in a cold sweat, the slither of serpent scales and the memory of knives hounding me from my sleep.

As our final footfalls faded, Crowhand steeped the thumb of his right hand in that cauldron’s brew, withdrew it, stuck it in his own mouth and bit down hard. Blood, hot and yellow as a Fyreslayer’s eye, streamed down his chin and into his beard.

From everywhere, and nowhere, a voice resounded.

‘The oath is struck.’

A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION

This eBook edition published in 2025 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

Represented by: Games Workshop Limited – Irish branch, Unit 3, Lower Liffey Street, Dublin 1, D01 K199, Ireland.

Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.
Cover illustration by Paul Dainton.

Conn Crowhand’s Last Oath © Copyright Games Workshop Limited 2025. Conn Crowhand’s Last Oath, 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: 978-1-83609-247-6

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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