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Cast a Hungry Shadow – Extract

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Cast a Hungry Shadow

Peter Fehervari

‘Faith is a ravenous beast that burns hotter than the fiercest fire.’

– Inquisitor Aion Aescher

As the three saviours climbed the mountain, the storm that had plagued their journey grew worse, congealing into a black blizzard that threatened to drag them from their narrow path. Soot storms were common on this scorched rock of a world, but there was a ferocity to this one that Ephras, who was Redemption born – and reborn – had never witnessed in his twenty-one years. A rage.

‘We are being tested,’ the young missionary murmured into his rebreather as he forged on, hunched into the wind. ‘The Severed Spire rails at the Spiral Father’s gospel and seeks to turn us from our calling!’

Spoken aloud, the thought energised him, renewing his oath to bring light to this unhallowed region. Since the coming of the great prophet, almost fifty years ago, the blood-deep blessing of the Sacred Spiral had spread across Redemption’s single, fragmented continent, yet Spire Vigilans still remained apart, severed from its kindred mountains in both form and spirit. The seven spires of the Koronatus Ring jutted from the molten sea like titanic obsidian spikes, encircling the mesa at their centre with a symmetry that denied nature. Like the spokes of a wheel, vast suspension bridges linked the spires to the mesa, but the one serving – or binding? – Vigilans was riven with cracks and twisted out of shape. It was a path only the desperate or the deranged would choose.

Or the truly devout.

We crossed where so many others have faltered, Ephras thought fervently. Neither wind nor fire shall turn us from our holy purpose. We –

‘Must shelter!’ a harsh voice called behind him as a hand caught his arm. He turned and peered at the acolyte who’d spoken, unable to tell if it was Jujehk or Gurjah. Both his companions wore rough-spun brown robes and hid their faces in deep cowls, lest their blessings frighten the ignorant. There was no need for such measures in this wilderness, but caution was bred into their kind and they cleaved to it always. While Ephras was merely a man, the acolytes were true spiralborn, both exemplars of the Second Holy Paradigm of Form. One day their descendants would walk Redemption openly, but that rapture was decades, perhaps even centuries, distant.

‘Look there!’ the acolyte hissed, pointing at the rock face behind them. Ephras wiped at his soot-smeared goggles and squinted. There was a recess in the mountainside – angular and framed with tessellated blocks: a shrine. In almost two days of travel it was only the sixth they’d come across, which was another peculiarity of Vigilans, for the other spires were riddled with places of worship. The entire Koronatus Ring was a web of faith carved into the raw stone of the mountains, its origins rumoured to predate the Imperium of Man.

‘Shelter!’ the acolyte pressed. Like most of its kind, its jaws were not shaped for speech so it was frugal with words.

Ephras hesitated, reluctant to accede to the storm, but it would be folly to pass over this succour and risk falling. He smiled at his companion. ‘Your eyes are sharper than mine, brother!’

And not just your eyes, he thought with a shudder of reverence.

The passage beyond the entrance was narrow and littered with the remnants of the bas-reliefs that had once graced its walls. Ephras frowned as his lumen lantern revealed the extent of the damage, for there was a completeness to it that surpassed natural dissolution. Someone had stripped these walls bare and crushed the carvings into fragments, expunging their meaning. This was desecration. Though he had no loyalty to the Imperial warrior gods that the people of Vigilans venerated, Ephras was repelled by the act itself.

Is it the Creed? he wondered uneasily. Are they here?

Such sacrilege was typical of the barbaric cult, but its disciples always left the mark of their messiah in their wake, and he could see no sign of the Scorched Hand on these walls.

‘Breaking is old,’ one of the acolytes said wetly. ‘Many year.’

Ephras nodded. He had no idea how his brother knew this, but he trusted its instincts without question. While converts like himself bore the word of the Spiral Father, acolytes like Jujehk and Gurjah were His holy warriors. Without their protection Ephras would never have survived this far.

We could wait out the storm here, he thought, trying to assess the dark passageway ahead. The shriek of the storm was muted here, but the volcanic rumble of the mountain was much louder, echoing up from the depths like phantom blood rushing through the vessels of an ossified beast.

A beast that was still angry in death.

‘Go deeper, Ephras,’ his faith urged, for it had a voice, though it spoke rarely and only ever in a whisper. The missionary’s heart soared with renewed conviction at the command. He had come to Vigilans to seek out those who had fled persecution during the dark days before the Spiral Father’s rise, but his quest had no map. Faith alone was his guide, and it had spoken!

‘Where there is darkness we must bring light, brothers!’ Ephras decreed, striding into the depths.

She had forgotten her given name, but the lost ones had called her the Teller.

It was a true name, for like the weight of the mountain, her words were undeniable, though she no longer spoke them aloud to make herself heard. The need for that had faded along with the lost ones’ souls. She didn’t recall when that had happened, or indeed how long she had been among them, but she had never forgotten the terror that had driven her here, for it was eternally sharp, preserved in a thousand flashes of burning brands and slicing blades and the castigations of the warrior women who had wielded them. Above all else, the Teller remembered her dead mother’s warning: If they find you, the Sororitas will cast you to the Black Ships.

What the ‘Black Ships’ were or why they wanted her were secrets the Teller wanted no answers to, but if she thought of the future she saw the ships waiting there – eager predators, pregnant with pain. The future was nowhere she wanted to go, so she chose limbo, for herself and for those she ruled over. Broken beyond all desire save service, they tended to her needs while she brooded on nothingness. She reigned with one purpose only: to deny change and the horrors it harboured.

Yet change had come to her realm.

The Teller watched from the crowd of animated cadavers as three intruders entered her crumbling refuge, the light of their lanterns drowning the ruddy glow of the fire pit at its centre. She knew the strangers couldn’t recognise her sovereignty, for she was as wasted and filthy as her subjects, so she took their measure with impunity as they hesitated at the threshold. Their leader was a tall, fair-faced youth who appraised her people with disgusted pity and an ignorant kindness that was somehow worse. She despised him instantly, but his comrades were… different. Though they were hunched and faceless under their robes, they radiated a cold, hard hunger that knew nothing of terror – that was beyond its touch. The realisation fascinated her for it offered hope, and repelled her because hope was surely a lie.

Evidently deciding the lost ones were no threat, the intruders approached, the youth offering platitudes as he passed among them. Incapable of curiosity or fear, the Teller’s subjects fell back listlessly before the strangers, while she watched from beside the fire pit. She had already dismissed the youth, so she was shocked when he looked right at her – into her. There was something else behind his eyes, something as cold as his comrades, but much stronger – a mind that recognised what she was!

As the youth opened his mouth to speak, the Teller’s coiled fear reared up into rage and she lashed out with her will, striking like an aetheric viper. The stranger screamed as his body was wrenched in a hundred opposing angles that snapped sinew, bone and sanity into a splintered abstraction of humanity. She held the twitching ruin suspended as the hooded ones slowly raised their arms, but she sensed a lie behind their surrender – something hidden.

‘We offer–’ one began, but she hurled it against the wall, high above the entrance, crushing it in a vice of will and rock until it ruptured. As if in recognition of their error, the survivor raised its third hand, revealing a barb-tipped claw sheathed in a hard blue plates, like an insect’s shell.

‘Peace,’ the creature wheezed, straining to shape the sounds. ‘We bring… peace.’

Peace? An end to dread? Through her rage, the Teller ached to believe it.

‘Be strong,’ the stranger urged.

Dimly the Teller sensed it was the master speaking now – the hidden mind she had seen behind the youth’s eyes. It had slipped to another host. Perhaps something with such power could make good on its promise. She yearned to listen, but the rage would not be denied. It had been buried too long and it thirsted.

‘Wait!’ the creature hissed.

Her fury burst forth in a primal shriek and tore into the speaker. As its hood split open she glimpsed an elongated skull and a toothy maw, but an instant later they split in turn, obliterating the bestial visage in a spray of blood. But her rage was still not sated. A flick of her eyes shredded one of her followers, then another and another – her will tearing through the vacant crowd like a storm of razors.

Shuddering with effort, the Teller reeled the rage back in, binding it a heartbeat before it consumed her. She had kept it leashed since her escape and it had grown strong in the shadows of apathy. Exhausted, she slipped back towards nothingness, denying the lures of fury and peace alike. As her eyes glazed, she saw her subjects approach the bloody flowers that had erupted among them. Like their minds, their bellies were empty, but unlike ignorance, hunger knew its business well.

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A Black Library Publication

Published in 2016 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd,
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Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.
Cover illustration by Guangda Li.

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