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The Dead Kingdom – Extract

A Black Library Publication

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CHAPTER ONE

‘What is that?’ asked Cado. The snow wind wrenched at his cloak as he pointed ahead along the ridgeline. Behind him, the blurred presence of Solia shifted.

~It…~ she began and hesitated. ~It’s a mortal.~

‘Alive?’ asked Cado.

~Yes, but weak and getting weaker.~

Cado held his gaze steady. A curtain of white shards whirled across his sight. They were close to the boundary of this underworld and the next, high in a mountain range that rose in the shapes of vast, shattered skulls of granite. The valleys here were the cracks running through crowns and the gaps between teeth. Glaciers gathered in upturned eye sockets, and snowfields bearded stone jaws. Whether they were the skulls of once-living creatures or formed by beliefs that had shaped this region of the Realm of Death, Cado did not know. Carefully, he reached over his shoulder and drew his sword. The wind moaned across the blade’s edge.

~Do you smell blood?~ asked Solia.

Cado shook his head and began to move along the ridge. The crust of snow crunched as his boots sank into the powder beneath. The cold pushed needles of pain into his flesh. He willed the sensation away and kept moving. The Soulblight curse in his veins took and gave many things. The deepest oceans could not drown him, and all but the most potent wounds or magic could not end him. But he still felt pain. Out here, the snow, wind and ice would not kill him, but it could still torment him.

There was magic in the air, thick, bitter and spiteful. It howled at his senses. The higher he had climbed towards the pass across the mountains, the worse it had got. Blizzards quickly obscured what had been a cloudless sky, and the peaks seemed to shift and move as though mocking his attempt to reach them. He had heard memories crying at him from the air: his mother’s gasp as the knife opened her throat; his sister, Jakinda, calling to him from the pyre of the palace; all the cries of his kingdom as it burned…

To travel between the regions of Shyish was more than a matter of crossing geography. Each underworld was a place unto itself. The beliefs of the living made these lands, gave them shape and form as homes for the souls of the dead. The magic of death, of the very realm, was their substance and power. You did not cross their borders lightly. It took acts of great will, or magic, or both. Even before the Age of Chaos violated the realm, mortals had taken such journeys with care. That was why whoever had lived in this land had marked a path up through the mountains to a place where such a crossing was, if not easy, then comparatively simple. That was the path that Cado had been following. A fast way to cross the Realm of Death to distant Lethis, the Raven City – the place where he might at last find his quarry and have his vengeance.

He had found the grey menhirs that marked the path’s start in the foothills, and followed them as they marched beside it, up into the cold sky around the peaks. There was magic in the stones – an old, dull ache that he could feel in his skin, an ember glow of forgotten power. As the snow had begun to hide the land, he had chosen to follow the pull of the stones rather than try to see the way ahead. Then the stones had become scarce. He had passed the shattered remains of some. Others were simply absent, or the echo of their power was so weak that he could not feel them until he was standing beside them.

When he could not find the way ahead, he had summoned Solia to help him. A touch of the worn iron ring on his right index finger and she was there, hovering at his back, always just out of sight, her voice clear even over the wind. She could see through both magic and snow, but even she was suffering, the spite of the magic on the wind pulling at her shade. She had known better than to suggest that he turn back, but he could feel her reproach without having to hear it.

~The direct path is often not the best path, my prince,~ she had said when he told her the route he had decided to take.

‘If the Burning Hand knows I am coming–’ he began to reply.

~They do know. You must assume that. They know you are hunting them, and it is possible, likely even, that you are following a trail that they have set for you. When an enemy sets a cup before you, it is foolish to drink from it.~

‘I am taking the pass west,’ he said, and that had been the end of the discussion.

He had reflected on that decision more than once as he climbed higher, the wind and ice closing around him. Solia was right, but it did not matter; he had almost lost the trail of the Burning Hand more than once, and he would not let this new strand slip from his grasp. So he pressed on, up over the shattered stone skulls, through the howl of lost voices and the bite of ice on his skin.

Then he had seen the shape on the path ahead.

He was on a ridge edge formed by the orbit of an eye socket. A drop down into the bowl of the eye ran along one side, a steep slope of snow, scree and ice on the other. The blizzard had whirled aside for an instant, and Cado had looked up and spotted it. It was low to the ground, half covered with snow. He could have mistaken it for a lump of stone. But it had moved, shifted.

Cado drew his sword and stepped forwards, cautious.

He was two paces away before he could pick out the shape of a human head, the face half hidden under a brown cloak, ice matting a beard. It was a man, his limbs curled up like a child, eyes closed.

~What is he doing up here?~ wondered Solia aloud.

‘Dying,’ Cado replied, and knelt beside the curled figure. He could hear the man’s heartbeat now, even over the howl of the wind – a fading pulse of heat through his flesh.

Fading life… A call for a swift end. A call to feed, to take the warmth from this soul before it fled into the ice and bitter air…

Cado pushed away the instinct, then reached out and touched the man’s shoulder. After a second of stillness, the man’s head twitched up in panic, his pink mouth opening but eyes still closed. Cado saw the frost burns on the skin then, and the tears and pus that had frozen in the eye sockets. Ice had sealed the man’s eyelids shut.

‘Be still,’ said Cado, his voice edged by forced calm. ‘I mean you no harm.’

A gasp of mist puffed from the man’s mouth. The feeble rhythm of his heart had risen for a second, but was now sliding back to its funeral drumbeat.

‘Sweet Sigmar, cast… cast your light on the faithful,’ the man gasped, and lifted his hands up from under the cloak. The fingers gripped a small, bronze emblem of a comet-headed hammer. His skin had frozen to the metal. ‘I am faithful…’ he said, voice fading to a whisper. ‘I am…’ His hands folded back under the cloak, and his head slumped.

‘What happened to you?’ asked Cado.

‘My… leg…’ whispered the man, shifting as though trying to reach down beneath himself. Cado lifted the stiff edge of the cloak. The man’s right shin had twisted up under him at an angle that intact bones would not allow.

~There were others with him,~ said Solia. ~You can see that they shed some of their packs a little further up.~ Cado glanced up and noticed the lumps of the bundles already half buried by snow, the edge of a piece of blue fabric snapping in the wind. ~He fell, and they–~

‘Left him to die,’ said Cado.

~Knew they could not carry him and reach the pass,~ finished Solia.

‘The mercy of humanity…’

~The necessity of life.~

‘What are they doing up here?’

~The same as any on this path – fleeing towards the hope of safety.~

Cado nodded. This was a cruel underworld, its nature unforgiving for the living, its lands boiling with the wild and bitter spirits of the dead. He had chosen to pass through it for the sake of swiftness but had been careful not to linger for long enough to attract the full force of its spite. The followers of Sigmar were less prudent.

Driven by faith, and divine mandate, mortals were spreading out into the underworlds again, hoping to reclaim them and make them the lands of a new age. In Cado’s eyes it was an act of supreme naivety and foolishness.

‘Abandoning one failed dream for the hope of another,’ he breathed.

‘Light…’ the man mumbled, as though in answer to Cado’s words. ‘Warm… hearth…’

Cado looked down at the ice-burned face. He wondered what this dying mortal would see if he could open his eyes: a ragged figure with a drawn sword, snow and ice crusting his cloak and hood, blue eyes and black hair, the bare flesh of his hands and face so pale that they would seem carved from the same snow that boiled from the sky. Not an image of comfort.

‘Take this,’ Cado said, and pushed a tiny, tarnished lump of silver into the knot of the man’s fingers beside the hammer icon. It was an argent-bloom, a rose shaped from silver taken from grave-coins. The soul of a mortal that died whilst holding it would pass into the afterlife they believed in, and escape Nagash’s torments. That was what its makers believed at least, and as with so much in the Mortal Realms, belief was truth.

‘I am… faithful… Sigmar… guard my soul…’ said the man, stuttering in failing whispers as he held the tiny silver rose. ‘Thank… you… who…’

Cado held still. He could hear the man’s heartbeat slowing.

‘I am Cado,’ he said.

The man’s lips parted as though he would say something, then his heart gave a final beat, and was silent.

Cado lingered for a moment, waiting to sense the man’s soul sliding from his flesh.

A gust of wind sheared over the ridge, and the howl on the air was suddenly shrill with the bite of magic. Cado flinched as ice flooded his senses.

Laughter… The cackle of fire as it ate his flesh… He blinked.

~My prince…~

He blinked again, spots of bright colour spinning through his sight.

~My prince,~ Solia repeated, her voice sharp, urgent. ~There is something on the path behind us.~

He stood and looked back down the ridgeline. He could see… something – a distant smudge of shape behind the curtain blur, a shadow of a figure against the ice and snow, briefly there and then submerged behind the whirl of white.

‘Another of these Azyrites?’ he asked.

~We passed none, and there was nothing behind us when we were lower down…~

‘A haunt or shade?’

~I cannot tell. Whatever it is, it is climbing after us at speed. It will be on us soon.~

‘There is no reason to presume it even knows I am here or might mean me harm.’

~There is no wisdom in presuming it doesn’t.~ Solia fell silent as the ice wind sent another blast across the ridge, then added, ~There is something wrong here, my prince, a danger…~

Cado stared into the blizzard that hid the way he had come, then he turned and began to climb. Snow was already covering the corpse of the mortal. The edge of the wind had sharpened; its howl cut through his senses. He looked back several times but could see nothing besides the snow swirl. He kept his sword drawn even as the wind tugged at the blade. He felt the presence of one of the marker stones ahead, fastened his attention to it, kept moving, feet crunching into snow, sliding on ice-sheathed rock. Then, suddenly, the ground in front of his next step dropped away. The ridge had curved abruptly and was now a knife edge no more than two paces across and slanting steeply up. One misstep and the open air would claim him. There were steps cut into the rock, sharp edged, ice slicked. He glanced behind, but the white sky still blanked the way he had come.

‘Help me!’ He heard the cry as he mounted the first step. ‘Mother! Father!’

A high cry of human terror coming from above him, loud enough to defy the wind. And just as before, the blizzard rippled back and he glimpsed a figure, clinging to the sheer steps, the wind ripping at their brown cloak. Smaller than the man, younger, strong enough to climb higher, but not strong enough to defy the spite of the mountains. Brave, credulous, foolish… As he looked, she tried to climb further up. The wind spilled her sideways, and now she was hanging half over the drop.

~She is going to fall…~

Cado sheathed his sword and started up the steps. He could feel Solia’s presence as a blur at his back. The wind struck him, tore at him. The mortal saw him and screamed. She was clinging to the steps, a fabric bundle dangling from her shoulder by a rope. Snow-caked fabric wrapped her head so that only her eyes showed, pupils wide in blue irises. Twenty winters old, heart beating like a drum roll of thunder.

‘Be still!’ he called, but the wind snatched the words.

Cado reached for her as the wind caught her again. For a second she balanced, then she slipped. Cado lunged. His hand fastened on her shoulder, and his arm was wrenched down as he caught her weight. He looked down into the near-vertical drop. There were bodies on the cliff face below, limbs snagged on jutting rocks, packs ripped, clothes and food dusting the ice-covered stone. Then he braced, and yanked the mortal up onto the steps. She lay there, breathing hard.

‘Thank you…’ she gasped, pulling her fabric bundle close. A hammer amulet hung from her wrist on a chain. ‘Thank you… You are kind…’

Cado felt the wind shift then, its forced dimmed, and now the laughter in it billowed into his ears again, calling with the cackle of cooking corpses.

~Cado! Something is wrong!~

‘They said you would try to be kind…’ said the girl.

There was someone behind him on the path. He turned, hand on the grip of his sword.

The man who had died in the snow back down the path stood there. Snow clung to his cloak. Frost burn marked his face. His eyes were closed. He held up the tiny, tarnished silver rose.

‘So kind of you,’ he said. The eyes opened. The pupils were black starbursts in yellow. ‘So kind, Hollow King…’

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A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION

First published in Great Britain in 2024.
This eBook edition published in 2024 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 Alexander Mokhov.

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ISBN: 978-1-80407-839-6

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