Contents

Cover

A Dynasty of Monsters – Extract

A Black Library Publication

eBook license

CHAPTER 1

The earth moved in the morning, when it should not have until the afternoon.

Jaras Anvarheim rose to greet the dawn of what was supposed to be the last day of the caravan’s journey to the Colonnade. The merchants and their armed escorts were camped on a high, wooded ridge, and though the Colonnade was not yet visible, Jaras knew it was just over the horizon to the east, hidden by another line of hills on the far side of a rock-strewn plain. A river cut a serpent’s line north-south, a barrier to cross a few miles away; a barrier that he expected to have changed by the time the caravan reached it.

Jaras watched Hysh rise, thinking about its rays shining on the Diamond Spire of home, and then the ridge began to rumble. Merchants scrambled out of tents to grab the tethers of startled horses. Jaras seized the trunk of the nearest tree, the instinct to hold on to something solid too hard to overcome, even when solidity was a lie.

The ridge dropped, and the land on either side rose. Stones flowed and reknit themselves. The trees swayed as if caught in a gale. Some of them disappeared, swallowed up where the earth turned soft as water. Jaras’ feet began to sink into the ground. He let go of the tree and danced away just as that patch of land folded in on itself. He jumped onto a boulder that emerged from the underbrush and rode it down. The rocks of the plain turned into scree as the new cliffs thrust their backs up. They tumbled down slopes that angled up from the horizontal to the near vertical, the roar of their fall filling the new valley. They piled up against the edges of the forest, toppling more trees.

The shaking stopped. The reshaping was complete. The ridge was now a deep gorge. The slopes of the forest had reversed, with the trees clinging to the lower slopes of the cliffs. About a mile to the north, a waterfall shouted down the cliff. The river on the plains had changed course and rushed into the gorge. Water foamed by fifty yards to Jaras’ right, where the centre of the gorge had formed a deep bed. The level of the river would rise quickly, but the caravan was high enough up the new banks to keep from being swept away.

Jaras looked up at the jagged cliffs and sighed. There would be no going east this morning. The merchants would have to travel south, where the level of the gorge and the riverbanks began a slow rise. He guessed the land shift had cost them half a day.

Someone was shouting at the caravan leader. ‘You said we had time! You said the change wouldn’t come until hours from now!’

‘That’s what the charts indicated,’ Vela Peltoan said, sounding both patient and exhausted.

Jaras made his way over to the confrontation. Three of the escorting guards from the Colonnade Freeguild stood nearby, unconcerned. They were used to merchants venting at each other, and Vela had proven adept at defusing tensions during the weeks-long trek from Fangshield. The upset merchant was named Bayar, and he had been in the vanguard of the malcontents from the first day out.

Jaras waited to see if he could help. As the caravan’s bard, he was being paid to keep morale up and make the journey seem shorter than it was. Now that it was going to be longer than it should have been, his duties would become more important. If the trip took an extra day, that put a few more riches in his pocket, though he was even more anxious than Bayar for the trek to be over. Bayar was from Fangshield. For Jaras, the Colonnade was home, and he had been away for months.

‘The charts!’ Bayar exclaimed. ‘Are they even real, or are you just incapable of reading them?’

‘They’re old,’ said Vela.

‘Can you afford the new ones?’ Jaras asked Bayar. He smiled to show he was sympathetic, that anyone would wish to have the latest tidal charts to come out of the Colonnade, but who in this caravan had the means for that? Quality was expensive. The charts from before the Necroquake were still accurate to within half a day, and that had been enough to make the journey manageable to this point. It was true that the early change in the land today was a hard blow. At the moment the end of the voyage should have been in sight, the horizon had been taken away.

Bayar turned to Jaras, ready for a fight. Jaras put an arm around his shoulder. ‘Listen,’ he said, as if to a fellow conspirator. ‘I’m grieving with you. Do you know how long it’s been since I saw home?’

‘You aren’t depending on the sale of rugs to put food on your table.’

‘That’s true. But you’re not hungry today, are you? We’ll still be at the Colonnade tomorrow. The next market isn’t until two days from now. But you know what? People will notice our delay. People will be anxious that they might not be able to buy the latest rugs from the looms of Fangshield. That won’t be a bad thing, will it?’

Bayar mumbled something incomprehensible, but his face was no longer turning purple. Jaras gave his shoulders a squeeze and let him go.

The caravan was ready to start the day’s march a few minutes later. The wagons were solid, built for the rapid upheavals of this region of Ghur, their cargoes held by four raised sides four feet high and securely fastened with nets. Jaras jumped up onto the lead wagon and stood up on its load of chests, making himself visible to the whole train. His clothing helped him stand out. It was a variant of the Freeguild livery of the Colonnade. A narrow wedge of silver, representing the castle’s great spire, bisected the green of the fields, above the brown of the land. This was the pattern for armour and uniforms alike. Jaras’ clothes turned the livery to a bright motley. The colours were there, but playfully brighter, and the complex repetitions of the pattern made it a celebration. The bard’s mission was joy, remembrance and exaltation.

‘My fellow travellers!’ Jaras called. ‘I woke up early just to look east. And you know what I saw of the Colonnade before the ridge fell? Nothing. It was still too far.’ He turned to address the cliffs. ‘Do you hear that, you rocks of the perverse? You are not taking anything away from us!’ Addressing the caravan again, he said, ‘The pleasure of our arrival is merely deferred! Let us use our extra time well! Shall we revel in our anticipation?’ He paused, long enough for a couple of faint cheers to make themselves heard, not long enough to make the absence of voices more awkward. He answered his own question with an enthusiastic, ‘Yes! We shall!’

He started to sing, and the walls of the gorge picked up his voice. Before he reached the second verse, most of the merchants had joined in.

‘Sing high for the hills, as they climb at dawn,

Sing low for the gorge, born the night just gone.

Sing high for the town that is unafraid!

Sing high for the Colonnade!

Oh, the land will rise and the land will fall,

And the waves of change shatter every wall.

But the Diamond Spire will never fade!

Sing high for the Colonnade!

Sing high for the Colonnade!’

There were twenty more verses. He had begun teaching the song to the members of the caravan on the morning of their departure from Fangshield. They all knew it by now, and they knew it well. By the time the song was done, the mood of the travellers was closer to eager than disappointed, and Jaras was satisfied.

He hopped down from the wagon and worked his way along the line of the caravan, joking with the travellers. He talked longer with those who seemed most troubled. One of those was a jeweller named Gallaf. Mid-morning, with the riverbanks rising more steeply, they could see the exit from the gorge only a couple of miles straight ahead. Gallaf looked as if he would be sorry to leave the cliff walls, as if their confines represented some kind of safety to him.

‘Why so grim?’ Jaras asked. ‘Don’t tell me that you’re starting to feel your jewels are shown off to better effect away from cities. Is the untamed land so much better a contrast?’

‘No, it isn’t that,’ said Gallaf.

‘You’re missing Fangshield,’ said Jaras.

‘I miss its civilisation.’

‘Is this your first trip to the Colonnade?’

‘It is.’

Jaras laughed. ‘Then you should be overjoyed. I mean no insult to Fangshield when I say that at the Colonnade, you will find true civilisation. It does not have its equal anywhere in Ghur.’

‘So I’ve heard.’

‘You don’t believe it,’ Jaras said, chiding.

‘Oh no, I do! I do! It’s just… I’ve heard some things about this region.’

‘What things?’

‘About monsters near the Colonnade.’

‘You mean the Avengorii,’ said Jaras.

Gallaf winced. He looked up anxiously, as if expecting the blue sky to darken and the horrors to fall on the caravan, summoned by the utterance of their name.

‘Don’t worry,’ Jaras said. ‘You wouldn’t find me in this caravan if I thought we were going anywhere near their lairs.’ He grimaced in disgust and anger. ‘The land they’ve stolen is some distance east of the Colonnade.’ He took a breath. ‘They won’t hold it forever,’ he promised.

‘You have a song ready for their defeat?’ Gallaf asked, doing his best to mount a front of bravado now that he knew he was safe from what he feared.

‘Many,’ said Jaras, and he strummed a few light chords on his lute before moving on.

To his right, the eastern riverbank widened as it rose. The cliff on Jaras’ left was less than fifty feet high now, its barren top poking up above the trees. The woods here were thick, though the trees stopped a good hundred yards from the edge of the water. The way forward angled westward ahead, but soon the slope would be level with the plain, and the caravan could finally strike eastward again.

Jaras was making his way back up to the head of the caravan, and was three wagons away from Vela’s, when the captain of the escort, walking point, stopped suddenly and held up a hand, warning for silence. The caravan creaked to a halt. Jaras padded forward to join Vela. ‘What is it?’ he whispered.

She shook her head.

The guard looked back at them. ‘Thought I heard growling,’ she said.

Jaras turned around slowly, scanning the clifftops, staring into the shadows of the forest.

‘This doesn’t feel like a very defensible position,’ said Vela.

‘It isn’t,’ said the captain. ‘We also have no choice.’ She raised her horn to her lips to sound the call to form a circle.

Before she could, another horn blew. It sounded from just around the bend. The call was savage, brutal, more animal than instrument. It stopped Jaras’ breath with fear.

‘Beastmen!’ the captain shouted, but the call of the horn had already spread the news.

There were twenty guards of the Colonnade Freeguild in the caravan’s escort. Their numbers and their weapons had been enough to keep the merchants safe from the predators they had encountered. The route was a well-travelled one, with frequent heavily armed patrols. It was as safe as any path across the landscapes of Ghur could be.

It was not very safe at all.

‘What about Skykeep?’ Gallaf wailed. ‘Where is its garrison?’

No one answered him. The garrison of the fortress projected the Colonnade’s power into the east. It was the sentry guarding the city’s approaches, and the patrols on the road went out from its gates. Skykeep was strong, but its sentinels could not see or be everywhere.

The merchants struggled with their terrified horses to pull the wagons into the defensive formation. The guards made themselves into a wall facing uphill, their halberds, swords and crossbows at the ready. Their speed and discipline were impressive.

We’re all going to die, Jaras thought.

The sound of the enemy’s approach rumbled through the gorge. It came for Jaras with the force of an avalanche, a cacophony of braying and bellowing, a thunder of hooves shaking the ground. Jaras tried to brace himself for the sight of the terror that produced that sound. He could not. It was too great, and he was too small, and he wanted to disappear into a hole in the ground. And then, in a howling storm, the beastmen charged around the bend.

The warherd was larger than the entire caravan. Even if it had been a quarter of its size, Jaras thought, the guards would still have had no chance. A massive brute in crude, pale-blue armour led the attack, bellowing to shatter the air. Jaras felt the roars in his bones. Merchants sobbed and fell to their knees, already defeated. Jaras managed to keep his feet. He was with Vela, just behind the too-small line of defenders. Rooted to the ground, he stared at the avalanche of horned, fanged monsters. The earth thundered with the pounding of hooves, shaking as if the tidal change were imminent again.

Crossbow bolts flew. Some of the smaller beastmen fell. The larger ones only came on faster when they bled.

‘Sigmar preserve us,’ Vela whispered.

The leader of the warherd carried an axe larger than a man. Snarling, it swung the massive blade and killed two guards in a single stroke. The defenders hurled themselves against the charge, and they almost slowed the beastmen. They even killed a few of the hulking creatures before they were torn apart and trampled into a mire of blood and bone.

In his state of frozen terror, Jaras saw the struggle unfold slowly, every detail etched into his memory between the distant beats of his heart. The heroes of the Freeguild fought valiantly. Their valour was worthy of song, and snatches of mournful, stirring verse and melody flashed through his mind.

Someone must remember them. Someone must sing of what they faced and what they did.

Sing of how they died.

They died struggling to the last. They died with honour.

Do not sing of how they were killed.

Heads crushed. Limbs torn off and used as clubs. Struck with spiked hammers, and with such force that they burst open like rotten fruit.

Who will sing? It will not be you.

Not if I die. The thought broke the spell of fear and jolted him into movement again. Two heartbeats into the attack, Jaras sprinted away from the beastmen. He was one of a panicked mob, and the monsters laughed at the terror of the merchants. The beastmen roared after their prey. The smaller ones, light on their feet, faster than humans, streaked ahead of the crowd and cut off the path of escape. The warherd surrounded its prey and closed in.

The slaughter began in earnest. Jaras was caught in the middle of screaming, struggling bodies. He and the merchants were animals now too, terrified, unthinking – creatures of instinct lashing out and clawing at their neighbours, driven by the need to flee though there was nowhere to run. Blood slicked the ground. Blood sprayed the air. The stench of blood filled Jaras’ nose. He was breathing blood, choking on blood, slipping on blood.

A wagon went flipping end over end, breaking bones as it cartwheeled over the crowd, scattering its load, crushing more bodies with hurled chests. It crashed down, upended, in front of Jaras. One corner rested against a boulder, holding it up at a slight angle. There was suddenly a dark space in front of Jaras, and he slid under the wagon. A heavy body smashed into it, sending it sliding, and he scrabbled to keep up with its movement and stay underneath. Knocked off its boulder, the wagon thumped down level on the ground, trapping Jaras inside.

He peered through gaps in the splintered slats and saw only violent blurs. He was surrounded by the bellowing of the beastmen and the screams of the dying. It was all he could do not to curl into a ball and join in the screams. He crouched on all fours beneath the centre of the wagon, his breath coming in halting gasps, his eyes wide in the darkness. He waited for the axe or the hammer that would smash open his shelter and bring him his death.

After some time, there seemed to be fewer shrieks and roars near him. The massacre was moving downhill. Then something hit the wagon again, hard enough to send it skittering across the ground as if it weighed nothing. It took Jaras with it, rolling and scraping him across the stones of the riverbank. It slammed against a tree trunk and split open.

Jaras lay motionless, clothing torn, the flesh of his arms and legs scraped raw and bleeding. He was a ball of pain. His head spun. He didn’t know what was happening, but he kept still, mouth wide in a silent cry of agony.

The roars of the beastmen moved further away. He held his breath, listening. There was no movement near the wagon.

Don’t stay here. They might come back.

Jaras crawled to the side of the wagon. He pulled on the broken slats. They were an inch thick, made to stand up to the punishments of the tidal shifts. He had to pull with all his strength before one began to give. The splintering cracks were deafening in the small space. He didn’t stop, urged on by the thunder of murder from downslope. He had to trust in the hope that the beastmen wouldn’t hear him breaking wood. If they did, it wouldn’t matter if he stopped trying or not.

He forced open a gap just large enough to squeeze through. Jagged wood clawed at him and drew more blood as he struggled out from under the wagon. He was at the edge of the forest. The nearest beastmen were a hundred yards downslope from his position, laughing as they finished off the last of the merchants.

Run. Run. There’s nothing you can do.

Sobbing with shame and terror, he stumbled deeper into the woods. There were shadows in the trees and the promise of hiding places. But the promises felt like taunts. Hysh was high in the sky. He could hide only if no beastmen looked for him.

He ran anyway, crashing through brush, too frightened to stop and look for cover.

And then, the light in the forest failed. The shadows blossomed.

Jaras heard the sound of wings. Now he did pause. He looked up.

He screamed.

The sky shouted horror.

Click here to buy A Dynasty of Monsters.

A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION

First published in Great Britain in 2021.
This eBook edition published in 2021 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 Igor Kieryluk.

A Dynasty of Monsters © Copyright Games Workshop Limited 2021. A Dynasty of Monsters, 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: 978-1-80026-590-5

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

For Margaux, with love, and in the gratitude of being home.

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.