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The Dead Hours – Extract

A Black Library Publication

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The Dead Hours

David Guymer

Nieder Pedsen had been watching the drunk since before the doors had shut them all in for the night. The drunk’s hobnailed boots hung from the spectrewood stool, the iron toecaps swinging like gibbeted knights across the stretcher beam. The pale wood had been carved to resemble a human bone. Nieder was not learned enough in anatomy to know which bone, only that it looked sufficiently realistic to him. Back in the days that his thrice-great grandfather had walked as a living man, the denizens of Skeltmorr had made such objects from the real thing. The local craft shops had been famous for the things they could do with bone. But times changed. It was the way of the living to change with them.

Oblivious, the drunk snored on. His broad, bullied face lay in a puddle of ale. The table was strewn with the restless corpses of supper: empty flagons, dirty platters, intestinal loops of fried cabbage. Dried yolks clagged his orange-dyed beard and his snores rattled the cutlery. The aelf, fortunately, had left her drunken companion an hour previously. Hamnil had won the snap of the wishbone on that score, and had followed her. He was not back yet. But Nieder wasn’t worried. Hamnil was careful and thorough. Nieder didn’t expect to see him before Hysh-rise ushered out the dead hours.

He wasn’t concerned so much as disappointed.

His gaze slid to where the duardin’s axe lay on the floor under the dangling right boot. The fire bound to its uncanny metals scraped greedily at the bare stones. It had already taken off the straw, and frightened the gheist-roaches deeper into the folds of the oubliette dimensions that existed beneath the skirting boards. Black Mals had wanted to put his foot down where the axe was concerned, but there had been something in the duardin’s swagger as he had come in, caked in bone dust and strange gore, shouting for ale, food and lodging – and in that particular order – that had made the old man bite his tongue and bide his time.

Nieder wasn’t a worldly man, but he reckoned himself to be about as large as men came anywhere in the Princedoms. Traders passing through Skeltmorr were few these days, and tended to come in well-armed groups with big men as bodyguards. And Nieder had even been called on to subdue the occasional flesheater that wandered into the Bone Drake Inn with strange ideas in its head.

He eyed the drunk. And his axe.

Neither looked as though they would be dealt with easily.

‘What are you waiting for?’ Black Mals’ voice rasped like a hair shirt over ghoulflesh. His eyes were large and sunken. His skin was papery. His head was crowned with a lank string of nuisance hair. Some said it was for the colour of his hair that he had earned his name. Others, and that was Hamnil and Nieder included, suspected it was because if you cut him then that would be the colour he would bleed.

‘The size of him, though…’

‘He’s not grown any since closing time. And nor will you. Not even if you wait until the Nadir swallows the Drake with all of us still here inside.’

‘We should send for Hamnil.’

‘Hamnil will be preparing the aelf for the Tithekeeper. He’ll be busy all night.’

‘You could lend a hand, old man.’

Black Mals polished the countertop with a spirit-soaked rag, as though it were the skull of a particularly loathed ancestor for display above the privy shed.

‘He’ll wake if I have to pull him to the door,’ Nieder said.

‘Kill him here, then. But keep it clean. That axe of his has taken off the sawdust and I don’t want a mess to deal with before serving the breakfast crowd.’

Nieder frowned, then nodded to himself and eased out of his corner.

He rolled his shoulder, limbering up the stiff joint, and pulled the wooden maul from the loop strap on his belt. He weighed it in his hand. Eyeing up the duardin’s broad skull. Picking his spot. Hands of the Bone King, the duardin was even more massive up close than he had appeared from the corner. His feet may not have touched the floor, but the breadth of him was sprawled across the full width of the table.

‘Enough tiptoeing.’

Nieder started.

Black Mals scowled and went on. ‘Club him and be done with it.’

Nieder turned back to the table.

He found one bloodshot, madly inhuman eye glaring back up. ‘Club who?’ its owner slurred.

Nieder made a choking sound.

This, he promptly learned, was due to a fist the size of a corpsing shovel squeezing tight around his throat. The duardin hauled Nieder over the table and through the culinary wreckage. Nieder put up a fight, but it was like resisting a horse. The duardin drew him in until Nieder was at his eye’s level. Stale beer dribbled like saliva from the creased skin of his ruined face. His beard was a drowned mess of congealed fats and mustard stains. His eyepatch sat askew, revealing a scarred hollow underneath, and his breath was so potent that being close to it was like being held face down in a barrel of ale.

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A Black Library Publication

First published in Great Britain in 2020.
This eBook edition published in 2020 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.
Cover illustration by Johan Grenier.

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ISBN: 978-1-80026-338-3

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