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Ghost of Nuceria – Extract

A Black Library Publication

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Ghost of Nuceria

Ian St. Martin

Jochura woke, if the brief, shivering yield to his exhaustion could be called sleep. The smell of ash and stale sweat greeted him, along with the coppery tang of blood, all blunted by intense cold. Claustrophobia set in as the rest of his senses cleared, and he began the slow, aching process of separating himself from the mound of his brothers and sisters in the darkness of the cave.

Huddling together for warmth, none of them ever truly slept. You were either on the outside, half-frozen and fighting to reach the centre, or fighting to stay there. Jochura had passed from one role to the other half a dozen times, never awake but never fully asleep either. Considering their options, though, he was grateful for whatever rest he could get. Hozzean had taken half of their number, and the cliffs of Desh’ea were swiftly seeing to the rest.

Fylaete was at the edge of the huddle, still and not squirming inwards for warmth, and Jochura shut his eyes for a moment as he knelt by his friend’s side. Every time they slept, fewer and fewer awoke. They were too cold, too hungry, too hurt from when they had broken free from the pits and the maddened, joyous slaughters that followed. They had cut the high-riders a deep scar they would not soon forget, but after Hozzean had burned, the cost in blood had begun to take its toll.

Brotherhood had sustained them, though. The hot dust had bonded their rebellion stronger than any iron. The high-riders’ laughter had quickly faded as their lines shattered and their cities burned. But Jochura knew the final day was coming, even with the Eater of Cities at their head.

The thought of him sent Jochura peering into the darkness of the cave, gently tugging at the chains wound around his arms to loosen them from where they had frozen to his skin. He looked to the cave mouth, seeing someone there just clear of the howling wind and stinging snow. It was not his leader, not the brutal giant who had bled with them, his rope unbroken red.

‘Klester,’ said Jochura, his voice a hoarse croak.

She turned to look at him, the chains rattling from where they bound the stump of her right leg to the barbed chassis of her shriekspear. The blades of the wicked thing were still dark with high-rider blood, and she had refused to clean it from them.

‘Jochura,’ she answered, her fingertips tapping against her spear. Cold and hunger had drained her, as it had them all, yet the fire of the huntress still blazed undiminished in her eyes.

‘Where is he?’ he asked, coming to her side to stare out of the cave mouth with his sister. ‘Where is Angron?’

‘He is hunting.’

There was only one of them that he could see through the blizzard, and none could see further or better than he. It had come up to the cliffs from the riverbed below, where the blood spilt was only now vanishing beneath the new snow. The lone figure slid through the storm on its silver vines, cast out beneath it like some mechanical sea creature so that its feet need not touch the ground.

A hateful name formed in his tortured mind, flaring down his synapses, cursing him for watching and not snapping, not rending, not killing.

Kin-guard.

They were the iron fist of the high-riders’ armies, the tool they wielded to keep all of Nuceria beneath their feet. The silver vines were everything to the kin-guard: their transport, their armour, their weapon. He had seen them used as shelter, wound into cones around their bodies to keep out the wind and the snow. He had seen the vines form bridges to span chasms, pull a pit fighter into quarters, and take a blow from a berserker’s axe full bore without breaking. They were formidable, strong and versatile, yet the warrior within their confines was still a man, just a man.

Men could bleed. Men could die.

The wailing gales masked his footsteps as he stalked, any trace of his path quickly disappearing in the storm. The kin-guard slowed. He closed to within a leap’s distance, every muscle coiled like a spring and screaming for violence. He stopped, still as the dead, watching as the silver tendrils ceased their undulation.

There had been honour, back on the hot dust. Nobility had existed, a martial brotherhood between the warriors of the pit even though they spent their short lives bleeding and killing one another. There were salutes, and declamations of kills. You would bear your triumph rope for them to see, and they would show you theirs, each of you bellowing that you would twist red that day, while your opponent would twist black in defeat.

Out here in the wider world, free of his chains, Angron fought a different way. For there was no camaraderie between master and slave, between tyrant and rebel. There was only hate, the letting of blood and a vengeance dreamt of after a lifetime languishing in the pits.

The kin-guard was quick to react when Angron struck, to his credit. Angron pounced through the whirling curtains of snow, suddenly upon the Nucerian without making a sound. A portion of the silver vines tightened reflexively around the man’s body to protect him from the blows that were sure to come, while others lashed out to ensnare Angron’s limbs and strangle his throat. But they only found air.

Angron was too quick, and he was too strong. The kin-guard’s snapping mechanical tentacles could not turn him away no matter how they lashed and stabbed at him. Even the vines could not withstand his rage, and the axe in his hands hacked deep, buried to the haft in the kin-guard’s hip, nearly splitting legs from torso. The deadly controlled dance of the vines became a spasmic flail, their lethality withering away to nothing as their wielder succumbed to agony.

Wrenching the axe free sent a torrent of dark blood spurting onto the snow, crimson pools that sank down in curling whorls of steam. The kick to the Nucerian’s chest that followed flipped the man onto his back, helpless to do anything but stare up at Angron as he glowered down.

‘Hnng,’ Angron snorted, spitting bloody phlegm onto the snow as he sank to his haunches over the kin-guard. The Nails had turned his blood to acid, burning him alive from the inside unless he fed them more violence. He reached down, clawing away the vines shielding the Nucerian’s face, and snarled in revulsion at what he found beneath.

The kin-guard was young, little more than a boy. He could not have made war in the high-riders’ name for more than a summer. Angron had been fighting since the day he was captured, snared and cast into slavery by those whose way of life this man fought to uphold.

‘I expected more,’ Angron whispered, his voice soft for all its guttural brutality. ‘Once, when I was still growing down in the pits, I thought you all were gods, divine beings who shaped the lives and fates of us who lived in chains. Then I tore your gates down, and what did I find? Men. Weak, paper-skinned little men did this,’ he jabbed at his Nails, ‘to me.’

Angron traced a grubby finger along the man’s skull, sneering as the Nucerian cried out at his touch. ‘But there are no gods. Nothing to stop me from vindication, and nothing to save you from it.’ He lowered his face, until the breath slashing from his nostrils made the man beneath him squirm. ‘Make plenty of room, in whatever darkness I am sending you to. All of your masters shall be joining you shortly.’

A twist, a cry cut short, and Angron rose to his full, towering height. He turned at the sound of blades carving air, as little Klester darted towards him on her shriekspear. She hung beneath the two-metre spar of bladed metal and its armoured anti-grav generator, holding on with one hand as she flew. Angron had witnessed her wield the spear in several ways, utilising any combination of her hands, her free leg, or the length of adamantine chain that connected it to the stump of her other leg. Seeing her brought a smile to Angron’s face, the steel plugs that replaced his teeth flashing from within a lipless maw. Oh, the magical violence she had wrought with that spear. His sister had made sure their former masters cursed the day when they had taken her leg and bound her to it.

Klester skidded to a halt beside Angron, disabling the anti-grav unit of her spear and spinning it to drive it point down into the snow. She looked down at the Nucerian kin-guard, summoning up a wad of phlegm to spit onto him. Her eyes flicked to Angron, as he looked at the man’s severed head in his frost-bitten hands.

‘A scout?’

Angron nodded. ‘More will come.’ He wrenched one hand back, tearing the silver lace from the Nucerian’s skull. He dropped it, immediately forgotten, and wound the still bleeding neural implants around his fist. ‘We need to go back, now. They know we are here.’

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A Black Library Publication

First published in Great Britain in 2019 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.
Cover illustration by Mikhail Savier.

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ISBN: 978-1-78999-408-7

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