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Ghazghkull Thraka: Prophet of the Waaagh! – Extract

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INTERROGATION I

Falx could hear it breathing in the dark. Short, hissing breaths, like the exhalations of forge-bellows. Quiet, but crouched forever on the brink of a snarl. Hot, damp, and tinged with the stink of an impossible metabolism. The breath of a monster.

The Imperial Truth told her she had nothing to fear. That this monster was weak and scrawny, barely larger or more dangerous than a malnourished human child. And having immersed herself in the ever-shrinking comfort of the Pax Imperialis for too long, Falx could almost believe it might be so. She wanted to believe. But humanity could not simply wish its enemies into inferiority, any more than a shepherd could wish away the gleam of predatory eyes at the edge of a campfire’s light. And as Falx saw it, the Imperium’s fire had long burned down to embers. The hungry dark was closing in, and realities had to be confronted.

Most in her order sought solace in zeal, huddling ever closer to the dying flames of faith as if they might offer protection, rather than blinding them to the glint of onrushing teeth. Falx had chosen, long ago, to turn and face the dark instead. It had cost her most of whatever hope her youth had accrued. But somehow, after one hundred and thirty years keeping the night at bay, the dregs of that hope remained. Steadying herself as she had done a thousand times before, she forced her hand to the switch that would reveal her foe, and prepared to lose a little more.

The cell’s overhead lamp flickered into life, casting a cold circle on steel, and all the way down the length of the brig, things stirred in a jungle of rivets, shutters and bars. As a frigate of the Ordo Xenos, the shipwrights had built the Severissimus Exactor with a containment deck fit to hold the menagerie of a planetary governor, and Falx had filled it with horrors. There were entities down here that had not walked free in decades: beasts without names, and nightmares that wore the skins of men. They rustled as they scurried from the sudden light, before falling into sullen silence once more. But the object of her attention did not even stir in its chains. It just stared at her, with a steady focus that suggested it had been watching her just as keenly in the dark.

It was a gretchin, as promised. An ork slave-beast, sharing the fundamentals of their biology, but without such… exuberance of form. Still, as ever with its kind, it was larger than Falx had expected it to be. It would have stood to her chin if it was upright, and there was certainly nothing childlike about it. It was thin-limbed and slender, but its hands spanned twice the width of a human’s, while the long bones of its limbs were wrapped in muscle as dense and knotted as Catachan stranglevine.

Falx knew to be wary, even though the creature was restrained. Life had taken her far away from bar fights, but she remembered her drinking days well enough to know it wasn’t the big, belligerent fighters you watched out for: it was the bastards built like this. The ones who’d disappear as soon as a glass was thrown, then make themselves known later via a forearm around the throat, and the sudden collapse of a lung on a knife-tip.

And even in the frigid cell, soaked with chill from the void beyond the hull, it glowed with life. Wisps of steam rose from its shoulders, venting the waste heat from its metabolic furnace, and she swore that in the silence of the brig, she could hear the rush of blood through its gnarled veins. Falx’s lip curled as she looked over its snaggled teeth, its gristly proboscis of a nose, its ragged bat-wing ears. While its face was laid out in the manner of a human’s, topology was all it shared in common. Beneath that rubbery green skin, the architecture of its skull was thoroughly, repulsively alien.

As Falx examined her captive, its lips drew back into a thin, vicious smile, and its head tilted slowly to one side. It was evaluating her in turn. She wondered, what did it see? An old woman, if the distinction meant anything to the sexless creature, with a shock of brittle hair she had once dyed white, but which had saved her the effort ever since she had spent a week in hiding beneath the hrud nest on Kalimant. A face she had often heard euphemised as striking, built around a jaw like a cruiser’s prow, and with little flesh to spare around its edges. Hatched with scars, bronzed by the glare of strange suns, and held so often in a cast of defiant scorn that it had been etched in permanence, Falx thought of it as a hard face.

But as those murky, pupilless red eyes probed her, looking for places to throttle and gouge and gnaw, it felt like scant armour. Her scalp began to prickle where it met the ceramite of her skullplate at the nape of her neck, and the spell was only broken by the thud of heavy boot steps approaching the cell door.

‘It stinks,’ sneered Brother Hendriksen as he ducked under the lintel, and threw his ship-coat to the floor with the mundane disgust of a man setting to the unblocking of a recalcitrant sewage duct. The old Rune Priest was not reserved in displaying his emotions. Eyebrows like the pelts of moderately sized ship rats furrowed down over his bright green eyes, while russet moustaches braided like bell ropes shifted as his nose wrinkled, exposing a grimace the width of a baseline human’s hand.

‘Could you not have hosed it down before we started?’ Hendriksen grumbled, rolling up the sleeves of his fatigues to reveal forearms like grox shins, tattooed with spirals of indigo runes. ‘This morning’s meat was good enough, as ship rations go, but I’ve no wish to taste it again.’

Despite his griping, Hendriksen could not have been less disconcerted by the whole business. It was as if he saw their prisoner as a task, rather than a creature, and his workmanlike disdain chased away the eerie, choking unease that had filled the room before his arrival. Indeed, Falx had always found the darkness much easier to face with a quarter-ton of Adeptus Astartes psyker beside her, no matter how much the man complained. They shall no know fear, indeed, she thought to herself, letting the edge of a smile push at the callus of some forgotten wound.

‘I’m not sure a smell like that can be washed away, Orm,’ Falx answered, as she considered the evidence of her nose for the first time. Hendriksen was right. The gretchin stank. Its tattered jerkin reeked of badly cured leather, and besides the strange necklace that hung over it – a length of dried tendon threaded with rounded, irregular lumps of metal that stretched the definition of the word ‘jewellery’ – it wore nothing else. Every fold of its skin was caked in grease and grime, and hummed with the odour of stale, alien sweat. It was the smell of a species to whom hygiene was an unknown concept. But beneath it, somehow more overpowering despite its subtlety, was a deeper tang. Algal, like a stagnant pond, or a hive world food factory with poor ventilation, and underlaid with complex, volatile scents that brought to mind spilled promethium.

‘I suppose it shall be worse when we open it up,’ said Hendriksen, briefly eclipsing the cell’s lamp as he stalked over to inspect the gretchin more closely. Even in his shipboard fatigues, with only the sigil of his old Chapter donned by way of armour, Hendriksen outmassed the prisoner several times over, but it seemed unbothered as his rune-inked cliff of a face loomed down to stare it out. Falx almost warned him not to get too close, but stopped her tongue. Hendriksen was Deathwatch after all, even if his current standing with the Chamber Militant was as murky as her own with the ordo. He knew the nature of the beast just as well as she did. He might not have shared her caution, but then he did not share her humanity, either.

As if to punctuate the point, the prisoner lunged forwards in its shackles, jaws splayed hideously. But before Falx had even registered the motion, Hendriksen’s arm had swung out in a backhand blow that snapped the thing’s nose with a pop of gristle, and sent it crashing to the floor along with the chair it was secured to. The sons of Fenris knew nothing of bar fights, Falx remembered, because any bar fight dire enough to draw in one of their number was swiftly reclassified as a massacre. She had learned this on the occasion she had first met Orm Hendriksen, ninety-six years prior, and the last day she had ever taken a drink.

‘It’s no coward, at least,’ Hendriksen grunted, wiping mucus from his fist with a rag, and Falx nodded grimly. The prisoner was unusual, in that regard. For all their wiry strength, she had never encountered one of the subservient orkoids with anything less than a complete aversion to a straight fight, let alone the appetite to challenge an opponent five times its size while restrained in irons.

‘Indeed,’ she said. ‘But then, if those pirates were telling the truth, I dare say this beast has seen far worse brutes than you in its time. I hear orks grow quite large, you know.’

‘No matter,’ replied Hendriksen, hauling the toppled chair upright again with one hand. ‘I’ll still find its limits soon enough, as sure as cold finds the holes in an old fur.’ As the captive glowered at him past its collapsed nose, he took a step back to regard it, then crouched down to its eye level and pulled a slim knife from his belt.

‘Why the rush, Orm?’ came a new voice, thick and warm as engine oil, as the third member of the interrogation detail entered the chamber. ‘We’re at least three days out from the Mulciber yards, even if the warp’s kind to us. That’s time at least to try talking, before the knives come out.’

Hendriksen glanced round irritably, then rose to his full height again as Cassia appeared at the cell’s entrance. He still had to look up, though. As Falx was a foot taller than the gretchin, and Hendriksen a foot taller than her, Cassia was taller still, her great ochre boulder of a head stooping as she squeezed her shoulders through the door. Cassia, after all, was an ogryn.

The battered canvas of her ship-coat creaked as she stood upright again, and as she moved towards the prisoner, it was like watching a storm system drifting in.

‘Budge, shaman,’ she rumbled, prompting a hiss of exasperation from Hendriksen, but still the Rune Priest stepped out of the way. The pair’s constant antagonism had underscored countless shifts on the Exactor’s bridge, but any real enmity had long been buried under mutual respect, and they seemed to snipe at each other out of habit now, more than anything else.

With the calm attention of a technician, the giant sank to one knee in front of the prisoner, and moved a hand as wide as a landmine through the air before its face. The captive did not stir, this time. Either its aggression had been cowed, or it realised it might as well have been faced with the prospect of biting a rock.

‘Let’s have a sniff, then,’ murmured Cassia, furrowing her slab of a brow. Her eyes narrowed in concentration, and as her jaw shifted with a slow ripple of muscle and fat, the air between her hand and the prisoner shimmered. Then, something snapped.

It was a sensation that Falx had never quite got used to: a slow build-up of tension that you wouldn’t be aware of at all, until some ephemeral dam broke and it all rushed somewhere else, sleeting through you with a feeling like a week-long migraine condensed into a heartbeat. Then it would be gone, leaving only the faintest smell of ozone, and you wouldn’t be able to remember what it had felt like at all.

Falx didn’t like it. It had been an ordeal enough, over the years, to cope with Hendriksen’s exercise of the art. And he, at least, had refined his methods through centuries of training. Now, with Cassia, she had two psykers in her retinue.

An ogryn psyker, thought Falx, and shook her head in wonder. Naturally, the Imperial Truth held that ogryns were stupid, just like it said that gretchin were weak. They were gigantic, hardy abhumans, whose bodies had grown into fortresses against the harsh worlds their ancestors had marooned them on. And as common wisdom had it, this fortitude had come at the expense of their wits. Most thought them incapable of three-syllable words, or even counting beyond their supply of bolt-shell-thick digits. And without a doubt, the Truth insisted that ogryns could never, ever muster the cerebral sophistication to manifest psychic talent. Falx was willing to concede that this last insistence at least might have been the case, until recently. But these were strange days. And while the guardians of the Imperial dogma might not have been willing to change their minds on such matters, there was no doubt that, across the countless worlds in their sway, minds were changing nonetheless. And thus, Cassia.

She had lived an ogryn’s life. Born in a work camp, drafted to a penal regiment, and sent to the nearest front, in the hope that the spending of her life might keep the front from collapsing for a fraction of a second longer. That would have been the sum of Indentured Conscript C455-I’s life, were it not for the moment where, during the fighting retreat from the Delq on Karkhemish Secundus, she had moved the burning hulk of a downed bomber to shield her unit’s commissar from mortar fire, using nothing but her mind. In that moment, she had also moved herself far outside the Imperial Truth.

Her commissar’s duty had been clear: to align reality with the Truth immediately. And indeed, somewhere in the mountainous strata of the Departmento Munitorum’s records, a single line in a report attested to C455-I’s execution on the spot for ‘cowardice’. But that commissar had owed Falx a favour. And so the Severissimus Exactor had flown to Karkhemish, and left with an undocumented ogryn aboard.

Cassia, as she had named herself, had a lot to learn about her new capabilities. Her potential, it seemed, was immense. But that would only make it harder for her to grow into it. Ahead of her was a life spent walking an ever-narrowing path above an abyss of madness. But it would at least be a life. And she knew that for all his outward hostility to her, Hendriksen was quietly dedicated to ensuring she made the best of herself.

‘It’s got secrets, this one,’ said Cassia, after digesting whatever she had gleaned from the grot’s mind.

‘I should hope it has secrets,’ growled the old wolf, ‘given what the inquisitor paid for it. And I was about to start extracting them, until you blundered in like a mastodon missing two legs.’

It was then, to the surprise of everyone in the cell, that the second xenos in the room spoke up.

‘Perhaps,’ it offered, raising a talon-tipped finger in a disconcertingly accurate mimicry of the human gesture, ‘you might start… by asking a question?’

Every face in the room turned to regard the green figure lurking against a bulkhead, outside the circle of light cast by the cell’s lamp, and Falx felt herself stiffen at the sound of its voice. It was quiet and snuffling, every word strung together from grunts like those of a beast at a trough. But despite coming from a larynx built expressly for the delivery of threats and commands, it was polite. That was unsettling enough. But worse yet was the fact that, despite having been in the cell the whole time – despite Falx having posted it there herself, just before she came down – she had entirely forgotten the beast’s presence.

Orks were not stealthy. Not by anyone’s measure of the truth, least of all their own. But then Biter – or Bites-Face-Of-The-Face-Biter-Before-It-Can-Bite, in its own unwieldy speech – was far from a typical ork. They were an interpreter, a so-called ‘intelligents officer’ for the pirate warband which had abducted the asset, and their services had been loaned to Falx for a further, extortionate sum, when it had transpired that said asset didn’t understand a word of High or Low Gothic.

The warband did not call themselves a warband, of course. They called themselves a ‘kompany’. For they were Blood Axes, and shared their wider clan’s fascination with human military culture. Embarrassingly, then, Biter had come aboard draped in a poorly tailored facsimile of a Militarum officer’s greatcoat, stitched from patchily tanned squig leather, and adorned with a sagging peaked cap. They had even awarded themself a row of ‘medals’ fashioned from hammered-flat scrap metal.

And yet, for all that their appearance was ridiculous, the ork had been compliant, and for lack of a better word, professional, since coming aboard. Enough so that Falx had made the mistake of ceasing to perceive them as a constant threat. But in her long and secret dealings with the Blood Axe clan, she had learned that ork allies were just enemies who hadn’t seen an opportunity for betrayal yet. She would have to keep a closer eye on Biter.

‘You’re being paid for translation, not advice,’ Falx said, eyes moving from her captive to the ork like the flicker of a sniper’s targeting dot. ‘But as it happens, I concur. Blade away, please, Brother Hendriksen.’

‘As the greenskin wishes,’ scoffed the Space Wolf, sheathing the knife with an expression of distaste. ‘I’m sure this “Makari” will be more than amenable to a robust exchange of views, after all. So please, be my guest.’ Hendriksen swept his arm towards the interrogation chair as if inviting Falx to her seat at a feast. She stepped forward again to stand in front of the captive, and tried to ignore the carnivorous smile sliding back across its face.

‘I want to know Ghazghkull Mag Uruk Thraka,’ said Falx, staring into the darkness of the prisoner’s eyes, as her words were relayed through Biter in a string of grunts and soft, glottal barks. ‘I want to know all you know of Thraka, from the first moment to the last, and nothing less.’ Biter’s translation of her words tailed off, but the prisoner just sat in silence, unblinking, with that smirk still fixed on her. She was on the brink of calling for Hendriksen’s knife after all, when at last it spoke.

In contrast to the ork, its voice was wet and scratchy, squeezed out like the last words of a strangled man, and dripping with malevolence.

‘Makari says… they will tell you everything,’ said Biter, with an air of faint discomfort. ‘But they say there is something you must understand first. Makari says that to know Ghazghkull… you must first know Makari. And to know Makari, you must know what it is to be grot.’

Hendriksen inhaled, ready to protest the prisoner’s time-wasting, but Falx stilled him with a hand, while keeping her eyes on the prisoner.

‘Tell me, then,’ she said, ‘what that is.’

The captive spoke for a good while, and Biter picked absently at their tusks while nodding along, before addressing Falx.

‘Whatever the gods gave the orks,’ the interpreter began, ‘whatever battle-bliss kicks all the fear and worry out of their lives… they didn’t give us. We live in their world, but we weren’t built for enjoying it. We live to serve, and we suffer through every bit of it, except them moments when something weaker’n us is suffering.’

‘It said all that?’ asked Cassia, raising a doubting eyebrow.

‘There were more… perfanities,’ admitted Biter, showing an inch of yellowed fangs as their mouth contorted horribly. ‘And I corrected some… syn-tacks. But yes, Makari said all that.’ Biter’s eloquence had taken Falx entirely by surprise, and she realised now the expression on the ork’s face was their attempt at a smug grin.

‘You must hate the orks,’ Falx said to the gretchin, probing at what she hoped might be the edge of common ground, and the prisoner’s eyes flickered in recognition of the words ‘hate’ and ‘orks’.

‘Gitsss,’ it hissed, glaring straight at Biter, and the ork shrugged their slab shoulders – there was no need to translate that. But then the grot looked back at Falx, and spoke further.

‘There’s… more to it, though,’ said Biter slyly, as the prisoner ranted. ‘They hate us, surely. This is… no surprise to you, hmm? But it is… ahhh.’ The Blood Axe paused for a moment. ‘You might call it… faith, perhaps?’

‘Give me the prisoner’s words, ork, not your own,’ demanded Falx, struggling with the idea.

‘Orks hurt grots, grots hate orks, Makari says. It is the… axework of the gods.’

‘Axework?’ interjected Hendriksen, frowning in concentration, as if he half-grasped the idea.

‘Hit-things-til-the-shape-is-good, literally. Design, might be the other way to say it,’ pondered Biter, causing Hendriksen to tilt his head and lift his eyebrows in grudging acceptance.

‘Øksarrbedin, we said on Fenris. It is much the same.’

‘I will remember that,’ said Biter, with studied neutrality, before resuming the translation.

‘Ork cruelty to grots, and their loathing in return… it’s good. It’s the way of the Great Green. The way things were in the eaten-now, and the way they’ll be in the now-forever. The Great Green is… it’s like a fungus with many roots. Many parts. Orks, grots and all the rest. Orks are best, but they’re all vital. Without us to serve ’em, the orks would falter. And sometimes, just sometimes, it’s down to us grots to remind ’em of their own part in the whole. Yeah, we hate the orks. But still we serve ’em. ’Cos that’s how the gods want it. And for all the pleasures the gods didn’t let us have, they did give us…’

Biter halted, gnawing on a leathery green lip while rummaging for the word. ‘An eckstassy for seeing their will done good.’

The cell fell into silence then, as the interrogators grappled with this revelation of gretchin ontology. Hendriksen, ever the least patient of them when it came to xenos philosophy, abandoned the effort in seconds.

‘A saenyeti’s two-day-old turds would speak more sense,’ he snarled, as the knife returned to his hand yet again. ‘Enough of these attempts to confound us with your xenos gátur-riddles. Lord Falx asked about Ghazghkull. So this “Makari” will tell us of Ghazghkull. Ghazghkull!’ repeated Hendriksen directly to Makari, with slow contempt, as he waved the knife in the air.

‘Ghaz’ghk’ull,’ parroted the gretchin, emphasising the weird, gulping native pronunciation as if to correct him, then repeating it three times more, in an increasingly sly tone. ‘Ghaz’ghk’ull, Ghaz’ghk’ull, Ghaz’ghk’ull…’ It tilted its head from side to side, as if trying to see the underneath of an idea, and then rattled off a decisive string of hisses and barks to Biter.

‘So be it,’ said the interpreter, with an open-palmed gesture. ‘You want the story of Ghazghkull Mag Uruk Thraka – you shall have it, humans. It may not be the story you expect, though. It may not be a story you like, either. But I shall tell it all the same. It is a story that ends in green. But it begins… in white.’

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A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION

First published in Great Britain in 2021.
This eBook edition published in 2022 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.

Ghazghkull Thraka: Prophet of the Waaagh! © Copyright Games Workshop Limited 2022. Ghazghkull Thraka: Prophet of the Waaagh!, GW, Games Workshop, Black Library, The Horus Heresy, The Horus Heresy Eye logo, Space Marine, 40K, Warhammer, Warhammer 40,000, the ‘Aquila’ Double-headed Eagle logo, 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.
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ISBN: 978-1-80026-653-7

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This book is dedicated to my dad, who, despite being generally baffled by Warhammer 40K, totally got the concept of orks. I reckon he would have loved this story.

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