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God of Earthquakes – Extract

A Black Library Publication

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God of Earthquakes

Phil Kelly

VEXOTH CAVES
THE GHURISH HEARTLANDS

Nensi screamed as a vast, grasping hand pushed through the hide-covered entrance of his family’s cave. Filth-encrusted fingernails the size of grave markers scrabbled rock from walls as tree-trunk fingers sought to catch him up. On the knuckles, rusted steel breastplates clanked and screeched.

A stray, probing digit crushed Nensi’s brother Naatan against the wall, his ribcage giving way with an awful popping crack. Blood bubbled from the dying tribesman’s lips as he was dragged to the mouth of the cave and plucked upwards to hang upside down in the air.

Nensi stood transfixed as Naatan was lifted high towards a cliff-like slab of a face with a great stinking maw. Behind that hideous apparition loomed another gargant, bald and sneering, the prow of the boat it wore as a pauldron limned silver by the light of the half-moon Gnorl. Two of the creatures, then, and another close at hand by the sound of it. The Gallet Stomp. Their hunger was the death of tribes.

Screaming all the while as he was lifted by the leg, Naatan was consumed in two quick, killing bites.

A bloodshot eye floated into view across the cave mouth as the first Gallet-brute peered in to find its next meal. Nensi saw a face with a twisted rope of scar tissue across its lips – the legacy of his stonewife Darna’s spear during the last attack. She had fought to the last, just as Nensi had known she would. He felt a sense of burning shame at the recollection, for he had not fought at all.

Then the fingers came again, and a voice that felt like the end of the world filled the cave.

‘Come ’ere, little weaklings! Come and get eaten!’

The sheer volume was intense. Nensi fought the urge to curl up in a ball and cry, instead casting around to see if anyone else was left alive.

One, and only one. Wiry-thin and standing fierce. His sister, Faranga.

‘Quick, Fara,’ shouted Nensi. ‘Run!’

He did not wait to see if she had listened, but weaved amongst the stalagmites, crab-stepping and scraping his legs as he squeezed into the sacred fissures. There was no other choice. Shaman Lohari was no longer there to forbid them, caught up and bitten in half during the last Ravening. All her talismans and amulets, all her bone flutes and woad daubings had come to nothing.

Such was the power of the gargants. They broke through magical protections with a horrible, earthy power of their own.

‘No!’

Nensi heard a scream of defiance. He looked back. Faranga was hacking at the fingertips with her old, rusted blade. She jabbed the foremost digit as savagely as she could, a spurt of dark blood staining her legs.

The giant hand recoiled, then came in twice as hard, smashing her against the wall with contemptuous ease. She gave a low moan, collapsing to the ground with her head lolling at a hideous angle and her thigh bone pushed right out the top of her leg. Her hip was a pink-grey paste.

‘No,’ said Nensi weakly. ‘No, Faranga, not you as well…’

He fought back a sob. But grief would not help him survive. His cries would only make it more likely the gargants would claw open the mountainside to find him, like anteaters gouging at a termite’s nest.

He was the only one left, then.

A sick feeling of betrayal surged up into his throat as he turned away from his sister and slid into the darkness beyond, shaking his clay jar of amberwasps as he went. A furious buzz emanated from within, as did a low, orange glow that seeped from its awl-drilled holes. He picked his way through more stalagmites, pushing further into the tunnels until he had to stoop to fit along them. Within a few minutes, even the echoes of the screams had faded.

They rang loud in his mind nonetheless.

The odd fissure in the ceiling led up to the mountainside, light streaming down in a drizzle of rain. Slick, molten-looking deposits of lime streaked the walls, making the passageway seem like the gullet of some impossibly vast beast petrified by the passing of the aeons.

On he went, further into the dank, intestinal warmth. He gave his clay urn another shake, bullying some more light out of the wasps inside, but even they seemed subdued by the clammy, moist darkness. One pricked his thumb through one of the holes, making him stumble on a rock and turn his ankle.

‘Blood of a dead god.’ Gritting his teeth, he bunched a fist and slammed it into his thigh to disperse the pain. His good foot scattered bones, small and fine. He froze at the noise, half expecting the low growl of a pouncer-cat to filter through the tunnels.

After a fraught minute he went on. It took an age, the pain in his ankle worsening as he went further in, but finally he got to the deep caves intact. He could feel the air change. The plip-ploop, plip-ploop of water dropping into cave pools spoke of a wide, echoing cavern.

The Painted Chambers.

Nensi felt his way along the wall with one hand, watching where he trod in case a cave scorpion stabbed the top of his sandal-clad feet. A flicker of light from the wasp-urn, and he found what he sought.

Ancient and abstract, the paintings were from another era. Their style was artful yet simplistic to the point of ambiguity, daubed there in the elder times by his distant ancestors. Lohari had spoken of them on occasion, but she had always forbidden the rest of the tribe from seeking them out.

Another shake of the clay jar, and more of the painted figures sprang into focus on the wall – stickmen daubed in charcoal, blood and chalk. Most were running, leaping or clutching their heads. Some were riding thickset mountain horses, the curving strokes of their necks and flanks carrying some part of their indomitable spirit. They made Nensi miss his own steed, Sontrani, likely still grazing in her favourite spot on the upper slopes high above him. Her smell, her earthy presence. Her sheer mass.

Above the figures was a sky of swirling lines. Depicted there were sinuous, serpentine things with broad wings and stylised flames that curled from triangular heads. Nensi traced his fingers across some of the more symbolic designs. Crusted blood-paint flaked away under his fingertips. He recoiled as if bitten by the blasphemy of it, but Lohari would not be admonishing him this side of Shyish’s veil.

Beyond the fleeing figures and serpent-like drakes were zigzag lines that Nensi at first mistook for lightning. Some of the painted men were being claimed by them, half consumed as the jagged lines overtook them. He traced them back, watching them converge on the image further into the darkness with a sick feeling in his gut.

And there it was, painted across a slab of rock twice the span of his arms. The deity of the ancient Vexoth people, its myth as faded as the paint that depicted it.

The Earthquake God.

A giant, centauroid monstrosity reared up across the amber-hued rock, a heavy-headed weapon in one hand and an ornate disc-shield in the other. The Dread Mace, that weapon was called – Nensi dimly remembered stories of it told by his grandfather. The shield was named Tuskbreaker, and had a story of its own. Weapons of an ancient time. Gifts from the land, the sky and the elemental spirit of Ghur itself.

Even in the form of an ancient cave-shape, the godly image had a raw, muscular power to it. It had the torso of a man, the mane of a lion, the lower half of a stallion and two massive horns curving back on themselves. From its great hooves came branching fissures, accentuated by the cave’s cracks and creases.

Nensi squinted, moving closer until he was only a few inches from the cave wall. He shuddered, all of a sudden feeling the lack of sun. Being Vexoth, he knew something of rock and its habits. Enough to tell that the cracks had formed around the painting, not the other way around.

Nensi took a deep breath and knelt before the wall, baring his throat at the image’s spirit. He dared not speak the name out loud, but it was there, burning in his mind.

Kragnos, son of Gorgos. Bringer of Ruin. End of Empires.

And there, at the creature’s back, was the detail he sought. A sketch at best, but one that would change Nensi’s life. Maybe even lead him to his revenge, if the realm was kind.

A mountain, crowned with two curving peaks.

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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.

Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.
Cover illustration by Catherine O’Connor.

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ISBN: 978-1-80026-732-9

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