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The Gnarled Bough – Extract

A Black Library Imprint

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The Gnarled Bough

Jamie Mistry-Evans

There is love here, in the dark.

It is love tinged with sadness and loss, embodied by two towering figures – one a woman, the other a man, both grey with sickness. Where once there were faces, now there is only a sucking void that spreads ever outward, consuming their memory until only death and the darkness remain.

The season turns. A cycle begins anew. Impossibly small points of light that at first seem like stars erupt into iridescent shoots of new life, growing, climbing, illuminating. Each stem is a tree, each tree a tower, a city of song wrought from living bark and breathing stone. Sadness fades. Hope blossoms, for a time.

Now hear the carriage rattling across the cobbles. It stops. The door opens and a hand reaches out, bedecked in emeralds and jade, palm open in invitation. Does this hand offer life or death? There is no time to think, no choice permitted. The palm closes. Hope is crushed and dragged back into the darkness. The city is gone. The season turns. Death it is.

Arnvoe awoke, his ragged clothes drenched in cold sweat. The blackness before his eyes was as absolute as it had been in his dream. Chest heaving with anxiety, the boy rolled his aching body onto its side and felt damp straw beneath him, giving way to cold stone. His trembling fingers searched the ground and at last found the small copper box they sought. He opened it, took out the firesteel, attempted to strike the flint and missed. He sat up and tried again. This time he made contact. The flint sparked and a dim glow bloomed into life as the charcloth caught. His eyes adjusting to the meagre light, Arnvoe spotted a rushlight beside him. He retrieved it and used the charcloth to ignite the wick. He almost wished he hadn’t.

The boy’s eyes darted from one corner to another, probing his surroundings. The windowless room was little bigger than a coffin, its stone walls wet with condensation, crumbling mortar consumed by black moss. At his feet was a rotting wooden door bearing a small aperture set with iron bars in the manner of a jail cell. Arnvoe breathed a sigh of relief. The last whispers of the dream loosened their grip upon his heart. All was as it should be.

The absence of natural light should have made it impossible to tell day from night, but years of punishment for sleeping in late had conditioned Arnvoe to wake before dawn by reflex alone. He put away the contents of the tinderbox, stood up and brushed straw from his threadbare trousers and tunic. Holding the slender rushlight aloft between finger and thumb, Arnvoe opened the door as swiftly as he dared, peering into the darkness to be sure that he was alone before leaving his quarters. He padded quickly down the narrow passage in his tattered goatskin slippers, flickering shadows following in his wake, before ascending a set of stone steps and emerging into the east wing of Schreikwood Manor. The passageways here were wider and adorned with carved panels depicting tree-like creatures engaged in various bizarre and disturbing sacraments that the master, Lord Schreikwood, insisted were merely benign supplications to the forest spirits of old. The figures danced in the guttering glow of the rushlight as Arnvoe scurried silently towards a grand wooden archway that led into the great hall at the heart of the sprawling manse.

The current interior of the hall had been conceived by Lord Schreikwood himself in mimicry of the Living City’s celebrated Everspring Temple, for the master had a passion for the Realm of Life that, to Arnvoe’s mind, bordered on obsession. The temple was famed, among other things, for its two mighty ironoaks that reached to the vaulted ceiling, and which supported an ornate bell tower in the cradle of their branches. These would have been natural growth, the houseboy guessed, sung into being by the city’s ineffable sylvaneth patrons, or perhaps even the Everqueen herself. The copies at Schreikwood Manor were carved from corpsewood by local craftsmen, and the artifices of Shyish had contrived to lend them a rather less wholesome aspect. They recalled to Arnvoe the hushed tales told by the Freeguild mercenaries that guarded the manor’s environs – of dead things reaching up from the soil with mangled fingers in the forest beyond the wall.

Arnvoe stared up at the bell tower. It was relatively small, he supposed, open to the hall below, with no ledge to stand upon and largely inaccessible except when a scaffold was erected for occasional repairs. This suited the boy well – no one ever expected him to be up there. Provided no one stood immediately beneath it and looked directly upwards, it was his own private world. He set his foot against a carved knot of the westward trunk, reached up and began to climb, arriving at the top and clambering through the branches in mere moments. He eased himself into the small tower – taking care not to knock the iron bell – and leant back, bracing his legs against the opposite wall. From here he could look out and see the whole valley.

It was dawn now, or what passed for dawn in Morrthawn Vale. Here the arrival of Hysh was marked not by a disc of brilliant light rising gloriously over the horizon but with a sickly glow that bled between the distant peaks and surrendered itself at once to the all-consuming fog. This was what Shyish did to beautiful things, Arnvoe thought – it twisted and diminished them until their original spirit had been entirely drained.

The grey light crept insidiously down the mountains and over the vast primeval forest, finally dragging itself up the walls of the manor, into the bell tower, and spreading across Arnvoe’s gaunt face. The valley was not greatly improved by its presence. A bereft artist teetering on the edge of sanity could not have daubed a bleaker or more oppressive vista, but it was the closest thing to beauty in the houseboy’s meagre existence, and in a sombre way he held it dear.

The courtyard below was largely obscured from Arnvoe’s view, but he could hear the distant thud of boots as the Freeguild made their patrols, along with the first stirrings of the household staff making preparations to depart. Tomorrow would be Nocta Heldenfast – the night of the god-king – and by established custom most servants were permitted two days of absence to observe the festivities with their families in the surrounding villages, leaving only a skeleton staff back at the manor. This comprised the Freeguilders, the cook, the steward and, of course, Arnvoe. He had no family in the Vale, or anywhere else for that matter, and the traditions of the Heldenfast were not his.

Arnvoe’s thoughts were interrupted by a loud and sudden creak as the great main entrance doors were swung open and heavy footsteps echoed purposefully through the hall below. He looked down and saw an unfamiliar figure flanked by two guards – an aelf by the look of her, pale face covered in scars and a cloak of reptilian hide wrapped about her ornate ebon armour. One of the guards continued on in the direction of the senior servants’ quarters, while the others stopped beneath the bell tower.

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Warhammer horror

A Black Library Imprint

First published in Great Britain in 2022.
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ISBN: 978-1-80407-185-4

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