Contents

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Hallowed Ground – Extract

A Black Library Publication

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Chapter One

The Thread of Memory

In the darkness, hands shaking, the girl hushed her breath and tried not to scream. There was a gap in front of her, a line of light to which she pressed her face. She peered through into the shadowed room beyond. The crackle of flame from elsewhere in the house, the stench of smoke, the reek of blood. On the floor lay her mother’s body, arms and legs twisted at impossible angles, her face turned away. The rent in her throat, blood pulsing onto the floorboards, the loaded crossbow at her side. She could see this. She could see everything. Her bed, the blankets tossed aside. Her dolls slumped on the sideboard. Her books. Her mother’s corpse.

She peered through the crack onto the ruin of her life.

‘Little girl…’ came the voice from deeper in the house. A woman’s voice, mocking and amused, sharp with pleasure. ‘Little girl, I can smell you… Come out, little girl, come out and play!’

Breath like a bellows now, rattling inside the darkness of the wardrobe where she had hidden herself. The girl clamped one hand over her mouth and reached with the other for the pendant around her neck. She squeezed it so tightly it broke the skin on her palm. The twin-tailed comet. Sigmar’s sign. Her mother’s final gift.

‘Sigmar protect me!’ she whispered. ‘Father, protect me.’

‘Child, don’t be so shy,’ the voice laughed. It was getting closer. The girl could hear the whisper of silk, the rustle of the woman’s gown. She could smell her corpse-scent beneath the stink of spilled blood. ‘If you’re waiting for your father to join us, then I’m afraid I have some bad news for you.’

The girl’s heart lurched in her chest. She sobbed, and the woman laughed to hear it. She was near now, very near.

‘Oh, don’t worry,’ the woman said. Her voice was like red wine, like velvet. ‘He’s still alive, for now. Although, I imagine it will be a long while before he can walk again…’

The girl crouched in the darkness, tears burning in her eyes. Smoke was drifting into the room now, creeping in frills and tendrils across the floorboards. Her mother’s blood as black as oil, smouldering in the light of the aether-lamp.

‘What did you think would happen?’ the woman said. ‘For your parents to come after me like this, to try in their blundering way to hunt me down, like an animal…’ She snarled suddenly and the girl felt the blood in her veins curdle. ‘Like an animal!’

There was no way out. She would die here, die like her mother at the hands of this thing. And then her father would die, and his strong and gentle light would be taken from the world forever, snuffed out in agony and humiliation. The girl cried, no longer trying to muffle the sound. The tears burned down her face. In her hand the pendant felt like a circle of fire, but as the woman laughed, the girl felt something far beyond the pain and sorrow begin to take hold of her. Something stronger, and infinitely more powerful than grief or the love she felt for her parents. Something more fervent even than her fear of Sigmar.

The girl began to hate, and her hatred was like a cool, clear flame burning in the darkness. It was inextinguishable. Even if she died here now, the girl knew that her hatred would live on. It would never die. Even from the Underworlds it would shine out to her, like a beacon calling her home, until she had had her revenge.

She pressed her fingers to the wardrobe door, inching it open. The crossbow was on the ground at her mother’s side, the wooden bolt sharp as a dagger, anointed with holy oils and carved with the names of Sigmar’s saints. She pushed the door open another inch, and another. The woman’s voice drifted like a winter breeze, dusted with frost and ashes.

‘Oh, yes, little girl… that’s right. That’s good, I wholeheartedly approve. Don’t die like a rat in a trap, shivering in the dark. Come out into the light, little girl. Stand your ground…’ She laughed again, and the sound was like a broken bell pealing across a graveyard. ‘Come out, and embrace your mother one last time…’

The girl looked at her mother’s body, lying there as torn and twisted as a rag doll. She pushed the door open yet another inch, and as she slowly stepped out into the light of the aether-lamp, the corpse began to twitch.

The arms flopped against the floorboards. The broken neck jerked around. The eyes, cold white coins pressed into her mother’s frozen face, blinked and swivelled in their sockets. And as the dark laughter rang out against the night, her mother slowly grinned and slumped forward, her head lolling backwards, mouth hissing, her arms twisting as she hauled herself to her feet. Stumbling forward, straightening, she looked down at her daughter with the cruel and malicious gaze of the undead.

Her dress was drenched in blood, but the savage wound in her neck had already healed. Her blonde hair was as pale as snow, and under her skin the girl could see the pulsing traceries of her veins, black with unlife. Her mother reached out her arms. When she spoke, her voice was like the creak of a rusting cemetery gate.

‘Doralia,’ she said. ‘Doralia, my darling. Come to mother. Let me kiss you, my child, do not be afraid…’

The girl stooped to pick up the crossbow. The thing that looked out of those cloudy, cataracted eyes was not her mother. She knew this, and yet all the same the crossbow wavered in her hands.

‘Put that down, my darling,’ the corpse said. She smiled, and her teeth were as yellow as old ivory, as sharp as blades. ‘Let me hold you, my love. Don’t cry, there’s no need for tears. I have something for you… Let me show you… A gift…’

A sound like tearing lace, the stench of death and the brush of cold shadows against her skin. Doralia screamed and pulled the trigger – but then what filled her vision wasn’t the creature that used to be her mother, but something infinitely worse. Red wings swept out towards her like a fan of blades, heavy with the stink of rotting violets, a cloying musk that choked her… And then Sentanus, the White Reaper, was screaming in rage as he was torn to pieces, and the hall around them was a kaleidoscope of blood and broken mirrors, her father groaning as he raised his pistol.

The Talon and the Voice…

‘Doralia! Shoot it, shoot it for Sigmar’s sake!’ her father screamed.

In the blazing shadows her mother’s dead face faded to a pale smear, and the dark laughter trickled across her skin like melting ice.

She snapped awake, choking, her face a mask of sweat. She gasped and rolled onto her side, snatching up her blade. Frantically she scanned the shadows, hands shaking, the sword stretched out in front of her. She fumbled at her belt for a pistol, but as the embers of her campfire stuttered in the breeze, casting a feeble glow against the scrubland, she knew that she was alone. Instincts from a lifetime of violence had made the sense of danger as clear to her as any sight or sound or taste; nothing had crept up on her while she slept.

Just a dream, she thought as she sheathed her blade. Her breath was ragged. Just the old dream, and…

The Talon and the Voice…

Doralia ven Denst shivered and squeezed her eyes shut, clamping a hand to the back of her neck. Fear buffeted through her like a wave, like a black cloud shutting out the light, but after a moment the feeling was gone and she could open her eyes again. She wiped the sweat from her face with a hand that wouldn’t stop shaking. Sitting back down beside her campfire, she looked at the hand as if it belonged to someone else. The fingers trembled. She felt cold.

‘Damn it all,’ she muttered.

She dug about in her kitbag until she found the bottle, pulling out the cork with her teeth and tipping a good swallow into her mouth. She gulped the firewater down, drank again, eyes burning and chest aflame. After one more drink her hand stopped shaking. Her heartbeat slowed, her breathing calmed down. She ran her fingers through the cropped bob of her lank blonde hair. The campfire fizzed and popped before her, and she tossed on a few more sticks to keep it going. Beyond the narrow circle of its light, the wilds of Ghur slumbered in the dark, deep in their uneasy dreams of violence and destruction.

What brought you out here, father? she wondered.

She sighed and glanced again at the bottle of firewater. She wrapped herself in her duster and tried to settle down on the stony ground, the campfire painting a flickering amber light against her grim, unsmiling face.

What are you looking for out here? What do you hope to find?

She had realised her father was missing when she had woken early a few days before, tumbling from her straw mattress with a vicious hangover and a livid bruise against her cheek. Groping for a bottle, Doralia had sat on the edge of the bed and swallowed down the dregs until her vision cleared and she could make out the bleak contents of her garret room: the simple cot, a wooden chair, a plain wardrobe where she hung her coat and stored her weapons. Her wide-brimmed hat had been tossed into a corner, the crown squashed, and there was a scattering of crossbow bolts and nullstone cartridges across the dusty floor. Light fell in a thin stream through the grubby window, and she could hear the chanted calls of the beggars and panhandlers on the streets of the Veins outside, the glimmer-addicts hustling for a shard.

There was the furious percussion of rebuilding as well, hammers and saws and the blunt commands of the stonemasons as they tried to knock the district back into shape. Excelsis had been smashed to pieces during the siege, but the citizens had come together practically the next day to try and rebuild it. Not out of civic pride, she was quite sure, but out of simple fear. The armies of Kragnos and the daemons of Slaanesh had nearly torn the place apart, but only a fool would think the danger had passed. Excelsis was a diamond glistening on the shore, a spear of Sigmar’s power planted on the Coast of Tusks. It was a target for everything in the realm that hated peace and order and decency, and it always would be. The siege had taught them that, if nothing else.

The light from outside was sickly and bright. She pressed her fingers carefully against the bruise on her cheek, wondering how it had got there. Last night was a blur to her. She remembered a tavern somewhere, a dark corner where she could nurse her ale, but other than that the evening was a blank. Her knuckles hurt, so she must have punched someone at some point. Always a safe bet… So many of her nights were like this now. Drinking too much, losing herself in low taverns and their masking shadows, her hat brim pulled down to block out the world, as if the bottom of a glass were as far as she wanted to see.

She tipped the bottle to her lips again but it was empty. She flung it into a corner of the room, where it shattered against the wall.

Downstairs, in the plain hallway, she had found a note nailed to the inside of the front door. Her father’s handwriting, the cramped flourish of his signature, as if she could have mistaken the terse instructions as coming from anybody else. She plucked the note free and read it, and it took her a moment to make sense of the words.

Doralia, I will return if I can. Forgive me, and don’t follow. Galen ven Denst.

Again, as if living through it one more time, she saw her father screaming at her to shoot, the daemons sliding across the skin of reality, broken mirrors splashed with blood. The White Reaper, Sentanus of the Knights Excelsior, his arm ripped from his torso… Those creatures flitting from the void, their black eyes and glistening mouths, the reek of spoiled flowers. And then the crossbow bolt slamming home, the daemon erupting into a cloud of rotting butterflies that stank of iris and musk…

She swore and tried not to be sick as she crumpled the note in her fist. Ever since the siege he had been plunged into this strange gloom, as if their impossible victory had instead been a defeat. He had been withdrawn, distracted, only half there.

Damn him! As if I’m no more than a child or a piece of luggage to be left behind! What does he think he’s doing, the old fool?

The hangover seemed to slide off her then, burned away by her anger. Her head felt clear. She checked his room, knowing before she opened the door that his kitbag would be gone, his swords and pistols, his cracked leather coat. She smiled as she gathered her own kit, sheathing the bolts in her quiver, filling her ammunition pouches and dragging a cloth quickly down the length of her blade. She flung on her blood-red leather duster and snatched up her hat from the floor, punching out the crown and carefully placing it on her head. There was no mirror in her room – she had thrown it away after the siege – but she knew the grim figure she must cut.

Very well, father, she thought, as she pushed her way out into the clamour of Excelsis. The hunt is on.

Doralia lay beside the fire now and watched the light expand, the fierce dawn of Ghur. Blazing sheets of red and gold erupted against the skyline, a wash of colour that tempered the land like steel. The plains stretched away from her, a rugged landscape of boulders and scrub a hundred leagues across. Far off to the north and west she could see the jagged sweep of the Krondspines, pale in the morning light, a vast, inverted crescent that sheltered the inland sea of Lake Everglut. The Great Excelsis Road to Izalend curved off a few miles away on her right, stretching east and then north along the coast, on its slow journey towards the Icefangs. Her way did not lie in that direction, though. It had taken only two or three intimidating visits to their usual snitches and informants to find out the truth: her father had been seen buying up some supplies and leaving by the west gate. He had turned away from the road in the direction of the Glossom Crevasse, it seemed. She would find him to the north-west. And when she found him, she would demand answers.

As she packed away her camp, she thought back to the dream that had woken her during the night – the nightmare that always flitted about her subconscious when she settled down to sleep. The darkness of that wardrobe, her mother’s body twitching on the floorboards. That sinuous, mocking voice, snaking up the stairs; the sound of dark laughter… Twenty years had passed, and it was still something she thought about every day. And now this as well, a new scene intruding on the old: the last moments of the siege, the Slaaneshi daemons birthing themselves from unreality, the city howling in distress around them. The edge of madness and horror in her father’s voice as he screamed at her to shoot, the shards of broken mirror glass that seemed to reflect from every angle Doralia’s own defeated gaze…

What’s the point? she remembered thinking, for just the briefest of moments. The crossbow had wavered in her hands. There will never be an end to the dangers we face.

She shook her head, tried to throw off the weight that had settled on her since those days. She stowed the firewater bottle deep in her pack and hefted it to her shoulder, drawing her hat brim down against the thunderous sun as it burned against the horizon. The plains simmered under the sunlight, trembling underfoot as if impatient to transform themselves into something else. Ghur was never still, she knew. She wondered how small a figure she must seem as she set off across its skin. How insignificant.

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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 Lorenzo Mastroianni.

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ISBN: 978-1-80026-658-2

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