Contents

Cover

Invocations – Extract

A Black Library Publication Imprint

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Fecundity

Crowds were gathering in the lower field. From the window as he dressed, Fletch could see a patchwork of colours from the costumes on display – emerald-green garlands, trains of vivid red and gold. Some of the villagers bore great feathered wings that they’d woven from last season’s grasses, dyed and painted during the dull hours of the Fallow just past. And now on this bursting day of lush new life the costumes had been unveiled; the drums were beaten in the viridescent fields, the flutes and the reed pipes trilled their echoing song into the fecund air. Everything was ready.

‘What do you think?’ Peer asked him. Fletch turned from the window to see his son standing in the doorway. He was nearly as tall as his father, but he seemed as excited as a young boy, proudly bearing the mask he had been carving for months. Wooden tendrils rose from its scalp like a crown of antlers. The mask’s face was a trio of savage scars, suggesting hollow eyes and a screaming mouth. The boy’s hands were gloved with woven sticks and he had wrapped lengths of ivy and catchweed around his body.

‘You look wonderful, lad,’ Fletch said. ‘A very vision from the forests!’ He clattered his son’s back with his wooden talons, and then with Hedda’s help lowered his own mask onto his head. Great curved horns rose from its temples, so heavy they pulled his weight forward. The plumes of his headdress rose almost to the ceiling. Fletch steadied himself. Through the vision slits in the fanged mouth he saw his wife cloaked in leaves, her face blue and her mouth a slash of scarlet. She raised her hands to steady him.

‘Can you manage?’ she said. ‘By Life, it seems even heavier than it was last year!’

‘It’s not as bad as it looks,’ Fletch said. His voice boomed back at him from the confines of the mask. Petra, his daughter, recoiled from him. She was dressed as a weaver bird, her costume flecked with shards of iridescent blue.

Fletch clacked across the floorboards on his wooden hooves and stepped into the streaming air, the sun bright and hot now, a smell on the breeze of fresh earth and clean, unspoiled air. As he passed across his land, he saw the gathered valley-folk turn and pay obeisance, kneeling to the Great Green Hunter and the beginning of the Fecund Procession. He grinned behind the mask, feeling a tug of pride that he should be so trusted to lead them in this most vital task. He would not let them down.

On three sides of the valley rose the mountains’ velvet peaks, and on the fourth was the tangled forest. Between them the valley lay cupped in an emerald oval that stretched for ten miles at its longest point and five at its widest. It was a circuit of this distance that the people walked in the season of Fecundity. Fletch, pacing himself on his wooden hooves, led them stage by stage. Some of the villagers, like Torvald and Nora, were too old to make the procession, and they walked instead with sprightly enthusiasm down the central track to meet the rest of the valley-folk at the Blessing Ground. Hedda and the children waved them off. Old Henrik the farmhand was already in his cups, capering about with a ragged staff in one hand and a jug of moonshine in the other. His beard was wet with drink, and he cackled and danced as he went. On they all walked, banging their drums and ringing their bells, the flute-song skirling wildly about them, the air filled with discordant music. At each field they stopped to scatter libations and chant prayers to Abundant Life. The land seemed to be waking up around them as they passed. In the verges Fletch could see flowers blooming: bloodwort and tussle, lamenter’s cup, even the strange pale flowers of three-petalled blight, stinking in the breeze. The first green shoots of the crops were strong and bold, breaking ground already. It would be a good harvest this year.

Inside the mask Fletch’s face was streaming with sweat. Every now and then Hedda made him pause to drink water through a reed straw, stooping to check on his feet, which were chafed bloody and sore from the wooden hooves. Bloatflies skipped up from the manure in the fields and droned away, and at each fence the kyne paused to consider them with their sad brown eyes. Sometimes Petra would come up and hold on to Fletch’s matted skirts, or she would skip off to join her brother as they teased old Henrik, who laughed and shook his staff at them, and then slaked his thirst with another slug of moonshine. His hair was spiked up with sweat like a crown of thorns. On and on they marched, from top to bottom of the valley, until finally they reached the dark line of the forest. Here in its cold shadow was the Blessing Ground, where the libation-tree was stained with centuries of offerings. With reverent silence, the procession came at last to an end.

The libation-tree was an ancient, blackened stump. Legends claimed the original tree had been used to build the first farmhouse in the valley, felled by the wanderer who had discovered it, although his name was lost now in the deeps of time. At this moment Fletch felt that he was standing at the end of a line which stretched back centuries, and he felt the weight of those centuries more powerfully than he felt the weight of the mask against his face. So much depended on him. It was a burden, he sometimes thought, that no one should have to bear.

He raised his arms. In one hand he held the libation cup, brimful of blessed waters. In the other, he held the holy aspergill.

‘Friends,’ he called out in a strong, clear voice. ‘Settlers of the Hidden Valley, farmers of the Living Realm. Hear me now. For what I say is–’

There was a crash of broken branches. A long and plaintive cry pierced the air.

Fletch whipped around, his blood racing. At the woodland’s edge a ragged figure tipped forward from the treeline and fell onto its face.

He looked back at the congregation, and it was like a shock had passed through them. Some started backwards, their arms raised as if to protect themselves. Others reached for staffs and cider bottles and pressed forward, forming a cordon around the libation-tree. Fletch gestured for quiet, and with Hedda’s help he took the mask from his head.

‘Get back,’ he said to the nearest villagers. He kicked the hooves from his bleeding feet. He noticed young Johann, a sturdy and straw-headed carpenter from the lower valley, and beckoned him forward. Together they crept across the Blessing Ground to the treeline. Fletch held the aspergill back like a mace, ready to strike. He looked again at the crowd behind him, and what had just moments before seemed holy and pure, the living symbol of this valley’s sacred protection, now seemed somehow fragile or vulnerable, touched by the taint that had emerged from the forest. You are protected, he wanted to tell them. Trust me, you are still protected, I swear.

The figure was trying to raise itself onto its hands and knees, retching and shaking its head, and when it tipped over and rolled onto its back Fletch saw that it was a young man. He coughed and sighed, blinking against the soft sunlight. He had a long scratch against his forehead, the blood scabbed and dark. His dusty hair fell against his eyes.

‘Who is it?’ Johann whispered harshly.

‘I don’t know, it’s…’

Hedda ran up and caught at Fletch’s arm. ‘It’s Eilert!’ she cried. ‘Don’t you recognise him? By my Life, to think he’s made it back!’

Fletch stared down at the figure.

‘It’s your son!’

Eilert… When Fletch had seen him last he had been a young and restless soul, chafing against the hard labour of farming his parents’ land. There was a whole realm out there, he had argued. There was more to life than this drudgery. He had scorned his responsibilities as the headman’s son, had mixed with the children of the landless families in the lower valley. The arguments between them, the shadow his behaviour had cast on Fletch and Hedda; it had been an awful time… And then, shouldering his pack with much boastful fanfare, he had set off one quiet day past the valley’s borders, oblivious to the fact that no one seriously thought they would ever see him again. He had passed into the darkness, and now he was back.

Eilert’s face seemed to clear, as if the recognition had placed him more firmly on the earth. He wiped a string of spit from his mouth and shivered. Fletch couldn’t quite believe it, but he was smiling at them.

‘Father,’ he said. ‘You cannot possibly imagine the things I’ve seen out there.’

‘Let the spirits of the forest deal with him!’ some argued. ‘He cannot come back, he must be cast out!’ Others, worried that he might have led outsiders to the valley, argued that he should be killed on the spot. ‘Foul is the evil out there! We have no idea what he might have tracked back in.’ Old Torvald and his wife Nora, kindly souls that they were, offered to put the young man up until he recovered. He was obviously sick, they said, although Eilert protested that it was nothing a hot meal couldn’t cure.

‘The distances I’ve walked,’ he said, his hands spread wide. ‘It’s a wonder I’m not mere skin and bones!’

In the end, Fletch took charge and said he would house Eilert in his barn. ‘For a few days at least,’ he told his wife. ‘I won’t have it said that we have no charity here, or that we turned aside someone in need.’ He paused. ‘He is our son, no matter what he’s done. No matter what anyone says.’

Hedda, although she seemed apprehensive, agreed. ‘We can set him up in the hayloft, there’s space.’

‘Why are we letting the sprite stay, father?’ Peer asked. ‘He’ll kill us in our sleep, won’t he?’

‘I’m no more a sprite than you are, boy!’ Eilert said. ‘Much less, judging by that wonderful costume. Do I really look like someone who would kill you?’

‘This is no sprite,’ Fletch said. ‘He’s… This man is your brother.’

‘That’s right,’ Eilert said. He looked on Peer and Petra with something like wonder. ‘We’re blood, you and I.’

The procession broke up into small, uncertain groups. Fletch and Peer supported Eilert as they took the central path back up the valley. Capes and masks from the costumes were abandoned in the fields, and near the crossroads they found old Henrik snoring in a ditch with his empty jug clutched to his chest.

As they walked back, Eilert leaning heavily against him, Johann appeared at their side.

‘You didn’t finish the ceremony,’ he said in a low voice. ‘The libation-tree’s still dry – it hasn’t drunk from the sacred waters.’

‘It’s nothing to worry about,’ Fletch reassured him. ‘Have faith, my friend, the intention is what truly counts. Isn’t it? We did everything else. We did it perfectly.’

Eilert stumbled and Fletch caught his weight. The younger man gave him a weary grin. He smelled, Fletch thought, like something rotten – like dead earth in a fallow field.

‘Thank you for this,’ Eilert said, in a quiet and almost conspiratorial voice. ‘I won’t forget your kindness, father. I promise.’

They pressed on. Further up the valley, scudding over the mountain peaks, came a drift of cloud as livid as a bruise.

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Warhammer horror

A Black Library Publication Imprint

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

Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.
Cover illustration by Rachel Williams.

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ISBN: 978-1-78999-887-0

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