Contents

Cover

Kragnos: Avatar of Destruction – Extract

A Black Library Publication

eBook license

Chapter One

Given how awfully the ogor had stunk as it had bulldozed through the Accari lines, it smelled surprisingly wonderful cooked.

There was no cooking pot or stove in the Freeguild’s supply that was big enough and so they had done what Ghurites always did best: they had improvised. Roughly fashioned clay tandoors swung like clappers from bone frames, heated from below by fires that spat and popped under the drizzle of juices. Each contained an ogor recently slain in battle.

The hiss of roasting meat and the crackle of fat came with the creaking accompaniment of mechanical fans. There was no Accari in the regiment with the skill to work with moving parts or cogwheels, and the fan-towers were the work of Gunnery-Professor Arden Shay, who had been pressed upon to throw them together over the course of an afternoon. The humming blades wafted the cooking aromas away from the Freeguild positions massed in the hills overlooking the gluthold, and across the desolation that was known locally, and with good reason, as the Eaten Plain.

General Casius Braun of the Accari Hounds stood at the head of his company with his back to the sizzling tandoors, his arms crossed impatiently over his huge, bare chest, and watched.

The gluthold of the Bloodgullet Mawtribe was a belligerent jaw of rawhide and bone, jutting out of the Gnarlfast Mountain in challenge. Its grisly thirty-foot-high wall faced off against two full regiments of Freeguilders and all the firepower of the Excelsian Ironweld, bristling with crude armaments and trophies of its own. Its gate was shaped like a giant mouth, its upper lip decorated with flapping banners of human skin, and stubbornly closed. The fortress itself sank deep into the Gnarlfast. As far as Braun could determine, and Accari scouts were the best scouts in the Heartlands, he was looking at the only way in or out.

He could almost hear the grumbling bellies of those inside, forced to endure the sweet smells of roasted meat after the privations enforced on them by the siege.

The Freeguild had only been camped outside their gates for a week, but ogors were not like humans. They could not go a day without food. Their stores would dwindle quickly, then their slave-creatures, and their mounts, and then they would either turn on each other or they would come out from behind their walls and fight.

Braun preferred to encourage the latter. It had been a long week for him as well.

‘Welcome to your new homes!’ He spread his arms to encompass the span of the walls. ‘This time tomorrow, all of this will be ours.’

The Hounds were the first Freeguild regiment to be officially raised from the city of Accar, itself barely fifty years old and sweltering under the haunted shadow of the Seraphon ziggurat-city of Mekitopsar. Accar had prospered under the aegis of far-Excelsis and now it was their turn to expand the dominion of Order into the Heartlands, to spread its faith, and its wars, to new and heathen peoples.

Braun relished both tasks equally.

He was a large man, built high and built broad, and made hard by the rigours of hard labour and countless battlefields. His face was sun-baked and blistered. An emerald-and-amber tattoo of the god-hammer, the great shatterer, cleft his face in three, the haft starting between his eyes and ending at the bone of his chin. The hammerhead, complete with excruciatingly intricate runic scrollwork, banded both eyes and had not spared the lids. He wore nothing but faded shorts and a pair of snake-leather boots with peeling soles and a hole in one of the heels. Lastly, he wore a belt for his weapons. Braun was easily strong enough to count himself amongst the Accari Greathammerers, the elite group of Hounds who could wield the holy bludgeoning instrument of Sigmar in battle, but Braun considered himself too pious to gird himself as the God-King. He bore two smaller hammers instead, one in each heavy fist.

His personal bodyguard formed a wall around him, as intent as he was on the fortress, anticipating the moment when its doors would open and the waiting would end, and the killing begin. They were known as the Dozen. Every one of the twelve had a story attached, but none of them ever got told around campfires and only Braun himself knew them all.

There was Jenk, the first amongst them under Braun – a thin, evil man with a prominent widow’s peak and black eyes that disguised an appetite for pain. He carried only a knife. He claimed to need nothing else.

Then there was Ragn, Murdo, Slayk, Kemrit.

Efrim Taal in his feather cloak and his drakewood staff with the skull of a saurus warrior staring emptily from the top, his belt stuffed with shrivelled wands and his pouches of arcane powders and prophecy. Always beside Taal was Ferrgin, his one friend in the realms, whose wiry body was a constellation of pinprick dots assembled into the Heavenly patterns by the tattooist’s needle.

Olgar.

Woan.

Kanta Grint was an enormously fat woman with whiskers on her wrinkled chin, but most of that excess weight was spread across her broad chest and packed into her upper arms. Braun had once seen Kanta lift a slain maw-krusha from the dead body of her eldest son. But that had been years ago. None of them were quite the heroes they had been back then. She wielded the greathammer as though she were doing it the honour.

Last of their number was Altin, an avowed cannibal, although the majority of the depravities ascribed to him were just rumour. It was a reputation he did little to discourage however, shaving his head, tending naturally towards pallor, and filing his teeth to points. He fought with a butcher’s cleaver and a gutting knife, as though acknowledging Jenk’s disdain for his enemies and deciding to go one further by disdaining his friends as well.

All of them were tattooed, scarred, clad in knobbled brown cuirass, vambraces, and cuisses made of maw-krusha leather. The very one that Kanta had once lifted, and that Braun himself had personally slain.

Twelve of them, including Braun himself. Sigmar’s numeral.

They were unbeaten. Unbeatable. Untouchable so long as they held Sigmar’s favour, and as they had held it for close to ten years, Braun saw no reason why they should lose it now. They were an undisciplined and almost chance union of thieves, murderers and eaters of human flesh, but there weren’t twelve men in the realms, never mind the Heartlands, so blessed at not dying.

Braun signed himself with the twelve-pointed star, filled with his love for the God-King and the desire to fight his enemies in his name. He hoped the gates would open soon.

‘I’m hungry,’ said Altin.

‘You’re always hungry,’ Jenk muttered, picking something from under his fingernails with his knife.

‘If the ogors don’t come out soon, I’m going to eat one of the Azyrites, I swear.’

There were chuckles at that.

‘You’ll be hungry again by midday,’ said Kanta.

Altin’s kohl-shaded eyes narrowed. ‘Then I’ll go back for another.’

Braun heard a deep sigh and turned his head towards it.

Gunnery-Professor Shay was looking up at one of the fan-towers she had helped to erect. She was an elderly woman with short white hair and thick-lensed glasses without which she could see almost nothing, inappropriately dressed for the humidity of Ymnog’s Trample, or for battle, in a blueish gown embroidered with mathematurgical symbols. Going one further even than Altin and Jenk, she did not appear to be armed at all, but was rarely seen without a book. A typically heavy tome was lying open in her hands, leather bookmark drooping over its spine.

‘I built cathedrals, you know,’ she said, staring at her creation with disgust forming like cloud shapes in her rheumy white eyes. ‘Cathedrals. And the great lighthouse at Bilgeport. Have you seen it?’

Braun had. It was an impressive building.

‘No,’ he said.

Shay was the most renowned engineer in Excelsis. Even a layman like Braun had heard of her. She had taught three generations of artillerists and there wasn’t a senior position in the Artillery School that wasn’t held by one of her former proteges. She was said to have developed her own signature method of mixing gunpowder which had supposedly won many victories for the forces of Order and saved many lives. She had a lecture hall named after her in the Artillery School, as she was wont to mention occasionally, and had been assigned to lead the crusade’s Ironweld contingent by High Arbiter Synor himself as an honour to their Azyrite allies: the most noble First Age Starhold Celestians.

Apparently, no other candidate was of sufficient esteem to be acceptable to the honour of either the Celestians, or the High Arbiter. That Shay’s first love was for civil engineering, that she had not fired a real gun in the forty years she had spent teaching, and that she had protested the assignment even as her bags were being packed for her did not appear to have troubled anyone else but Braun.

A cheer went up from the watching ranks ranged across the broken plain, a beating of clubs and axes on leather shields and a stamping of banner poles on the rocky ground. Taal elbowed him in the ribs, and Braun turned back towards the gluthold. With a shriek of tortured iron, the huge gate-mouth began to grind open.

Grinning, Braun pulled his hammers from his belt. ‘Tonight, we feast on ogor meat. And tomorrow we raise the God-King his new monument.’ He clashed his hammers together and started forwards.

The Dozen followed.

Then his army.

Ellisior Seraphine Lisandr, general of the First Age Celestians, knelt as Mother-Superior Thassily Dispensa, warrior-pontiff of renown, blessed her.

‘Heaven-made and Heaven-sent,’ said the pontiff, scattering her bowed head with stardust and leaving her white hair glittering like a stellar nursery. ‘With Heaven armed and in Heaven armoured.’

Lisandr signed the hammer and lifted her gaze.

The pontiff’s eyes were as stern as sigmarite. Her armour was a full-plate harness of blued steel edged with gold, her open helm crowned with a laurel of teeth that were said to have been broken from the mouth of the great squig Gritztomper by the fist of the Celestant-Prime.

‘To Heaven returned,’ Lisandr finished.

Thassily nodded and moved on to bless Lisandr’s squire.

Lydia Victoria Aubreitn was the daughter of a noble family with ambitions of adding the Aubreitn name to the prestigious rolls of Azyr’s oldest regiment. She knelt to receive her blessing with the reins of Lisandr’s demigryph still wound around her hand, armoured in midnight blue and starsilver, overlaid with the white tabard of her provisional rank with the regiment. In her right hand was a long spear that she leant her weight against, the multitude of heraldic devices that Lisandr had inherited or married into fluttering from the array of pennons tied around the haft.

The demigryph itself was a prince amongst its noble breed, proud enough that it would bear none but the scions of Azyr’s oldest families to war on its back. Its shoulders were broader than the diamond carriages that conveyed even the lowest-ranking members of the Grand Conclave through the tiered colonnades of Starhold. Its plumage was as bright as a halo, its beak as sharp and elegant as stained glass. Its harness was silver, studded with blue spinels and sapphires, and caparisoned in heraldry older than gods.

Long before the first forging of the divine Stormhosts, there had been Celestians on the walls of Azyr’s greatest cities.

As Thassily took Lydia through the Oath to Azyr, Lisandr stood and looked down the close-drawn ranks of her regiment with pride. Two thousand knights stood patiently beside their steeds and attended by their squires, unmoved by the rank horror of the gluthold before them, or of the Accari around them, each flying their own banners and personal heraldry. Some represented militant dynasties as old and gloried as Lisandr’s. But not many.

For all the variation in iconography, however, every warrior was identically equipped and armed. A cuirass, fitted to each individual wearer by fusing together bands of meteoric iron and then studded with diamond rivets. Long, pleated skirts of silver rings that reached down to the knees to protect the thighs. In the right hand a long spear, sometimes referred to as a half-pike, more commonly a weapon of the aelves of Hysh, but proudly borne by the regiments of the First Age as a reminder of the ancient time when the god Tyrion had tutored the first of Sigmar’s mortal legions in the conduct of war. At the left hip, ready to be drawn, was a scabbarded sabre, and across the back, a kite shield and a warhammer.

A Celestian was a lord, on the battlefield and off it, expected to be equally adept with any weapon and in any role, and to switch between them at the command of the moment.

As her forebears had marshalled the armies of Azyr for the purging of the Realm of Heaven in the Age of Myth, so would she now see this small piece of Gallet cleansed. She would oversee the establishment of the Accari’s new settlement in the ruin of their enemies’ former stronghold, and then by the order of Azyr she would be free to return to Starhold: a few precious months with her husband and daughter, and then on to the next crusade. She had won the God-King many victories in her thirty years of war, and lived only for the furtherance of the regiment’s glory. She would never complain.

But she longed to be rid of this place.

It was the insect bites. The howls that filled each night. The insufferable humidity and heat, as if they fought not over a land of rock and earth but the hard-furred body of a fiery-tempered beast. It was the way the ground would tremble, at any time and without warning, severe enough on occasion to break bones and throw even demigryphs to the ground. Sometimes it felt as though that was the ground’s intent.

After this crusade, a campaign in any other realm would seem preferable.

She looked up as the tramp of heavy-booted feet announced Braun’s advance on her right. Another mob of Hounds, this one even larger, were marching more or less in time on her left. Lisandr was almost impressed. The Accari were organised, if one were to be charitable and call it that, along several parallel hierarchies of strength, each one tied together and in mutual competition through familial ties and bonds of marriage. Only Braun himself could get so many of them to go in the same direction at the same time.

They were as eager to see this battle through as she was.

As she turned, the sweet stench that Braun and Shay’s infernal contraptions were blowing across her lines wrinkled her nose. She heard the jeers from Braun’s troop as they marched past, Braun’s shaman rattling his staff and making lewd gestures in the vague direction of Mother Thassily. His warriors, meanwhile, clearly encouraged by his less-than-worthy example, threw insults at the kneeling Celestians.

‘If I knelt for every ogor I crossed I’d never stand up.’

‘I wouldn’t kiss this ground, it bites.’

‘If the meat looks a bit tough, we’ll soften it up for you.’

Lisandr’s squire, Lydia, rose from the ground, going for her sabre, her young face flushed with offended nobility and sparkling with Heaven’s blessing, before Lisandr’s light touch on her sleeve restrained her.

‘Inspire by example,’ she said. ‘Show them Heaven.’

Sheepishly, Lydia slid her fingers from the grip of her weapon. ‘Yes, my lady. Forgive me.’

‘It is all right, Lydia. Ghur will make savages of us all, there is no shame in acknowledging that we are no more human than the Hounds, and strangers in a land that hates us.’

‘Thank you, my lady.’

Smiling thinly, Lisandr put out her hand.

Lydia passed her spear.

Using the long pole as a punt, Lisandr eased her foot into her stirrup and guided herself up into the demigryph’s high saddle. It issued an eager sound, something between a chirrup and a growl, but nothing so terrestrial or mundane: it was the whale song of one celestial body as it sang across the ceaseless void to another. She felt its movement under her, willing for her leave to charge. She restrained it.

One did not lightly command the beasts of Heaven.

Raising her spear aloft she cried out, ‘Are there abominations such as the Bloodgullet to be found in Azyr?’

Half her warriors were still bowed and kneeling, awaiting their blessing, but the rest, fastidiously arming themselves and tending to their mounts, called back in fair voice, ‘No!’

‘Why then do we tolerate them here?’

‘We do not!’

‘Show these Reclaimed savages Azyrite contempt.’

Lisandr pulled on her helmet, a silver barbute with a long plume and a vertical slit for eyes and mouth, but starsilver over both ears that muted her warriors’ cheers. The face behind that vertical bar was gaunt and grim.

‘Shall I sound the attack order, my lady?’ Lydia asked, as the Accari Hounds continued to tramp by in seemingly endless ranks.

‘No,’ said Lisandr. ‘I will not deny my soldiers their rightful blessings, nor cause a pontiff of Azyr to rush to meet the impulses of barbarians.’ She nodded towards the glutfort where the gates were now fully wide, the first armoured gluttons stomping forth and forming into sweating ranks. ‘If the Hounds are so keen to be the first into the fight, then I am not of a mind to deny them.’

Click here to buy Kragnos: Avatar of Destruction.

A Black Library Publication

First published in Great Britain in 2022.
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 Igor Kieryluk.

Kragnos: Avatar of Destruction © Copyright Games Workshop Limited 2022. Kragnos: Avatar of Destruction, GW, Games Workshop, Black Library, Warhammer, Warhammer Age of Sigmar, Stormcast Eternals, 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.
All Rights Reserved.

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN: 978-1-80026-599-8

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

See Black Library on the internet at
blacklibrary.com

Find out more about Games Workshop’s world of Warhammer and the Warhammer 40,000 universe at
games-workshop.com

This book is dedicated to my childcare bubble. It was late, but it could have been a whole lot later.
I’ll never again take school for granted, or complain about it in any way.
Promise.

eBook license

This license is made between:

Games Workshop Limited t/a Black Library, Willow Road, Lenton, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, United Kingdom (“Black Library”); and

the purchaser of a Black Library e-book product (“You/you/Your/your”)

(jointly, “the parties”)

These are the terms and conditions that apply when you purchase a Black Library e-book (“e-book”). The parties agree that in consideration of the fee paid by you, Black Library grants you a license to use the e-book on the following terms:

* 1. Black Library grants to you a personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable, royalty-free license to use the e-book in the following ways:

o 1.1 to store the e-book on any number of electronic devices and/or storage media (including, by way of example only, personal computers, e-book readers, mobile phones, portable hard drives, USB flash drives, CDs or DVDs) which are personally owned by you;

o 1.2 to access the e-book using an appropriate electronic device and/or through any appropriate storage media.

* 2. For the avoidance of doubt, you are ONLY licensed to use the e-book as described in paragraph 1 above. You may NOT use or store the e-book in any other way. If you do, Black Library shall be entitled to terminate this license.

* 3. Further to the general restriction at paragraph 2, Black Library shall be entitled to terminate this license in the event that you use or store the e-book (or any part of it) in any way not expressly licensed. This includes (but is by no means limited to) the following circumstances:

o 3.1 you provide the e-book to any company, individual or other legal person who does not possess a license to use or store it;

o 3.2 you make the e-book available on bit-torrent sites, or are otherwise complicit in ‘seeding’ or sharing the e-book with any company, individual or other legal person who does not possess a license to use or store it;

o 3.3 you print and distribute hard copies of the e-book to any company, individual or other legal person who does not possess a license to use or store it;

o 3.4 you attempt to reverse engineer, bypass, alter, amend, remove or otherwise make any change to any copy protection technology which may be applied to the e-book.

* 4. By purchasing an e-book, you agree for the purposes of the Consumer Protection (Distance Selling) Regulations 2000 that Black Library may commence the service (of provision of the e-book to you) prior to your ordinary cancellation period coming to an end, and that by purchasing an e-book, your cancellation rights shall end immediately upon receipt of the e-book.

* 5. You acknowledge that all copyright, trademark and other intellectual property rights in the e-book are, shall remain, the sole property of Black Library.

* 6. On termination of this license, howsoever effected, you shall immediately and permanently delete all copies of the e-book from your computers and storage media, and shall destroy all hard copies of the e-book which you have derived from the e-book.

* 7. Black Library shall be entitled to amend these terms and conditions from time to time by written notice to you.

* 8. These terms and conditions shall be governed by English law, and shall be subject only to the jurisdiction of the Courts in England and Wales.

* 9. If any part of this license is illegal, or becomes illegal as a result of any change in the law, then that part shall be deleted, and replaced with wording that is as close to the original meaning as possible without being illegal.

* 10. Any failure by Black Library to exercise its rights under this license for whatever reason shall not be in any way deemed to be a waiver of its rights, and in particular, Black Library reserves the right at all times to terminate this license in the event that you breach clause 2 or clause 3.