Contents

Cover

Lords of the Storm – Extract

A Black Library Publication

eBook license

Chapter 1

The crone, finger painted yellow with the ochre she was applying to the young man’s face, turned her eyes to the sky. She opened her mouth as if to taste the charged wind, but her mouth was empty, for she had no tongue.

‘The gods are coming.’

The words were murmured by the little girl squatting at the crone’s side – her helpmate and her voice.

The crone turned to the young man kneeling in front of her and grasped his face, pulling it close to her.

‘Go to them.’

The words were an echo of the crone’s youth, uttered by the child, who spoke no words of her own. None among the Faithful knew whence the girl came; some whispered that she was the crone’s soul, taken human form; others held that she was the crone’s daughter. The crone herself gave no sign.

The crone’s eyes were black, pits without reflection. The young man could feel her looking into his soul. He felt it quailing before her.

‘Go to them, Montalte. Take them to the saint. He is calling. The gods come at his call.’ The girl’s eyes remained downcast all the while she spoke, as though she were caught in a memory.

As if in answer, lightning forked across the roiling sky then split a Bael tree in half from crown to root. The tree screamed in mortal agony, its thorn ropes lashing, before the holy fire consumed it.

The crone turned her scarred face to the blaze. Montalte saw the light from the holy fire illuminating the dark cave of her mouth as she opened it to savour the smoke. The smell, pungent and aromatic, took Montalte back to a time before the sky had cracked and vomited the Defilers onto his world. The feast of Saint Blaise, its spices, sweets and incense. The flames smelt like ceremony.

Montalte smelled cloves as the Bael tree burned.

The crone turned back to Montalte. ‘The saint blesses you with his fire. Find the gods.’

Montalte nodded.

The crone held out her hand. The silent girl placed on it a medallion – one of the pilgrim medals, cast in the thousands when pilgrims still came to Chevreuse to walk the Chemin Royal to the shrine of Saint Blaise. Montalte bowed his head and the crone hung the medallion round his neck. The metal disc, signed with the Holy Fire, sat cold on his flesh. He looked up again into the old woman’s lined face.

The crone opened her mouth, her lips moving, the words spoken once again by the silent girl at her side.

‘You are the last pilgrim, Montalte.’

Montalte bowed his head and made the sign of the aquila upon his breast.

‘Now go.’

As Montalte got to his feet, the silent girl pressed a needler into his hands. He looked down at the weapon, then to the crone. ‘Are you sure?’

‘Find the gods. Bring them to the saint.’

Montalte lay, silent, in a lightning pit. The sky fire had seared the soil to cracked black glass. All of Chevreuse was pockmarked with these pits, but nowhere more so than the Stations of the Saint that lay at the end of the Chemin Royal.

Around Montalte, the scrub jungle crackled. Flashes of light told of the discharges of sky fire that had been stored in the Bael trees. He was at the edge of the storm zone. Ahead of him, the scrub jungle became a twisted, blasted plain of devastation, littered with the remnants of war vehicles and the shattered stumps of Bael trees. The Defilers had made many attempts to enter the saint’s realm in the years since they had taken Chevreuse, but all such incursions had ended in piles of smoking metal and cooked flesh when the saint sent his fire burning from the sky. Now, the Defilers maintained a sullen sentry on the far side of a no-man’s-land that swelled and shrank as the storm itself writhed above.

No aircraft could fly into the storm zone, not even one bearing gods. Now, Montalte waited. The crone had told him to meet the gods at the ruin of the tomb of Blessed Etienne, companion to the saint. From where he lay in the lightning pit, Montalte could see the broken remains of the tomb, a corona flickering from the jagged ruin of its spire. The sun of Chevreuse, a bloated red giant, hung low in the sky, filling the horizon. To the south, the rising dark told of a sandstorm blowing over the flats. Lightning sparked through that dark, so distant that no trace of its thunder reached Montalte.

Movement. There. Furtive and grey, clambering over the snapped branches of fallen Bael trees. He would likely not have seen them in the gloom, save for the feeble thrashing of the trees’ thorn ropes, struggling to lasso a passing meal.

The yellow ochre painted over Montalte’s face and bare scalp camouflaged him against all but the sharpest eyes. Only the eye whites might give the Faithful away amid the yellow and grey and green of Chevreuse, so they stained their eyes with the juice of the Bael tree. Now he turned his yellow eyes towards the movement and saw it slowly resolve into a Defiler patrol.

The mind that framed the strategy of the Defilers on Chevreuse was subtle, determined and unafraid of taking losses. It had tried frontal assaults, infiltrations, flanking attacks, misdirection and feigned retreats in its efforts to first take the storm zone and then, when that had failed in the face of the saint’s holy fire, it had switched to trying to lure the Faithful out into the killing zones beyond. So far, the Faithful had mostly resisted the temptation to engage the enemy outside the storm zone. But ever and again, the enemy probed and tested. It was doing so now. The patrol, clad in grey and with the foul sigils of the Defilers on their combat fatigues, were sectoring in towards the storm zone.

They were off-worlders. Everything about the way they moved proclaimed that. The way they placed their feet confidently upon the earth, how they scanned for enemies in the distance but looked neither to the ground in front nor the air above, told that they were newcomers to Chevreuse. They did not know its particular dangers.

The ground near the patrol rippled.

Fire worm.

Even off-worlders would know to take cover in a building should a fire worm reach out of the earth of Chevreuse and turn a member of the patrol into a living candle. But that would mean them taking cover in the only structure within reach: the Tomb of Blessed Etienne.

He had to draw them away.

Montalte sighted down the needler. The weapon the crone had given him was a holy relic itself, one of the weapons wielded by the saint’s companions when he first drove back the Enemy. The point man of the Defiler patrol stopped, scanning the distance.

The needles took out his eyes.

Hearing the alarm shouts, Montalte threw a stone into a tangle of nearby metal that had once been a Chimera and, as the saturated metal discharged in a volley of sparks and flashes, he slid, fast as a fire worm, to his right, heading towards the nearest stand of Bael trees.

Behind and above him, Montalte heard the snap of las-rounds. In the storm zone, the supercharged atmosphere left a trail of spark discharges behind every las-round, turning each shot into tracer fire. The Faithful found this useful. They always knew where the enemy was once he started firing.

Coming into the scar zone around the Bael trees, Montalte felt the thorn whips slide over his shaven scalp. Tasting their own ichor, the thorn whips fell still, and Montalte crawled through into the cover of the trees.

Turning, keeping low, Montalte looked to see that he had pulled the Defiler patrol away from the tomb. He scanned the ground for the telltale phase ripple that showed a fire worm was rising, but the earth was still.

For a native of Chevreuse, the marks of fire worm and ball sprite and whistler were learned young and learned well, or the native never grew old. For the many pilgrims who had come to Chevreuse to walk the Chemin Royal to the Stations of the Saint, purifying themselves of sin before coming into the saint’s presence, the learning was often the final act of their pilgrimage.

Montalte squirmed sideways. Occasional las-rounds sizzled through the air, sounding like meat frying on a pan. The patrol was vectoring roughly towards him, but clearly they had no idea exactly where he was. From his position he could see the officer, scurrying from one flimsy cover to another, pointing at various areas for his Guardsmen to fire at. The Defilers had quickly learned that, on Chevreuse, communication equipment worked reliably no further than an officer could shout. It had become a war of runners and messengers. It had cost the lives of a score of the Faithful to bring the message to the crone that the gods were coming.

Glancing to the horizon, Montalte saw the final arc of the sun’s setting.

The gods would come with the night. The Defiler patrol was still too close to the infiltration point. He had to lead them further away.

Montalte began to line up the needler.

Steel. Cold, sharp, thirsty, at his throat.

At the same moment, his mouth was sealed and he was held, with unspeakable strength, against something more unyielding than Chevreuse itself.

A voice whispered in his ear.

‘To call out requires a throat. Make a sound and I will remove yours.’

Montalte felt his head being turned and he looked into the face of death.

And death looked back.

A finger, clad in armour, traced the ochre patterns the crone had painted over Montalte’s face and scalp.

‘You have the mark,’ Death whispered. ‘You live. For the moment.’

Death turned from him then, its red eyes searching through the slowly twisting thorn whips of the Bael trees for the approaching patrol.

Montalte saw the blue of Death’s armour and the black of his bolter and the lightning on his shoulder and he knew that the gods had come. He would have abased himself in worship, but the god held him immobile.

Death gestured and, to his left and right, other gods appeared, moving with a silence and stealth that their size and armour made extraordinary. But then, Montalte thought, ideas tumbling wildly through his mind, they were gods. They could go where they willed, leaving no trace of their passing.

The gods unsheathed their knives. The blades were dulled with oil and rubbed-in dirt but the edges, ah, the edges. Montalte saw the way the cutting edges of those knives sliced the air. Death pointed, flanking left and right, and the gods turned and were gone, slinking into the shadows and rifts.

The Defiler patrol was still directing random las-rounds into the Bael trees while the patrol officer gestured his squads into flanking positions on either side of the stand. But as the squads reached their locations, taking up firing stances and looking to their officer for the command to fire, death rose up behind them.

From where he lay, Montalte saw the blue gods move with a speed and silence that was not human, pulling back heads and slicing throats, crushing windpipes and shattering skulls, killing every man in each of the squads in the time it took for him to look left and right and left again.

‘Fire!’ The Defiler officer screamed his command.

But only silence answered it.

The officer stood up, looking to see what had happened to his men, and as he rose a god rose behind him.

The blue god picked up the Defiler officer, his armoured fist immediately muffling the man’s strangled cries. Around him lay the broken remains of his command squad. None of them were moving.

The blue god made his way towards where Death waited, Montalte beside him, with the Defiler officer dangling in his hand.

The god saluted Death. ‘All accounted for, brother-sergeant.’

‘Vox?’

‘Destroyed. But I could not tell if they made a report first.’

‘Put him down.’

The Defiler officer stood, swaying, in front of Death. For his part, Montalte looked with curiosity at the man, for this was the closest he had ever been to a living servant of those who had torn the sky asunder. The man was bald, as was everyone who stayed longer than a few days on Chevreuse, but his face and scalp were tattooed with sigils and signs that made Montalte’s gorge rise simply from looking at them.

‘Did you send an alert?’

The Defiler officer looked up at Death. The traitor opened his mouth and Montalte saw that his teeth were filed to points and his tongue, licking fear over his lips, was forked.

‘I-I serve the Dark Gods. I do not fear death. I welcome it.’

‘Then today is your day of fortune.’

Montalte, although he was looking upon Death, saw nothing beyond a flicker. Neither, apparently, did the Defiler officer, for he continued to stare in defiance at the skull-headed god standing before him. But a red line opened across the Defiler’s belly, from hip to hip, and the officer, feeling the death he had welcomed, reached down, trying to hold himself together. In his reaching he upset the momentary balance that was binding him. With a look of ineffable surprise on his face, the Defiler officer fell apart, his torso falling backwards, his legs and hips pitching forwards.

Montalte stared up at Death’s blank bone face. He had cut the man in two and Montalte had barely seen him move.

Death turned to the blue god who had captured the Defiler.

‘Assume mission secrecy compromised.’ Death turned his red eyes on Montalte. ‘Why did you alert the patrol?’

The Faithful stared into Death’s skull face. He could not speak. He made to give obeisance but Death pulled him up from the ground.

‘Speak.’

Staring into the face of Death, a memory flicked across Montalte’s mind, of a Defiler running at him, screaming, his face a mask of tattoos and mutilations, flesh self-sacrificed to the Dark Gods. Montalte had been a child up until then. If he had remained a child that day, he would have remained locked in his fear until the cultist skewered his body. But his childhood had ended as he had raised the laspistol his father had given to his keeping, to guard his mother and sisters. Montalte had emptied the entire power pack into the cultist before dropping the empty weapon and staring, in horrified fascination, at the charred lump of flesh that remained. What he had faced down that day was the face of corruption, the horror of an unclean death. Now, face-to-face with Death itself, he saw that true death was clean.

Now, at last, Montalte could answer.

‘Y-your reverence. I-I thought to draw them away from the infiltration point.’

‘We were already here. Waiting for you. If you had not alerted them, they would have all been dead before they could send a signal.’

‘Communications rarely work on Chevreuse, your reverence. Mayhap they could not send word.’

‘Or perhaps they did.’ The man, the god, fell to silence, his red eyes distant.

‘Your reverence?’

The blue-armoured figure glanced at the little man. ‘I am deciding whether to let you live.’

‘Permission to speak, brother-sergeant.’

Death turned to another of those who wore the death mask. ‘Granted, Brother Jansenius.’

‘This creature has already compromised mission security. He will slow us down. Recommend ensuring that he has no further negative impact on the mission.’

Death shook his head. ‘He is our contact with the local resistance and, for the moment, our guide.’

Death turned to Montalte.

‘You live. For now.’

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A Black Library Publication

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 David Sondered.

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