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Murder by Moonlight – Extract

A Black Library Publication

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MURDER BY MOONLIGHT

Noah Van Nguyen

Standing in sopping fields of stinking mud, Lord-Celestant Gardus of the Steel Souls drove a nagging worry from his mind.

Not fear. Never fear. This was more tedious. Disquiet: incessant, parasitic, gnawing. It rasped at the shield of his patience, clawing at the armour of his calm, urging him to harken.

This is not the war you were forged for. And this is not the battle you sought.

Gardus returned his attention to the mortals, who had almost finished their ministrations to the dead. Rows of fallen comrades surrounded them. Islands of naked orruk corpses dotted the flooded killing fields. The hungry silt bed pulled at them in sedate pulses, drawing the slain down towards the shale maws said to feast below. Ghur hungered, always.

Heavy boot-falls thudded closer. Retributor-Prime Feros of the Heavy Hand slogged to Gardus’ side. Feros was a formidable tower of plate and muscle, as steady as the Stormcasts came.

‘Grey skies, grey lands, grey souls. And rain without end.’ Feros shouldered his hammer, and its head spat with the play of mist on lightning. ‘I am grateful to serve the God-King, Lord-Celestant, but this is not a war I would have asked for.’

Gardus suppressed a grim smile beneath his stern-faced mask. The Heavy Hand’s protestations were like an old blanket, welcome and warm in these cold lands. ‘Take pride, Feros. We bring faith and salvation to the Claw’s Eye clans. We have endured far worse than this.’

‘Aye, what I’d do for worse.’ Savage nostalgia underpinned Feros’ bass growl. ‘Ghyran, lord. Or Gravewild. Those were battles of renown.’

Together they watched the Freeguild guardsmen and Claw’s Eye warriors finish their tallies of the dead. The guardsmen placed sigmarite talismans upon the fallen, reminders of the cause they served, and which served them.

The talismans were gift from the Steel Souls. Gardus’ chamber had come here not merely to protect the Claw’s Eye clans, but also to return them to the fold of Sigmar’s worship. The Reclaimed must be made to understand that Sigmar would protect them. He would not have sent Stormcasts otherwise.

The mortals muttered in their motley tongues, brushing obsessively at their exposed flesh lest an insistent native fungus take root. A mildewed fug blanketed the lands. Mushrooms flowered in the silt beds, on the dead, feeding on whatever would nourish them. The fungus was another realisation of Ghur’s ravenous nature, Gardus suspected. But even the Claw’s Eye clans didn’t know where it came from.

A cry echoed across the fields, passing from the road on the ridge to the guardsmen scavenging and prowling in the mud.

‘More orruks in the lowlands, I reckon,’ Feros rumbled. ‘They summon the lord of the Stormcasts.’

Gardus straightened, moving with the inevitability of an iceberg adrift. ‘No. This is something else.’

A mule-pulled cart trundled closer. From Excelsis, judging by the tack. Beside it, a daughter of Ghur shouted at dog-tired guardsmen and sinewy clansmen in baggy trousers. The soldiery tried to calm her, but that only caused the woman to raise her voice. She demanded to see him.

Intrigued, he made his way to the ridge. Something about the Ghur-daughter felt familiar. Not her clean, threadbare dress, nor her hair the shade of straw from Azyrite blood. Nor indeed her fairness, which belied obvious strength. She looked like she could have pulled the cart she came with faster than its mules.

The straw-haired Ghur-daughter dug a kerchief into her wrinkleless hands, brushing the crevices of her nails before meeting Gardus’ gaze. Her eyes were bluff but sincere. ‘Lord of the Stormcasts?’

‘I am Lord-Celestant Gardus, of the Steel Souls.’ He glanced to her kerchief, to the smears of blood bronzed from exposure. A leather roll of surgeon’s instruments was slung over her shoulder.

She was a physician. Perhaps an army surgeon with one of the Freeguilds, but certainly a healer.

Another bout of fickle rain sighed across the battlefield. Gardus glanced into the cart, at another woman with two armfuls of children, all of them weeping.

The doctor within Gardus – Garridan of Demesnus, that fallen hero of a bygone age, plucked from death’s clutches by the God-King himself – sensed something deeply wrong.

He unclasped his helm and knelt, letting the road’s filth seep into his finely worked greaves. Better the mortals see the human rather than the hero. A goliath, with an unshorn mane of ivory-white hair and starlight in the depths of him. But nevertheless human. Nevertheless kind.

‘You are troubled,’ Gardus told the mourners. He held out a talisman, one of those his chamber distributed to the local warriors. ‘Take heart. Sigmar protects his faithful. We are here for you.’

Terror stricken, the woman in the cart recoiled. Her children grew inconsolable. They clasped at their mother, drawing away from Gardus.

‘The man of their house was murdered, my lord,’ the straw-haired healer said. ‘In Claw’s Eye, after eventide, under the light of the Beast-Moons.’

Gardus turned and regarded her. Her tone was hard, sharp, like an old hunting knife slicing its master’s thumb. Purpose filled her poise, but grace did, too.

And accusation.

‘That is regrettable,’ Gardus said sincerely. ‘But it does not concern a Lord-Celestant of the Hallowed Knights.’

‘It does, my lord.’ The Ghur-daughter raised her voice for all to hear. She was like a quarrel in flight to its target’s heart. She would not be deterred. ‘Because I believe one of your warriors did it. One of your Stormcast Eternals. And this murder was not their first.’

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A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION

This eBook edition published in 2023 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

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Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.
Cover illustration by Henry Peters.

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ISBN: 978-1-80407-528-9

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