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The Method of Madness – Extract

A Black Library Publication

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The Method of Madness

Peter McLean

‘There’s a gorestorm blowing in, High Master,’ the guide said, his heavily sutured face twisting into a frown as he stared into the reddening sky above the war palanquin’s armoured canopy. ‘Best make haste now.’

Thrallmaster Vignus Daneggia snapped open his fan and cracked its iron spines twice against the mouth of the communication tube, not deigning to speak. Hearing the command, the ten-band of mindbound below who drew the travelling throne threw themselves into their draught harnesses, and the conveyance picked up speed.

Bloodfall began to come down outside the mail curtains of the palanquin, hot gore splattering on the canopy overhead. The mindbound would soon be running wet with it, Vignus knew, and the thought made him smile behind his alabaster mask. Ahead, the spiked walls of Carngrad were coming into view through the crimson downpour, the severed heads that topped them glistening, slick with black rot and the falling blood.

Such storms were common across the vast expanse of the Bloodwind Spoil, but Vignus thought this one looked to be heavy even by the standards of that ever-changing land. The thought pleased him.

‘Fleshripper’s Gate up ahead, High Master,’ the guide announced. ‘I brought you here, m’lord, how I said I would. There was talk of a reward, sir, when I’d done that.’

Vignus looked down from his travelling throne into the vile face of this base character who persisted in daring to speak to him. That was repellent enough, but to have the temerity to expect a reward simply because one had been promised? Behind his mask, Vignus’ thin lips twisted into a cruel smile. A reward it would be, then.

‘So there was,’ he said.

He spoke softly, his cultured voice barely carrying over the hammering bloodfall, but still the guide quailed before him as though realising the lack of wisdom in his request.

Vignus took something from his robe, a small glass orb, and casually let it fall into the servant’s well to the left side of his throne where the guide crouched.

The orb hit the iron floor and smashed, and an oily black vapour rose around the guide’s sutured face. He screamed.

His howls of torment served to herald the coming of the war palanquin of Thrallmaster Vignus Daneggia to Carngrad.

The guards on Fleshripper’s Gate looked up as they heard the siren call of agony and madness, and then Vignus’ second ten-band of mindbound were up and throwing. Their alchemical bombs landed amongst the gate sentries and detonated, the noise of them swallowed by the howling fury of the gorestorm.

‘Get them off me!’ one of the guards shrieked, over and over as he scrabbled frantically at his armour as though it were covered in fang-leeches. ‘Get them off me!’

Another drew his thick-bladed stabsword and laid about himself with it in a maddened frenzy, gutting three of his comrades before they could react. That one fell as another split his head with a great spiked axe, then their last surviving member hurled himself at the axeman and tore out his throat with a rusty dagger.

‘Please, please, get them off me!’ he shrieked, flailing at hallucinatory terrors before finally plunging his blade into his own heart to end his torment.

So it was that Thrallmaster Vignus Daneggia of the Hands of Darkness warband entered Carngrad unopposed.

The Cypher Lords will not be denied, he thought as his palanquin ground over the corpses in the worsening bloodfall. I am here. Fear me.

‘Let the Lords of Chaos rule,’ he whispered.

The palanquin passed into the warren of narrow, twisting streets that marked the outskirts of the Reaver City. Shanty buildings loomed above them, their upper storeys leaning precariously out over the streets and looking ready to collapse at a moment’s notice. The twin stenches of blood and dung warred for mastery in the thick, foetid air. One of the mindbound pulled the guide’s bubbling, dying body from the servant’s well and dumped it unceremoniously into the gutter where it would not offend the High Master’s eye.

Vignus wafted his fan lazily in front of his alabaster mask and sat back in his travelling throne with a smile of contentment on his unseen lips, ignoring the unprompted action.

‘The ways ahead are too narrow, High Master,’ a voice said.

Vignus looked to his right, where his chief mirrorblade stood in the other servant’s well. Mirrorblade Semili Calcis looked up at him, her dark eyes unreadable through the slits in her own mask. The long hilt of her polished glaive protruded over her right shoulder like a war standard, the pommel carved to resemble a face of screaming madness.

‘Then widen them,’ Vignus said with a dismissive waft of his fan.

Calcis leaned over the parapet of the war palanquin and barked curt orders to the unharnessed mindbound below. A moment later six or seven of them were off and running into the shadows of the streets with rough leather satchels over their shoulders. Vignus turned away before the alchemical explosions started ripping through the close-packed buildings, tearing them out of his way like so much brushwood in a dry forest. Flames leapt into the rapidly darkening evening sky, but were swiftly quenched by the unceasing bloodfall. The palanquin ground forward into the widened thoroughfare as all around them families burned unmourned in their demolished hovels.

‘High Master, your Word is mighty and will never go opposed,’ Calcis said, ‘but we lack the explosives to so widen every thoroughfare of this city to make way for the greatness of your passing. The cargo takes up much room within the palanquin, and space for ordnance was thusly limited, as your eminence knows.’

Vignus knew it was as Calcis said, but he was a great believer in making a proper entrance when he first came to a new place. These worthless scum needed to understand who they were dealing with, after all. Still, he supposed, that would have to be enough for now; the cargo was very important to him, and if conveying it had meant sacrificing space more commonly used to hold his carefully brewed alchemical explosives then so be it.

‘It is understood,’ he said. ‘The palanquin must remain behind, it seems, although it must not go unguarded. Without the cargo there is no sense to my being here at all.’

‘So it is decreed, High Master,’ Calcis said, and she bowed her masked head deferentially. ‘So shall it be done.’

She swung down from the palanquin with the lithe grace of a hunting lioness, her voice cracking like a whip in the bloodfall as she barked orders at her two mirrorblade disciples and the two ten-bands of mindbound under her indirect command. She was the Thrallmaster’s Voice, chief among his most trusted warriors, but she was not close to being his equal and Vignus knew that she understood that.

Life in the hierarchy of the Cypher Lords was strictly stratified, as such things should be, and even the most trusted and exalted mirrorblade was not a Thrallmaster and never would be. For all that, Vignus reflected, Calcis was the most able and deadly servant he had ever had in all his long life. Only his luminate, the mute Palania who rode in the hold with the cargo, stood equal to her and answered directly to Vignus himself.

Vignus sat back in his travelling throne and regarded Carngrad through the blood-slick mail curtains of his war palanquin. The city writhed around him, a restless pit of human venom and spite. This was Carngrad’s flesh district, so his advance spies had told him, home to slave pits and flesh markets beyond counting. This was where the lowest detritus of the Bloodwind Spoil washed up, to be sold for labour or meat or still baser things.

The spies of Vignus’ Hands of Darkness warband had been in the city for a month or more already, planting in strategic places the sorcerous Eyes of Noschseed through which Vignus could watch and listen and command. He closed his physical eyes behind his mask and reached out for the nearest one that he could feel, his mind ranging across the swirling Paths of Chaos as he opened the sorcerous Seeing Eye of his mind. He found one of the small silver-and-gold stones stuck high to the chimney of a forge not three streets away. Through it, he could make out his war palanquin, glistening with gore and reflecting back the flames of destruction that were still guttering out around it in the pounding bloodfall. The forge itself looked promising, solidly built of stone and easily defensible, but regrettably not large enough to house the palanquin. He cast around with the Eye of Noschseed, searching the surrounding area until he spied what appeared to be a half-collapsed warehouse in the next street.

Vignus nodded to himself and opened his physical eyes behind his mask. He snapped his fan open and rang its iron spines against the side of his throne in summons.

Calcis was at his side a moment later.

‘I live to serve, High Master,’ she said.

‘The next street to the left,’ Vignus said. ‘There is a warehouse there. We shall secure the palanquin and its cargo within, then proceed on foot to a sturdy forge I have chosen as my temporary base of operations.’

‘So it is decreed,’ Calcis said, and slipped once more into the pounding bloodfall.

Three mindbound ran ahead to secure the warehouse, and barely minutes later the palanquin was moving once more. It bulled its way through streets too narrow for its passing, but there were no more explosions. Instead the mindbound simply chopped down obstructions with their axes, and any dwellers who emerged from their houses to protest the action received the same heavy-bladed treatment. They were all armed and ugly, base warriors to a man, but the mindbound were in the presence of their High Master and under his gaze they fought with an unstoppable ferocity in the close confines of the stinking street. Vignus wafted his fan in front of his masked face and ignored it all. He was a noble scion of Noschseed, and such disputes amongst animals were beneath his notice.

Soon the thralls pried open the great rotting wooden doors of the warehouse, and Vignus ordered that his palanquin be brought inside. Once the huge, armoured conveyance – almost the size of a Thunderscorn dragon ogor – was safely secured within and the mindbound freed from their draught harnesses, Vignus sat up in his travelling throne and stretched until his shoulder joints popped. Without needing to be told, Calcis ordered one of her pair of mirrorblade disciples, Darrath by name, and half a ten-band of the mindbound to remain and guard the conveyance and its precious cargo. They would do so with their lives if need be, Vignus had absolutely no doubt about that.

The alternative, of course – to face his wrath if they lost the cargo – would be so much worse.

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A Black Library Publication

First published in Warcry: The Anthology in Great Britain in 2019.
This eBook edition published in 2020 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.
Cover illustration by Paul Dainton.

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