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The Nameless – Extract

A Black Library Publication

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The Nameless

Hal Wilson

I open my eyes to a sky as dark and ugly as a bruise.

My head: pulsing pain, rich and spiteful.

My mouth: dry, cotton-thick from a dreamless, restless sleep.

I start using my hands to work life into my bones, and grit out of my eyes. But I soon give up – my pale skin is too thickly caked with dirt and dust.

I shift my weight, muscles protesting, until I feel an unforgiving jab in my leg. Parting my long, tattered tunic, I reach for the source. My fingertips brush cool, smooth metal. I pull it into view and find a pistol, glinting like starlight and weighing like an unhappy conscience. Six pieces of dark, crystalline stone sit snug in the rotating chambers, and a single silver word is engraved in the barrel.

MARNE.

I glance about. I lie in a broad street, buildings leering down at me in idiot curiosity, each a uniform grey under veils of powdery dust, their vacant windows as black as gapped teeth. That’s when I first glimpse it.

The bell tower.

I stumble slowly to my feet, stuffing the pistol into the folds of my tunic. The bell tower looms at me, plaster-cracked, sun-bleached, but as imposing as a cliff-face.

I know this place. I know its gargoyles, the slouching sentries with weather-beaten faces and chipped shoulders. I know the friezes of carved skulls and hammers, and the tapering tower, with its single bell hanging proud of the masonry, a silhouette amid the violet clouds.

Every feature is inevitable; every line is in its place.

And yet, I have no memory of the tower.

I have no memory.

Of the tower.

Of the gun.

Of me.

‘My name,’ I blurt out. ‘My name!’

I put my hands to my head, burying my fingers in loose curls of hair. Breathing becomes frantic. Faster and faster. Panic, mounting in my breast like a growing flame. My knees give way and I drop to the ground as if in prayer. There I kneel, head in my palms, heart racing.

Slowly, with laborious care, I fight to ease my nerves. I bottle up the questions multiplying in my head and I slow my racing breath. And then, to be safe, I slap myself once or twice. The sting burns deep. I get up.

As a drowning man needs air, I need to move.

With only the wind and my shadow for company, my footsteps ring out a pattern on the flagstones, announcing my progress along the streets. Glimpses of motion watch me go – tell-tale flickers, suggestions of something more and something less than the drifting dust.

In time I spy a figure, some way ahead, walking towards a low palisade wall. I take a breath to call out. But the silence gives me pause. Instead, I break into a jog. My legs eat the distance gamely, while the figure makes no effort to hurry.

‘Hello,’ I venture, drawing closer. ‘Hello?’

The figure turns, revealing a haggard woman with a gaze as hard as granite. She sizes me up from under a frayed hat, and opens her cracked lips to ask, ‘Got any firewater on you?’ Her hand, I notice, rests on the pommel of a knife, tucked into her belt.

‘No, I don’t.’

She lets the hand drop. ‘Piss off, then.’

‘Where are you going?’

‘To find a drink.’ She turns away and shuffles on down the street.

‘Who are you?’ I ask, keeping step with her.

Her pace falters, if only for a moment. ‘Don’t know.’

Without thinking, I take her arm. ‘You don’t know either?’

She recoils, flashing the pommel again, businesslike. ‘Try running that mouth some more.’

‘At least tell me where we are? Does this town even have a name?’

But she’s already moving on. The buildings around us taper off like an unfinished sentence as we approach the palisade wall. A simple abutment of raised earth and logs, as dry as stacked kindling. It stands without sentries. No weapons are piled along its length, waiting patiently. Only the dust stirs on the wall, spilling freely towards the town.

‘Where are you going, then?’ I ask her. ‘You can tell me that, surely?’

‘Like I said,’ she grunts. ‘To find some firewater.’

I follow her through a gap in the palisade.

Nothing awaits beyond. A grey and desiccated waste, riven with cracks and fissures, stretches far away. Only one feature breaks up the unremitting scheme of greys. A road – or the remains of one – charting a lonely, ochre path. It curves tentatively to the indigo horizon, as if unsure of itself.

Despite my irresistible ignorance, some obscure instinct breaks through and draws up a name for this wretched place, as easily as I draw my every passing breath.

Shyish.

The woman starts walking. But something tells me to hold my place.

Over my left shoulder I spy a statue, with a single stone hand outstretched in cold command. I beetle my brows. Like butter on a pan, the stone of the statue’s head has somehow melted, congealing like tear-tracks along its sculpted breastplate. Of the head itself – sparking and glowing with latent energy – a mere stump remains, from which a bottom jaw hangs low, as if in mute horror at its fate.

I glance to my right, finding an identical statue, and another beyond that. Each part of a perimeter line along the palisade wall. Each equally deformed. But still, I read the sculptor’s silent eloquence – the passions behind these half-wrecked things.

‘You should stay,’ I call out to the woman. ‘Come back.’

Her steps raise subtle ghosts of dust from the lonely road, heedless.

This time, I shout. ‘Come back!’

A shudder runs up my spine. Out there, in the barren dust, I had seen something. It had defied my focus. Like a mote drifting across the eye, or some half-remembered dream. Yet the after-image lingers. Of chains and bones, of fraying cloth and rusting steel – a shimmering, teasing impression, coming and going with the light. But terrible to look upon. That same instinct which named this place Shyish speaks to me again, now offering a name for these spectres.

Nighthaunt. Monsters which once were men and women.

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A Black Library Publication

This eBook edition published in 2024 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 Alex Boyd.

The Nameless © Copyright Games Workshop Limited 2024. The Nameless, 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.
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ISBN: 978-1-83609-074-8

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