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Oracle – Extract

A Black Library Publication

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Oracle

By Liane Merciel

Etanios found Anvilgard unsettling.

Though the city stood in Aqshy, its ornately clawed architecture and gloom-choked streets seemed better suited to the shadowy lands of Ulgu or Shyish. Its skyline was all hooks and spires, a woven crown of thorns; its people wore grim grey and black, for other colours stained too easily in Anvilgard’s envenomed air.

Grey fog filled the city’s streets, belched out continuously by enormous, dragon-headed alchemical towers. The dense vapour was a powerful defoliant, pumped throughout Anvilgard to keep the streets from being choked by the unnaturally vigorous flora in this part of Aqshy.

It was said to be harmless to the city’s inhabitants, but Etanios wondered how true that was. How could something so deadly to plant life not hurt the people who lived in its grasp? It turned unwashed windows into blind black cataracts and purged the city of gardens. Surely it must do something to living bodies and souls? Mortals were not so resilient.

But if so, no one in Anvilgard spoke of it. And so it seemed to the Stormcast Eternal that Anvilgard’s fogs were but the physical manifestation of the secrets and lies that drifted through the clawed city, equally pernicious and ever-present, and equally unmentioned by its citizens.

It would be a relief, Etanios thought, to leave this murk-haunted place and return to the parched red wastes he knew. There, at least, Aqshy’s hostilities were honest.

For now, however, he was needed here.

Most of the Anvils of the Heldenhammer, the primary Stormhost defending Anvilgard, had been called away to serve in another realm’s great struggle. Etanios wasn’t privy to the details; all he knew was that the towering fortress of the Black Nexus stood near empty of its guardians, and that his small strike force of the Hammers of Sigmar had been called back from the hinterlands to reinforce their depleted strength.

He’d thought that this might entail standing watch over the Black Nexus’ precious Realmgates, or patrolling the smoke-swept walls of the city. He had not expected it to involve assisting with a murder investigation. Stormcast Eternals were not, in general, noted for their skills of inquest, and Etanios was no exception to that rule.

But Anvilgard had been plagued by a rash of murders among its influential citizens, and the city authorities were so short-handed that they’d asked the Stormcast Eternals to step in – particularly where heretics were suspected.

Two weeks ago, Magistrate Ilius Caroscale had choked to death at dinner. Post-mortem dissection of the eminent jurist’s throat had turned up neither fishbone nor bread chunk. Instead, the mortuaros had found an embryonic head. A ball of teeth, eyeless and monstrous, had erupted from the inner flesh of Magistrate Caroscale’s throat. That writhing white thing, not any morsel of food, had choked him.

Poison, the mortuaros had declared. Varanite. The deadly distilled essence of Chaos.

None but an agent of the Ruinous Powers would dare to touch such a poison, knowing the penalties for its possession and the dangers of its use. None but a truly dangerous agent could obtain it, given that it came only from the Eightpoints.

And where the cults of Chaos were at work, the Stormcast Eternals stood against them. It was the purpose for which they’d been forged. It was why they drew breath.

It was Etanios’ duty.

‘There,’ said Witchfinder Ithyrac, nodding towards a gaunt spire of black stone sunk in the shadows between two higher, more majestic towers. ‘They’ve holed up in there.’

‘How many?’ rumbled Lord-Relictor Sereghast, eyeing the spire’s narrow windows as if he could see through their lightless slits. Perhaps he could, Etanios thought. The Anvils of the Heldenhammer were an ancient and secretive Stormhost, practitioners of grim rites and keepers of strange powers carried from the ruins of a forgotten world. Who knew what one of their Lord-Relictors could do?

‘Six to eight, including Remera herself. Maybe traps, maybe magic and poison. Biggest obstacle’s likely to be the spire itself, though,’ Ithyrac said. ‘Low ceilings, flimsy floors. The place wasn’t built for visitors as big as yourselves. Getting through without collapsing the entire building’ll be the real trick. That, and taking Remera alive.’

The Lord-Relictor’s stern black helm turned towards Etanios. ‘You will go with the witchfinder. Capture the poisoner for questioning. We will ensure none escapes the spire.’

Etanios nodded, readying his shield and hammer. Though he was of another Stormhost and Lord-Relictor Sereghast had no formal authority to command him, he was eager to offer aid in whatever way he could. Sigmar had honoured him greatly by choosing him to be reforged, and Etanios was still anxious to show himself worthy of that honour.

He fell in behind Ithyrac and the witchfinder’s two assistants, identically clad in close-fitting leather cowls and masks of volcanic glass. All three carried duardin-crafted shock-sticks and small crossbows loaded with paralytic quarrels, intended to subdue their targets rather than kill.

At a signal from Witchfinder Ithyrac, Etanios kicked in the door. Wood shattered under his sigmarite-plated boot, scattering across a cramped entryway and a parlour littered with the desiccated carcasses of moths and mice. Rotting velvet curtains, more dust and cobwebs than cloth, covered the grime-smeared windows.

Etanios went in first. The witchfinder and his assistants fanned out behind him, and he motioned for them to take the upper floors while he cleared the ground level.

Low-hanging draperies caught on Etanios’ helm and tore loose from the ceiling. Deformed beetles and blind, iridescent moths flittered from the cloth, swirling around him in a disorientating cloud. They shimmered brilliantly in the dark, and phantasmagoric sigils flashed on their wings before burning into curls of pungent, multicoloured smoke.

Etanios blinked away the magic’s sting. Had he been human, perhaps the smoke would have choked him, or his eyes might have burst and run down his cheeks, but it took more than that to affect one of Sigmar’s chosen. Still, it confirmed the presence of Chaos in this place, and the power of the cult that Witchfinder Ithyrac had uncovered.

Past the parlour was a musty library, its walls crowded with uneven bookshelves obscured behind more loops of damp, rotting drapery. Etanios pulled one aside, dislodging another cloud of maddening insects.

Behind them stood a row of books bound in soft, fleshy leather. Their covers were flayed faces, human and aelven and duardin, trapped in a macabre semblance of life. They winked and yawned and chuckled at Etanios as he looked upon them, their withered lips moving in words they had no lungs to voice. It was a horror, but not one that affected his mission. This place would be purged later. His duty was merely to clear its defenders.

The cultists were waiting for him in the next room. It might have been a kitchen originally, or a vivisectionist’s laboratory. In their hands it had become both – a place where bodies lay pinned open on bloodstained tables, roasting forks thrust through their wrists and ankles to hold them against the wood.

The corpses had been partly eaten, and as Etanios moved into view, their devourers rose up, hissing. Gaunt and greyed by lifelong immersion in Anvilgard’s fumes, they were barely recognisable as human. They’d replaced their teeth with shards of brightly coloured glass, which twinkled like fractured jewels in mouthfuls of dark blood.

Perhaps they hoped that the ghastly sight would unnerve him, or that the swarms of insects in the earlier rooms had weakened him enough to give them a crucial edge.

If so, they were in for a deadly disappointment.

Etanios kicked the nearest table, sending it flying backwards with such force that the two cultists behind it were crushed into bloody pulp as it slammed into the spire’s stone wall. A third leapt at him, swinging a dented cleaver. Etanios didn’t bother dodging or blocking; he simply swept his hammer out in a wide, lightning-chased arc. A blinding flash filled the room, bright enough to incinerate shadows, and when it faded the cultist was a twitching, smoking corpse.

More fighting had broken out upstairs. An ambush. Etanios lifted his head, tracking the noise with inhuman precision. Six heartbeats… no, one was suddenly failing. Five. One of Ithyrac’s assistants cried out in terror as the other heartbeat faltered. The witchfinder snarled defiance, but Etanios could hear the shiver of apprehension under his bravado.

Whatever Ithyrac faced was beyond his abilities. They needed help, and Etanios didn’t have time to hunt through stairs and hallways to find them.

He strode back to the library of flayed faces. Gauging the pace and placement of the noises upstairs, Etanios hurled his hammer against the ceiling and called upon Sigmar’s power.

Lightning erupted from the weapon, accompanied by a deafening crack of thunder. Shattered plaster, dirt and blasted wooden beams rained down, along with three flailing figures and two corpses.

He’d aimed well. The two dead were cultists, their skin threaded with glass that had exploded in the face of Sigmar’s wrath, leaving the bodies speckled with starbursts of torn flesh.

Witchfinder Ithyrac and his surviving assistant picked themselves up unsteadily, dazed but alive. With them rose a massive, lumpen figure, her cloaking rags scorched and torn by the blast and fall. The cult’s leader, he presumed. Remera.

Every inch of her skin was riddled with glass shards, glittering in the dancing aftershocks of the Stormcast’s lightning like a mosaic of crushed rainbows. As Remera rose from the debris and the fleshy rolls of her body fell back into place, the shards clattered together in a maddening cacophony. The spiked tapestry had been worked into obscene sigils and icons of depravity powerful enough that they drew tears even from Etanios.

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A Black Library Publication

First published in Great Britain in 2021.
This eBook edition published in 2021 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.
Cover illustration by Catherine O’Connor.

Oracle © Copyright Games Workshop Limited 2021. Oracle, 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: 978-1-80026-728-2

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