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This Rough Beast – Extract

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This Rough Beast

Graham Thomas Wilcox

Outside many-mountained Ulrung, the Knights of the Wolf Rampant watched the Fyreslayers gather for battle. They sat arrayed in conroi upon a ridge overlooking Mingol Drazhgrund – Blackhammer’s Tower – the dying sun striking bright fire from their red and fluted plate. Kastellan Sforzia stood in her stirrups, turned to Marcuccio and grinned.

‘At last, we have them. Loose Morgaw on them, and we shall charge.’

Marcuccio was staring at the tower. It did not, he thought, look anything like the keeps and donjons of old Carstinia. In truth, it was little more than a squat gate hewn into a mountainside, choked with runes and carven bearded faces. Yet, bloodroses are known to bloom from the driest, ungory earth. So Torquato, bearer of the Banner of Night Forlorn, had assured them when first they clapped eyes upon it. Even so, doubt, that dagger of the soul, pricked Marcuccio’s heart.

‘Marcuccio,’ Sforzia said, impatience sharpening her voice. ‘Order the wolf onwards. We charge behind her. Now, if you please.’

He looked to his left, at the Kastellan. Then to his right, where lounged the wolf Morgaw – white-furred, amber-eyed, tall as a Hammerhal destrier at the shoulder. The wolf growled. Her hackles bristled. Hearing in her rough voice the spectre of his own apprehension, Marcuccio shook his head.

‘She says they are too many. I do not believe she errs. Our strength wanes – let us fly.’

Sforzia speared him with a look. ‘She is a wolf. She receives no say.’

‘I am a knight. I have given her my oath. She shall see the cairns of her homeland again. We have hunted the Black Chalice this long. Another night shall not injure us.’

‘Oaths to a wolf.’ Sforzia snorted. Morgaw growled, but the Kastellan, if she heard her, did not acknowledge it. ‘We divined this night in the entrails of the Broken Templar. We heard it in the death howl of Wiglaf One-eye and all his Darkoathed horde. Now, the legendary Whitebeard stands below. His blood is the last reagent. With it, the Black Chalice shall be ours. Nagash’s curse may end, brother. Upon your own sword, you swore yourself to this hunt. Do you not recall?’

Marcuccio looked at the duardin below. One among them, his beard longer and paler than his kin, bawled orders in their harsh language. A crown crested his helm. At his right hand stood one of their priests, chanting and swinging a censer; at his left another duardin, cloaked and hooded, lounged upon an axe. Sforzia snorted again, and Marcuccio’s gaze snapped back towards her.

‘I recall,’ he said. ‘Yet, I did not think Whitebeard a king. And this one’s beard is more grey than white, I daresay. Nor is the language of the legend so certain as you claim.’ Sforzia scowled, and he shrugged. ‘It is of no matter. We’ve hunted him this long. What is a night or two longer to recoup our might? We hunt elsewhere, and return.’

‘If they are many now, they may yet grow in number. The Chalice can wait, but Whitebeard may not. The realms are large, brother. Who is to say where he shall go? We clasp our fangs to his throat. We would be fools not to bite.’

The argument was old and well-worn between them, like a ghoul’s favourite bone; Marcuccio could not resist one more gnaw at the marrow.

‘You do not err, Kastellan,’ he said. ‘We’ve hunted long. Yet, we’ve feasted little. I fear we act rashly.’ Marcuccio unhasped the book from his saddle, ignoring the groans from the knights behind him. ‘Consider what Sir Gromdal wrote – The first and greatest victory is to conquer the thirst. There is no shame more vile than to be by the thirst conquered.’

Sforzia shook her head. Beneath her helm, her hair, like braided sunlight, gleamed. She looked down the long arch of her nose at Marcuccio. ‘That book. By the Crimson Keep, I curse the day you dredged it forth. It is nothing.’

Marcuccio remembered well the day. The tower, old and ruinous, a fang splintered off from some elder world. The desperate battle amidst its crumbled battlements, its rotten roots. The terror they slew within its dungeons – one of the Sombre Paladin’s abhorrent get. Morgaw, then but a starveling wretch, had saved him from the ghoul-king’s claws. He’d sworn his oath to her thereafter. They’d fished the book from the bones and offal of its treasure hoard and read in that tome’s yellowed pages about the location of the Black Chalice. Though it was couched in long metaphor and strange diction, they nevertheless recognised the legend – no Kastelai in all the Eight Realms was ignorant of it. The Black Chalice was Sir Ushoran’s own cup, thieved from him when he was at last cast down by Nagash. To sup from it, so the legends said, promised an end to the Hunger. An end to Nagash’s hold upon their honour. The Knights of the Wolf Rampant all swore themselves to its discovery, beneath the waning moons.

Memories of an older, better time. He shook his head, thus dispelling from him nostalgia and its sweet melancholies. ‘The book speaks of honour. And of the quest.’

Sforzia’s scowl deepened. Her eyes, blue as watered steel, thrust for him anew. ‘Enough,’ she said. She lifted her chin and the Wraith Moons gilded the sharp edges of her face, and her beauty deflected Marcuccio’s retort before he ever spoke it. ‘Would you be Nagash’s slave forever? We ride. We conquer.’ Then, to Marcuccio alone, her voice razored down to its finest whispering edge. ‘You swore yourself to its discovery, sir.’

For freedom, she may have claimed. For the Black Chalice. But her sunken cheeks, her burning eyes, her slavered lips spoke a different story. The Hunger is in her, Marcuccio thought. It was in him, too. His tongue was dry, like leather baked beneath a sun unsetting. When he blinked, his eyes gritted against their lids. He saw the eyes of his fellow knights, red and hungry as wood-starved flame. His own fangs ached, as though by pain alone they might water that desert in him. He clenched and unclenched his fists. Blood, some part of him whispered (always whispered, wind breathing across a tomb), blood.

Sforzia was not wrong. The Hunger was Nagash’s chain, noosed around the necks of all the Kastelai. Its shattering was worth all hazard. And he had sworn himself to it.

Sforzia, he realised, was staring at him. He snapped his mouth shut, and nodded. Sforzia turned her head away, her expression unreadable. She flogged the air above their heads with her mace, its head carved like a fist robed in blood.

‘The Black Chalice,’ she cried. ‘Vhordrai! Vhordrai!’

Behind her, Torquato unfurled the Banner of Night Forlorn – a wolf and crescent moon, argent and sable – and it was time. Drawing breath into his dead lungs, Marcuccio winded once more the Flayed Clarion. As one, the conroi’s lances lowered. Hooves thundered the earth.

‘Vhordrai! Vhordrai! Vhordrai!’ The whole conroi now, chanting their absent lord’s name, a battle cry, a warning, a prayer. The whole conroi, that is, but one.

Marcuccio’s lips parted, his fangs bare to the wind. He needed something on which he might focus besides his comrades’ chanting, fang-gnashing frenzy. He chose – as all true Kastelai should choose – to focus on his Art. His seat in his Nightmare’s saddle: settled but not stiff; loose but not slovenly. His lance couched beneath his arm, its filigreed neck snugged tight against his breastplate’s arret, its point straight and proud and unwavering as pale death itself. All in accordance with the One and Sanguine Art as proscribed in the scrolls of the Kastelai by Vhordrai himself. Art, not ardour. Honour, not hunger.

Marcuccio’s teeth ached.

A Black Library Publication

This eBook edition published in 2025 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 Catherine O’Connor.

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ISBN: 978-1-83609-250-6

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