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The Strong Among Us – Extract

A Black Library Publication

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The Strong Among Us

by Steve Lyons

The forge had been besieged for seventeen days.

It felt like longer. Jarrah struggled to remember how life had been before, when he had felt protected. He was becoming accustomed to fear’s icy grip on his heart, and this frightened him more.

Hard labour was a welcome distraction. Today, he manned a defensive emplacement. A half-constructed Earthshaker cannon had been wheeled up to a huge crack in the wall. Jarrah didn’t know how to operate it – though he had played a small part in its manufacture – but he could heft heavy shells up onto his shoulder and pass them to a fellow drudge, who would load them.

The big gun’s blast had made him wince, at first. Now his ears were deadened to it, as they were to the rolling thunder of guns from without.

Jarrah hadn’t looked outside in days. He feared what he might see, though he knew he would likely see nothing. The forge’s attackers were distant yet, hunkered down in their trenches and dugouts. Jarrah had glimpsed them only once, shortly after their arrival, specks on the horizon or possibly tricks of the eye. Now a smoke haze clung to the blasted land between them, obscuring them further.

He knew the attackers were still there by their thunder. In his bones, he felt the impacts of their better-targeted shells. He may have helped assemble their cannons as well. Blackfire Forge had shipped so many Earthshakers to the Emperor’s fighting forces. It was one such force that now pounded at its obdurate walls.

Every morning, every night, Jarrah prayed for them to break through.

He prayed for the Emperor to save him.

Jarrah slept in fits and starts.

The most comfortable places – the few living spaces and larger clerical offices – were taken by Blackfire’s occupiers. He bedded down draped in a scavenged sheet against the cold, iron side of a broken-down press. He hadn’t bathed in weeks.

The forge was the size of a hundred city blocks. This deep inside, the only light was actinic, unnatural. Jarrah had no way to measure time, but for the klaxons that still blew to mark the changing of work shifts. He rose not when he had slept enough, but when his muscles ached too much to sleep on.

He took what food was provided to him. There had been plenty, but now rations seemed to shrink daily. Jarrah boiled up grey oats over a sputtering furnace, and joined a group of weary labourers to eat and converse in low voices.

‘I tell you,’ said an older, sallow-faced man – Jarrah didn’t know his name, but thought he had worked in Grinding – ‘they’re Death Korps. That’s who they’ve sent to take back Blackfire, a Krieg regiment.’

At least half his audience, including Jarrah, looked blank.

The man sighed. ‘I saw them in a pict-feed. It must have been, I don’t know, twenty years ago. Siege specialists, they are. No matter the target, they’ll dig in and wait, for weeks or months if they have to. I heard of one siege that lasted over ten years.’

A gleam had entered the sallow-faced man’s eye. He cleared his throat and looked away. A pair of cultists in frayed black robes, their faces crazed with tattooed blasphemies, walked by but didn’t spare the speaker a glance. He resumed his narrative, trying harder to maintain a neutral tone.

‘I saw footage of them in action. They never once faltered. For each one that fell, another two, three, four rose to replace him, and they just kept on coming, advancing.’

Jarrah pictured a mass of Guardsmen in shining armour, breaking Blackfire’s tattooed captors, trampling them underfoot. He felt a thrill of hope, but suppressed it. Like the speaker, he didn’t dare let his loyalties show. No cultists were watching him now, but there were traitors among his fellow captives.

He had woken to the screaming of one such, two nights ago: ‘Masters! Masters! These men are plotting to kill your sentries and open a gate to our foes.’ Jarrah had shrunk beneath his flimsy sheet, plugging his ears and hating himself for being unable to do anything. He had tried to blot out the sounds of gunshots and tortured screams, as black robes had swooped upon the scene.

Three alleged plotters had been dragged away, bloodied, one body left to rot. The informant had snatched at a trailing robe, gibbering, ‘Did I serve you well? Will I be rewarded?’ Dislodged with a sharp kick, he had scampered into a corner to whimper.

When Jarrah had woken again, the informant was dead, his throat slit. This at least reassured him that not all his former workmates had turned. Most were keeping their heads down as he was, doing what they must to stay alive. He couldn’t tell the faithful from the heretic, however, nor guess who might break next.

‘I heard…’ a young man with a tangle of blond hair ventured, ‘I heard that Garran and the others were dead.’

The news was met by noncommittal murmurs, none of them surprised. ‘I heard the same,’ someone else spoke up, ‘from Tharn in Waste Disposal. He said their bodies…’ He drew in a shuddering breath. ‘He said they were covered in boils and sores, and deformed. Like their skin and bones had melted.’

A few men almost crossed their chests with the sign of the aquila, but checked themselves. Jarrah eyed the mound of tasteless oats on his spoon and lowered it again.

When the cultists had infiltrated and seized Blackfire Forge two months ago, they had killed its shift managers, administrators and security personnel. They had spared the labourers, those who didn’t try to fight them. In the earliest days, they had been pressed back into service, forging and assembling weapons to employ against the soldiers whom the Emperor would undoubtedly send.

Most of the forges had ceased to function now. The cultists, blaming sabotage, had executed scores of suspects – or done worse with them, it was rumoured.

More likely, they were themselves to blame. They had no concept of how to run this facility, how to serve the machine-spirits that controlled its daily routines. They cared only for their earthly pleasures, and for whatever profane rituals they conducted behind chained doors. They worked their captives hard – but one cultist’s order was often gainsaid by another, creating confusion. Small but crucial tasks had been neglected until the complex processes that relied upon them had broken down.

Jarrah’s job, assembling minor components of the Earthshaker’s targeting system, had vanished along with said components. He had not been reassigned, but was afraid to stand idle. He had no wish to be taken beyond those chained doors, to share the fate of the luckless Garran and friends.

‘How much longer, do you think?’ asked the young blond man. ‘They’ve been out there so long, the soldiers, and don’t seem to be getting any closer.’

‘They will,’ said the sallow-faced man with quiet certainty.

‘You said they’ll wait. They’ll wait for months if they have to.’

The older man nodded. ‘The Death Korps of Krieg will break through these walls, we can be sure. It’s just a matter of time. But if half of what we hear is true – about the cultists, about the powers they are trying to raise here – they may be too late.’

The diners lapsed into a sullen silence thereafter. Jarrah added his bowl to the piles of dirty crockery that it was no one’s job to wash, and trudged back towards his post. He spotted a rattling, whining trolley headed his way and, hurrying to match speed with it, hopped onto its flatbed trailer.

The trolley snaked its way through the forge’s gloomy, overheated tunnels, with passengers stepping on and off along the way. Some of them conversed, in the usual desultory tones, and Jarrah listened in, always eager for news, for hope.

He never spoke himself, however, just as he never met the glowering eyes of the cultists they passed along their route. It was safer that way.

Jarrah had not been assigned to the Earthshaker. Becoming superfluous several days ago, he had anxiously sought a useful role for himself. Finding two workers struggling to tame the massive cannon, he had offered his assistance.

He knew Tallen, the cannon’s loader, already. His skin was bronzed, his muscles rippling from a lifetime of swinging heavy hammers. The wirier, thin-faced gunner he did not know, and they hadn’t swapped names.

Compared to Tallen, Jarrah felt puny and clumsy. He had struggled to match the fitter man’s pace, at first. By now, he had adapted to the unchanging routine of bending, lifting, turning, lowering – or Tallen had wearied and slowed.

Jarrah tried not to think about what he was doing. He prayed that none of his shells had taken a life. The soldiers surrounding the forge, he hoped, were safe in their trenches. The bombardment was merely intended to keep them from emerging. He was only delaying their advance – which was troubling enough.

A braver man might have confided in the others. He might have suggested firing the cannon less often, perhaps only when they were observed. He might have proposed tampering with its sights to make its shells fall short. They could even have damaged the weapon beyond repair.

Tallen thrust a shell into the Earthshaker’s breech and stepped back, wiping his brow with the back of his hand. ‘Let’s hope it blows some soldier’s head off,’ he grumbled. ‘Why can’t they just leave us alone? We didn’t invite them here.’

Jarrah looked at the big man – properly, for the first time that day – and suddenly his failure to speak out felt like a blessing. Tallen’s face was not smeared with soot as he had assumed, but with ink. It formed a smudgy but distinct shape on his cheek, spilling onto his neck: a shape that Jarrah had seen upon many a cultist’s face.

It was a star, formed by a black circle with eight barbed spears jutting out of it.

‘If they just went away, we would be fine,’ Tallen resumed. ‘We could live as the masters aim to do, a life of pleasure.’

‘Outside of the Emperor’s protection,’ the Earthshaker’s gunner rumbled, without turning from his charge.

‘What has the Emperor done for us?’ Tallen spat. ‘I break my back for over twenty years, working ten-hour shifts for Him, and for what in return?’

He glared at Jarrah, who shifted awkwardly. He wasn’t prepared for such a test. He shied from speaking blasphemies aloud. He forced a weak smile – supportive enough, he hoped – to his lips instead, but hated himself for it.

‘You think the cult will allow us to join them?’ the gunner asked, mildly.

‘They said so, didn’t they? They told us, anyone who turns to their cause would be welcomed. They said we could be saved. We could be free.’

Jarrah heard a sudden sound, and whirled around. He expected to find a cultist standing behind him, perhaps with a knife drawn to punish him for disloyal thoughts. Instead, he only glimpsed a dark, hunched figure as it slipped away around the tunnel’s curve. It was roughly humanoid in size and shape, and yet something about it made his spine tingle with dread.

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A Black Library Publication

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

Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.
Cover illustration by Mark Holmes.

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ISBN: 978-1-78999-749-1

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