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Scourge of Fate – Extract

A Black Library Publication

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Part One

The Barrow King and the Black Pilgrim

In the Death-Realm of Shyish, the village of the Necris burned.

Its people burned with it, their slaughtered bodies flung onto the pyres kindled from their homesteads. Those who attempted to flee were chased down, killed and immolated. The Black Pilgrim’s instructions had been clear – neither flesh nor bone was to escape the flames that night.

The pilgrim himself saw little of the grisly work. He had ridden on from the village, leading his razor-fanged mount up the narrow, snowy tracks that wound their way into the Barrow Hills. He carried on now on foot, the firelight of the burning village long ago swallowed up behind him, bitter darkness and eddying snow pressing in on every side.

Hold your course, mortal. The voice echoed through the pilgrim’s head, colder than the biting wind.

He climbed higher. He was a towering figure, tall and broad-shouldered, his natural bulk accentuated by his armour. The black plate was baroque, edged with burnished silver bands and inscribed with dark runes of protection. Over his shoulders was draped a pelt cape, the hard blue scales of a slain Dracoth, now thick with snow. His helmet bore a slit visor and a crest of red-dyed horsehair, flanked by two horns that curled outwards like those of a ram. At his left hip was a heavy sword, sheathed in a scabbard of cured aelf-hide, while two long daggers were crossed over his chainmail cingulum. A shield of thick warpsteel was strapped to his left vambrace, embossed with an iron crest – a sea wyrm coiling beneath an eight-pointed star.

Glory awaits you.

The voice in the figure’s head was growing louder, its sickly tones quickening with excitement. It wished for nothing more than to be free, and the Black Pilgrim represented a chance for just that.

The man – if man he was – passed between the burial cairns of the ancient dead, the stone mounds almost lost beneath the thickening snow. He ignored them – he had not come this far for some brass trinket or rusting blade. His destination lay ahead, rising out of the swirling darkness, a pillar of cold stone set into the fallow earth at the heart of the hilltop.

The barrow of the Frost King, eternal lord of the Necris.

Step closer, my champion.

The Black Pilgrim halted at the barrow’s entrance, which was framed by two cornerstones of snow-clad rock. For a moment, he might have been a statue, cast from black iron, set to guard the king’s tomb for eternity.

The illusion was shattered as he reached out with his right hand, the spiked gauntlet passing just beyond the entranceway flanked by the two great stones. Immediately, a thick coating of hoar frost closed like a vice over the black metal, threatening to shatter it. The figure withdrew, flexing his fingers and breaking the ice with a crack.

He raised the gauntlet again, this time to the left-hand stone. A crunching blow shuddered away the snow that clung to it in a white cascade, revealing the markings carved into the rock.

The figure spent some seconds assessing them. Then, with abrupt force, he slammed the edge of his shield against the first of the etchings.

Did they truly believe their corpse-wards would keep him at bay?

The Black Pilgrim broke them with his shield, each in turn, until all were reduced to shattered stone strewn around the entrance to the barrow. Their power dissipated and he stepped into the darkness beyond, no icy death-spell closing about his heart.

He had come to retrieve a fellow servant of the True Gods, and he would not be dissuaded.

At first, he could see nothing in the barrow’s depths. He murmured a prayer to the Silver Fin, asking for guidance. Slowly, the interior of the burial place resolved itself around him, though whether that was because his eyes had grown accustomed to the darkness or because great T’char had answered him, he knew not.

The tomb was large, a circular space of drystone walls against which were set a dozen plinths. They were carved with mortuary emblems – skulls, bones, hourglasses and all the weak esotericism of the servants of the so-called Great Necromancer. Upon them rested the remains of twelve warriors, all skeletal, clad in ancient battle armour and with long, two-handed blades clutched to their rusting breastplates.

They occupied the pilgrim’s attention only briefly. His gaze was drawn to the far end of the chamber, to the stone sarcophagus that stood there, flanked by the twelve plinths. Its upright lid bore a crudely worked depiction of a skeletal figure standing in triumph, praised by the outstretched arms of living tribe folk prostrate beneath it.

Weak. So very weak.

Yesss, hissed the sickly voice of Nakali in the pilgrim’s skull, slithering around like the Golden Serpent. He shrugged it off, approaching the sarcophagus and slamming his warpsteel shield against it without hesitation.

The blow reverberated through the barrow, and sent a split running from the lid’s top to its bottom, breaking the effigy in half. He clenched his fangs and slammed home a second blow, then a third. The tomb continued to shake, and finally with a cracking sound the front of the sarcophagus crumbled and came crashing down before him.

He took a step back. A figure lay slumped within, another skeleton. This one was more finely armoured than its guards, and bore upon its helm a circlet of bronze. It was not the barrow king’s attire that held the pilgrim’s attention though, but the weapon it clutched.

The sword was large, its hilt gripped in two bony fists. The length was black steel, its double edge jagged and irregular. The pommel was crafted in the likeness of a golden serpent, its long fangs bared and its forked tongue darting out. The crosspiece was likewise fashioned into a two-headed snake, also cast in gold.

It was no rusting barrow-blade. It was an exquisite weapon, forged in the daemon furnaces of the Varanspire. It was what he had been hunting for, the debaser of the Lightning Temple and the great serpent-daemon of Slaanesh.

Nakali.

There was a glimmer of illumination. It was not the wholesome flicker of flames, but was cold and bitter, like grave-dirt caught in the back of the throat. The pilgrim realised that blue deadlights had flickered into being in the sockets of the barrow king’s skull.

The Frost King wakes, Nakali hissed. Quickly, champion!

He reached out with his right hand to snatch the sword from the king’s grasp, but before he could touch it the skeleton shuddered. There was a rattle as its bones re-formed and straightened, dragged tight as though by the sudden twitch of a marionette’s strings. It stood fully upright, its armour scraping against the stone of its tomb. With a snap, its head turned to face the pilgrim, and the deadlights in its sockets flared with an unnatural, immortal awareness.

Fool! Nakali shrieked.

The Black Pilgrim drew his own sword, Serpent’s Fang, the sensation of the heavy blade in his fist sending a familiar thrill through his body. It was always a blessing to kill, even when the enemy was already dead.

The Frost King stepped from its shattered resting place and hefted its own sword: Nakali, desperate to be free, desperate to be saved from the deathless grip of a warrior who could never be tempted by its whispers or tainted by its perverse aura. Though nothing but bone, the ancient undead champion carried the heavy blade without any difficulty, lent strength and vitality by the sorcerous tricks of its False God.

‘Come to me, corpse,’ the pilgrim demanded. ‘That I may release you from your long bondage.’

He attacked. Serpent’s Fang met Nakali’s edge, the clash of Chaotic steel ringing through the barrow, and he knew at once that the king’s weapon was superior. The realisation brought a smile to his thin lips. It was good to know he was not wasting his time.

He turned his right-handed stroke into an overhead blow, then a thrust, relying at first on his strength, then seeking to drive the reanimated corpse into the stone at its back. Neither tactic worked – the death magic binding the thing together was at least as strong as he was, and the master of the Necris had no human regard for self-preservation. It refused to take a backward step as he rained blows down upon it, its motions clumsy but enough to parry each strike. It was not trying to attack, he realised. After another flurry of blows, he understood why.

More light had filled the chamber. He heard the rattle and clatter of bones and the scrape of worn armour, and noticed that the twelve guards had risen from their plinths. At first their motions were jerky and uncoordinated, but as they moved to surround him he knew his time was up. Soon every barrow and cairn across the hillsides would have awoken.

‘Tzatzo!’

The pilgrim roared the name, the sound shaking the burial place just as surely as the first impact of his shield against the sarcophagus. The undead were unperturbed – they had no eardrums to burst, no brains to addle. The word had not been uttered for them, though.

The Frost King attacked. Nakali clashed against Serpent’s Fang once, twice, and then scored a jagged blow down the pilgrim’s left pauldron. He realised the corpse was becoming stronger and faster as it fought, the magics animating it taking a firmer hold of its remains the longer it was awake.

He took its next blow against his shield. Nakali rebounded violently from the hexed warpsteel, and he seized the chance to thrust Serpent’s Fang into the king’s open guard. His sword punched through the rusting breastplate and split its ribcage. Half a dozen shattered bones came away as he dragged the steel free, but the undead champion showed no sign of injury – it attacked, forcing him to take a step back or risk having his guard opened. He snarled with frustration, fangs bared.

The barrow-guard were upon him as well, and he was forced to turn away to meet them. They were slower and weaker than their king, but they were a distraction he could not afford. He shattered the skull of one with an upward thrust of his shield and cut another from collarbone to pelvis with a tight, spinning blow. The broadsword of another clattered ineffectually from his back, snagging in his Dracoth-pelt cape, but he was forced to turn to the king before he could break the one who dared strike him.

The undead master of the Necris had used the distraction well. It struck with an overhead blow. Made with the likes of Nakali, it would have cut open even a favoured champion of the Four. The pilgrim barely managed to get Serpent’s Fang up to meet it, and the clang of the two blades striking one another jarred up his arm. The blow was too much – with a clatter, the upper half of Serpent’s Fang came away, sheared in two, its tip impaling the frost-covered soil at his feet. He just managed to take enough of a step back to avoid Nakali’s descent.

The moment seemed to slow. Death was reaching for him, its icy fingers scraping along his skin and tightening around his heart and throat. He brought the shorn hilt of Serpent’s Fang up with all his strength, angling for the Frost King’s arm as it swung downwards, cutting towards the exposed bone just above its brass vambrace.

Even in death, Serpent’s Fang served the pilgrim well. The blade’s remains – a wicked stub – bit through the skeleton’s limb, splintering the ancient bone. Its fist came away, and with it Nakali, the sword spinning through the air for longer than seemed possible.

As the Frost King’s shorn limb disintegrated, the pilgrim reached out and, with a bellow, he grasped the sword’s hilt.

A landscape of writhing flesh consumes him. There are drumbeats on the perfumed breeze, primal and brutal. The vision comes apart, rent open with blood and screaming. In its place stands a boulder, a great block of pulsating green stone. Its outer surface cracks and splits, and verminous creatures spill out, gnawing the verdant substance with maniacal energy. It is consumed whole, and the flesh returns, crawling, writhing with lust-maddened need. Ahead of him, the Black Pilgrim sees a tree, its bark and boughs formed from intertwining bodies and grasping, fleshy limbs. A serpent is coiled about its groaning form, its scales golden and glittering with a lustre that fixes his eyes in place. It hisses his name, slowly, as though savouring it for the first time.

Vanik.

It lunges at him, its long fangs bared, and he lashes out with one hand, the motion born of instinct. The serpent is gone. The sky above is a black thunderhead, flickering with lightning. A single bolt slams down with a deafening crash, striking him, shattering him, splitting him into a thousand thousand broken shards–

He returned to the present, to reality. Somehow, he was still whole. The roar died in his throat.

Vanik blinked and, in the darkness, realised that his assailants had been flung back against the barrow’s walls. A shock wave of daemonic power had picked them up and hurled them away, the Frost King included, and now the barrow-guards lay shattered and broken around the edges of the tomb. The Frost King itself was slumped against its broken sarcophagus, head hanging to one side, a single flicker of deadlight still lingering in one eye socket.

Vanik looked down. Nakali was clenched in his gauntlet. The whole blade was vibrating, buzzing with the ecstasy of release.

Free me, the daemon’s voice slithered in his skull, full of hideous desire. I know your thoughts now, pilgrim. Release me, and all your desires will be realised.

‘Never,’ he replied, out loud. There was a cracking, scraping sound, and he half turned before the daemon could reply.

A femur was scraping through the barrow’s frozen dirt, as though tugged by an invisible string. Vanik realised that all of the shattered bones around him had begun twitching and rattling – they were coalescing, each one reknitted by whatever sorcery animated the tomb’s guardians. A pathetic necromantic trick. Even as he realised what was happening, the Frost King twitched. Its other eye socket ignited with deathly illumination once more, and it reached out with its one remaining skeletal hand, gripping the side of the sarcophagus.

Free me, Nakali reiterated. It is the only way we can escape this place.

‘No,’ Vanik said again, even as the reanimated barrow-guards began to rise around him, bones crunching and clacking. He had heard a noise from outside the tomb. A familiar scrabbling of claws on icy dirt.

The entrance to the barrow burst inwards, old stone and grave-dirt cascading down around the creature that had forced its way inside. It was a massive beast, moving on all fours and clad in thick barding, as though it were a Freeguild warhorse.

But it was not a warhorse.

It was his steed, Tzatzo.

The creature shrieked and lunged with her elongated, quill-studded head, her twin sets of serrated fangs clamping over the skull and upper ribcage of one of the barrow-guards. It came apart with a snap of splintered bone, and the rest of it turned to dust in her jaws. Tzatzo shrieked again, furious at having found neither flesh nor blood on her prey.

Vanik sheathed Nakali, but the blade snagged and snarled against the aelf-hide scabbard, and it took what felt like an eternity for him to break his grip and remove his gauntlet from its hilt. Had he grasped it with the bare skin of his palm, he doubted he would have had the strength to ever release it again.

Nakali snarled, but Vanik ignored the daemon – his mind was his own again. He moved to Tzatzo’s side and from there past the broken remains of the barrow entrance. The Chaos steed was screaming and snapping, her great fangs breaking apart the skeletal guardians while their blades slid from her flanks, unable to pierce either her armour or her reptilian hide.

‘Come!’ Vanik snapped at her. The Frost King had fully recovered itself and was approaching from across the tomb, the sword of one of its guards in its bony grip. Tzatzo snorted in disgust and turned, a violent hind-leg kick sending more bones scattering across the barrow. Finally, she cantered outside.

Snow was still descending, swirling thicker than ever. He grasped Tzatzo’s mantle and put a foot in one stirrup, pulling himself up into the saddle. He could hear ethereal screeches in the air, and the drumming of hooves. In the distance, barely visible through the snow and darkness hemming them in, he made out mounted figures emerging from the other barrows and cairns surrounding them – spectral horsemen, come to avenge the insult he had dealt their master. His pride stung, he felt the mad desire to turn his steed and face the oncoming warriors. To his surprise, it was Nakali who dissuaded him.

Don’t be a fool, the daemon snarled. Nakali clearly had no desire to run the risk of remaining an immortal prisoner of the Necris.

Vanik overcame his ennui and turned Tzatzo right, back down the winding track. There was little enough time as it was – delay any longer, and claiming the sword would count for nothing.

Below, in the heart of the valley of the Necris, the hunters had become the hunted. The screams of burning villagers had turned into the icy howls of the disembodied – the newly dead had risen.

Vanik came upon the scene as his retinue, the Eightguard, re-formed in the centre of the village’s remains. The hovels surrounding them were ablaze, lighting up the snow-streaked darkness all around and providing the illumination that was driving the shadows back and keeping the small war party alive.

The dead were assailing them from all sides. Though the bodies of the villagers were charred embers, the necromantic energies that wreathed Shyish had already resurrected their spirits. The pallid, ethereal things were now shrieking down at the Chaos knights, kept in check only by ensorcelled blades and the flames that had consumed their corpses, which they seemed to fear.

Vanik rode in amongst the melee, Tzatzo blowing hard, her thick muscles bunched in rage. The spectral riders were close behind, unimpeded by the snow or the rocky earth of the high hills. Seeing their lord thundering into the light of the fire, the Eightguard opened their circle, admitting him into their midst. As they did so, a clutch of the wailing phantoms swooped from the darkness above, out of the ash and snow, their screams making the living warriors’ ears ache.

Vanik tugged Tzatzo round hard, sawing on the steed’s chains, and brought up his shield. The things that had once been the villagers were nightmarish, their ghostly forms echoing images of sloughing flesh, liquefied organs and hideously burnt faces. Ethereal flames clung to them as they dived down, talons flaring with witchfire that reached for the Chaos knights.

One crashed into the pilgrim’s shield with the force of a duardin’s greathammer. He grunted but held, trusting in the warpsteel to repel the undead sorcery. The apparition burst apart around the thick metal, leaving it blackened and scorched but failing to pass through. The howls of the other spirits redoubled as the Eightguard resisted them, their Chaos-blessed blades capable of harming the otherwise incorporeal nightmares. The True Gods would not abandon their servants so readily.

‘Is it done, lord?’

Vanik twisted in his saddle. Shielded at the centre of the circle of riders was his retainer, Modred. The youth was wearing no greater protection than a black leather doublet and plain cap, and was sat astride a wild-eyed, nameless nag. Both rider and mount were dwarfed by the towering armoured warriors surrounding them.

‘It is,’ Vanik said curtly. ‘The blade is mine. You have looted the village?’

‘We have, lord,’ Modred said, indicating the small chest strapped across the nag’s rear. He cringed as another spirit screamed overhead, trailing witchfire.

‘And a living prisoner?’ Vanik demanded. ‘You saved one from the fire?’

‘Yes, lord,’ answered one of his knights, his bannerman, Kulthuk. The Black Pilgrim realised that the body of one of the villagers had been slung over Kulthuk’s saddle, unconscious.

‘Then let us be gone,’ he said, urging Tzatzo towards the track that led from the blazing village. ‘Skoren Blackhand has already claimed his prize, and there is no more time for us to waste. There is no glory in this place. Only death.’

With phantoms shrieking at their heels, Vanik and the Eightguard lashed their steeds towards the dawn.

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A Black Library Publication

First published in Great Britain in 2018 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.
Cover illustration by Anna Lakisova.

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