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Tomb of the Necron – Extract

Warhammer Adventures

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CHAPTER ONE

The Psyker

‘What do you want?’ the old woman snarled.

Zelia Lor wanted one thing and one alone – to get back to the ship. It wasn’t enough that, together with her friends, she’d spent the last few weeks being hunted by some of the most terrifying alien races in the galaxy, now she was standing alongside Mekki and Talen in a stinking hovel, facing a wart-covered crone who wouldn’t know dental hygiene if it bit her.

Grooda Vanikir was craggy-faced and snaggle-toothed, and smelled worse than a grox-paddock. Her home was a shack built in a waste pipe beneath a towering hive. A waste pipe that smelled only slightly worse than Grooda herself.

Captain Harleen Amity stepped forward, extending a hand in greeting, only to retract it seconds later when Grooda snarled like a rabid chemdog.

‘I hear that you have certain… abilities,’ the rogue trader said.

Grooda’s bloodshot eyes narrowed. ‘What if I do?’

Amity produced a bulging purse, which jangled as she waved it in front of the woman. ‘Then you’ll end the day considerably richer than you started it.’

Grooda shot out a bony hand to grab the proffered bounty, only for the rogue trader to snatch the purse away.

‘You’ll be paid after you’ve told us what we want to know.’

Hissing like a phyrr-cat, Grooda turned her gaunt face to Zelia and her friends.

‘Are they yours?’ she rasped, jabbing a bony finger at the children.

The rogue trader’s expression didn’t flinch. ‘I’m helping them find something.’

The old woman sniffed. ‘What?’

‘Pastoria.’

‘Never heard of it.’

‘It is a planet,’ Mekki offered helpfully. ‘Also known as “the Emperor’s Seat”.’

Amity shot the Martian a sharp look. She hadn’t been happy about the children tagging along while she visited Grooda’s lair.

‘Why not?’ Talen had asked.

‘Because Grooda Vanikir is an unsanctioned, and often unpredictable, psyker,’ Amity told him.

Talen’s response had been characteristically overconfident. ‘Then you’ll need us to watch your back,’ he said with a shrug.

Now, Zelia wondered if leaving the relative safety of their ship had been a mistake. The trek to the psyker’s hovel had been long, not to mention disgusting. Rhal Screena was the capital city of a particularly downtrodden hive world. Its passages were dank and the crowds suffocating, too many sweaty bodies crammed into too tight a space. Even protected by Grunt, Amity’s lumbering servitor, Zelia had felt ill at ease – unlike Talen, who had been in his element.

The former ganger had grown up in a hive – albeit one in much better condition than this – but Zelia had spent most of her life on archaeological digs with her mother. She was happiest in wide, open spaces, not at the bottom of thousands of tonnes of metal and rockcrete. Even after all this time, she found it hard to breathe in a hive, knowing that she could walk for kilometres and still not see the sky. But Amity had insisted that if anyone could find Pastoria – the legendary planet the Zealot’s Heart had spent the last few weeks searching for – it was Grooda.

The skeletal woman peered at Mekki in the same way a spine-snake might scrutinise a tasty rodent. ‘You’re a Martian.’

‘I am,’ Mekki replied, his voice as calm and emotionless as ever.

‘A long way from home.’ Grooda’s eyes crawled over Zelia and her friends. ‘You all are.’

‘You don’t know anything about us,’ Talen said.

‘Don’t I?’ Grooda took in a shuddering breath and her eyes rolled up in their sockets. ‘A planet torn apart by metal faces,’ she rasped, her voice taking on a sing-song quality. ‘Grinning faces. Evil faces.’

Zelia shuddered, picturing the monsters Grooda described. ‘The Necrons. They destroyed Targian.’

Grooda’s eyes rolled back down to fix on her, a pinprick of light seeming to glow behind pupils like black holes. ‘And yet you survived. Little things like you.’

‘We’ve done a lot of things,’ Talen said, his tone hardening.

Amity stepped between him and Grooda before the former ganger could lose his temper. ‘I see that the stories about you are true. You are a gifted woman.’

‘Some would call me cursed,’ Grooda rasped, nodding at the purse that was still in Amity’s hand. ‘But what you ask will cost more than a few coins.’

Now it was Amity’s turn to narrow her gaze. ‘How much more?’

Grooda glanced up at Grunt. ‘A woman like me needs protection, especially down here in the pipes.’

Amity shook her head. ‘I’m afraid that Grunt isn’t for sale.’

‘But I’m so weak,’ Grooda continued, hunching over as she spoke. ‘So vulnerable.’

Amity chinked the purse. ‘Then this could buy you a weapon.’ She cast a look around the ramshackle hut, from the rags that served as a bed to the crooked shelves smothered in spiderwebs. ‘Or even the means to move somewhere more…’

Sanitary? Zelia thought to herself, although Amity finished with a simple: ‘Secure.’

Grooda chuckled, the laugh descending into a gargling cough. ‘I’ll tell you how to find your planet, but it’ll cost you.’ Her rheumy eyes settled on the children once again. ‘It’ll cost them.’

Something moved behind Grunt. Zelia spun around. ‘What was that?’

Grooda shrugged. ‘Just one of my little pets.’

A shadow moved beyond the ragged curtain Grooda used as a door. ‘It doesn’t look that little to me.’

And whatever it was, it obviously wasn’t alone. The sound of scurrying legs filled the pipe. Lots of legs, accompanied by the clack-clack-clack of snapping jaws. Zelia knew what was making the noise before they scuttled into the shack.

Long ago, when her father had still been alive, Zelia had become entangled in a temple-weaver’s web during the excavation of an old tomb on Araza IV. Her dad had got her out before the ten-legged monstrosity could attack, but ever since then she had been terrified of spiders. That’s why no one could blame her when she screamed out in terror as half a dozen arachnids scuttled into Grooda’s hut.

They were huge, each the size of a cyber-mastiff, their thick legs ending in wicked claws. Their swollen bodies were covered in coarse red hair, while their swaying heads were smothered in bulbous eyes the colour of pus-filled blisters. They surged forward, herding Grooda’s visitors together, and even Grunt had the sense to avoid their snapping mandibles.

Grooda, meanwhile, was tickling one of the fearful things as if it was a faithful dog, even as the creature hissed and quaked, desperate to attack. Something was holding them back. Zelia didn’t know what, until she noticed that Grooda’s eyes had become the same colour as the spiders’. Was she controlling them?

‘Perhaps now you’re ready to listen to my terms,’ the psyker wheezed. ‘To strike a deal.’

Amity slipped the coins back into her pocket. ‘What do you want?’

Grooda released her spider and it scuttled forward to join its kin. ‘I am old.’

‘No kidding!’ Talen snapped, never taking his eyes from the twitching arachnids.

The psyker ignored him. ‘Rhal Screena is not a place for the old. You will make me young again.’

Amity raised an incredulous eyebrow. ‘How are we supposed to do that?’

Grooda jabbed a skeletal finger at the children. ‘By giving me one of them.’

‘One of us?’ Talen parroted. ‘Why?’

Amity’s expression had turned grave. ‘So she can steal your youth.’

‘That’s not possible.’ Talen looked from the captain to the psyker, and then back at the captain again. ‘I mean, it’s not, is it? She can’t really do that.’

‘I have done it before,’ Grooda cackled, ‘and I will do it again.’ She scraped a gnarled hand across her bald head, and flakes of dried skin dusted her thin shoulders. ‘How do you think I’ve remained this beautiful for so many years?’

Amity took a step forward, ignoring the spiders who reared up to block her path. ‘And you will tell us where to find Pastoria?’

Grooda nodded. ‘I think that is a fair price.’

‘I don’t!’ Talen said.

‘Then take me,’ Amity said. ‘Take my youth and tell us what we need to know.’

Grooda chuckled, amused by the offer. ‘You? You are old.’

Amity tried her best not to look insulted. ‘I’m in my prime. Besides, I look better than you.’ She offered the old woman a tight smile. ‘No offence.’

‘None taken,’ Grooda said, licking her chapped lips with a black tongue. ‘Very well. I shall feast on what years you have left.’

‘No!’ Zelia stepped forward despite her fear. The spiders hissed furiously.

Grooda tilted her head, her pack of arachnids mirroring the gesture. ‘You have something to say, girl?’

‘Take me instead,’ Zelia said, the words spilling out of her mouth before she could change her mind. ‘I’m the one who wants to go to Pastoria, and I have more years to give. If you want youth, take mine, just let my friends go.’

‘You don’t have to do this,’ Amity told her, but Zelia stood her ground.

‘Yes I do. We need you to pilot the ship.’

‘I can pilot the ship,’ Talen insisted.

Amity snorted. ‘Thank you very much!’ she said bitterly.

‘You know what I mean,’ he said. ‘I just… I don’t want Zelia to get hurt.’

‘I’ll try not to take it personally,’ Amity muttered.

‘The girl is right,’ Grooda cut in, weighing Zelia up like a slab of meat. ‘She is young… strong. She will do nicely.’

‘What do I have to do?’ Zelia asked, sweat trickling down her back.

Grooda’s leathery face split into a hideous smile. ‘Nothing too difficult. You just have to die!’

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WARHAMMER ADVENTURES

First published in Great Britain in 2021.
This eBook edition published in 2021 by Warhammer Publishing,
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 Cole Marchetti.
Internal illustrations by Dan Boultwood & Cole Marchetti.

Tomb of the Necron © Copyright Games Workshop Limited 2021. Tomb of the Necron, GW, Games Workshop, Warhammer Adventures, Space Marine, 40K, Warhammer, Warhammer 40,000, the ‘Aquila’ Double-headed Eagle logo, 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: 978-1-78999-661-6

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