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Thunderstrike & Other Stories – Extract

Chapter One

A Black Library Publication

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Dear Reader,

Thank you for buying this book. You stand on the precipice of a great adventure – welcome to the worlds of Warhammer Age of Sigmar.

Herein you will find a host of great stories that explore the Mortal Realms – a fantastical landscape of mighty heroes, strange beasts, wizards, terrifying monsters, bloodshed and betrayal. Here, rampaging armies clash in brutal conflict, dauntless explorers test their mettle and their swords amongst the cavernous ruins of ancient civilisations, and wild magic causes the dead to rise again.

With this book you will undertake a journey through these realms and meet some of the many characters that inhabit them, pointing the way to even further adventures – recommending your next reads from the extensive and ever-expanding Black Library range.

So strap on your sword or ready your wizard’s staff and let us begin. You have but to turn the page...

THUNDERSTRIKE

Richard Strachan

Chapter One

If there was one thing Captain Holger Beck hated about the swamps – even more than the bloodthirsty mosquitoes, the overbearing heat and the stink of filthy, brackish water – it was the light. Filtered through the feathered branches of the paperbark trees, it fell from the sky like a foul miasma, gloomy and sick. It gave everything a queasy, submerged look, and constantly peering through it was beginning to give him a headache.

Holger looked out from the raft over the choked wetlands and felt his heart sink. They were poling along a narrow channel that cut between the glades, the surface of the water carpeted in a thick green scum. On either side of the channel the swollen boles of the swamp mahogany trailed beards of moss into the water. They looked like faces staring at him, he thought, like creatures uneasily mashed together from all the muck and filth of this awful place. He turned away. Every now and then he could hear the rippling flop of a leopard eel slipping below the surface, the slow and menacing drip of the recent rain pattering through the leaves.

Something screeched in the distance, hidden in the mists. Holger sighed. A mosquito landed on his neck with a flicker and he slapped it into a bloody paste.

‘It’s a man’s life in the Freeguild,’ Sergeant Huber said. She raised an eyebrow, an ironic smile on her face. ‘Isn’t this the kind of adventure you signed up for, sir?’

Huber’s collar was unbuttoned and her sleeves rolled up, her breastplate stacked with all the others at the centre of the raft. The rest of the platoon was sprawled out exhausted in the heat, mopping their brows with sodden kerchiefs or staring dejectedly into the shadows across the water. On either side, two guardsmen dipped poles into the stagnant water and propelled them slowly onwards. The water slopped over the lip of the raft, oily and dark. Holger looked back at the rafts that were following behind, another dozen or so carrying his whole company deeper into the Mirkmere Swamps. He could see the glint of metal, the faded green of uniforms, but he couldn’t even see the rearguard, the light was so dim.

‘I didn’t take a commission in the Iron Bulls so I could have adventures,’ he said. He uncorked his flask and took a careful sip, feeling it burning in his chest. Only enough firewater left for another day or two, damn it. ‘I took it for a nice uniform, a quiet bit of guard duty, and plenty of opportunities for playing cards and drinking in the officers’ mess.’

‘And then the siege happened,’ Huber prompted him.

‘And then the siege happened…’

He shut his eyes, tipped the flask to his mouth again. No matter how long ago it was, the memories still lashed him with their original force. Lieutenant Holger Beck of the Iron Bulls had spent the best part of the Siege of Excelsis hiding in a tavern cellar off the Pilgrim’s Way, head buried in his hands as he tried not to cry. The smart new uniform, the polished steel breastplate, the officer’s sword at his hip – none of it was worth a cuss when the enemy were at the gates. He had slipped away as the first arrows fell, as the Ironweld cannons had started firing with a sound like holy thunder. He didn’t think of himself as a coward, Holger Beck. He was more of a realist, and the idea of matching himself against the awful things that had fought their way into Excelsis had been just too fantastical a concept for him to entertain.

Armoured orruks slavering for war, ogors and daemons… He shivered. Thank Sigmar he hadn’t had to witness the worst of it.

‘Still, it all worked out in the end,’ Huber said cheerfully. ‘The lone survivor of your platoon, all those medals, the promotion. Your own company.’

‘Yes,’ he sighed again. ‘It all worked out beautifully.’

‘I must confess,’ a voice said at his side, ‘that it pains me to hear you talk in such cynical tones, Captain Beck.’

Holger turned to see the priest standing there with a strained look on his face. Caspar Hallan was young, ascetically thin, his hair shorn down to the scalp. He had the sort of flinty, uncompromising look in his eye that had always made Holger nervous. He bobbed slightly as the raft buckled over the water. As far as he could tell, Caspar was as close to being a fanatic as you could get without actually grabbing a copy of Intimations of the Comet and ranting your way into the wilderness to convert the heathens. Holger had always been highly suspicious of men who were that certain in their beliefs – they tended to be the ones who got you killed.

‘Mere soldiers’ banter,’ Holger said. ‘The life of a guardsman is a hard one, I’m sure you’ll agree, and our humour occasionally tends towards the dark.’

‘We must not make light of our mission, however,’ Caspar said. Unlike the sprawling troops, he hadn’t even loosened a single button against the heat. ‘The brave settlers missing from Palmer’s Creek, from Dezraedsville and Junivatown, deserve better. They deserve our zeal, our courage, our faith!’

‘They’ll get all three,’ Holger said. ‘We’ll find out what happened to them, I promise.’ He glanced at Sergeant Huber and shrugged. ‘As much as I can promise anything in this benighted place.’

Caspar drew himself up and stared with unyielding fervour into the dripping murk.

‘There is nowhere in the Mortal Realms that can be considered benighted while the light of Sigmar is there to illuminate it.’

‘And what brings you with us?’ Huber interrupted. ‘This is a military expedition, not anything to do with Sigmar’s Temple.’

‘The ministry of Sigmar’s priesthood is wherever his justice needs to be meted out,’ Caspar intoned. Holger couldn’t tell if he was quoting scripture or not; everything the young man said felt like it came from a parchment or a scroll. ‘Nearly a thousand of the faithful have vanished from these settlements, brave crusaders spreading the light of Excelsis deeper into the Mirkmere, and I would be on hand to offer spiritual succour wherever it is needed. Succour,’ he added, patting the hammer at his belt, ‘and righteousness.’

The reports had been coming in for weeks now, of homesteads and settlements utterly deserted, their inhabitants vanished, as if swallowed up by the swamps. Contact had been lost with Fort Harrow, and concerns had even reached the office of the High Arbiter in Excelsis. Holger shook his head and traipsed to the back of the raft, stepping over his soldiers’ feet. He had no doubt that all those settlers were dead. Leopard eels were the half of it; there were flense-fish in these waters, he was sure, razorspines too. Even bloaters. Any number of disgusting diseases, any quantity of poisonous fruit. Bogs, quagmires, quicksand. No matter what Caspar thought, it wasn’t just the faithful who joined these crusades out into the wilderness; it was those too poor or too stupid to see any other way of surviving. You take folk who’ve spent their lives grubbing about the slums of Excelsis and drop them in the middle of the Mirkmere Swamps, what do you expect to happen? You could barely see five feet in front of you in here. They’d only built the rafts because the trails were so choked and overgrown it would have taken them weeks to cut their way through.

Holger sighed for what felt like the hundredth time that day. Sigmar knew what had happened to those people, but where was the sense in sending a full company of Freeguild into the swamps to look for them? And a full company that was led by none other than the Iron Bulls’ least enthusiastic officer, for all that?

‘Just my luck,’ he muttered bitterly.

He squinted through the rising mist at the rafts coming up behind, raising his hand to signal them.

‘We’ll have to stop soon,’ he said to Huber. ‘Evening’s nearly on us, and this damned mist is getting worse. It stinks like corpses. We’ll press on to Fort Harrow in the morning.’

‘Take us in to the bankside,’ Huber told Corporal Fischer.

The corporal angled his pole to push the raft to the left, and soon they came under the lowering canopy of the woe trees. The shadows were deeper here, danker, the mud oozing into the water. A whooping, almost mournful cry came from deeper in the swamps. It rose and then broke apart, fading into a careful silence.

Holger could see the other rafts following up behind and bumping into the bank. He stepped out into the mud and slogged his way up towards the treeline, where lank ropes of ivy dropped from the canopy overhead. The undergrowth was thick with bindweed and scrub. The swamps were full of these patches of raised ground, hummocks of mud that were like islands in the shallow waters. He could see Lieutenant Weigand further down the bank chivvying his platoon from their raft, and the other platoons beyond them – all of them struggling with their weapons and equipment, the helmets and breastplates, firearms, swords and shields, ration packs.

What a waste of time… he thought.

He turned to call on Corporal Fischer to start setting up camp. Fischer was standing there under the low sweep of a woe tree, one hand resting on its trunk, the other trying to pluck something from his mouth. For a minute it looked like he had something caught in his moustache, and then his knees buckled and he sank into the mud.

‘Fischer, what do you think you’re doing?’ Holger said. ‘Get on your feet.’

He stepped forward. A snick in the air, the whip of something passing his face. He turned and saw Lieutenant Weigand with an arrow sprouting from his eye, his mouth open and a look on his face of vexed amazement. He toppled from the bank, and with a splash disappeared into the slimy water. Holger looked back at Fischer, slumped against the tree. His eyes were like glass. An arrow had passed through the back of his neck and was jutting from his jaw.

Holger turned to Sergeant Huber, who stood there with her mouth open, her hand on the hilt of her sword. Half the other guardsmen from the company were still on their rafts, the other half milling about uncertainly on the bank. There was absolute silence, broken only by that same strange whooping call far out across the wetlands and the glades, which rose once and then melted off into the mist.

Holger swallowed. ‘Huber?’ he whispered.

‘Yes, captain?’

‘…What do we do?’

There was a sharp hiss, like falling rain. A dozen guardsmen hit the mud, riddled with arrows.

Someone screamed. There was the scrape of drawn swords, the damp thud of arrows striking shields. Hoarse shouts of command, steel clashing against steel. A guardsman stumbled past and collapsed in the undergrowth with a knife buried in his neck.

Holger threw himself into a hollow between the bloated roots of a tree. Groaning, screams, the splash of water. He risked a glance over the edge of the root and saw a dark shape slip past, lank and wiry, a long blade in its hand. He saw one of the guardsmen from Third Platoon stagger past with his guts hanging out, blood pouring from his mouth. He choked, dropped, fell face forward into a brackish puddle. The mists swam like a rolling tide, the gloom broken only by a few columns of watery light falling down from the canopy.

‘God-King save me, save me, please!’ Holger hissed.

He scrambled over the roots and slipped into the slime, rolling, hauling himself up, running. An arrow smacked into a trunk beside his head.

‘Huber! Where are you?’

He ducked, tripped again, smacked his head against a stone. He scrambled into a spume of razor-tipped fern, the stink of rot and blood in his nose. He was heading deeper into the swamps, but there were screams still ringing from the bank, and if Holger Beck knew one thing it was to run away from where the fighting was fiercest.

‘Oh Sigmar, please,’ he whispered. ‘I swear, see me through this and you’ll have the most faithful servant at your command!’

He ran on, scurrying from cover to cover. When he glanced back, the channel of water had been swallowed in the mists and the screams and cries were dying away. He’d lost his sword somewhere, but no force in the Mortal Realms would have made him go back for it.

Slowly, for the next agonising hour, Holger crawled forward inch by inch through the putrid water, weaving his way through the swamp weed and the fern, trying miserably not to make a sound. Insects clicked and whirred in the air around him; creatures slithered away through the muck. Water dripped down his collar. The darkness drew in and he started to shiver.

He started and stifled a scream when he saw a pale face peering at him from the undergrowth, but it was only the priest, Caspar Hallan, huddled in the mud.

‘Damn it, you scared the life out of me!’ Holger spat.

Caspar’s thin face was drawn with fear. There was a long, shallow cut down one cheek, blood dripping onto the torn collar of his robes.

‘Captain Beck…’ he said in a hoarse whisper. ‘What… those things, they… Did you see them, Beck? Did you see what they were?’

Holger swallowed and shook his head. He risked a glance over his shoulder. Was that laughter he could hear? A liquid cackle, burbling off into the fens.

‘We have to go back,’ Caspar hissed, staring into the darkness. ‘For Sigmar’s sake, we have to go back…’

‘I don’t think Sigmar’s listening out here, priest.’

‘Then what do we do?’

‘We make for Excelsis – it’s our only hope now. Get back to the city, warn them if we can…’

Or, he thought, just hide away in the lowliest backstreet tavern we can find and never breathe a word of what happened here…

A shadow dripped across Caspar’s face. The priest’s eyes went wide with horror, and his mouth opened to scream. A dank smell enveloped him.

Holger spun around, but then all he saw were stars.

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A Black Library Publication

‘Shiprats’ first published in
Black Library Events Anthology 2017/18 in 2017.
‘The Neverspike’ first published in
Black Library Events Anthology 2018/19 in 2018.
‘The Sea Taketh’ first published digitally in 2018.
‘Bossgrot’, ‘Blessed Oblivion’, ‘Strong Bones’ and ‘The Garden of Mortal Delights’ first published digitally in 2019.
‘The Serpent’s Bargain’ first published in Inferno! Volume 4 in 2019.
‘Blood of the Flayer‘ and ‘The Siege of Greenspire’ first published in Oaths & Conquests in 2020.
‘Buyer Beware’ first published digitally in 2020.
‘Ghastlight’ first published in Direchasm in 2020.
‘Watchers of Battle’ first published in Inferno! Volume 5 in 2020.
‘Mourning in Rainhollow’ first published in Inferno! Volume 6 in 2021.
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Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.
Cover illustration by Alexander Mokhov.

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