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Yndrasta: The Celestial Spear – Extract

A Black Library Publication

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Chapter One

‘Sick Gumper was causing stillborns once.’ Njda yanked her knife, and hot blood spurted into snow. ‘Didn’t know until Bavval brought the givers with torches. They found flies in his sled – three of them, fat and buzzing. I don’t know how, but they’d rusted Gumper’s iron. Bavval crossed his arms, said Gumper had insulted Brother. The sick man cried pus when Bavval killed those flies. That’s the first time I felt the amber wind.’

More blood spattered the snow, and Njda lifted her foot. The black bilge’s stink wrinkled her nose. She brushed sweat from her brow. Spruces and bare birches guarded the hill like soldiers on silent patrol. Snow stole through their branches as if the grey bands in the sky were a prison’s walls to be escaped and hidden from on the earth.

Njda had bound her captive to a tree. Once the marauder quit moaning, Njda brandished her knife. ‘The noajdi taught me to bleed the corruption before setting cultists free. That way your souls find their way where they should.’

‘You dispense sweet pain.’ Four iridescent eyes gleamed beneath the stitched leather of the marauder’s brow. ‘Join me. The Prince has need of pleasure-wrights as skilled as you. No more hurt. No more hunger. Only… joy.’

Njda made another cut and ignored the caterwauling that followed. ‘I’m a finder. And I’m not hurt or hungry. I’m just bleeding you before you kill more of Riika-Min’s herd. Then I’ll set you free.’

She surveyed her handiwork. The marauder bled from two dozen wounds. Her blemished magenta flesh had paled to light violet. The erect horn that stood where her left ear might have been now sagged. But the sick grin on the cultist’s lips made Njda wonder if she was doing this right.

A forked tongue flitted from the marauder’s mouth. Tiny teeth lined its worm-like length. ‘Not joy… You crave… love.’

Njda cleaned the blood from her mitten, then wiped her knife in the crook of her arm.

The cultist’s ghoulish lips split her cheeks. Her crescent mouth cracked, too wide. ‘You love your family. Your people. Your lands. Strangers you just met. You love your delicious reindeer, too. Taste their pain with me. The Prince will gift you a love you could never imagine. He will protect you from the bogcallers, as Sigmar-Stormcaller cannot.’

Crow’s feet cracked the corners of Njda’s eyes. She had never heard of bogcallers, and slaves to darkness didn’t scare her, but the cultist’s wily promise still found purchase. Njda imagined Riika-Min’s boazu herds as they spiralled in the Sukuat’s tundra. She thought of her people, the Suku, and their Izalender neighbours and their marvellous metalworks, and all the brutal wonders in the realm. She thought of her former betrothed and realised she longed for what the cultist offered.

Njda turned her knife in her hands. ‘What kind of love?’

‘Glory. Lust–’

Njda wrenched the marauder’s tongue out, then severed it. She dodged a spurt of blood and tossed the flapping muscle to the snow. ‘This isn’t for Sigramalles Apmil,’ she said. ‘It’s for you.’

Njda cut again and ignored the braying that followed.

After cleaning herself up, Njda waited. Corrupt blood attracted Ghur’s predators the same as any other. She couldn’t leave the cultist to them. If beasts devoured the marauder before the last black corruption had oozed from her veins, she’d die a damned woman. Like the cultist had said, Njda loved her lands, their purity. And abandoning anyone to Ghur didn’t seem a kindness.

Wind knifed through the forest. Then the murmuring of spruce branches quietened and timber creaked. A birch with parchment bark uprooted, then wobbled uphill in a crashing path. Insects and grubs pushed from the hard humus, then squirmed and skittered through the snow. Even the wind was afraid.

Njda eased herself to the ground. Her hand clawed out and grasped her bow. She dragged it closer and stabbed her eyes at the cultist, but dread had peeled back the marauder’s lids. The gelid air hadn’t bothered the marauder before. Now she was shaking. She gurgled a warning from her tongueless mouth, but Njda already knew. This wasn’t the so-called Prince. Fouler threats than the vague spectre of damnation haunted the coasts of Glacier’s End.

Njda exhaled and slid an arrow from her quiver. Whatever was coming, it was from the sea. And Brother Bear hadn’t scared it away, so it was powerful. During the Drownharrow, that could only mean one thing.

She had come.

Paralysed, Njda considered her options. She was safe here in the highlands. Ten thousand sledcrofts lay camped on the black sand shores between the wooded hills and the heady seas. They would be easier prey than her. Her siida numbered among them, though. Her family.

By her next breath she hurtled through the forest. She remembered the cultist and skidded to a halt, then circled back and slit her throat. As the marauder drowned in her own blood, Njda knew she had done her a kindness. In a realm as cruel as Ghur, people had nothing else.

Njda tumbled through the palisade sleds onto packed snow and plankwalks. Quiet crowds of Suku limped in the opposite direction, eerily focused in the way they got when screams and panic would attract deadlier predators. Their blue eyes met Njda’s. Those who recognised her hissed for her to come with them, then fell silent as she ran on.

A hoary giver, Hari, guided a clutch of elders over smooth rocks bulging from the ground. Njda scurried beside him and jerked at the thick sleeve of his fur coat. Beads and bartered metal charms clinked on his indigo tunic as he spun.

Hari relaxed and lowered his baleen sword. ‘Njda.’

‘Have you seen my pa?’ she asked.

‘No. But your ma’s looking for you.’

He nudged Njda with the elders, but she shook him off. Hari clucked and gestured to armed givers trotting up on their reindeer mounts. As Njda raced onward, she couldn’t shake the thought they were forming a battle-line.

Sledcrofts creaked into glacial motion on both sides of the path. They resembled beached ships on timber skids, with scuppers for windows and canvas roofs. Suku herdsteaders goaded draught boazu from the sledcrofts’ holds, then harnessed the reindeer to drag the sleds away like Izalender carriages. Others kicked out the pegs holding their homes upright. The timber landships groaned with hostility as they accepted the burden of their weight.

Snow fell in drifts and darkened the day. A team of lumbering boazu dragged a towering longsled from its lot. Njda bounded across the frozen ruts it left behind. In the blue bay, the air was still. Breakers pawed at a corpse, then seeped into coarse black sands. The sight of Gramb sprawled out dead hit Njda hard, then drifted off like a feather. Her feeble grandmother had wanted to join Gramp a long time.

Close by, her clan’s sledcroft sat. Njda went inside and picked her way through. Brine dripped from shelves, and slush covered the deck. At dawn her pa had prepared for a journey to Suodji for the trade season. Where he was now – where any of her family was – she couldn’t tell. But someone had come through in a rush. Their weapons were gone. The hold was empty, too.

Njda crouched through the pantry into the mudroom. She gathered a handful of scattered arrows into her quiver, then stalked back down the ramp onto the sands. She rubbed her hands and glanced at the driver’s bench. She couldn’t move the sled without their draught boazu. Hopefully her family had taken the reindeer, along with their weapons and metal tools. If they hadn’t, that didn’t matter. All they needed was each other.

The hair on Njda’s neck stiffened. In the corner of her eye, Gramb had risen. The crone sipped tea from a chipped teacup. Frigid brine lapped at her gnarled feet. Despite a lifetime of Njda’s knitted blankets never being warm enough – Njda still couldn’t knit, and didn’t care – Gramb seemed content. A pang of guilt rocked Njda. She’d assumed Gramb was dead. Her eye dropped to a splintered bone jutting from a bloodless break in her knobby knee. A thick, glistening rope ran from Gramb’s damp white frizzle of hair to her heels. Gore and pink jelly dribbled down its length.

‘I was so alone,’ Gramb croaked.

Njda’s stomach turned. She followed Gramb’s gaze out into the surf. A dozen more Suku stood in the waist-deep waters, their hands joined. Eels teemed in the waves around them.

Njda reached out, but then her shivering hand fell back to her side. ‘Gramb. We should–’

Gramb wobbled around. Fleshy orchids pulsed like anemones in her eyes. They had pushed through the back of her skull, from the rope – the tentacle – buried in her neck. She sipped at her broken teacup. Briny foam dribbled from her toothless gums.

‘But then… you found me.’

Njda steeled her eyes. This was the Drownharrow. She drew her stubby knife, but Gramb had no blood to bleed. What would Bavval have done? This wasn’t Chaos. This was worse.

The call of gulls over the surf drew Njda’s gaze back to the enthralled Suku. Swaying, they staggered into the hazy bay like captive swine, and the teeming tendrils around them disappeared. It hurt to let fellow Suku be taken, but Njda could not resist the resistless. This was the Harmony of Ghur. As the Suku fed, so must others feed. Tjatsår Mai deserved to eat as much as any other.

Njda shoved her knife into its hide scabbard. She clasped her hands and bowed, then hurried the way she’d come. Gramb was good as dead. But she’d been dying twenty years, since Njda’s birth to her betrothal and after. As long as Njda had lived, it had always been too late for Gramb. For the rest of Njda’s family, there was still time.

The misshapen blobs of overturned longsleds resolved through the wall of falling snow. A hanging sign squealed on a broken chain. A frenzy of boazu tracks lay written in the morning powder, frozen into crust where blood had forged mud. In the whiteout, jagged, alien hills rose over a spruce glade. Njda couldn’t remember them, but Riika-Min’s ten thousand clans moved so often Njda couldn’t recall half their grazing sites.

A handful of silhouettes prowled ahead, weapons drawn. Hari and the givers. They must have fought a hard fight, because their reindeer were all lumps in the snow, heat steaming from their massive carcasses. Hari’s moan sailed from the haze. Njda could see him lying catatonic in the mud, a rangy giver crouched over him.

Njda rubbed her raw cheeks and jogged closer. She tore her pointed hood from her plaited queue. She scratched away the tingle her hood had spawned in her scalp. She didn’t need the hood to tell her predators were near. Only Hari mattered – he’d taught Njda how to track as a girl.

Njda opened her mouth to speak when she realised Hari had been stripped. The warrior crouching over the naked giver dragged a wicked knife through his belly. Hari gargled as the rangy fighter ripped out a handful of ropy entrails. A scar-pocked hand with thick, yellow nails dug into his belly and cupped Hari’s puddling gore. The warrior slurped. Hot crimson gruel dribbled down his jaws and dripped onto Hari’s blue flesh.

Njda’s gorge rose. More warriors stalked through the whiteout. Tattered furs soiled in mud draped them from their hunched heads to their ape arms. Rusted piercings studded their olive skin, which began to look less and less like war-paint. They peeled the planks off a nearby longsled. Two givers, both wounded, bellowed and sailed from the hold. The laughing raiders parried the givers’ desperate blows. Four of them scampered up behind the Suku and, sniggering, chopped them down with chipped cleavers.

Njda stifled a whimper. She couldn’t scour the butchery from her eyes. Hari grimaced at her, pleading and paralysed, until another foe-warrior waddled up and pulled out his arm, then lopped it off.

The hooded butcher’s red eyes shot to Njda. It wasn’t a he – it wasn’t even human. Gristle hung from its jaws. Tusks stained with verdigris jutted from its greasy lips. An oily topknot dangled down its scarred porcine face onto its rusted iron gorget. The ugly cliffs of its caveman brow arched, and a panther’s growl clicked in its chest.

The foe-warrior’s face warped into a perfect parody of human horror. ‘Hari!’ it parroted, mocking Njda. She had been screaming.

More hooded killers loped in. Heinous children scampered at their feet. No, not children – long-nosed devils with outsize heads and stringy arms that scraped the snow. Njda nocked an arrow and swivelled from foe to foe. They feigned fear, then snorted like pigs and cackled. She bellowed and loosed. Her arrow thumped into Hari’s eye and erased the agony from his face.

Beyond Hari’s body, the alien hills slid into the sky and toppled the nearest spruces. A storm of displaced air whipped the blizzard into a stinging gale. As the moving mountain undulated like a serpent, nests of eels erupted from blurred slits in its side. This was no wyrm. It was a tentacle, and it belonged to a kraken older than the world.

The green-skinned killers barked and snarled. Tendrils like those Njda had glimpsed teeming in the surf lanced through the snowstorm. They tore headlong into the blood-drinking raiders, hauling them from their colossal feet. Others were severed and left wriggling where the foe-warriors moved faster.

The twisted scar-face with the topknot turned its lifeless leer back on Njda. A sick promise poisoned its warped grin. It muttered a curse and green motes of magic smothered the red in its gaze.

Njda ran. The whiteout blinded her as she careened into its teeth. She smashed into the wreckage of another longsled and tripped onto a headless elder. She yawped and barrelled away. Abandoned treasures and provisions and fresh corpses littered the trampled snow. She’d wanted to help Hari. She’d done it. She was his murderer. He’d been her friend.

Breathless, Njda took cover in a shattered sledcroft. Wind blasted through the gashed timber. The calamity of the kraken’s strike still shook the ground. When that calmed, they would come for her. The storm’s howl suffocated the din of slaughter, and she closed her eyes and counted to six. She imagined the green gore-eaters slinking through the snowstorm, rusted blades raised, human meat stinking in their craws. They would do to her what they’d done to the givers. If not them, then the kraken.

Njda roared from the splintered sledcroft. Her taut bowstring creaked and her shoulder muscles screamed, but nothing was there.

The tension eased from her bow, and Njda vomited in the snow. She wiped the dribble from her lips and looked up to find a man looming behind her. Grey clouds filled his eyes. Blue paint striped his face. Pathetic wisps of beard covered his neck. Liver spots and blood marred the rest of him.

Njda inhaled and gripped her knife. He’d given it to her years ago after putting old Gumper from his misery.

‘Njda,’ the ancient shaman rasped.

‘Bavval.’ Njda squashed him in her arms and cried.

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A Black Library Publication

First published in Great Britain in 2023.
This eBook edition published in 2023 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 Robson Michel.

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