Warbeast, p.1
Warbeast, page 1
Discover more stories set in the Age of Sigmar from Black Library
~ THE AGE OF SIGMAR ~
THE GATES OF AZYR
An Age of Sigmar novella
~ THE REALMGATE WARS ~
WAR STORM
An Age of Sigmar anthology
GHAL MARAZ
An Age of Sigmar anthology
HAMMERS OF SIGMAR
An Age of Sigmar anthology
CALL OF ARCHAON
An Age of Sigmar anthology
~ THE BLACK RIFT OF KLAXUS ~
PART ONE: ASSAULT ON THE MANDRAKE BASTION
PART TWO: IN THE WALLS OF URYX
PART THREE: THE GNAWING GATE
PART FOUR: SIX PILLARS
From the maelstrom of a sundered world, the Eight Realms were born. The formless and the divine exploded into life.
Strange, new worlds appeared in the firmament, each one gilded with spirits, gods and men. Noblest of the gods was Sigmar. For years beyond reckoning he illuminated the realms, wreathed in light and majesty as he carved out his reign. His strength was the power of thunder. His wisdom was infinite. Mortal and immortal alike kneeled before his lofty throne. Great empires rose and, for a while, treachery was banished. Sigmar claimed the land and sky as his own and ruled over a glorious age of myth.
But cruelty is tenacious. As had been foreseen, the great alliance of gods and men tore itself apart. Myth and legend crumbled into Chaos. Darkness flooded the realms. Torture, slavery and fear replaced the glory that came before. Sigmar turned his back on the mortal kingdoms, disgusted by their fate. He fixed his gaze instead on the remains of the world he had lost long ago, brooding over its charred core, searching endlessly for a sign of hope. And then, in the dark heat of his rage, he caught a glimpse of something magnificent. He pictured a weapon born of the heavens. A beacon powerful enough to pierce the endless night. An army hewn from everything he had lost.
Sigmar set his artisans to work and for long ages they toiled, striving to harness the power of the stars. As Sigmar’s great work neared completion, he turned back to the realms and saw that the dominion of Chaos was almost complete. The hour for vengeance had come. Finally, with lightning blazing across his brow, he stepped forth to unleash his creation.
The Age of Sigmar had begun.
Chapter One
A fresh flurry of snow swept across the mountainside, layering onto thick drifts that already half concealed remnants of ancient walls and towers toppled in a distant age. The rusted and fused remains of great gears jutted from the ice, staining the snow the colour of dried blood. The immense barbican that had once housed them was little more than wind-worn boulders scattered across the area. Of the ramparts, buttresses and ravelins that had supported the gatehouse little remained – humps and ridges beneath the snow delineated by heaps and lines of unnaturally regular rocks.
The wind caused tent sides to crack and guy ropes to sing as it keened over an encampment within the comparative shelter of the centuries-old ruins. In the lee of broken stairwells and part-tumbled walls, the nomads huddled close to their fires, wrapped tight in pelts of many different colours and patterns – black bear, the white and grey stripes of snow tigers, exotic carmine and mauve spots against white from slain lyregryphs. On small spits over glowing charcoal they cooked their meat, slowly turning the skewered flesh while dripping fat caused the embers to sputter and hiss. Cauldrons bubbled over flames, the water within bobbing with pieces of gristle and bone through a greasy slick.
Tonight’s was a special feast, despite the weather, for the hunting had been good. Thick haunches and splayed ribs would grace the trenchers of the chief and her favourites, with fresh marrow and small cakes thick with congealed blood, while those less in regard licked their lips in anticipation of liver, shins, feet and fingers.
The cannibals bickered over the other spoils, fighting over metal buckles, tin cups, teeth pulled from the skulls – used as necklaces and for beads in braided hair and beards – while clothes, weapons, boots, jewellery and armour were stacked neatly in piles beneath awnings, awaiting the chieftain, who would award them to those that had fought the best or pleased her in other ways.
A few captives were still alive, roped together to an immense stake outside the large tent of the clan’s leader. Naked, they huddled together for what warmth they could find, terrified and numb with shock. There were eight of them, three women and five men, and each bore cuts and bruises from the battle, and rope burns from their chafing bonds at ankle and wrist.
The wind picked up, starting to pull at the tent ropes, flattening the flames of the more exposed fires, throwing sparks and ash into the air. The sky darkened and the arguing and laughter petered out. The Bonekeepers glanced at the heavens and to the tent of their leader, wary of the sudden change. There was good reason why no tribe remained in one place for long, for the mountains of Ursungorod were of ill-temper, always prone to the sudden spasms and constant peregrinations that had laid low the fortress currently sheltering the kin-eaters.
The prisoners started wailing, lifting shrill voices in lament while blue lightning crackled across the unnatural storm gathering above. The children who had been tormenting them fled for the shelter of the tents and the protection of the adults, who in turn rose from the firesides, whispering prayers to Kronra, God of the Bloody Feast.
Trailing half-naked suitors, the Gore Maiden emerged from her grand marquee, still clad in red-lacquered leather armour. Hair the colour of raven feathers spilled to her waist from beneath a helm adorned with a crown of bone splinters taken from the body of a goroxen she had slain single-handedly two winters before. She snapped commands, calling for her guards to form around her while others scrambled for spears and shields left close at hand.
The Bonekeeper war party gathered, the strongest at the front, the unblooded behind. Battle and internal politics, as well as long winters of famine, meant none amongst the Bonekeepers lived long enough to become old and infirm.
In a rough half-circle with their chief at its centre, the clan waited. Eight dozen pairs of eyes scoured the gloom, casting their gaze over snow-blanketed stones lit by the flashes of azure above.
A single bolt lanced down, striking the ground no more than a hundred paces in front of the Gore Maiden. All flinched from the brightness and blinked furiously to rid themselves of the after-shadow. When their eyes cleared they saw a single figure, a cerulean statue, standing where the lightning had struck.
It stood half again as tall as the largest warrior of the Bonekeepers, and was clad entirely in gleaming plates in representation of a muscled warrior. A huge guard curved across its left shoulder, the roundel where it met the sculpted breastplate moulded with a sapphire in the design of an upraised hammer that blazed two bolts of lightning from its head. A helm with a snarling visage hid the face beneath a spiked halo-like arc of gold. In the right hand a sword gleamed with moonlight brightness, angular runic shapes lit by their own power along its length. The left held a hammer, its head blazoned with the mark of a twin-tailed comet. From the figure’s shoulders hung a slatted cloak, each ribbon tipped by a weight in the shape of a warhammer.
For ten heartbeats nothing stirred save for the snow devils whipped up by the wind. A few of the tribespeople edged forwards, looking to each other for reassurance, grunting in their guttural tongue.
The eyes of the helm blazed into life, filling with a scarlet glow. Magical energy coruscated across the figure’s body, crawling up the arms and into the weapons, causing them to shine even brighter with white light. The statue broke into a run, blade and hammer head leaving a trail of silver sparks in its wake.
In a voice edged with a boom of thunder in the skies, the lord of metal let forth a mighty shout. The volume alone was enough to shake all but the hardiest of constitutions, but what stunned the Bonekeepers was that the words were in their own tongue, albeit an ancient dialect.
‘The Bear-clad hath returned. The Hard Winter shall end and justice be restored!’
‘The storm comes.’
So spoke the sagesayer Radomira. The skies above the great mountains of Ursungorod filled with sinister clouds that flickered with green lightning. Withered hands with nails painted blood-red clutched the twisted wood of her staff, knuckles white with tension. Beneath a hood of coarse black wool, she turned her face up to stare at her krul, the warrior-king of the Ursungoran clans. There were tears in her eyes. ‘The omens have not changed. You shall not see the end of it.’
‘Ratkin scum,’ replied Arka, known as the Bear-clad for the thick black pelt he wore across his immense shoulders. A word came to him, passed down through the many generations that had fought against the plague-rats of the deep. A cursed word that came from the Times Before. ‘Pestilentzi.’
He stood nearly a head taller than the men and women of his stratzari, the best warriors from more than two dozen clans. Many had once been clan leaders themselves, of the kort, zakar, hussta, zagir, uztek, kimmeri, ussra, and many others. For this he was also called the Uniter, and the Bear of Hard Winters for other feats, and several other titles across the peaks and valleys of Ursungorod.
The elite of Arka’s army waited on the gatehouse, six hundred in number, their armour a mixture of hardened leather and bronze rings, supplemented with bands or roundels of steel for those fortunate enough to have inherited such protection from their forefathers. There were styles from across the mountains – the high-peaked helms and gilded ave ntails of the valley clans, rounded basinets and dog-faced visors common amongst the scythic clans that had once dominated the caverns of inner Ursungorod, and skullcaps flamboyantly decorated with tassels, crests and beast-visaged emblems from the summit clans of the upper snows. Flags of red and gold, banners of white and blue, and gonfalons of black fluttered and snapped above them in the strengthening wind.
All were set with grim faces turned towards the darkness approaching from the mountain depths – the zienesta abisal, the Shadowgulf. While the coming ratkin horde spread out from scores of tunnels and caves, the air above them seethed with corrupted power, churning and frothing like a maelstrom.
The high walls to either side thronged with three thousand of Arka’s spear- and axe-wielding warriors, for the most part guarded against harm by nothing more than layers of leather and wool, and wooden oval shields painted with the rune of their new overlord.
The outer wall of Kurzengor, the settlement itself but a small fragment of the immense city built above and dug below Ursungorod, stood five times the height of a man, and thick enough for chambers within. But it was broken in places, shattered by the constant upheavals that wracked the mountain range, the breaches filled as best as possible with dull brown bricks, mortared stones and thick planks.
It was not ideal, but it was the best place to meet the squealing, shrieking mass of half-man rat-things that boiled up from the tunnels below. The wall itself was nothing, it was the men and women who held it that would decide the course of the battle.
Arka held up his axe, its long haft in one hand, the crescent moon blade glittering in the light of the accursed storm. He lifted his voice above the growing rumble.
‘This was the weapon of my mother. She took it from the fist of my father when he fell at Nijholli, already bathed many times in the blood of their enemies. Scores of foes – human, gods-tainted and ratkin – fell beneath it from my mother’s hand. She lived for the battle, but the cowardly vile-rats did not give her the peace of a war-death. Their corruption, their filth, spewed forth on noxious clouds, and plague heralded their attacks. In her bed, choking on lung-rot, every gasping breath an agony, that is how she died.’
He paused, eyes closed as the memory of that sight sank its claws into his throat, stifling his words. Taking a deep breath, Arka continued.
‘Before her final moments, I, a child of eight winters and seven summers, took this axe from her. I bid her farewell, and swore that I would see every one of the rat-filth slain. Every day since, I have cleaved to that oath. Long I have waged that war, and now they are goaded into showing themselves in the full light of day. Today shall live long in the legends of our people.’
Arka spoke the words with passion, but as he looked down at Radomira, who had nurtured him after his mother’s death, he shared her sadness – though he could not show it.
‘The omens do not give us hopes.’ Her words appeared in his thoughts, not passing her lips. ‘On the day you were born, the Ursungorod shook and the earth cracked beneath the Skagoldt Ridge to throw up the fires of the deeps. I saw a storm that day, and in its depths comes your ending.’
‘You knew as much when you took me as your son,’ Arka replied without speech, as he had been able to do with Radomira since that day she appeared at the house of his dead mother and bid him to leave with her. ‘You also spoke of great things that will happen this day. Our people will be saved, you said. If that needs my death, so be it.’
‘I did not say our people would be saved,’ she chided. ‘You must pay attention to detail, I have told you before. I said from the events of this day our lands will be freed.’
‘It is the same thing,’ grumbled Arka.
Accelerating, Arkas gloried in the touch of the frozen ground beneath his feet. The air was crisp and clean in his nostrils, at once so familiar and yet an almost forgotten memory. It instantly brought to mind childhood hunts and stalking the other youths of the Greypelt clan.
Darker recollections encroached, fuelling his long stride. Much had changed, in the lands as well as in his form and knowledge, but still his heart burned with the same furious thirst for vengeance. Sigmar the mighty God-King had furnished him with the means to finally fulfil that oath to his dying mother, gifting him with an immortal reforged body and weapons of celestial power. He was Greypelt no more. His clan loyalties were insignificant compared to the brotherhood ties of a Strike Chamber. All of the old titles were nothing compared to the epithet he had earned from Sigmar himself – Arkas Warbeast.
The kin-eaters were foolishly brave, not knowing the full nature of the warrior that attacked. They saw a solitary figure and perhaps thought to overwhelm him with the first rush of their counter-attack. He pounded up the slope, vaulting toppled stones and bounding across crevasses that had once been tower chambers. Arrows from short bows and stones from slings clattered and cracked harmlessly from his plated body.
‘The Lord Sigmar sends this message to all that nestle in the bosom of the Dark Gods,’ Arkas roared, his voice carrying like the wind of a storm.
He swept out the trails of his cloak and a flurry of hammer-shaped bolts flew across the gap, slashing golden wounds through the cannibalistic Chaos worshippers. A dozen strides later, he met the first of the kin-eaters’ warriors. Arkas’ sword flicked out, trailing lightning bolts, its tip parting the depraved barbarian from gut to chin. His hammer smashed the heads from two others. Pig iron blades and studded cudgels clattered ineffectually from his silvered armour.
It was more than the earth underfoot and the air in his lungs – the subtle nature of the Realm of Ghur stirred within him, calling him back to his roots, unleashing the war-beast that had always been part of him. When he had been known as the Bear-clad it had been something of a madness, coming upon him in the heat of combat. As the bloodfever rose he understood now that something more primal was aroused – something in the fabric of the mountains of Ursungorod that ignited inside him.
The leading edge of the storm was no more than a bowshot from the walls. Putridity, foul and yet sweet, carried on the strengthening wind. The rankness of the vile-rats came before them, accompanied by the chittering and squealing of warriors with matted fur and ragged robes.
‘There are fewer of them than I expected,’ Arka joked. The pestilentzi numbered at least five times that of his host. But in truth he did not think it too many; his warriors were a match for that number, and the walls, though broken, gave them even more advantage. He started to think that perhaps Radomira’s dire prophecy was wrong. It was not unknown for her to misinterpret the signs.
A shout from the left brought his attention to the upper end of the valley. There were shapes moving through the rocks of the gorge, the sickly light of the storm glinting from rusted armour and weapons. Men with unkempt locks and filth-crusted beards skulked through broken boulders and stunted trees. Their womenfolk came with them, their hair teased out into untidy braids slicked with human fat.
‘The ghoul tribes,’ sneered one of Arka’s companions, a wiry uzteki called Timur. The one-eyed warrior spat on the stones. ‘They are already cursed by the foul powers, and now they have made an alliance with the ratkin.’
‘No matter,’ Arka replied, though the confidence he had felt moments earlier was starting to ebb. ‘They are hardly better fighters than the scab-rats from below.’
He eyed the storm, which washed over the grand fortifications, bringing with it choking fumes. Men and women on the battered ramparts coughed and retched as foul-tasting smog obscured everything.
‘Archers!’ Arka bellowed, knowing that the pestilentzi would use the cover of the cloud to advance quickly. He had marked their approach carefully and had expected such a ruse – this was not the first time the ratkin had unleashed the foetid breath of the Horned One. ‘Loose to one hundred paces!’
Fifteen hundred bows were lifted and fifteen hundred dark shafts disappeared into the gloom. Eyes stinging, Arka could not mark their flight beyond fifty paces, but the fog could not wholly muffle the shrieks and squeaks of pain a few moments later. The archers reloaded and sent another volley, more ragged than the first, and another.
