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This Rough Beast – Graham Thomas Wilcox

About the Author

An Extract from ‘The Hollow King’

A Black Library Publication

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This Rough Beast

Graham Thomas Wilcox

Outside many-mountained Ulrung, the Knights of the Wolf Rampant watched the Fyreslayers gather for battle. They sat arrayed in conroi upon a ridge overlooking Mingol Drazhgrund – Blackhammer’s Tower – the dying sun striking bright fire from their red and fluted plate. Kastellan Sforzia stood in her stirrups, turned to Marcuccio and grinned.

‘At last, we have them. Loose Morgaw on them, and we shall charge.’

Marcuccio was staring at the tower. It did not, he thought, look anything like the keeps and donjons of old Carstinia. In truth, it was little more than a squat gate hewn into a mountainside, choked with runes and carven bearded faces. Yet, bloodroses are known to bloom from the driest, ungory earth. So Torquato, bearer of the Banner of Night Forlorn, had assured them when first they clapped eyes upon it. Even so, doubt, that dagger of the soul, pricked Marcuccio’s heart.

‘Marcuccio,’ Sforzia said, impatience sharpening her voice. ‘Order the wolf onwards. We charge behind her. Now, if you please.’

He looked to his left, at the Kastellan. Then to his right, where lounged the wolf Morgaw – white-furred, amber-eyed, tall as a Hammerhal destrier at the shoulder. The wolf growled. Her hackles bristled. Hearing in her rough voice the spectre of his own apprehension, Marcuccio shook his head.

‘She says they are too many. I do not believe she errs. Our strength wanes – let us fly.’

Sforzia speared him with a look. ‘She is a wolf. She receives no say.’

‘I am a knight. I have given her my oath. She shall see the cairns of her homeland again. We have hunted the Black Chalice this long. Another night shall not injure us.’

‘Oaths to a wolf.’ Sforzia snorted. Morgaw growled, but the Kastellan, if she heard her, did not acknowledge it. ‘We divined this night in the entrails of the Broken Templar. We heard it in the death howl of Wiglaf One-eye and all his Darkoathed horde. Now, the legendary Whitebeard stands below. His blood is the last reagent. With it, the Black Chalice shall be ours. Nagash’s curse may end, brother. Upon your own sword, you swore yourself to this hunt. Do you not recall?’

Marcuccio looked at the duardin below. One among them, his beard longer and paler than his kin, bawled orders in their harsh language. A crown crested his helm. At his right hand stood one of their priests, chanting and swinging a censer; at his left another duardin, cloaked and hooded, lounged upon an axe. Sforzia snorted again, and Marcuccio’s gaze snapped back towards her.

‘I recall,’ he said. ‘Yet, I did not think Whitebeard a king. And this one’s beard is more grey than white, I daresay. Nor is the language of the legend so certain as you claim.’ Sforzia scowled, and he shrugged. ‘It is of no matter. We’ve hunted him this long. What is a night or two longer to recoup our might? We hunt elsewhere, and return.’

‘If they are many now, they may yet grow in number. The Chalice can wait, but Whitebeard may not. The realms are large, brother. Who is to say where he shall go? We clasp our fangs to his throat. We would be fools not to bite.’

The argument was old and well-worn between them, like a ghoul’s favourite bone; Marcuccio could not resist one more gnaw at the marrow.

‘You do not err, Kastellan,’ he said. ‘We’ve hunted long. Yet, we’ve feasted little. I fear we act rashly.’ Marcuccio unhasped the book from his saddle, ignoring the groans from the knights behind him. ‘Consider what Sir Gromdal wrote – The first and greatest victory is to conquer the thirst. There is no shame more vile than to be by the thirst conquered.’

Sforzia shook her head. Beneath her helm, her hair, like braided sunlight, gleamed. She looked down the long arch of her nose at Marcuccio. ‘That book. By the Crimson Keep, I curse the day you dredged it forth. It is nothing.’

Marcuccio remembered well the day. The tower, old and ruinous, a fang splintered off from some elder world. The desperate battle amidst its crumbled battlements, its rotten roots. The terror they slew within its dungeons – one of the Sombre Paladin’s abhorrent get. Morgaw, then but a starveling wretch, had saved him from the ghoul-king’s claws. He’d sworn his oath to her thereafter. They’d fished the book from the bones and offal of its treasure hoard and read in that tome’s yellowed pages about the location of the Black Chalice. Though it was couched in long metaphor and strange diction, they nevertheless recognised the legend – no Kastelai in all the Eight Realms was ignorant of it. The Black Chalice was Sir Ushoran’s own cup, thieved from him when he was at last cast down by Nagash. To sup from it, so the legends said, promised an end to the Hunger. An end to Nagash’s hold upon their honour. The Knights of the Wolf Rampant all swore themselves to its discovery, beneath the waning moons.

Memories of an older, better time. He shook his head, thus dispelling from him nostalgia and its sweet melancholies. ‘The book speaks of honour. And of the quest.’

Sforzia’s scowl deepened. Her eyes, blue as watered steel, thrust for him anew. ‘Enough,’ she said. She lifted her chin and the Wraith Moons gilded the sharp edges of her face, and her beauty deflected Marcuccio’s retort before he ever spoke it. ‘Would you be Nagash’s slave forever? We ride. We conquer.’ Then, to Marcuccio alone, her voice razored down to its finest whispering edge. ‘You swore yourself to its discovery, sir.’

For freedom, she may have claimed. For the Black Chalice. But her sunken cheeks, her burning eyes, her slavered lips spoke a different story. The Hunger is in her, Marcuccio thought. It was in him, too. His tongue was dry, like leather baked beneath a sun unsetting. When he blinked, his eyes gritted against their lids. He saw the eyes of his fellow knights, red and hungry as wood-starved flame. His own fangs ached, as though by pain alone they might water that desert in him. He clenched and unclenched his fists. Blood, some part of him whispered (always whispered, wind breathing across a tomb), blood.

Sforzia was not wrong. The Hunger was Nagash’s chain, noosed around the necks of all the Kastelai. Its shattering was worth all hazard. And he had sworn himself to it.

Sforzia, he realised, was staring at him. He snapped his mouth shut, and nodded. Sforzia turned her head away, her expression unreadable. She flogged the air above their heads with her mace, its head carved like a fist robed in blood.

‘The Black Chalice,’ she cried. ‘Vhordrai! Vhordrai!’

Behind her, Torquato unfurled the Banner of Night Forlorn – a wolf and crescent moon, argent and sable – and it was time. Drawing breath into his dead lungs, Marcuccio winded once more the Flayed Clarion. As one, the conroi’s lances lowered. Hooves thundered the earth.

‘Vhordrai! Vhordrai! Vhordrai!’ The whole conroi now, chanting their absent lord’s name, a battle cry, a warning, a prayer. The whole conroi, that is, but one.

Marcuccio’s lips parted, his fangs bare to the wind. He needed something on which he might focus besides his comrades’ chanting, fang-gnashing frenzy. He chose – as all true Kastelai should choose – to focus on his Art. His seat in his Nightmare’s saddle: settled but not stiff; loose but not slovenly. His lance couched beneath his arm, its filigreed neck snugged tight against his breastplate’s arret, its point straight and proud and unwavering as pale death itself. All in accordance with the One and Sanguine Art as proscribed in the scrolls of the Kastelai by Vhordrai himself. Art, not ardour. Honour, not hunger.

Marcuccio’s teeth ached.

Morgaw, loping ahead of them, took the Fyreslayers’ sentries in her teeth. She shook them like rats; their blood misted the air.

Nearer the charge, louder the thunder, and Marcuccio saw now the heat hazing the field of battle, rising from the Fyreslayers as they turned to face the knights, as though they were themselves one inferno, cave-pale and sparsely gilded. He saw their king heave high his key-bladed axe and bellow, in their hammering tongue, a challenge. He saw Morgaw bearded now between two duardin, their axes singeing her mane as she snarled and backed and leapt, a curl of steam between two fires. It was at this pair he aimed his lance.

The duardin in front of Morgaw, to her left: a tall helm upon his head, and scars twisting his broad back. Marcuccio roared a challenge, and as the duardin turned, the lance punched into his chest square below a rune. Blood, everywhere the blood, and the other duardin whirled even as Morgaw leapt at him, his twin axes whistling through the air towards Marcuccio. Dropping his lance, Marcuccio drew his estoc and parried, his palm up, his blade down. One axe spiralled up and away into the nether. But the second axe bit into Marcuccio’s Nightmare.

It cleaved through barding, reins, and black-eyed skull. Marcuccio kicked free of his stirrups and rolled from the saddle even as the beast fell. The sky tumbled end over end over end. The earth kicked him. Dust clouded the air, and for a moment Marcuccio’s eyes closed.

Something wet on his face. Blood, he thought (he hoped).

Again the wet. Something else beneath it. Rough, and warm. He blinked.

‘Morgaw,’ he said. The wolf’s mouth opened, a predator’s toothy salute to kith and kin. He crouched before her, lifting her gums, turning her muzzle left then right, peering under her mane and behind her ears. ‘You do not bleed,’ he said at last, and the wolf licked his face again. But then her ears lay back and she growled and Marcuccio turned, scything-swift, and an axe clanged from his estoc. A flick of the wrist and duardin blood warmed his hands, and Morgaw howled, for around them sweet battle raged.

Ahead of them, Sforzia cried out ‘Vhordrai!’ as her mace smote skull after skull, as she danced her Nightmare forward and back, as she parried with her shield the reaping axes of their foes.

Another duardin – lanky, full-bearded, feinting with his axe in a manner most convincing, were he not five paces out of measure – rushed in and hewed downwards at Marcuccio’s helm. Marcuccio stepped back, sketched a parry, riposted (an upward cut from that low guard the Askurgans called the Wyvern’s Tail) and remised (a high thrust, named the Wolf’s Tongue among the clans of far-faring Vyrkos). The duardin ducked the first with admirable speed – but ate the second straight through his teeth as he rose. Marcuccio stepped over his corpse, over his Nightmare’s sundered hulk, and deeper now, deeper into the fray he strode, Morgaw by his side, biting, leaping, clawing, her jaws a ravening pit, her muzzle grizzled with duardin gore, her eyes amber and untroubled.

Marcuccio glanced at the rest of the battlefield. He liked little of what he saw. After the initial charge, the conroi had scattered, each knight raging into the duardin according to their individual hungers. A travesty. Warriors must fight side by side, wrote Gromdal, for like a beard woven into a mighty braid, together the warriors resist their foeman’s shears. Alone, however, they shall be trimmed.

An odd metaphor, Marcuccio admitted, but apt. Even as he watched, Sir Donato charged headlong into a knot of duardin. He spitted one upon his lance, rode down another, and exulted in the spray of their blood – until the hooded duardin’s axe snatched his head from his shoulders. So died another knight – burnt by the fire-spitting lances of the duardin Hearthguards – and another – heartshot by a javelin – and so on, and so on.

And yet, they spilled much blood.

Blood. On Marcuccio’s helm. Flecking his gauntlets. Painting his estoc. Blood dark as rust, scabbing already. Blood that reeked of iron and blood that smelt of copper.

Marcuccio hacked a black-crested duardin down, caught an axe on his couter, stabbed its owner through the eye, slapped a javelin from the air, thrust its one-eyed wielder through the heart. Marcuccio stomped forward and heaved his estoc above his head – but now there was no blood, for no duardin remained near him. And no knights either, for that matter. He blinked, and turned around.

‘Blood,’ someone snarled. A moment later, he reckoned the voice for his own. Another moment, and he saw more duardin. A line of them, backed against the tower’s ivied wall. Short beards and few runes. Their knuckles whitened on their axes, their warpicks. He heard their hearts thumping in their breasts. Could almost see the rivers of their veins mapped bright against their flesh. Could taste, as a wanderer in the desert tastes the rain prophesied by a clouded sky, the sweet red relief tombed in that yielding loam they called their flesh. Beside him, Morgaw whined. He ignored her.

The true warrior slays those who offer challenge. The squalid beast feasts on whomever, whatever, it might catch.

Someone wrote that, long ago. But Marcuccio could not recall who. He stepped towards the duardin and they shuffled a half step backwards, a candleflame whipped by the wind. Marcuccio’s estoc hung limp. Pain hammered him: his skull, his arms, that space between the shoulder blades where the hand cannot scratch. Pain’s hammer breaks some, cracking them like false iron. But others it purifies, like a sword forged true by the smiths of yore.

Marcuccio rolled, heard the air whistle, and his sword arced up into a parry. He stood, the duardin-king’s axe blow sliding off his blade, slapping into the ground as Marcuccio swept the estoc up into a high, cleaving guard – and abandoned it a moment later as the duardin-priest, aiming a braziered staff at him, roared a word of power and gouted fire at his head. Marcuccio stepped back and to the side – the temptation was to leap back, but he knew a warrior must never grant a spellslinger space. Rather, the warrior must press near, seeking an opening. So, this was what Marcuccio attempted. The priest swung his staff at him once, twice, flames licking from its head. Too close to parry, too swift. Marcuccio ducked one, sidestepped the other. Close now, close enough to thrust up at the soot-streaked strands of its beard. He lunged–

And another axe smacked his estoc aside. Marcuccio had time enough to glimpse the duardin-king – Whitebeard himself – scowling up at him before the duardin-priest stepped back, his hand raised, the runes engraving it glowing, and Marcuccio, who knew magic when he saw it, dashed forward, beneath and between the two duardin. Swift he stepped, careful as the dancers of dead Carstinia. But not swift, not careful enough. An axe clanked into his cuisse, bit through the steel and into the white thigh flesh below. Marcuccio fell.

A howl split the air. Morgaw, teeth a-snarl, leapt. Whitebeard’s axe flashed and she tumbled back, yelping. The duardin-king laughed and the Runesmiter turned, his hand a furnace yawning open over Marcuccio.

‘Vhordrai!’

A lance burst through the Runesmiter’s neck. Behind it, Sforzia. Blood masked her. She grinned, her teeth red as the rest of her, and, dropping her lance, drew once more her mace.

‘The Black Chalice,’ she cried at Marcuccio, ‘We shall have it, brother! Vhordrai!’

Her mace crushed the head of a Hearthguard, bludgeoned blood from the duardin-king’s own mouth. For a moment, Marcuccio thought she might win the day for them then and there, prying defeat’s fangs from the very flesh of victory by her own mighty hand. But then the priest staggered to his feet, stumbled towards her and, skewered throat bulging, croaked some final word in his molten tongue. The runes on his hand flared and, like a mountain split by the earth’s burning heart, vomited flame all over Sforzia. Her Nightmare reeled, skeletal legs flailing. Sforzia, her helm melting, her hair a whip of flame, toppled from her saddle, screaming.

Whitebeard cursed, then spat at her. But now Marcuccio stood, sword in hand. He leapt, stepping up and over Sforzia’s burning steed, over its saddle, hurtling forward until his pauldron smashed the duardin-king off his feet. Together, they plumed dust from the earth.

They rose together. The duardin backed away, his empty fists balled, his right bleeding from the stump of his little finger. Marcuccio stepped out of sword measure. He waited. Then he paced left, right, left again. But the duardin did not move.

Whitebeard’s axe lay near Marcuccio. He flicked his estoc’s point towards the weapon. ‘Pick it up.’ The duardin did not move – presumably, he did not speak High Carstinian. Marcuccio frowned. He motioned again with his sword. ‘The axe, pick it up.’ The duardin only scowled, cracked his knuckles, and settled lower in his guard.

Marcuccio darted forward, hooked his soleret under the haft, and flipped it back towards the duardin. The duardin snatched it from the air and cut at him once, a great hooking cleave aimed from a low guard. Gripping his estoc by hilt and blade, Marcuccio parried, then thrust at Whitebeard again and again and again. The king punched the estoc away with his axe haft, then smashed its key-toothed blade into Marcuccio’s pauldron, stumbling the knight back. Whitebeard hooked the axe into Marcuccio’s cuirass, slashed the helmet from his head, crashed the knight straight down to his knees. Roaring his victory, Whitebeard heaved the axe above his head. Its edge glinted. The runes gilding the old duardin’s flesh blazed. In them, Marcuccio read his doom foretold.

But Marcuccio was a Knight of the Wolf Rampant. He’d slaughtered foes on battlefields across the Eight Realms. He’d faced princelings of the Ruinous Powers, chieftains of the aelves, knights of a thousand human lands. His soleret scraped stone. He dropped the point of his estoc – not so far it was obvious, but enough that a seasoned warrior would see the gap and think, Here is my moment.

A warrior is most vulnerable when he strikes. Gromdal wrote that, and it was, Marcuccio knew, sage advice.

Whitebeard struck and Marcuccio stood, twisting hip and shoulder into a hew along the throat where the gorget so often droops, and the king kissed the earth, gargling his own blood.

Marcuccio’s blood, black as a Witch Aelf’s soul, leaked from him. Spent, nearly all spent. Nearby, Sforzia’s Nightmare crackled and smouldered. Sforzia herself he did not see – dead beneath her mount, he thought, or perhaps fled, pain-maddened by the duardin-priest’s flame. The thought was an unpleasant one.

Marcuccio licked his lips. Blood there, hot as forge-ash, sweet as honeyed cream. The Hunger again – he might have choked on it, so fierce his need, his want. He looked down at the duardin-king’s corpse. He should rejoin the conroi. The banner. He should not stare at the king’s throat, a second mouth gashed in it. He should not kneel over the corpse, his own mouth agape like a squire before a princess.

But what harm, in a sip? A lick? Had he not earned it? Had he not slain Whitebeard, champion of the stunted folk? Had he not achieved something beaut–

–a flash of white in the corner of his vision, a flap of hood. And a voice, deep as mountain roots. ‘Khazukan kazakit-ha!’

A bright light flared, and something struck Marcuccio’s head. The world shifted and he glimpsed, for the briefest moment, such sights as only the night-bats saw – the earth, turning and distant, and then darkness. No pain at first; then a great deal. He lay on his back, blinking back the scourging light, groping for his sword. He opened his eyes and saw the now-unhooded duardin, his axe held upon his shoulder. He wore no helm, his hair a stiff broom swept back from his brow, his beard a mass of braids, pale as fresh snow. He led a wedge of flame-haired duardin in a charge, their voices rumbling a dirge. Marcuccio glanced at the fallen duardin-king, and realised then his mistake. Here, alive and deadly, charged Whitebeard.

The wedge thudded past Marcuccio, towards a loose knot of knights. The last of the conroi still on the field, so far as Marcuccio could see – now too diminished in number and strength for victory.

Had they remembered their discipline, they still might have won. But frenzied by the blood, each charged alone into the duardin ranks. On the left, Baudolino Twiceslain leapt from his Nightmare onto a duardin, gnawing at his neck. They tumbled to the earth and Baudolino stayed atop him, blood staining red the blond spade of his beard, a leech fastened to his foe. He did not even bother raising his shield as the duardin’s companions surrounded him and, like a leech, pried him from his prey and splattered him flat. Innamorata charged through the duardin ranks, shrieking her hate, her eyes like black flames in the cavern of her helm, until an axe snuffed them out forever. Beyond her, the same drama played itself out again and again. Everywhere, the unhooded duardin’s axe cleft skull and spine.

Marcuccio saw crimson plate carved asunder – drake-winged helms stoved, lances shattered, the Nightmares a stiff-legged jumble. Even as he counted the dead, he saw the Banner of Night Forlorn, borne forth by them for years uncounted against foes unmeasured, topple. Torquato’s gauntlet, severed at the wrist, hung from it still.

A whimper behind Marcuccio whipped him round. But it was only Morgaw, front paw held off the earth, limping towards him. That decided him.

‘Come,’ he whispered. ‘Away.’

The wolf obliged, trotting as swiftly on three legs as most managed with four. Low to the ground, they fled towards the surrounding mountains.

Into the peaks climbed Morgaw and Marcuccio. Empires had risen, fallen and risen again since Marcuccio last felt his sinews tremble, or the long ropes of his muscles shake. A thin novelty, the sensation. 

They passed stone heaped high by hands long dead, arches and caryatids of a people made dust by the years unreckoned, beautiful as starwrought night. They passed valleys pristine as Alarielle’s own cradle, queenly lands robed in pine and oak, spangled with pale flowers, crowned by pools of water long unfouled by mortal lips. But they saw no men. Marcuccio drank no blood. So passed a thirsty day, a desert night.

Morgaw hunted what small game roved the mountains, the rats and rabbits and such. But soon even she rooted up no food. At last, they crawled into a dank cave, a pore within the white face of the mountains. There Marcuccio did not sleep – for the Soulblighted never sleep as mortals may. But in his pain and hunger, his eyes closed and he saw, resurrected by a necromancy not his own, the grand, dead days of his past.

The siege of the Knights of the Brimming Font, where Sforzia rode a winged Nightmare against the Preceptor of the Font and cast him down – terrorgheist and all – into the pit.

The charge against the Stormcasts outside Anvilgard, where Ruggiero fell. The charge alongside the Stormcasts outside Glymmsforge, where the Crimson Keep unveiled itself and they all saw Vhordrai smite down some king among the gargants. The Saint of Slaughter tapped his foe’s throat like a firkin and filled a chalice right there upon the battlefield. They had cheered.

Marcuccio remembered the blood and almost wept – would have wept, had he gore enough in him to wet his eyes. 

He tried to speak – a curse? A thanks? It was only then he realised he lay face down upon the ground. Someone shouted something at him. It sounded like a prayer, or perhaps a very long list of orders.

Then, a whimper. Marcuccio’s eyes snapped open. He stumbled to his feet – and felt within his punctured meat the lawless grinding motion of his unmended bones – and saw, not three yards distant, Sforzia. She leaned against the cavern wall. Above her, lichen hung. No weapon in hand but her own clawed fingers. With one blistered foot, she pinned something to the ground beneath her. A hairy lump, mewling and whimpering by turns. It bled as it writhed.

‘Morgaw,’ Marcuccio said. Or rather, attempted to say. A rattle emerged instead, bones cast within a pit. Sforzia’s one remaining eye – the metal of her helmet had run, like red wax, into the other – rolled in its socket and blazed at him. In it Marcuccio beheld no vision of the knight she had once been. Only the Hunger, fiery as fell Aqshy. She cocked her head to one side.

‘You live.’

‘Aye.’ He stepped closer to her. His legs shook, as though he were a colt newly dropped from its mare. His left hand steadied him against the stone. His right groped for his estoc. ‘As do you. How?’

She did not acknowledge the question. ‘Come, Marcuccio,’ Sforzia said. ‘Let us drink, and be gone. The Black Chalice awaits. Whitebeard pursues me. He walks alone. We might still take him unawares.’

Marcuccio looked at her. ‘You are standing on my wolf.’ Blood beaded Morgaw’s neck, matted her mane, pooling atop that thirsty stone on which she lay.

Sforzia stared down the bridge of her nose at him. The effect was only slightly spoiled by the clench-toothed tremble of her jaw, the axebit ruin of her face.

‘I need her blood,’ Sforzia said. Marcuccio clanked forward a step. Sforzia ground her heel into the wolf’s throat. Morgaw yelped.

‘My oath to h–’

‘Prate not of your oaths, sirrah,’ Sforzia growled, ‘nor of your honour. Oaths to a wolf – the folly!’ She spat. Or rather, attempted to spit. A thin gruel of dust and brackish blood dribbled down her chin.

Marcuccio licked his lips, and said nothing.

Sforzia sneered at him. ‘Always you blabber of these nothings. As though you were some mortal priest, rubbing your beads and your holy book, scanning its pages for some succour from the fears of the world. Aye, the fears, that is it! You fear what you are – what we are. We’ve been given a gift. A mighty gift. The Black Chalice, Marcuccio. Think of it. Think of it! With it, we could crack the teeth of Nagash himself and be free, free to ride roughshod over the realms themselves! And still you babble of oaths and honour and other such nonsense. I shall not have it. I shall not waste away because of your words. I will drink.’

After she finished, a moment passed of wind-skirling, stone-rustling silence. Then Marcuccio touched his estoc to his brow.

‘You are standing,’ he said, ‘on my wolf.’

Sforzia’s lunge was quicker than one might expect from a one-armed, half-dead corpse. Marcuccio realised this only after he fell, his head smacking against the stone floor, the estoc clanging off and away into the dust. Sforzia scrambled atop him, her claw digging flesh from his face, her legs pressing down upon him.

Fangs bared against the pain, Marcuccio snatched for her throat. She rocked to one side and the stump of her left arm – a club of mottled flesh and splintered bone – crunched into his head. Her right hand gouged for his eyes.

Marcuccio grabbed at her hands, but he moved as though mired in a dream, his hands swimming through the air. Sforzia batted him across the face again, again, again. She brought her mouth nearer and nearer, fangs yellow and reeking.

His vision narrowed to a pinprick. Breath, hot and wet on his face. Jaws snapped.

And suddenly, he was free. A terrible roaring, a screeching, like ghyrlions in heat. Marcuccio scrambled to his feet. As he reclaimed his estoc, he saw them: Morgaw and Sforzia, each ragged as the other, the wolf crouched low and the knight stooped lower, locked jaw to jaw and claw to claw on one another’s throat.

The unmistakable sound of flesh tearing, and he lunged. Sforzia hunched over Morgaw, her face buried in the wolf’s neck, sucking greedy as an infant at its mother. She did not turn from her feast. Not even when his estoc pierced her. Not even when Marcuccio, foot braced against her naked back, wrenched the sword free and, sweeping it above his head, brought it down once more in an all-cleaving, all-slaying blow. He heard, rather than saw, her head slop to the ground.

Even before Sforzia ceased her death spasm, Marcuccio bent his own head down to Morgaw. She whimpered again, the sound coarsened by the ruin of her throat. She could not turn her head, but she licked at Marcuccio’s hand once. Then, she stilled.

Blood stained her coat, scabbed her mane. Marcuccio stared at it.

Slowly, his tongue lolling, he lowered his face until it hovered a hair’s-breadth above the wolf’s ravaged corpse.

‘Ach,’ rumbled a voice behind him, ‘I knew one of you leeches yet dirtied this realm.’

Marcuccio’s head snapped back up. He resisted the urge to cover his face, shamed by its urges. ‘Not. Leech,’ he rasped. ‘A. Knight.’

‘Ah, is that what they call it?’ The heavy tramp of boots. The jingle of metal. From the corner of his eye, Marcuccio saw white. Again, the voice. Old thunder and raw smoke. A king’s voice, or perhaps a god’s. ‘I suppose that’s one word for it.’ The voice sighed. ‘You’ve had a rough day of it, knight. I can’t say I’ll improve it.’

Marcuccio did not reply. After a moment, the speaker stepped into view. A long beard, white as clouds above peaks; a swept-back shock of hair, similarly hued. Scale armour, gilded. A tankard hung from his belt. He leaned upon a two-handed axe, its haft battered, its blade pristine and runed.

Marcuccio stared at him. ‘Whitebeard.’

The duardin arched his brow. ‘Some have called me that, aye. Reckoner and Avenger, Grudge-bringer and Vengeance-taker.’ He snorted. ‘But Whitebeard will do for you.’

Marcuccio struggled to his knees, and Whitebeard paced around him. Out of measure by the barest hair, some part of Marcuccio noted. Close enough to tempt a lunge, far enough to parry and riposte with ease. A huntsman’s tactic when confronting a wounded beast.

‘Stand up now. I’ll trim you sitting, by Grungni. But I never got a taste for killing something on its knees.’ Whitebeard laughed, as though he’d cracked a jape. ‘Up now, ’fore I change my mind.’ He tested the axe with his thumb. Blood beaded.

Marcuccio did not answer. He should have cut for the hand. Cripple the hand and the head shall follow. Gromdal wrote it so, in the scrolls of old. Marcuccio saw it play out in the theatre of his mind’s eye, plain as night. But he felt now all the long centuries of his unlife. The Hunger no longer gnawed. It bit. It drank.

Perhaps Whitebeard read that all in his face. Or perhaps he’d simply met his kind before. ‘There was a time,’ he rumbled, ‘when I would have fought you for the sheer pleasure of it. I am wiser now. Perhaps Snadri was not. He was one of Grimnir’s kith – just in case the big red hair wasn’t clue enough. The Zharrdrengi love fire a bit too much for my taste – but they’re duardin still, sure enough. You killed him, so I reckon I owe you a grudge for him and his. But you killed the other leech when she ate your wolf. Avenging the fallen, that’s tromm of you. Gives you the right to a better death than the rest of your clan, by my lights.’

Marcuccio said nothing. If he drank Morgaw’s blood, he might kill the duardin. It would not take much. He was a Knight of the Wolf Rampant, last of his conroi. Even if he died, it would be worthy of a song.

‘What I can’t figure,’ said Whitebeard, thumbing his moustache, ‘is just why you charged old Snadri. Beardlings, most of them. But they had the ground, and the numbers. They don’t break easy, the Zharrdrengi, for all their other nonsense. Seems… unwise, I would say.’

Marcuccio stared at the old duardin, thinking. He could lie, lure him closer somehow. Insult him – duardin tempers were not famed for their patience – and provoke a wild swing. Pretend his own death, even, and strike when – if – Whitebeard checked his body.

All these plans, and more, spooled through his mind, each more savage and less honest than the last. Marcuccio pushed himself away from Morgaw. Even that hurt. He lay on his back a moment. He swallowed, glass jagging his tongue. He spoke.

‘We sought the Black Chalice.’

‘Ah, of course. And that is?’

‘The Sombre Paladin’s own cup. Stolen from him by Nagash. It cures our… thirst. So the legends say.’

Whitebeard appraised him with a look. ‘Thought you zanguzazi enjoyed sipping blood. Like a good ale, or such.’

‘Most do, I suppose. But not all. It is Nagash’s leash around our throats.’ Marcuccio coughed. ‘We are knights. Such submission stains our honour.’

‘No one told your clan-mates. They filled their bellies with duardin blood, right enough.’

‘The first and greatest victory is to conquer the thirst. There is no shame more vile than to be by the thirst conquered.’ Marcuccio grimaced. ‘Sir Gromdal wrote that. Words of honour. Not always did we match them.’

Whitebeard blinked. ‘Sir Gromdal, eh?’

‘You know of him?’

‘You might say so, aye. Knew him a long time ago.’ The duardin frowned. ‘Don’t recall him being a zanguzaz, though. Or a knight.’

‘He wrote of the thirst, and of honour. What else would he be but a knight?’

Whitebeard’s laughter rumbled. ‘Hard to argue with that sort of wisdom.’ He ran his free hand through his beard. ‘Something to what he wrote, of course. But, there’s more than one kind of thirst. We duardin were full of them, those thirsts. Still are, I suppose. Thirst for ale, thirst for gold – thirst for vengeance. Used to be, we thought we could hold back the world. Make it what it once was, when our holds ruled the mountains and the sea, and everything in between. Thought if we kept our ways like they once were, we’d be that way again. That was honour.’ He snorted. ‘So we said, at least.’

‘We knights value our tradition as well.’ Marcuccio’s eyes wandered back to Morgaw’s neck. He closed them. ‘And our vengeance.’

‘I can see why you liked Gromdal’s words then, ha!’ Whitebeard slapped a hand against the belly of his mail. The scales rattled. ‘Not for me, any more. Nowadays, I reckon honour is family. Clan. Protect them, give them a life better than the one you led. That’s honour enough.’

Marcuccio thought of his mortal family – long dead, he supposed. His conroi now too. His mouth twisted. ‘I’ve no clan, as it were.’

Whitebeard pointed the axe at Sforzia’s headless corpse. ‘You can’t say she wasn’t one of yours. She bit the wolf – you slew her. I saw that much.’

‘I swore I would see the wolf back to her homeland. Sforzia swore to retrieve the Black Chalice.’ Marcuccio shrugged, then wished he hadn’t. Pain ground his teeth together.

Whitebeard nodded. ‘Oaths. Aye.’

A silence passed between them. Then the duardin unclasped the tankard from his belt, thumbed the top open, swigged from it, and strode forward. Marcuccio closed his eyes. He thought about honour. About glory. About the Black Chalice, and Sforzia, and the treachery of knights. About Morgaw. About oaths.

When he stood, his legs shook. For a moment, he feared they’d collapse under him. But then he steadied, and took his guard: point back, sword low. The Fool, they named it in Carstinia. Mannfred’s Guard, they called it in Nulahmia.

‘Wait, sir.’ Whitebeard had paused as Marcuccio stood. His brow wrinkled, by turns wrathful and sorrowful, like a father confronted once more by the iniquity of a wayward son.

But then he shrugged, and raised his axe above his head in that two-handed high guard, and nodded. Marcuccio lunged. The duardin stepped, struck, and Marcuccio sprang backwards. A downward cleave of the axe. Marcuccio snapped his blade up into the Fifth Parry and–

–parried air. A feint. Marcuccio leapt back, the true strike – a blow with the axe’s pommel – whistling past his chin. Whitebeard stormed forward, his axe thundering down again, again, again. Marcuccio twisted into the First Parry and the Third. He passed backwards, then sideways – and thrust, felt his thrust skitter off the duardin’s parry, recovered, feinted left, then hewed the Fourth Cut, his thews bending with the force of it.

Whitebeard grunted, Marcuccio’s sword ringing off his mail. A tear of blood, bright as the absent day, jewelled his armour where Marcuccio’s blade pricked it. A second hew followed and a third. He retreated, his axe whirling in his hands like a peasant’s staff, sword blows thudding from it with every step. Marcuccio advanced, each step a cut, a thrust. He scented it, that blood, its bouquet richer than the reddest rose. He–

–tasted iron. A pommel strike, smashed from below like a pugilist’s hook, floored him.

Marcuccio rolled to his back, gathered his legs under him, scrambled upwards, a ghoul fleeing some predator larger and stronger than himself. The axe whistled down at him once, twice, thrice, its runes crimsoning the air, brighter now, as though they felt his death approach. He slapped his sword upwards, leftwards, rightwards – no name for these moments (these failures), no art to them – nothing but the brute flailings of a beast withered down to its final stumbling moments. Whitebeard walked him down, his eyes grim, his axe inexorable. He made no wild lunge, no eager strike – simply ate up Marcuccio’s measure, haft and blade warding whatever lines his armour did not close, his advance slow and careful as vengeance itself.

Marcuccio’s soleret scraped stone. Thought and memory pierced the haze of pain and thirst gauzing his mind. A warrior, he recalled, is most vulnerable when he strikes.

Marcuccio dropped the point of his estoc – not so far it was obvious, but enough that a seasoned warrior would see the gap and think, Here is my moment.

He watched Whitebeard. Saw, in the duardin’s eyes, the spark of recognition. Saw the axe heave towards his own head. Whitebeard stepped into his hew, his axe singing through the air. Marcuccio lunged with him, his estoc whispering upwards. Steel clanged steel, long and ragged as a howl, and–

–Marcuccio lay on the ground. His limbs would not move. His eyes would not open. Somewhere far away, the rumble of laughter. It was not unkind. The tremble of the earth, as though trod by a giant, or a god. Stillness followed. An eternity of darkness, or perhaps, merely a moment. And then–

–Something wet on his face. Blood, he thought (tears, he dreaded).

Again the wet. Something else beneath it. Rough, and warm.

About the Author

Graham Thomas Wilcox is a writer and editor living in the Northeastern United States with his wife and their two dogs. “Grimnirsson” is his first story for Black Library.

An extract from The Hollow King.

The girl ran through the wood under the grin of a skull moon. Breath panted from her lungs. The roots tangled the ground under her feet. A branch caught in her hair, and her head snapped back. She pulled at the branch. The thorns tangled deeper. She yanked, panting, tears running through the blood smearing her face.

A howl came from the direction of the road.

‘Please…’ she cried, the words dissolving into a gasping ball of panic. She wanted her mother, her father, her elder sister. She wanted to be back in the rocking dark of the wagon as it jolted along the road in the twilight. She wanted the world to be a shape she understood, to hear a voice say that everything would be all right. She wanted someone to reach down and pick her up.

The thorns sliced into her fingers. The branches of the trees thrashed. She saw crimson eyes, pinpricks of ember red in the dark, behind her, coming closer.

Branches whipped Cado as he ran. The moon poured silver down on him. He could smell blood. Could taste it. Death was howling through the forest. The quarry was out there, running, flooded by fear, bleeding. It was fast too. He reached a thicket of trees. His eyes had become red flames in their sockets. The skin of his face pulled back from his teeth. The world was silver and red. It had taken too long to catch the caravan. Too long running along the lich-marked paths, hunger growing inside, as the prey sent a fraying thread pulling him on. Now the wagons of the caravan lay behind him on the road, tipped over, spattered with blood, dying horses thrashing in the harnesses. Now there was just this chase and a world redrawn by hunger.

His senses were singing. The reek of blood was a crimson haze. Magic spiralled through the bare branches. The gasp of breath. Bones rattling. Close. An abyss of hunger open and waiting to swallow him. He reached a rock, bounded onto its top and launched up into the branches of the trees. Birds took flight, cawing, their song splitting the air.

She had been asleep in the wagon, and then there had been shouting. She had come awake blinking, thinking for a second that the shouts were echoes of her dreams.

‘Stay here,’ her father had said, and she had clutched at the cold-iron hammer amulet and pulled the furs close. The rock and sway of the wagon had slowed, and then the vehicle had kicked, and she had heard voices shouting to ride fast. Her heart jolted. The grave-coins, bone amulets and dried roses hanging from the wagon’s roof swung on their cords. She hoped they would keep them safe again. There were things in the forests. For as much as her parents and the other adults tried to hide it, she knew this land wanted them dead.

Two nights ago, she had heard muttering and the click of cocking crossbows as she lay awake. She had sneaked up and opened the hatch at the back of the wagon. Peeking out she had seen something drifting through the trees. At first it looked like nothing, just a smudge of pale light. It was no more than two hundred paces away. It glowed, fizzed. Dead leaves rattled on tree branches above. The more she looked, the more she thought it had a shape – like an old person bent under a cloak, long arms and thin fingers trailing. She had wanted to duck back into the wagon but stayed, watching as the shape crackled past. Once it turned, and for a held breath she was certain she could see a head, the curve of a hood hiding a face and eyes. It had looked at her while the breath she was holding burned in her lungs. Her fingers had gripped the little iron hammer. She whispered what she could remember of the names her mother had spoken while hanging the charms inside the wagon: Sigmar, Morrda, and others that were just sounds.

Please let all the cruel things of this realm pass… Please protect us… Please let us reach a safe place… Please.

The blurred figure had drifted away through the trees. The guards settled again as she went back inside the wagon and watched the amulets turn on their cords as the wheels rolled on.

Tonight, as she heard the guards shout, she had begun to plead to the names and amulets again. Not whispering. Calling. The wagon had started to shake, wheels bucking over earth and stone. They were going fast, trying to outrun something coming after them. Then the world had tipped over. The wagon rolled and skidded, and the amulets clanged against each other. Toppling bundles of clothes half buried her. She heard the horses cry, and her father shout, and then another sound. A sound that froze her in place. A howl that passed through the wagon’s walls like they weren’t there. More shouts and then a loud, wet crunching. She had lain still, hardly daring to breathe.

Then she had heard claws on the outside of the wagon. She had looked around at the hatch-door, now on its side and level with the ground. Its bolt had broken, and it lolled on its hinges. The scrape of claws came closer. Her eyes stayed fixed on the hatch, waiting for a shadow to blot out the sliver of moonlight falling between it and the frame. Then there was a shout from somewhere nearby and the scraping of claws paused. She had not waited. She was up and through the hatch and running before her heart beat again.

There had been an instant when she had seen the shadow, looming close, ragged under the moonlight, eyes red. She had run into the trees. She saw a figure ahead of her, running too. She had followed. So had the red eyes of the ragged shadow.

She yanked her hair free from the thorns. Ran, gasping. Small bare feet over dark loam and tangled roots, fear numbing the cuts of sticks and stones. A tall, twisting tree stood in the middle of a clearing ahead. Its bare branches reached up to the rictus face of the moon. Birds crouched upon them. Hundreds of birds. Hunched forms of white and black feathers.

She could see someone running ahead of her. It was one of the caravan guards. Morinar, the kind one with the gut that did not fit under his armour; who always gave her one of the dried fruits from his pack when she asked; who was never scared of the sounds that came from the night, and always smiling.

‘Help!’ she cried. He turned, armour plates and chainmail jangling. He had a sword in his hand. His face was pale, eyes wide with terror, air gasping from his mouth. ‘Help! Please!’ she called again. Her foot caught on a root.

She fell. Her knee hit the edge of a stone. Blood… Blood beading her skin, black under the moon’s glare. She twisted to look back.

Red. Spots of red in between the trees. And jaws. She froze. A rattling sound of breath through long teeth came from behind her. The tears had stopped now. The birds shifted on their perches, beaks and feathers rustling. A rattling sound of something that could not breathe growling through a rotten throat. She was shaking. Her eyes clamped shut.

‘Mama…’ she whimpered, ‘Papa…’ It was the only thing she could think to say, the prayer of a child in the face of the unimaginable. It was right there, on the other side of her eyelids. She needed to be brave. Be brave and things would be all right. She turned, shaking, and opened her eyes. Glowing eyes looked back at her. Rotting skin and fur hanging from a long, yellow skull. Bits of red and pink hung from its teeth. It cocked its head. The ember light in its eyes flared. Two others padded from its shadow. Death-light and blood drooled from their mouths. Dead muscle tensed under flesh. Jaws hinged wide. She could see strands of hair and bits of cloth caught in the fangs. Be brave…

A sound like a scythe passing through wheat. Black, rotten blood splattering.

The nearest dead wolf twisted. The two halves of its split skull thrashed from side to side. A bubbling howl came from its throat. A shadow landed. It looked human. Almost human. It crouched on the ground between her and the wolves. A tattered cloak covered its back. It had a sword in its hand, bright under the grin of the moon. Two dragons coiled either side of the cross guard. She noticed rings on the thin fingers, black iron on pale skin. The wolves gave a growl. Their heads lowered. The figure in the tattered cloak looked back at her over its shoulder. Red eyes. Skin pulled taut around a mouth of knife-point teeth.

‘Run,’ it said.

The wolves howled.

The birds in the tree above took flight.

She ran.

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