Dark Master by Richard Strachan

Author:Richard Strachan
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 2021-04-15T12:41:56+00:00

About the Author

Richard Strachan is a writer and editor who lives with his partner and two children in Edinburgh, UK. Despite his best efforts, both children stubbornly refuse to be interested in tabletop wargaming. His first story for Black Library, ‘The Widow Tide’, appeared in the Warhammer Horror anthology Maledictions.

An extract from Warcry Catacombs: Blood of the Everchosen.

On the edge of the blasted wasteland that was the Desolate March, the settlement of Spite prepared for the Feast of the Black Spire.

Spite was a mean collection of squalid huts and tumbledown shacks, and as the evening crept through its meagre streets the wind began to blow from off the plains. The mountains of the Fangs, like a ragged jaw, loomed dark in the distance. The horizon flashed and muttered with thunder, and great banks of cloud roiled like silt in brackish water across those distant peaks. The storm was moving closer.

Ankhad huddled into his cloak as he moved through the streets, a bucket of water sloshing at his side. Uneasily he passed the towering model of the Black Spire, the seat of the Everchosen, which had been cobbled together from bone and rusting scrap in the middle of the town square – the centrepiece of the ceremonies that would take place later that night. He turned his gaze from it. Archaon Everchosen, the lord of this benighted land… Ankhad had never thought it advisable to pay too much attention to the Three-Eyed King; there was always the chance that the Three-Eyed King would start paying attention to you.

The wind picked up, stripping the plain of its ferrous topsoil and scouring it across the night. Lightning stabbed towards the earth, probing its way from the mountains to the edge of the March. The air in Spite was febrile and tense, and the gathering storm had only made it worse. Ankhad had already passed a scuffle or two, mutants and scavengers squabbling over a crust of bread or a scrap of salvage, rolling in the dust in bitter argument. No doubt blades had been drawn and buried, although it was death to shed blood on the Feast of the Black Spire. He cut through the derelict market and watched the other looters gather round to watch as another fight broke out.

Like corpse-hawks, he thought. Waiting for the scraps…

He hurried on, toting the bucket he had filled with muddy water at the well. The clouds seemed to drift closer above the settlement, thick and menacing. Spite’s rickety walls shivered in the wind, rattling with blown dust and sand. Ankhad grimaced at the smell in the air, the rank scent of fear and festering meat.

Above him, the clouds flickered and pulsed with light. Thunder rumbled across the land, shaking the very air, as coarse and violent as if the mountains themselves were being ground together. Ankhad flinched as the air cracked and trembled around him, and then, as he reached his hut on the edge of the settlement, a spear of red lightning crashed down with a deafening bark against the scrubland outside the gates.

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