Hammer and Bolter: Issue 23 by Christian Dunn

Author:Christian Dunn
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
Publisher: Black Library
Published: 2012-08-24T16:00:00+00:00

LET THE GREAT AXE FALL

Part One

Graham McNeill

In the end, they counted eighty-eight skulls in the pile at the heart of the village: the skulls of children, no larger than a fist, all the way to those of fully grown men and women. The entire settlement had been wiped out in a single act of slaughter. Such feasts of death would usually attract the attention of carrion birds, but the sky above Heofonum was empty of scavengers.

Stacked in a pyramid, with the smallest at the top, the skulls were coated in sticky blood that had run down the bony ridges of empty eye sockets and jawbones to pool beneath this grim shrine to man’s mortality. The wooden homes of the villagers lay in ruins, smashed apart as though a herd of bulls had been driven through them. Even the stone hall at the edge of the settlement had been destroyed.

Their hunting party had ridden the length and breadth of Heofonum, turning over every fallen timber, digging through every collapsed home and raking the debris of its abandoned barns, but they had found nothing of its inhabitants save their fleshless skulls. This was the third such village they had found, and with each bloodied pile of skulls laid before them like monstrous altars of worship, the mood of the hunters darkened still further.

Wenyld leaned against the stone wall of what had been the village alderman’s home. The stonework was simple, imitating the style of Sigmar’s great hall in Reikdorf, but this building had not been crafted by the mountain folk, but by the hands of men and was nowhere near as grand or finely made. It had been built to last, with dutiful care and a cunning eye for defence, but that had not been enough to thwart the monster that had razed Heofonum. Having listened to Leodan’s account of its ferocious strength, Wenyld doubted any wall, no matter whether wrought by man or dwarf, could withstand such dreadful power.

Wenyld pulled his cloak tighter around his shoulders as a chill blast of wind scudded through the ruined hall. Ever since he’d taken a dead man’s spear to the belly in the last moments of the battle to save the Empire from the necromancer’s undead legions, he’d found it next to impossible to keep the cold at bay. Only perched on a bondsman’s bench at a blazing firepit would any hint of warmth touch him. With winter blowing in over the Vaults to the south, Wenyld knew he was in for a painful season of snow and misery, with aching bones and frost-touched marrow.

‘Great Ulric, you favour the snows, but I’ll be glad to see your brother again with the spring,’ he said with a respectful nod to the ice-white skies of the north.

‘Careful,’ said Cuthwin, emerging from the trees on the far side of the ruined hall. ‘I’d rather we didn’t offend Ulric before we head into the mountains.’

‘Into the mountains?’ said Wenyld, irritated he hadn’t even suspected his friend was near.

Cuthwin

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