The Interrogator by Richard Strachan

Author:Richard Strachan
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 2022-01-24T09:24:45+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, and he has since written ‘Blood of the Flayer’, ‘Tesserae’ and the Warcry Catacombs novel Blood of the Everchosen.

An extract from Hallowed Ground.

The sun was on its long decline as the scavenger came across the dead. Spears of light lanced down from the far horizon and stabbed into the littered plain. The afternoon drowsed into dusk, coloured by all the bold shades of Ghur: purple and scarlet, orange and gold. It would be a long night, the scavenger thought. You could never really tell in this realm; even the nights seemed possessed of their own volatile and irrepressible will. They lasted as long as they pleased.

He waited above the plain for a little while, crouched by an outcrop of rock until the light had further dimmed. Around him, tough sprigs of thorn grass wavered in the breeze. He tapped his fingers lightly against the flank of his cart and gazed down on the spread of corpses a hundred yards away. Orruks mostly, he thought. An ogor or two, perhaps. Stragglers from the great armies that had marched this way a season ago, heading to the city on the Coast of Tusks – Excelsis, proud bastion of Sigmar’s domain. Fell tales had drifted along the trade routes since then, weaving their way through the wilderness. Awful stories of slaughter and dread, mayhem and violence. The walls of the city had been breached, some said. The populace had been drowned in their own blood. The hosts of Destruction had given no quarter, and they had feasted well that night.

Kragnos…

The scavenger shivered. He had heard the rumours. Some said a god had burst forth from the mountains of Ghur, a beast fit to trample entire empires into the dust. A new god or a very old one, no one could quite say. Whether Excelsis had survived or not was hardly his business, but he doubted any mortal stronghold could have held back such violence. The ground had shuddered for days with the passing of the host, but the scavenger had not been foolish enough to try and lay eyes on it. Better to wait, he had thought. Better to skulk about in the mountains and keep your head down, emerging only when the air had ceased to tremble with rage.

Whether these orruks and ogors on the plain below him had died at their own hands or at the hands of their enemies was not the scavenger’s business either. They were a brutish, violent breed, and it would have come as no surprise if they had all torn themselves apart over some slight or insult, or just for the sheer pleasure of fighting. No matter. He only cared that they had left a goodly spread of bodies for him to pick over.

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