The Slaves to Darkness are poised to rampage across the Mortal Realms when the new Battletome, Sorcerer Lord, and Spearhead sets arrive for pre-order this weekend. To celebrate, a substantial sacrifice is made to their dark gods…
It was a bright, clear Verdian morning when the Skull Serpent Tribe met its end.
Their numbers had already been thinned by the vicious carnage of the past days. Urkan had watched as most of them were cut down by Sigmarite gunfire, but it was still a shock to see so many faces missing: Keheg Half-nose, Malog, Cenha the Axe, the Durg twins.
Chieftain Vasha had somehow lived through it all. She stood before them now, smashing her axe on her shield and screaming threats and curses at the squares of red-clad soldiers that approached at the far end of the valley, clustering beneath the cover of their towering war machines like a bear’s cubs.
In normal times, the Skull Serpents would have never faced such a force in the open. But the days of ambushing their slow, lumbering convoys had long passed. They had laughed, then, at the corpses they had left strewn about the root-nests of carnator trees and the blood that had seeped into the soil, feeding the corpse-vines until they grew as fat as leeches.
That first flush of victory had faded into a distant dream. First they had lost the forest outskirts. Then the hot springs and the Path of Altars. Now they had the mountains at their back and naught but artillery-blasted wastelands ahead. The city-men could suffer a thousand losses and come back less than a season later with twice that number under arms. They wanted these lands and their rich springs, and they meant to have them whatever the cost.
‘Bi’lal take their eyes!’ Chieftain Vasha screeched, ’Lord Gulch, turn their flesh black and their bones brittle! By the Eightfold One, I swear it – I will die with Sigmarite blood on my lips!’
Urkan felt a hand on his shoulder and turned to see Regheth’s smile. The left half of the woman’s face had been turned into a shiny mess of burns, and the empty socket of her eye was still seeping blood. The pain must have been extraordinary, but the big warrior seemed unbothered.
‘Here it is, then,’ she said. ‘Ready to take a few of these wretches down before we die, stuntling?’
‘Not today,’ he said. ‘I have sworn my pact before the Watcher in the Smoke. I heard his answer, Regheth. My soul is forfeit, but I’ll have my vengeance.’
Regheth sighed. ‘They’ve already won. They bled us white, and now they’ve come to finish the task. They’re stacking the walls of their great settlement on the bones of our ancestors. Goldhope, they call it.’
‘Mark me,’ said Urkan, and he grabbed the sides of her head in a vice grip, feeling the blood pound in his skull as he spoke the words. ‘Mark the pact I sealed before the eyes of the gods. I’ll see that city burn.’
It was a vain, ridiculous statement in that darkest of moments. What was he but a stripling killer barely out of his youth, with no more than half a dozen oathstones fulfilled in his name? Yet when he made the vow, he saw that she believed it.
Then the first cannon shots filled the air with screaming metal. To their left, the axeman Skel disappeared in a wet eruption of blood and bone. Another two warriors collapsed, screaming as they clutched bleeding stumps where their legs had once been.
‘Charge!’ screamed the chieftain, and each of the Skull Serpents howled their own war cry as they surged down the shallow incline toward the waiting guns. More cannonballs whipped past, and more tribesmen were obliterated. Some of the rounds burst in a crown of red flames, setting flesh alight. At fifty paces, the muskets roared, and the first ranks of tribesmen perished in perfect accordance, collapsing with that peculiar, boneless slump that marks those who are dead long before they hit the ground.
‘Death to the coward Sigmar!’ screamed the Skull Serpents, but their defiance was drowned out by the Sigmarites’ second volley. By the time they reached the line of red-and-black clad soldiers, less than a third of their number remained.
Then came the hand-to-hand slaughter, and here at least the Skull Serpents held the advantage. Flushed with oath-power and rage, they slew, their axes biting into necks and tearing open bellies, shattering the Sigmarites weapons into useless splinters. Urkan chanted the name of the Watcher in the Smoke, and in the spurting blood of his enemies, he thought he saw the avian face of that capricious deity, laughing and urging him on. Chieftain Vasha, her left arm nothing more than a bloody stump, was howling insanely as she crushed a struggling man’s skull with the rim of her shield. Regheth screamed something incomprehensible as she brandished a lump of misshapen flesh that might have been an enemy’s severed head. The city-men threw down their guns and fled in disorder. Drunk on bloodshed, the Skull Serpents roared their triumph and followed.
But by then, every cannon in the valley was trained on their position.
A storm of death enveloped them. Bodies simply disintegrated under the terrific concentration of lead shot. The air was filled with fire and smoke and blood. Urkan felt the impact of a bullet shatter his elbow, and then another took off his right ear. He collapsed to his knees, and perhaps it was this that allowed him to survive the cannonade while his kin were annihilated around him.
The ground shook. From the smoke kicked out by a hundred muskets came the enemy’s cogfort, looming above the battlefield like some mythical titan. The walking fortress halted, and there came a dreadful grinding sound as gears chugged and shells were jolted into position. From its towers came streaming a mass of smoking contrails, whirling and twisting in the air before slamming to earth. The explosion blanketed the field in fire, and Urkan felt the scorching heat of the impact blister his flesh a moment before a shockwave picked him up and threw him twenty feet. He landed in a shell crater filled with icy, foetid water. The sheer force of the impact threatened to rob him of consciousness. He slipped beneath the surface. Through the brackish liquid, he saw more blossoming fireballs and felt the tremor of cannon shot. Grasping a clump of mud, he pushed himself free, retching as he tried to breathe through bruised lungs.
Something came tumbling into the crater, slamming down on top of him with force enough to submerge him once more. As the pool clouded with mud and gore, he stared into Regheth’s dead visage, split by a sliver of shrapnel that had driven straight through her forehead. Rage and grief overcame him, and he tried to scream. Acrid water surged into his lungs, and he felt the strength ebb from his limbs as he tried to free himself from beneath the dead weight of his friend’s corpse.
As blackness swept over all, he was prepared to die and meet whatever fate awaited in the afterlife. But then he heard the whisper clearly in his mind – the voice that would be with him for the rest of his days.
Sixty years later.
Sorcerous fire melted hallowed stone until it ran like water, and with a grinding roar, the first wall fell. A great sheet of smoke and ash billowed into the air. When combined with the light from the blazing fires of Goldhope, it turned the sky an ominous dark crimson. Defenders rushed to the breach, hurrying to assemble Castelite formations under the bellowed orders of soot-smeared sergeants.
‘Warriors of Sigmar!’ cried Cavalier-Marshal Orvis Cade, leading his steed along the rear of the battleline. ‘This is your home! Your grandparents built this sanctuary with their blood and toil. They tore this land from the hands of ruin worshippers and blood sacrificers, and they purified it with the strength of their faith. What will your own legacy be, soldiers of Sigmar? Will you let the city fall, or will you stand and kill anything that dares set foot through that breach?’
The full-throated roars that met Cade’s words proved that his troops had not lost their spirit just yet. That morale was tested to breaking point as the first shadows loomed at the rubble-strewn opening.
First came a colossal slab of greyish flesh, pocked and criss-crossed with scars. A cyclopean brute, clutching a huge chunk of masonry in its hands. It was met with a rippling volley of gunfire and howled as part of its jaw burst apart in a spray of blood and bone. Reeling, it threw its crude missile. So tightly packed were the Freeguilders that they could not evade the boulder. It crushed a Steelhelm’s skull and left another two men screaming, their bones smashed to dust.
Marshal Cade urged his mount through a gap between the infantry lines and reached for his dragoon pistol, stowed in its holster on the horse’s flank. He drew it and took a bead on the one-eyed giant. He fired, seeing the puff of red smoke as the bullet smacked against the monster’s temple. It slumped to the ground, dead or dying.
More figures emerged: huge and broad-shouldered warriors, clad in metal inscribed with symbols that made Cade’s mouth fill with acid bile and his head throb. Bullets cracked into that armoured wedge from all sides, ringing and ricocheting from shields and gorgets. Some of the brutes went down. Many more simply shrugged off the volley with a bark of laughter and increased their pace, barrelling into the line of Steelhelms and driving the Sigmarites relentlessly back. Cade cursed, recognising that the battle’s outcome hinged on whether the enemy could be held here at the gates.
‘To me, Cavaliers!’ he cried, and his elite riders formed up behind him in a wedge of metal and horse-flesh. They rode into the flank of the Chaos worshippers, swinging maces and slashing with heavy riding swords, using the bulk of their war-trained steeds to drive the warriors to the muddy ground and crush them underhoof. They killed many in that charge, but the density of the enemy was so great that its momentum soon played out. Now rune-etched blades came stabbing up to take riders in the belly or side. Gauntleted hands dragged Cavaliers from their mounts to be butchered.
The Cavalier-Marshal urged his soldiers to fight on. He screamed until he was hoarse, his voice rising above the deafening crash of steel and the thunder of lead shot. Despite its bloody cost, the charge had checked the enemy’s advance. Seeing their leader in battle, men and women teetering on the edge of panic reclaimed their courage. It seemed the day might yet be saved. Then Cade saw the reptilian monstrosity lumbering towards him and the war-helm of its rider, so ornately elaborate with its golden horns that it could only be that of a warlord. Cade tried to manoeuvre about to meet his foe’s attack, but the press was too chaotic and his steed was tired, bleeding from several deep cuts.
His enemy’s axe carelessly brushed his sabre aside and hacked into the Marshal’s shoulder. Bone splintered with a wet crunch. Blinding agony saw Cade lose his grasp upon his reins, and he felt his arm tear loose as he slid from the saddle and struck cold, wet earth.
How long he lay there, writhing in agony, he could not say. His limb had been severed, and he had surely split his skull in the fall. Somehow he was not trampled to death by milling warriors and panicked horses, Eventually the battle passed him by. The defenders of Goldhope had fled deeper into the city upon seeing their Marshal fall. Screams and laughter echoed all around, and Cade could do naught but close his eyes and listen to that cacophony of horrors.
‘You fought well, for one of Sigmar’s whelps. It was a bold charge.’
Cade opened his eyes and stared up into the helmeted visage of the very warrior who had laid him low. The beast-rider was accompanied by a score or so of bodyguards – gigantic men, each splattered from head to toe in blood and filth.
The warlord kicked the flanks of his reptilian steed and it stalked forwards, looming over the Cavalier-Marshal. It drooled rancid strings of saliva that left melted streaks across his breastplate. The creature’s open maw was filled with rows of black teeth, and between the fangs dangled lumps of rotting flesh. The stench was unbearable.
‘You can kill us all,’ gasped Cade, ‘but this is our land. This is the God-King’s realm, and your gods will never rule here.’
The rider stared at him for a moment and then laughed. The humour was not taken up by the rest of the ruinous warriors, who looked down at the Cavalier-Marshal with expressions of murderous contempt.
‘Your land,’ the man repeated at last. ‘Do you know, sometimes I forget how pitiful the memories of men truly are. Two generations. Is that all it takes for a craven god’s lies to have the ring of truth?’
Cade flinched as the dreadful beast gnashed its jaws no more than a few inches from his face. The stench was that of rotten meat and sour bile. The rider hauled himself out of the saddle, landing with a crunch of metal. A hissed command sent the reptilian prowling away, its eyes still fixed hungrily on Cade’s bloody form. Its master kneeled down next to the Marshal before taking off his helm, revealing a grizzled face with a scalp of grey stubble. The man’s eyes were bright and clever, but the left was twisted by a horn-like growth that protruded from one temple, stretching the skin so that one side of his face looked like a leering mask. Other than that, Cade was shocked by how normal he looked. How sane.
‘This land was never yours,’ the warlord said. ‘This was Skull Serpent territory – until the day your war machines arrived and swept them away with fire and bullets.’
‘And so what?’ spat Cade. ‘You think that should shame me? They were raiders and murderers, like all who bow to the Ruinous Ones. I’ve fought out in the hinterlands. I’ve seen what horrors your kind wreak. Comrades flayed alive. Strongpoints sacked, butchered to the last. We should have burned you all.’
The warlord’s lip twitched in what might have been a smile.
‘But you failed,’ he said. ‘In truth, your kind made me what I am. I thank you for it. That day was a blessing that set me on the path to true power. Urkan of the Skull Serpent Tribe was a half-blind fool, staggering in the darkness of a world he could not hope to understand.’
He leaned down until his face was mere inches from the Marshal’s. As Cade looked into those grey orbs, he saw the dark lights that blazed behind them and glimpsed the worlds of horror they had borne witness to. He saw that despite his calm demeanour, this man was insane. Fear seized hold of Cade’s heart, more intense than pain.
‘Now my eyes are open,’ whispered he who had once been Urkan. ‘And I am here to fulfil an oath.’
He rose and replaced his helm.
‘Take him,’ he ordered his warriors. ‘When the city burns, let this fool burn with it.’
Chaos is clearly in the ascendant during the Hour of Ruin! You’ll be able to pre-order your own host of Slaves to Darkness tomorrow, alongside a new Battletome, Warscroll Cards, dice, and other gear.