Hammer and Bolter 13 Read online

  GILEAD’S CURSE

  Nik Vincent and Dan Abnett

  Chapter 1

  I sat alone with the bard the night the cursed stories came. He was almost as ancient as I am now, and he had not the power to rein in his thoughts nor to staunch the flow of words that tripped over his tongue into my innocent ears.

  He had mentioned the cursed stories before, and the calamities that went with them. He was sorry not to tell tales of such daring and bravery that none could doubt the prowess of their elf hero: Gilead te Tuin of Tor Anrok, son, brother, companion, warrior. He was the fiercest and most loyal of his noble race, or so the bard would tell anyone who would listen.

  I sat alone with the old storyteller. The delirium had taken him, and the women had worked their medicinal magic. I was to sop his brow with a poultice, rub his hands and arms with sappy oils, and sit awake for as long as I was able, while the women recovered their strength.

  I was fearful, and his delirium was loud and fierce; there was no risk of my falling asleep that night. In the morning, he would be dead, and the cursed stories would be circling my brain, but not before the bard had rehearsed the curses, over and over, between the more lucid moments when his eyes stared straight ahead, and the stories came tumbling forth.

  He had sworn he would not tell the cursed tales, but he was insensible and driven by unknowable forces. I had not sworn to block my ears against the telling, nor would I have known how so to do for I was no more than a slip of a girl.

  I am ancient now and eager for the end to draw near. If I am as bewitched as the old man was, so be it. I would not pass his cursed tales to one unconscious of their significance or of the dangers inherent in hearing them.

  I told the tales as a child. I talked of the curses until I was boxed about the ears, beaten black and blue and silenced by anyone scared enough to quiet a child with violence.

  Leave now if you cannot stomach hearing these stories recited for the last time since I was an infant, for the last time by me. Someone must keep them in his heart until it is time to pass the baton to a new generation, when, perhaps, a little of the curse will have withered away. When the curse is old and dissipated, man will hear the complete tales of Gilead, and in the meantime, the great elf lord, the compassionate, stoic warrior, will add to this canon of adventures with feats so noble as to be almost beyond imagining.

  Three generations of men have been born in my lifetime. I should have been a great-grand-dame, but it was not to be. The cursed bard lived a century through, and many of his stories came from generations of storytellers before him.

  They say that elves live forever. I believe that Gilead lives, yet, and I know that he has lived a dozen of our short, human generations, and more besides.

  He would have been an old man when the cursed tales began, had he been a man. He was, instead, a tall, slender, fine-boned young elf of grand descent, fallen on the most desperate of circumstances. His home and his family were gone, his brother dead, his lessons in revenge learnt, and his honour restored.

  There was never a tale of cruelty or neglect, except when it came to himself. He was the saddest of beings, the most bereft, the least heedful of his well-being. Some said his mind was so tortured that he looked long and hard for death, but that it eluded him, that cruel fate preferred to keep him in rude health while he fought against the fragile nature of his broken heart.

  Be not a-feared. My first tale is not cursed. It is a preamble, a setting-up, a prologue. Hear it out, and then I will begin the cursed tales, for my time on the dirt of this realm is short, and I could not desire to live beyond the story’s end.

  Gilead fell into the practice of traveling for a little after the sun began to rise, or he began to journey before the sun had set. It was unpleasant always to sleep in the daylight and move through the darkness. It irked him to be always under a lightless sky. The shadows were long and lean, as he was, grey-on-grey in the twilight; that magic time when a thread each of black and white resonate with the same dull sheen when held against the sky. Any shadow was better than none at all, any light a blessing.

  He travelled when the earliest risers were beginning their working days, and was aware of their heavy human scents and vulgar vocal tones. He had been alone so long that he was quite used to the meagre sounds of the natural world around him, the sighing creak of ancient trees, the tremulous whisper of fast-growing wild herbs, the fall of all kinds of rain, and the movement of the air. He heard the voices of the few remaining creatures, the hesitant mews of the deer of the forests, the swoops and caws of carrion birds, and even the rustle of insects foraging in the mulch that gathered in the undergrowth.

  He did not need or particularly want human companionship, but his path inevitably skirted the more populous villages and towns. He knew better than to move openly among them, for their safety as much as for his own, and so that he avoid distractions from his cause. Humans were creatures of urgent and consuming need, especially in these increasingly desperate times, and if they knew he was close-by they would call upon him to make their pitiful lives more bearable. A thousand small acts of kindness might add weak smiles to some of the human faces that he so readily cringed from, but he had a mission that could change so much more, so much for the better.

  ‘The shadow... It’s too long. It’s an omen... As bad an omen as you could wish for,’ the woman whispered to her husband, clutching the child close to her skirts.

  Her husband bent towards her, her low tones almost inaudible.

  ‘By Sigmar, you’re a foolish woman, Brigida,’ he said. ‘The sun so low gives us all long shadows. Look at the bairn’s, as tall as a willow switch whip.’

  The woman stopped in her tracks, picked up her only child, who was too big to be lifted, but who was glad to be carried, warmed by his mother’s anxious body, and eager to return to a sleep so harshly cut short.

  ‘Not our shadows, Ignaz,’ she said. ‘The other. Look to the edge of the ditch where the path loses its metal. Look to the shadow there.’

  Gilead had not noticed his shadow and he cursed his carelessness, but he had already retreated from the road edge, ducking between the trees that leaned out over the road, windswept in the harsh, northern climate. He had crossed the Middle Mountains weeks ago into Ostland, and Wolfenburg was behind him to the west as he headed into the depths of Ostermark. He had travelled through the night, mounted on the fresh horse that he had procured in Altdorf the previous spring. He was fortunate indeed to get even this moderate palfrey, but the mare was young and even-tempered, and Gilead was spending whatever time he could training the beast. She was a useful horse, clean and sound, not easily unnerved, and habitually quiet.

  At sunrise, he had left her in a sheltered glade only a few dozen yards from the edge of the road, which was more-or-less straight and fairly recently metaled, with room for carts and carriages to pass easily, so there must be regular traffic along it between villages and market towns. The air was cold and he could see his breath clouding slightly in front of him. All was quiet. He was tired, but content, and he had allowed himself to drift into memory, not of happier times, for there had been none these many decades, but of his people, at least.

  He had been in a place very like this, at the edge of the Forest of Shadows, when the time had come for him to depart for the memorial. The similarity to those other circumstances so struck him that, in his imagination, he was back with his people, hearing the stories told by the women, examining the beautifully woven and embroidered shroud of the lost, casting his mourning cape around his shoulders and saying his farewells. The humans spoke so ignorantly of the elf, of his way of life and the manner of his death. The race was not immortal. An elf could and would die, perhaps not as readily as the huma
n, who chased the narrow thread of his life away so quickly, but with his eyes so rarely facing forwards. A human life was so short that the future was as nothing. No man could rely entirely on being in the future of tomorrow, next week or next year, let alone the next decade or century.

  Elves died too. Gilead had travelled a thousand miles, two, to return to the place of departing, to mourn his distant cousin. Death generally came only after a long life, and the fallen elf’s noble deeds were celebrated in the times of departing, of the departed and of mourning. This death had come too soon.

  The time of departing was for the closest family and friends. For anything between a decade and a score of years, depending on the elf’s status and the size of his family or retinue, the fallen was in the departing stage of his life and death. He was still close enough to be spoken of in the present tense by those who had loved him the longest and most loyally. During the time of departing, the shroud was spun, woven and embellished with icons of the season and year of falling. When this phase was complete, the wider elf community was brought in for the time of the departed, when the fallen’s career was celebrated, stories told, and the elf’s embalmed, enshrined body finally dressed in his shroud. The second phase was shorter than the first, but equivalent in the hours spent. Ten brethren might spend ten years in the time of departing, one hundred cousins, six weeks in the time of the departed.

  The elf population was small, in decline, and spread widely across the Empire and beyond. Intimate family groups were often made up of only two or three elves, and extended groups seldom had more than a dozen members.

  The time of mourning was the last of the three phases, and would extend across centuries or even millennia. The time of mourning continued until the last of those present at the time of the departed entered their own time of departing. In the time of mourning, the fallen elf lived on in the hearts, minds and deeds of those who had known him, those fellow elves who had crossed his path.

  Gilead had met his cousin, seventh generation removed, in that last time of departing. It had pleased him greatly for Fithvael’s sake, for his old servant, friend and co-conspirator in the events that followed his brother Galeth’s death. That had been the beginning of it, when he had been the age of this young elf, this Laban te Tuin of Tor Mahone. The boy was young and eager, but respectful and gentle, and when the time of the departed was over, every old elf kissed him and smiled to know that, so long as this elf-child lived, their time would not be forgotten. Even Fithvael, among the oldest of them, could expect to live in this boy’s memory for a thousand years.

  Gilead’s latest and most significant cause had been cemented in his will during the memorial to his old friend and cousin. It had been cemented with the knowledge that he must ensure Laban live a long life, that he might remember Fithvael for his allotted time of mourning. All hope would be lost if the elves began to fall to the evil that had cursed the weaker species of the world. Gilead would not allow it.

  He knew not what was at the centre of all that was happening in the world, but he knew now that it was affecting every life force that inhabited every corner of every continent. How many decades ago had it started? Had it begun with the failing hedgerows and the meagre crops? Had it begun with the hunger that had caused so much fauna to perish? Once upon a time, the calls of the beasts and birds of the fens and woods, prairies and plains that he had traversed had been more than Gilead could stand. The abundance of layered voices, cries, caws, growls and howls had followed him everywhere he had travelled, and at night, a whole vast new array of beastly sounds filled the hours that should have been more restful. At the time, he had been able to find no peace, now he craved the sounds of a healthy and robust environment.

  Livestock had been affected once there was not the excess of strong grass and grazing crops to feed them. They had grown tired and hungry, had withered to hide-covered skeletons and had died leaning against trees, walls and buildings, or had lost the ability to stand and had fallen dead to the bare earth.

  The humans had struggled on. The very old and very young had died in greater numbers than they would have in times of plenty, but their lives had always been short and lived too quickly. Then the children stopped coming. Suddenly, even the youngest and most fertile of human women began to look drawn and wan and tired. Children came less often and families grew more slowly, and many of those that were born clung to the threads of their lives with quiet desperation.

  Gilead’s purpose was set in stone. It led him across the Empire from the Loren Forest, north through Altdorf and on towards the Middle Mountains before his brethren began to suffer. Then his beloved cousin, Benath, had fallen. The time of the departed was spent speculating as to the cause of his death, and when no ready answer came, Gilead began to suspect that the plague that had befallen first flora and fauna, and then the fragile humans, might have taken his cousin and friend.

  He returned to the north with renewed vigor, determined to find the source of the evil that was permeating all strata of life. Nothing would sway him from his cause or from the course he must follow to track the evil force.

  ‘It is gone,’ said Ignaz, ‘if it was ever there. Your imaginings will get the better of you, wife. You will scare the bairn to death.’

  He stopped and gave his wife a rough hug. He had been too harsh with her, but he was fearful, too: fearful of losing his wife, and his child; fearful that his sparse and meagre beet crop might yet succumb to some blight or other; fearful that his one remaining milking goat had lost the will to bleat. More than anything, he was fearful that there would be no work for him or Brigida at the labour fair in Bortz, seven miles hence. A shadow, even a shadow so unusual that it had made his wife’s face pale and turned her voice to a whisper, was the very least of his worries.

  Brigida leaned her head into her husband’s shoulder, and their child buried himself more deeply into the cocoon that their bodies made. Ignaz swallowed hard as he saw a long, grey shadow stop suddenly to the right of the road, and then ripple and wobble its way over the rutted ditch and disappear into the trees beyond. Apart from the effect of the terrain on the shadow, it seemed to glide as if by magic.

  Ignaz held Brigida’s head against his chest until the apparition had passed, and then disengaged, looking down at her, his pale face full of concern.

  ‘I won’t let any harm come to you,’ he said. ‘I promise you that on Sigmar’s beard.’

  ‘Don’t promise,’ said Brigida. ‘Don’t dare to invoke the great god’s name. How could you stop it? The harm is already done.’

  Gilead was roused from his reverie by Ignaz’s reassuring words. He turned, unconsciously, towards the sounds the human couple were making, and caught sight of the low-slung sun, barely above his eye height, between the trees. He shielded his face for a moment and looked out across the road, a hundred yards or so behind where the couple stood, locked in their embrace. Their long shadows stretched away between their position and his.

  Gilead waited for the little family to move away, aware of their heavy footfalls for several long minutes. The watery sun was rising slowly, and the shadows would be long for some time to come.

  Tired, his mind dulled by the unravelling of recent memories and with a long night’s journey, Gilead returned to the little glade where he had left his horse. He unburdened the palfrey of the few essentials he carried with him, rubbed her down with a handful of sickly, yellow strand grass, and threw a blanket over her. When his mount was comfortable, he swathed himself in the rough cloak, woven from contrasting threads, that he had bought when his beloved elf cape had become too fragile to wear for any but the most serious or sacred of occasions.

  Gilead lay on the ground, sheltered beneath the greying canopy of a tree that was struggling to hang onto the last of its life. He could not sleep. He cast his mind back over the night’s journey. It was a trick that Fithvael, his oldest, dearest, last companion had taught him, that his mind might not return to the darkest of places from which the old retainer
had barely managed to rescue him. The night had been without event. He had travelled a long, narrow path through the woods, close to the edge of the road, staying in shadow, hidden from the twin moons that hung in the sky so high, for so much of the night.

  Shadows. There had been talk of shadows. It was this morning. His mind was sticking on something that had happened this morning.

  Gilead soon realised what it was, and knew that a sleepless day would follow, a day of information-gathering, of listening from the shadows, of moving among the humans, among their scents and sounds. He was loath to do it, but do it he must.

  Gilead had not been slack or careless on the road that sunrise. He had not neglected to see his shadow running ahead of him, into the human woman’s line of sight. He cast his mind back. It had been early, the sun low, so everything had been casting long shadows, but he had been moving to the west and south of the couple, and his shadow must have been cast into the woods, not onto the road.

  Gilead’s tiredness ebbed away as this clue played on his mind. The palfrey needed to rest, if she was to be useful to him over the days to come, but she could sleep while he scoured the area for whatever had cast that shadow.

  He hugged the edge of the ditch to the south and west of the road, keeping his shadow beyond the tree-line, while he reconnoitered the area. There was nothing in the road, no sounds of people or creatures anywhere nearby, and the only shadows were of the tree line on the opposite side of the road. Gilead lifted his head to smell the lightly moving air, but there appeared to be nothing on the breeze. He could faintly sense the three humans that had walked the path before him, maybe an hour earlier, but he knew their scents and sounds, and was content to rule them out; he knew they had passed and moved on to their destination.

  Several hundred yards further along, in the direction the little family had taken, the road swerved gently to the left so that the tree line shadows covered its entire width. Gilead crossed quickly, using the shadows to consume his own. His swift, silent feet barely seemed to connect with the hard, smooth surface of the road, and the air around him hardly moved at all. If he smelled of anything, it was of cool air and clean water, of the few food stuffs that he still managed to forage and of the sweet hide of the beast that carried him.