Warriors of the Chaos Wastes - C L Werner

by Warhammer

  Sul

  A breed of sorcerers and mystics, the Sul are of the Hung race, sallow-skinned horsemen of the east. The dark power of magic burns within the souls of the Sul, twisting and corrupting them from the womb to the grave. Treacherous, cunning and opportunistic, the Sul are loyal to none but themselves. Their magic gives them powers over both the mortal and unseen worlds. Daemons bow before them and beasts hearken to their words. The Sul do not see themselves as servants of the gods, but rather as exploiters of their power. Their fealty to Tzeentch is a matter of convenience, invoking the Lord of Change to protect them from the wrath of lesser gods and daemons. But even the Sul are not so arrogant to believe that such patronage does not come with a price.

  Vaan

  One of the many tribes of the dark-haired Kurgan race, the Vaan are the most numerous of the tribes of the domain. Militaristic and highly disciplined, the Vaan have ever been willing servants of Khorne. Skilled tacticians and strategists, the zars of the Vaan approach war as a sacred sacrament, believing that carnage without victory is offensive to their god. The Vaan maintain legions of goblin slaves to work the extensive mines and forges that writhe beneath their land. Their warriors sport mail of blackened iron and bear weapons finer than anything born in the crude fires of their rivals. If not for the Tsavags and the Sul, the entire domain would long ago have fallen beneath the iron boots of the Vaan armies.

  Seifan

  Another of the Hung tribes drawn by the promises of Teiyogtei Khagan, it is said that the Seifan are a people born in the saddle. They measure their wealth in the size of their herds, and they breed the fastest steeds in the domain, fierce animals fattened on flesh and blood. In battle, the Seifan employ scythe-wheeled chariots of wood and bronze. They do not favour any of the gods, but worship each in his turn according to the tribe’s need. Without concept of conscience or honour, the Seifan are dangerous enemies and equally dangerous allies. Their power in the domain lies not from sorcery or force of arms, but from an uncanny facility for playing one foe against another.

  The Warherd of Kug

  Inhuman beastmen, the Warherd takes its name from the ancient beastlord who swore fealty to Teiyogtei Khagan. Feral, savage monsters, the beastmen found themselves with few friends when the horde disintegrated in the aftermath of the king’s death. Driven into the mysterious wooded expanse of the Grey, the beastmen have long nursed their primordial hate for the races of man. Generations of dwelling within the lightless depths of the forest have rendered the beastkin all but blind, but the mutating influence of the forest has given them new senses in compensation. The beastmen have become the foremost of the terrors of the night, raiding the lands of even the strongest tribes, slaking their savage hunger for human flesh.

  Gahhuks

  A tribe of Kurgans, the Gahhuks are deadly enemies of the Seifan, viewing the Hung horselords with a bitter enmity born of spite and envy. Horsemen themselves, the Gahhuks see the Seifan as their most immediate rivals in the domain and vie with the Hung for control of the grasslands. The hulking steeds of the Gahhuks bear little resemblance to the shaggy ponies of the Seifan and are bred for raw strength and power rather than speed and endurance. The Gahhuks practise a grisly death-cult, each man forced to slay a rival before he is accepted as a warrior of the tribe. The flayed skin of the vanquished rival is a token of the warrior’s status, stretched across a wooden frame and worn across the back when the warrior rides into battle.

  Veh-Kung

  Of the three Hung tribes who swore allegiance to Teiyogtei Khagan, the Veh-Kung have strayed the farthest from their origins as horsemen and nomads. Defeated by their rivals, the Veh-Kung were forced to seek sanctuary in the macabre Desert of Mirrors, a weird realm infested with the noxious power of Nurgle, the Plague God. Decimated by the invisible pestilence exuding from the crystalline landscape, the Veh-Kung swore to embrace the worship of the Crow God if he would spare their lives. Nurgle was as good as his promise, and no longer did the Veh-Kung die from the plague all around them. But the god did not spare their flesh and the Veh-Kung became debased, ghastly creatures.

  Confronted daily by their decaying reflections in the crystalline spires of the desert, the Veh-Kung burrowed beneath the shimmering sand, carving a network of tunnels beneath the desert to hide not from the sun, but from their own hideous transformation. Now they eke out a troglodyte existence, scratching a starveling subsistence from their unforgiving home. The legacy of their ancestors and their origins upon the eastern steppes is a mocking memory that serves only to remind the Veh-Kung how far they have fallen and to heighten their despair.

  Muhaks

  The Muhaks are a tribe of Kurgans renowned for their immense strength, if not their subtle natures. Grotesquely swollen with inhuman growths of muscle, the Muhaks more resemble ogres than men. Infamous as cannibals, the Muhaks wear the skins of their victims as visible displays of their strength and power. Even among the fierce tribes of the domain, the Muhaks are seen as vicious barbarians, as dangerous as rabid trolls. No tribe has been spared the depredations of the Muhaks, but exterminating the brutes is a task that even the Vaan hesitate to consider, knowing the losses such a campaign would incur and knowing that the other tribes would be quick to exploit such weakness.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  C L Werner’s Black Library credits include the Age of Sigmar novels Overlords of the Iron Dragon and The Tainted Heart, the novella ‘Scion of the Storm’ in Hammers of Sigmar, the Warhammer novels Deathblade, Mathias Thulmann: Witch Hunter, Runefang and Brunner the Bounty Hunter, the Thanquol and Boneripper series and Time of Legends: The Black Plague series. For Warhammer 40,000 he has written the Space Marine Battles novel The Siege of Castellax. Currently living in the American south-west, he continues to write stories of mayhem and madness set in the Warhammer worlds.

  An extract from The Tyrion & Teclis Omnibus.

  Tyrion sat on the edge of the wall of his father’s villa, legs dangling, enjoying the sense of danger. Behind him lay a twenty-foot drop and the one in front of him was even steeper, for the ground sloped away downhill. If he fell from here he might break a limb on the rock-strewn ground below.

  The late winter sun burned bright in the clear blue sky. It was cold this high in the mountains of Cothique. His breath came out frosted and he felt the chill through the thin cloth of his tattered tunic and his patched woollen cloak. In the distance, he could see a troop of mounted figures riding up-slope towards the hilltop villa.

  Strangers were rare in this part of Ulthuan. Very few people ever came to visit them. Most were passing hunters dropping off part of their kill as a tithe for hunting on his father’s lands. One or two were highland villagers who came to consult his father about a sickness in their family or on some minor matter of magic or scholarship.

  Things had been different when his mother was alive, or so Thornberry claimed. The house had been busy then, when his parents had arrived to occupy it for a summer season or two, escaping from the heat of the lowlands. Sorcerers and scholars from all over Ulthuan had come to visit it along with his mother’s rich relatives. People had liked his mother and were prepared to travel to even this remote place to visit her.

  Tyrion was in no position to know. She had died during the difficult birth of himself and his brother and he had never known a world with her in it. There was one thing of which he was sure – none of the locals except his father could afford a horse, let alone a warhorse.

  Tyrion’s eyes were keen as an eagle’s and he could see that the strangers were mounted on steeds even larger than his father’s, caparisoned in a way he had only seen illustrated in books. Most of them were carrying lances. He could not imagine what else that long pole with its fluttering pennon might be.

  The truth was he did not want it to be anything else. He wanted them to be knights, glamorous warriors such as he and his brother were always reading about in their father’s old books. He wondered if this were somehow connected with his birthday, which was tomorrow, alth
ough his father appeared to have forgotten yet again. He felt somehow that it was. It seemed right.

  He sprang up, balanced on the thin lip of the wall, then walked along it to the roof of the stables, arms held out from his sides to maintain balance. He let himself in through the large hole in the slates and dropped down onto the support beam. The dusty, musty smell of the old building filled his nostrils along with the warm animal scent of his father’s horse. He ran along the beam, grabbed the rope he had left knotted round the edge and jumped.

  This was always the best part, the long swing to the ground, the dizzying sense of speed as he careened downward and let go, landing rolling in the bales of hay. It always made him smile.

  He raced out of the stable, past the startled Thornberry. The wrinkled old elf woman watched him with a look almost of embarrassment on her face, as if young Tyrion’s energy somehow baffled and upset her.

  ‘Strangers are coming,’ Tyrion yelled. ‘I am going to tell father.’

  ‘Hush, young Tyrion,’ said Thornberry. ‘Your brother is sick again. You will wake him.’

  ‘My brother is already awake.’

  Thornberry raised an eyebrow. She did not ask how Tyrion could know that. Tyrion could not have answered her anyway. He had no idea how it was possible that when he was in close proximity to his brother he could sometimes tell whether he was asleep or awake, happy or sad or in great pain. To tell the truth it always seemed strange to him that others could not. Maybe it was something to do with them being twins.

  ‘He is now – with you making all that noise,’ said Thornberry. Her tone was grumpy and she was trying to make her face stern but her gaze, as always, was kind. Nonetheless, as always, she managed to make him feel guilty.

  He raced upstairs, and ran into his father’s chambers.

  His father held up a hand for silence. He was standing over his workbench, peering at something through the eyepiece of a magna-scope. ‘Hush, Tyrion, I will be with you in a moment.’

  Tyrion stood there almost bursting from his desire to give the news but he knew his father was not to be hurried when he was about his studies. To occupy himself he gazed round the room, taking in his father’s huge library of books and scrolls, so beloved of Teclis, the jars full of pickled monster heads, and odd chemicals and weird plants from the jungles of Lustria and the rainforests east of Far Cathay.

  His gaze was drawn as ever, and no matter how much he tried to avoid it, to the gigantic, terrifying suit of armour that stood on its wire frame in the corner. It looked for all the world like some monstrous golem waiting to be animated. His father claimed that this armour had been forged in the magical furnaces of Vaul’s Anvil for their legendary ancestor Aenarion and that it was broken and dead now, needing magic to bring it back to life and grant it power and make it once again fit to be worn by a hero. Tyrion was not entirely sure of the truth of this but he hoped it was the case.

  It was discoloured around the chest and arms where his father had repaired the ancient damaged metalwork with his own hands. In those places the armour did not have the patina of age it had elsewhere.

  It was his father’s life work to make the armour whole again. He had dedicated a lifetime of scholarship to it, ever since he had inherited it from his father, who had inherited it from his father before him and so on back into the mists of time. Family lore had it that the armour had been presented to their ancestor Amarion, by Tethlis himself, as a reward for saving the life of his son. It was their family’s most precious heirloom.

  As far as Tyrion knew his father was the first of his line who had tried to remake the armour. So far his efforts had proved fruitless. There was always just one more thing needed, one more piece of rare metal, one more fabulous rune to be re-discovered and re-inscribed, one more spell to be re-woven. Many times Tyrion had heard his father claim that this time, he would do it, and always he had been disappointed. It had cost his father his not-inconsiderable fortune and his life’s energy and it was still not complete.

  Tyrion studied his father now and realised how frail he was. His hair was fine as spun silver and white as the snow on the peak of Mount Starbrow. A mesh of wrinkles spun out from his eyes to cover most of his face. The purple veins stood out thinly on his hands. Tyrion looked at the smooth skin of his own hands and saw the difference at once. A life of failure had aged his father prematurely. Prince Arathion was only a few centuries old.

  ‘Tell me what you came to say, my son,’ said his father. His voice was calm and gentle and remote but not without a certain mocking humour. ‘What brought you into my workroom without even knocking?’

  ‘Riders are coming,’ Tyrion said. ‘Warriors mounted on warhorses.’

  ‘You are certain of that?’ his father asked.

  Tyrion nodded.

  ‘How?’ His father believed that observations had to be tested and justified. It was part of his method of scholarship. ‘Not just book learning’ were his watchwords.

  ‘The horses were too large to be normal mounts and the riders carried lances with pennons on them.’

  ‘Whose pennon?’

  ‘I do not know, father. It was too far away.’

  ‘Might it not have been more useful, my son, to wait until you could see it? Then you might have been able to tell me more about who the strangers were and what their purposes might be.’

  As always Tyrion could not help but feel that he was somehow a disappointment to his gentle, scholarly father. He was too loud, too boisterous, too active. He was not brilliant like Teclis.

  His father smiled at him.

  ‘Next time, Tyrion. You will do better next time.’

  ‘Yes, father.’

  ‘And fortunately I have a spyglass here in my study that will allow me to find out the information you missed, despite the fact these aged eyes are not as keen as yours. Run along now and tell your brother. I know you are dying to give him the news.’

  Teclis lay in the great four poster bed, covered in piles of threadbare, patched blankets. The room was so shadowy that it was impossible to see how moth-eaten the bed’s canopy was and how old and rickety the room’s furnishings were.

  Teclis coughed loudly. It sounded as if a bone had come loose inside him and was rattling round in his chest. He twisted in the tangle of covers and looked up at his brother with bright feverish eyes. Tyrion wondered if this time Teclis was really going to die, if this illness would be the one that would finally claim him. His brother was so weak now, so feeble and so full of pain and despair.

  And selfishly Tyrion wondered what would happen to him then. He felt the echoes of his brother’s pain and his weakness. What would happen when Teclis went on the dark journey? Would Tyrion too die?

  ‘What brings you here, brother? It is still light out. It is not yet reading time.’

  Tyrion looked guiltily at the copy of Maderion’s Tales of the Caledorian Epoch that lay on the chipped table beside the bed. He walked over to the windows. The drapes were fusty and smelled of mould. Cold air whistled in through gaps in the shutters, despite the torn shreds of sacking he had stuffed into the gaps. There was no place in the old villa where Teclis could escape the cold that seemed to leech all vitality from him.

  ‘We have visitors,’ said Tyrion. Interest flickered in Teclis’s eyes and for a moment he seemed a little less listless.

  ‘Who are they?’ The tone was a dry echo of their father’s, as was the question itself. Tyrion wondered at the resemblance. For all his weakness Teclis was very much their father’s son, in a way that Tyrion never felt himself to be.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he was forced to admit. ‘I did not wait to check their heraldic banners. I merely ran in with the news.’ He could not keep the sullenness from his voice even though he knew his brother did not deserve it.

  ‘Father has been subjecting you to inquisition again, I see,’ said Teclis and was wracked by another long, horrible paroxysm of coughing. Laughing was sometimes a mistake in his case.

  ‘He make
s me feel stupid,’ Tyrion confessed. ‘You make me feel stupid.’

  ‘You are not stupid, brother. You are just not like him. Your mind runs in different channels. You are interested in different things.’ Teclis was trying to be kind, but he could not keep a certain satisfaction from his voice. His twin was eternally conscious of his physical inferiority. His sense of intellectual superiority helped balance that. Normally it did not trouble Tyrion but today he felt unsettled and insecure. It did not take much to put him off-balance. ‘Battles and weapons and such are what interest you.’

  The tone of his brother’s voice let him know exactly how unimportant he considered such things in the great scheme of things.

  ‘One of the riders at very least is a warrior. He carried a lance, and his armour shone brightly in the sun.’

  At first Tyrion thought he was making up the latter detail but even as he said it he realised it was the truth. He had observed more than he thought. It was a pity his father had not questioned him about that detail.

  ‘And what of the other riders?’ Teclis asked. ‘How many were there?’

  ‘Ten with lances. One of them without.’

  ‘Who would that be?’

  ‘I don’t know, a squire perhaps or a servant.’

  ‘Or a mage?’

  ‘Why would a mage come here?’

  ‘Our father is a wizard and a scholar. Perhaps he has come to consult him and the warriors are his bodyguard.’

  Tyrion saw that Teclis was twisting events to suit his own views and fantasies. He wanted one of those riders to be a scholar and the others, the warriors, to be in the inferior position. It stung. He felt like he should say something but he could not think what, then Teclis laughed.

  ‘We really are country mice, aren’t we? We sit in our rooms discussing strangers who may or may not be coming to visit us. We read of the great battles of the Caledorian Age but some horsemen in search of a night’s shelter are a source of great commotion to us.’