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Grimnirsson – Extract

A Black Library Publication

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GRIMNIRSSON

Graham Thomas Wilcox

Laughing, Grimnir killed.

Rats, they were – manling-tall and aelven-skinny and patchy-furred. A pack of ’em, deep-tunnelled and tight-squished beneath his mountain. This was good, and this was hateful, and this was good. Grimnir loved his hate, was made of hate as steel makes an axe, veined with it as fire veins the mountain, crested with it and bearded with it and roaring with it.

He came at the first one, swift as gold through the finger, swifter. Roar became step became leap and the ratman lifted its shield, tricky-quick. Quicker than most, Grimnir thought. But it might as well lift a shield against the plague as lift a shield against Grimnir.

Grimnir’s axe hacked down, splitting shield and skin and bone all in one whistling, cracking blow. The ratman opened its mouth and squealed its pain like a babe from the womb and this was also good. Up came Grimnir’s axe, out slopped the ratman’s brains – out slopped its tongue and teeth and life, and this was better.

Hate sneered upon Grimnir’s face, hooked his lips wide and smiling as an axe, and this was best of all.

‘Insults.’ Grimnir stamped down on a struggling ratman. ‘Bloody insults.’

Before him, they fled. This was right and proper. Grimnir laughed that dead-man’s laugh, the laugh straight back from the Old Time when he first cut his crest and dyed his beard. That laugh older than Old Man Death himself, and twice as cold.

Killing, Grimnir laughed.

Genseric awoke covered in blood, and not for the first time.

Seeing it lurched his stomach. Tasting it lurched something else. Sleep and light bleared his vision, smeared the world into mud and jelly. Genseric knuckled his eyes. It hurt. He knuckled deeper.

‘What did I do?’ He coughed, and it was wet. ‘What did I do?’

Rough his voice, raw as pig iron and scratchy gruff. A mounting horror pricked his guts. His hands, they shook.

‘You killed me,’ whispered a voice, ghost-soft and ghost-harsh, familiar as his own.

Cold dripped down Genseric’s spine. He blinked. ‘What?’

Then tinkled the laughter, like silver on a scale. The blood faded, like dreams of old, and Genseric remembered.

‘Not funny,’ his voice grated, rust flaking from iron.

Again, Aoife silvered the air with her laugh. ‘Quite funny, if you think about it.’

Her smile flashed, but Genseric saw something beneath it – a touch of fear, brittle as slag in steel. He grinned back, because that was what one did to cheer one’s kin. That Aoife was a manling altered nothing. She was his chosen kin – kalanbarazi, ‘sworn-not-born’ in the argot of his people, the Zharrdrengi.

‘Aye,’ Genseric said, clapping a hand to Aoife’s arm. ‘Funny. So it is.’

She staggered some at his clap, but neither winced nor whined. Never had and never did, far as Genseric remembered. Not even when she was a sprat and found him, rune-addled and blood-drunk, wandering through the mountains. One reason among many for their kinship.

Genseric heaved himself from his stone bed. He’d the feeling he was forgetting something. Most likely, he was. He got that way after the Grimnir-dreams, as if sleep carved some piece from him and held it estranged from his greater whole. Worried him, that forgetfulness. Trembled his hand, knotted his guts, left him wondering what fate age might forge for him, wondering if he’d forget more and more of himself till one day he was nothing but forgotten things, like an axe left sitting in the rain, dulled all to rust, dust and nothing by time’s creeping ache.

Aoife clacked open a shutter, and daylight lanced aside Grimnir’s melancholies. He scowled, as a duardin does when interrupted from a good grumble, voiced or otherwise.

His scowl glanced off Aoife like honesty off an aelf.

‘Ready for the thunder-lovers today, Gen?’

For a moment, all memory fled Genseric’s mind. Then, it all came back to him, like ale through a tap. The Sigmarites were here. One of their damn fool crusades. They desired supplies, fealty and fighting men from Aoife’s people, the Fir Danu of Cathair Conaill: all the typical demands of those swollen by faith and rotted by their own righteousness.

Genseric grunted. Grunts were like axes to Genseric – he’d one for every occasion. This grunt was not a happy one.

‘The thunder-lovers, aye, I remember. War, is it then?’

Genseric did not wait for an answer. He stumped over to his weapons rack, drew his axes, and commenced their sharpening. It was not what he wanted to do. But it was what he needed to do. That was the way of things for a Zharrdrengi with his kin – always the need, never the want.

So, he sharpened his axes and thought of war.

Barely had stone whetted steel when Aoife’s hand touched his shoulder.

‘Gen,’ she said, friendly soft yet queenly hard. ‘I’ve a plan.’

In Genseric’s experience, she always did.

‘Aye,’ he said.

‘Already sorted with their ambassador. Peaceful, like.’

‘Aye.’

Aoife cut her gaze to his own. ‘Promise me you’ll do nothing rash. Nothing bloody.’

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A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION

This eBook edition published in 2023 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

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ISBN: 978-1-80407-495-4

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