You know what’s really festive? Ghosts. Yeah. It gets dark early around Christmas, and spooky stuff happens when it’s dark. Can you imagine a man – or a grot, even – breaking into your house and leaving stuff under your tree? It chills us to our very bones.
It’s fitting, then, that today’s Grotmas Calendar entry is a terrifying tale about the Nighthaunt.
Old Sins
‘Spare a crust for an old Dawner, milord?’
Danos Tangalt hardly heard the man’s words at first, distracted as he was. With the snowstorms so prodigious the last day and night, he was going to be late for the gathering of the conclave, even if it was by no more than a minute or two. Provost Tangalt always hated to be late.
‘Spare a crust for an old Dawner?’
At last, he glanced up to see the figure standing at the far end of the crooked alley. Whoever they were, they had wrapped themselves in a dark cloak and were half-obscured by the snow, which swept in thickly and without pause. Tangalt came to a halt, one hand straying to the jewelled dirk on his hip. Cutthroats were not common in a small frontier place like Pickmanspire, but they were not unheard of either. Still, he felt little alarm. Ten years in the Freeguilds would gird any man’s heart with steel.
‘I have no gold and not a drop of lifewater,’ he said sternly. ‘If theft is on your mind, know that you’ll find no easy prey tonight. If otherwise, stand aside.’
There came no answer but a clinking of metal. Tangalt’s temper – always short – began to rise. This vagrant had an ill-favoured disposition. He was hunched and wretched, and were those manacles that bound his bony hands? Through the blizzard, it was hard to see. Yet something more than the bitter cold of the Verdian winter sent a shiver through Tangalt’s heart.
‘Stand aside,’ he said, louder now. ‘Make way, sir, or I shall have you sent to the gaol.’
The wind howled. The figure gave a rattling sigh.
‘Deathmarsh,’ it said. ‘’Ere battle’s end. All he wanted was a few crumbs to ease his hunger.’
Tangalt’s mouth went dry.
‘What did you say?’ he breathed.
Then he was charging, swiping his long knife at the figure in a blind panic, not even sure what he aimed to do. Even in his delirium, he was certain that the blade should have struck the man’s face, cloaked or not. Instead it whipped by without striking anything, and the unexpected momentum sent him stumbling awkwardly to his knees.
He whirled about, red-faced and wild-eyed, only to find the alleyway empty. The vagrant was gone. There, amidst the snow, lay naught but a simple disc of metal. A Coin Malleus. The Dawner’s symbol. Disquiet set Tangalt’s heart to a fearful hammering as he looked upon that medallion. A memory long-buried flickered up from the back of his consciousness, bringing with it a wave of shame and revulsion. He closed his eyes and sent it all screaming back to the depths of his soul, where it had festered for twenty years.
When he opened his eyes, the coin, too, was gone.
Distress followed Tangalt through the day, lingering like a shadow. He attended his meetings, said what they required of him, each word spilling from his mouth like ash. Yes, the tithes were being collected on time. Aye, the latest communiqué from Greywater was that the shipments of smokepowder would arrive by Hallowswatch, Sigmar willing. He was dimly aware of the queer looks that people fixed upon him, the concern in their gaze. On any regular day, it would be Provost Tangalt driving a meeting such as this, demanding ever more from the strongpoint’s leadership. Taking charge.
Today, Tangalt could hardly bear to speak.
The Deathmarsh. The last, doomed stand of the Hammerhal Ghyra 193rd. The horror of that killing field had never truly left him. Nor had the memories of what he had done to survive it. Had the encounter with the strange vagrant been no more than the delusion of a tired mind? But the figure’s words had seemed so real…
He made his excuses, claiming illness, and left the gathering early. The snow was even thicker now, near knee-deep in some places. Dagger-length icicles hung from the housefronts, and the wind sent window slats slamming together and rattled roof tiles. Here and there he passed shuffling, cloaked figures, making desperately for the shelter of their homes. He bent his head to the wind, keen not to be waylaid. He needed rest. That was all.
His own was the largest manse in the strongpoint, located at the summit of a low hill that overlooked Pickmanspire’s unlovely sprawl. He reached the door at last, opened it and was followed inside by a vicious gust and a drift of ice. He grunted and hauled the door shut, finding himself in darkness.
Tangalt placed his forehead against the door and took a deep breath.
From the second floor came a clattering and clinking of metal, followed by a series of thumping footsteps. Tangalt froze, heart hammering in his chest. His eyes flashed to the stairs.
Thieves.
His old cavalier’s pistol still hung above the fireplace. He went to it swiftly, fished in a lockbox for powder and bullets, and loaded a round. Taking the old weapon in hand granted him a fresh surge of courage, and he made for the stairway. On the way, he seized a candle from the dining table, lighting it with a little pyrite fire-striker he always kept in the pocket of his robes.
‘Hear me now, whoever you are,’ he shouted, as he climbed one step at a time, aiming his gun at the gaps in the bannisters. ‘Flee this place now, or I’ll see you hang.’
He made the landing, his candle bathing the gloomy corridor in an orange hue. His chamber door was open, and the threshold littered with fragments of glass. Tangalt inched closer, pressing his back against the far wall. Reaching the edge of the frame, he took a moment to collect himself and then leapt into his bedchamber, scanning the room for a sign of movement.
It was empty. The far window was open, the shattered frame slamming against the wall with every whip of the wind, letting in icy gusts that had left the floor carpeted in white. Candlesticks rolled back and forth on the snow-covered floor, clinking together.
Tangalt approached the window, peering out into the swirling white clouds beyond. If anything was moving out there, he could not see it. With some effort, he pushed the window shut and latched it. Though the storm still raged outside, Tangalt’s house was once more quiet. Eerily so: he was unpleasantly reminded of the hush of a headsman's audience as they anticipated the fatal swing.
‘Spare a crust for an old Dawner?’
Tangalt spun and fired without conscious thought. The room was briefly illuminated by the flash of igniting powder. The cloaked figure slumped against the doorframe and slid to the floor. It lay there, breathing raggedly.
Tangalt’s pistol slipped from his shaking fingers. For a moment, all he could do was stand, struggling to catch a breath. Forcing his numbed legs to move, he approached the stricken intruder. Blood and rainwater mixed on the floor. He reached down to pull back the thing’s hood, and a shard of ice pierced his heart as he revealed its face.
‘Ignan?’
There lay his old friend. Though, of course, it could not be so. Ignan had perished in a muddy shell crater on the Deathmarsh field. The same foetid prison the two of them had shared for eight days and nights, with naught but a half-filled ration tin and a few drops of rusty water between them. Until the constant thunder of the cursed duardin’s guns had driven them both beyond madness and they’d fought like devils for the last of the rancid scraps.
‘Spare a crust?’ rattled the Ignan-thing, and its lips peeled back to reveal black, broken teeth.
Tangalt had spared nothing, not now and not then. No, he had slit Ignan’s throat and watched him bleed out while he devoured the last strips of salted rhinox.
Ignan’s dead eyes rolled in their sockets, fixing him with a mournful stare.
‘I’m so hungry, Danos. It's so cold here in the dark.’
Panic seized Tangalt. He tried to run, but the revenant rose with unnatural swiftness to block the path to the stairs, its shape rippling and changing, chains clattering from its overlong forelimbs. It swiped at him with a taloned hand, and Tangalt staggered as a bloody furrow was torn in his forearm. The wound ached as if he’d plunged his arm into a bucket of icy water, the cold spreading through his body and stabbing at his heart.
Gasping, clutching his chest, Tangalt sought the only visible path to freedom. He threw open the window of his bedchamber, clambering onto the ledge and hesitating only a moment until he saw the Ignan-thing sweeping towards him, its eyes blazing orbs of emerald, its claws reaching for his throat. It no longer wore his friend’s face but a skeletal deathmask, half-concealed beneath a tatter of black cloth.
Tangalt leapt out into the freezing night, twisting in the air, wrapped in a terrible embrace with this spectral horror as it descended to claim him.
‘Forgive me!’ he screamed, as the wraith’s fingers closed around his throat.
Danos Tangalt’s physical torment would end when he struck the iron railings below. But for his broken soul, the agony would stretch unto eternity.
When a Freeguild patrolman stumbled upon the Provost’s broken body the next morning, there was no sign of who or what had sent him plunging to his doom. All that remained was an old, worn Dawner’s coin, pressed into his lifeless palm.
Brr, throw a few more heretics on the fire, we need warming up after that. It feels like we’re one step closer to that petrified Necrotopia that Nagash desperately wants to create in the Mortal Realms. If you want to learn more about the Supreme Lord of the Undead, check out this Loremasters episode on Warhammer TV.
Catch up on the Grotmas Calendar
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