My short stories #2: The Hounds of Winter

Here's one from the archives (a.k.a. my old blog Unnatural History) presented here to mark Black Library's 15th birthday this week...

Having written a short science fiction story for Issue #1 of the brand new ‘Inferno!’ magazine, published by the fledgling Black Library, the editors asked me to pitch them a fantasy Warhammer tale. It was for the promotional Issue Zero, which was to appear inside an upcoming copy of the Games Workshop hobby magazine White Dwarf. The pitch was taken up and ‘The Hounds of Winter’ ended up seeing print before ‘Salvation’.

It was something of a ghost story (inspired, amazingly enough, by the title of a song from the album ‘Mercury Falling’ by Sting) with the Kislevite mercenary Torben Badenov and his band re-enacting an ancient battle against the forces of Chaos. It was later re-printed in the anthology ‘Realm of Chaos’ (2000).

When I was writing the story, I considered it to be a one off. It’s amazing, when I think about it now, but at the time I didn’t think about the future prospects of the characters I’d created. As it turned out, Badenov and his band were to appear in ‘Inferno!’ magazine on a further four occasions and were the stars of my first full-blown novel.

But more about that another time...