Blacktalon: First Mark Read online

  ‘I… had never thought,’ said Neave, taken aback. Of course the servants of Chaos would visit their displeasure on those less able to protect themselves, she thought. How many mortal tribes had faced persecution and death in revenge for a war they had not started, and took no part in? The thought made her nauseous.

  ‘Katalya, I believe that it is the swamp king I am here for,’ she said earnestly. ‘Sigmar… Sigmar made me to hunt men like the swamp king, and kill them. So yes, I am a killer, Katalya, but not of your people. I am a killer of those who want to hurt them. I am here to protect you.’

  The girl stared at her, then turned her gaze towards her fallen fellows. Neave saw a single tear track, unwanted and unacknowledged, down Katalya’s cheek.

  ‘You’re too late,’ the girl said bitterly.

  ‘I’ll leave you with them for a time,’ said Neave softly. ‘There may be more skaven. Wherever you see one, there’s thirteen more you don’t. I’m going to scout the area, make sure we’re safe. I’ll come back.’

  Katalya ignored her, and Neave took her cue to depart. She loped away through the tussocky hillocks, spreading her senses out in search of danger, and hoped the girl would still be there when she came back.

  A half-hour’s sweep took Neave two dozen leagues out towards the roots of the mountain, into the afternoon shadows cast by its towering enormity. A whole range’s worth of lesser crags rose from the mountain’s slopes, and its split peak jutted up like a witch’s fingers forking the sign of the evil eye. As she stared up at it, Neave felt again that stirring sense of familiarity, and felt her temples ache at the way it jarred with her knowledge of the now.

  She swept back in the opposite direction, scouting a wide parabola around the site where she had met Katalya, giving the girl time. Whether to mourn her fallen, or to make good her escape, Neave couldn’t say which. There was no sign of further skaven, beyond the trail the warband had left as it pursued Katalya and her comrades from somewhere southwards.

  Yet still Neave couldn’t shake the feeling of danger drawing close, an instinct she had long ago learned to trust. She cast glances back across the marshes from whence she had come, seeking skyborne specks or enemies drawing near.

  ‘You’ve spent too long on this girl already, Sigmar only knows why,’ she told herself as she hastened back to the site of her recent battle. ‘If she’s there, you figure out what to do with her quickly, then you press on. If not, so much the better.’

  It was with some surprise that she smelt and heard the girl and her steed still lingering upon her return. Neave was careful to approach slowly and from an open direction, making no secret of her coming. She could taste the magic of Katalya’s vambraces tainting the air again, and was in no hurry to surprise the girl and receive another jade blast for her troubles.

  ‘What have you done to Ketto?’ demanded Katalya hotly. Neave drew to a stop some yards away from the girl, took in the severed skaven ears hanging from her belt, and the cairn of freshly piled stones that lay off to one side of the battlefield. The insect steeds lay where they had fallen, but of the dead tribesmen there was no sign.

  ‘I haven’t done anything to your beast,’ said Neave, frowning. ‘Why, does he ail? The Plague Monks seethe with disease, girl – you shouldn’t have lingered amongst them.’

  Katalya snorted dismissively.

  ‘Ketto isn’t sick. Tribes, beasts, all that live in the mountain’s shadow, they live this long, they don’t get sick any more. No. You bewitched him.’

  Neave was taken aback. ‘I don’t have the power to do that.’

  ‘He wouldn’t leave!’ shouted the girl. ‘I tried to carry on my hunt, but he wouldn’t leave! He waited for you.’ Katalya kicked one of Ketto’s chitinous legs, the limb towering higher at its arched knee joint than the top of her head. Ketto gave a patient chittering noise, tilted his head, nudged Katalya with it. He waved long antennae in Neave’s direction, and chittered again.

  ‘He’s a stupid beast,’ said Katalya sullenly, rubbing one palm against the insect’s tough chitin. She hugged herself with her other arm.

  Neave kept her face carefully solemn, despite the smile that tried to surface.

  ‘Perhaps he’s wise,’ she said. ‘You mentioned a hunt. I’m a huntress. What is your mark, Katalya Mourne?’

  ‘Mark?’ asked the girl.

  ‘Your quarry, the being you pursue,’ explained Neave. ‘Whenever Sigmar sends me, or one of his other Knights-Zephyros on the hunt, he gives us a mark we must kill. We may not return to kneel before his throne until the deed is done.’

  ‘Then my mark is the swamp king,’ said Katalya. ‘His ratkin killed all of my tribe, days ago, far to the south. Me, Danya, Tievin, we were hunting him, but his rats kept hunting us.’

  ‘And that’s where I found you,’ said Neave. ‘Run to ground by the band that slew your tribe. I am sorry, Katalya.’

  Katalya spat on a nearby skaven corpse.

  ‘Sorry is an empty belly and a cold fire,’ she said. ‘I hunt him alone now. And I must move on. This isn’t all of them. Not even many of them.’

  Neave thought again about her crawling sense of danger approaching. It had not abated.

  ‘Katalya, I am hunting the swamp king, and you can be assured that I’ll kill him for you. I always find my mark.’

  ‘I will kill him first!’ said Katalya.

  ‘You’ll not kill him at all, nor get within a dozen leagues of him,’ said Neave, her tone stern. ‘I admire your spirit, but you are alone and this swamp king has an army, and the blessings of the Plague God besides.’

  ‘You are alone also,’ Katalya retorted. ‘You are just one. I have Ketto. He is swift. I only need to get close enough to crush the swamp king’s skull. After that… nothing else matters.’

  ‘I have a duty, and I must see it done,’ said Neave. ‘If I should fall in its execution then Sigmar will take me up and reforge me.’

  She saw incomprehension in Katalya’s eyes.

  ‘That is, he will bear my soul back to the Realm of Heavens, and there he will resurrect me so that I might fight for him again. But if you die, you’re gone, and so is the Mourne tribe. Forever.’

  She saw tears rise in Katalya’s eyes, quickly fought back. Neave felt for the girl, but she pressed on.

  ‘I can’t protect you, Katalya, but I can tell you to find safety, to get as far from the swamp king as you can. If you can find one of the cities of Order they will take you in and make you safe there. That is the best way to honour your fallen, by living on, and giving what you can to see civilisation rise again across all these lands.’

  ‘You don’t understand,’ said Katalya. ‘You can’t, sky knight. You didn’t swear the oaths I have. They didn’t kill your tribe.’

  Neave’s brow creased at the echoing memory of a child’s cries.

  ‘I cannot turn aside,’ Katalya continued. ‘We all swore, and I will not be the only one of my tribe to break their oath. Do not tell me to.’

  Neave raised her hands, defeated. The cries were still murmuring in the back of her mind, and for a moment she thought blue motes danced in her peripheral vision. The sensation quickly faded.

  ‘What else can I do then, but ask leave to join your hunt,’ said Neave. ‘You won’t turn aside, and neither will I. My duty to Sigmar demands I slay my mark, but my duty as a Hammer of Sigmar is to protect and to liberate the people of the realms. If you can keep pace with me, then let us hunt together. A local guide could prove useful. So far I have followed only my intuition, after all.’

  Neave doubted that Ketto would be able to match her swiftest pace, no matter what manner of beast he was. But there was something about Katalya Mourne that she could not place, something she felt strongly enough that it warranted protecting her as best she could, and binding the girl to her own duty.

  ‘I… could allow it,’ said Katalya gr
udgingly. ‘And Ketto likes you, big stupid.’

  This time, Neave allowed herself the ghost of a smile.

  ‘We should move soon then,’ she said. ‘There’s likely enemies on both of our trails, and I sense we have a long way yet to travel.’

  ‘Not so far,’ said Katalya. ‘Beyond the mountain, more swamp. Worse swamp. We go through that by ways my tribe know, we avoid the rusted ones and the monsters, then north of the Forest of Ghosts we find the swamp king’s castle.’

  ‘The forest, do you know your way there?’ asked Neave. ‘It’s hard to explain why, Katalya, but I don’t think we can just hunt the swamp king straight away. I think we need to go to the Forest of Ghosts. I need to speak to the ones that live there.’

  Katalya’s eyes widened.

  ‘The spirits live there,’ she said, her voice low and urgent. ‘You cannot, they will curse you!’

  Katalya made a rapid gesture of warding with her hand, tucking her thumb into her palm and creating a ‘v’ shaped split between her middle and ring finger. Neave found with surprise that though the gesture was crude and unclear, she understood without being told that it was meant to form a twin-tailed comet. Her surprise redoubled when, without any conscious thought, she returned the gesture with one of her own.

  What is this? she thought, bewildered. Why does this sign feel so familiar? Like something I knew once, and then forgot. Neave told herself that, surrounded always by Sigmar’s iconography as she was, the sigil of the twin-tailed comet was simply ingrained in her mind, easier for her to recognise than most. Even to her, though, the rationalisation seemed terribly convenient.

  The two of them stood like that for a moment, frozen in mutual confusion. Then Katalya snatched her hand down to her side.

  ‘You know the warding of the two-tailed comet?’ she asked.

  ‘I don’t know how though,’ said Neave quietly.

  ‘Then you know not to go to the Forest of Ghosts,’ said Katalya.

  ‘I have to, my path leads me there. And I don’t believe they will curse me, Katalya.’

  ‘Maybe they already have,’ said Katalya darkly, and Neave flinched at the thought. She heard the rustle of jagged branches in a cold night wind, saw eyes of blue fire in the darkness behind her own.

  ‘Maybe,’ she echoed, before her tone became firm again. ‘But I don’t believe it. I think they have answers, secrets about the swamp king that I need to know before I can kill him. I have to try.’

  ‘Then we will come with you,’ said Katalya, swinging herself up onto the crude saddle tied between two segments of Ketto’s thorax. ‘Where the sky knights brave the path, the Mourne tribe will do no less. And if it means the swamp king dies…’ She clashed her vambraces together, creating a dazzling rain of jade sparks. ‘Then it is worth it,’ she finished.

  Neave nodded, still hearing branches rasping together, and a child’s distant sobs. She smelt smoke as she watched the jade sparks float towards the ground, turning golden and blue in her mind’s eye as huts burned and the forest whipped past and something crooned in the darkness.

  ‘I…’ Neave frowned, took one faltering step, and suddenly the darkness was all about, racing up like a flood-tide, like the banks within her mind had finally burst and she could only stand aghast before the onrushing waters.

  The world vanished in a spray of whirling blue motes, and as she felt herself fall, the roar of the rising waters melded with the cries of the child and the screams of the dying, and the inhuman, creaking croon of a voice.

  Its incomprehensible words followed her down into oblivion.

  Chapter Nine

  Tarion crouched upon the grassy lip of a precipice and lost himself in the sound of rushing water. He was perched on the sloping bank of a floating islet. It hung high in the sky above a river valley that cut its way between rolling hills. Higher still, more islands drifted, meandering like docile cattle. Jade waters spilled down from their flanks, skyfalls that collected in a chuckling pool on this isle before rushing down its side to leap eagerly into thin air again.

  Below, the waters hammered the surface of a deep lake at the head of the valley, then wound away as a pale silver ribbon beneath the evening sun.

  ‘Beyond the river’s third winding,’ murmured Tarion. ‘Looks to me like you knew where you were going, Blacktalon. I just wish you’d taken me with you.’ He supposed his friend had believed she was sparing him danger, perhaps even accusations of desertion. Looking down upon the rest of their Vanguard Chamber picking their way along the valley, Tarion wasn’t so sure she’d done him a favour at all. There, at the heart of the loose formation, rode the Lord-Aquilor; Tarion imagined he could taste the man’s sharp displeasure on the air even from here.

  Krien alighted next to Tarion in a shimmer of light. Folding his wings, the star eagle dipped his beak in the rushing waters, then preened his feathers with fastidious care. He looked up at Tarion, cocking his head to one side.

  ‘Don’t give me that look – I know we need to report back,’ said Tarion. Krien’s head tilted the other way. His fierce avian eyes glinted enquiringly.

  ‘All right, old friend, all right,’ said Tarion. ‘You are a hard taskmaster, you know that? Merciless.’

  Krien gave a harsh cry and leapt skywards, light blazing from him as he looped up on the thermals then tucked his wings and dived down towards the Rangers below. Tarion sighed and launched himself after his companion.

  Danastus sat astride his gryph-charger, maintaining a steady canter along the overgrown lower slopes of the valley. Gallahearn and Kalparius flanked him as always. Tarion landed some way ahead of them, rising and folding in the crystal pinions of his wings as the riders approached. He saluted as Danastus reined in his steed.

  ‘Report,’ said the Lord-Aquilor.

  ‘The terrain ahead becomes increasingly marshy, beyond the end of this valley,’ said Tarion. ‘If memory serves it stays that way as far as Splitpeak. The touch of Nurgle has been felt here, my lord, though not as badly as in many of the Jade Kingdoms.’

  ‘As for Blacktalon?’ asked Danastus. His charger raked the ground with its talons and clacked its beak.

  ‘Neither I nor Krien have seen her, my lord,’ said Tarion. ‘She leaves next to no trail; the Rangers have been compelled to double back twice since dawn and find signs of her again. But the aetherwings continue to keep her in sight. She is still ahead of us, they say.’

  Danastus leant back in his saddle, gazing off towards the horizon as though he could spot Blacktalon and somehow pin her in place.

  ‘She must be caught,’ said the Lord-Aquilor.

  ‘And she will be, my lord,’ said Tarion. He wished he could have kept all of Neave’s secrets, but after Tarion had returned to the ranks of the chamber, his wounded condition and Neave’s absence had raised too many questions. The Lord-Aquilor had demanded point-blank that Tarion tell him everything that had transpired and why; withholding information from Danastus was one thing, but Tarion knew that Neave would never have wanted him to disobey a direct order, and so he had not. How far Danastus had disseminated the resultant flurry of information, Tarion didn’t know. He hoped not far.

  ‘You’ve more to say?’ asked Danastus, fixing Tarion with his gaze.

  ‘Neave would not have done what she did lightly,’ said Tarion. ‘This is not a desertion of duty, my lord. We should be helping her, not hunting her.’

  ‘We help her by hunting her,’ said Danastus. ‘Hammers of Sigmar do not disobey their orders. They do not abandon the fight before it is finished. Sigmar may not yet have given Neave a fresh mark, but that does not mean she is free to come and go as she sees fit. She has a duty to this chamber.’

  ‘She is doing this for the chamber,’ said Tarion, holding on to his temper. He drew closer to the Lord-Aquilor and dropped his voice to a murmur. ‘You know what she wrestles with, my lord. She fears she might contam
inate us by her mere presence.’

  ‘All the more reason for us to reclaim our own,’ said Danastus. ‘This is a matter for our chamber alone. If she should be slain, and the Sacrosanct Chambers detect some corruption within her soul during her Reforging…’

  Tarion suppressed a shudder. As Sigmar’s war ground on, and the tales of failed Reforgings multiplied, so other rumours grew. A Stormcast Eternal could never truly die, or so it appeared, but what the Sacrosanct Chambers did with those souls they found wanting was the subject of macabre speculation.

  ‘We will find her,’ said Tarion, ‘and we’ll help her.’

  ‘If we can,’ said Danastus, his expression unreadable.

  ‘Yes, my lord,’ said Tarion. ‘I’ll go now and continue the hunt.’

  ‘Tarion,’ said Danastus, catching the Knight-Venator as he turned away. ‘Your loyalty to your comrade does you credit, but don’t let it blind you. Neave acted without orders. Her intent may be pure, but she is not blameless in this, and there will be consequences. Any who I suspect are helping her to confound our pursuit will face those consequences also.’

  ‘Yes, my lord,’ repeated Tarion. He strode away from the Lord-Aquilor, then launched himself skywards, glad of the faceplate that concealed his thunderous scowl.

  Neave’s eyes fluttered open. Light pierced the fog around her mind, cutting like knives. She could feel that she was lying on her side, cheek resting on cool, spongy grass. She winced, blinked, then snapped into wakefulness as she saw a monstrous face bare inches from her own. Bulbous black eyes stared at her with idiot intensity. A lantern jaw gaped, stuffed with jagged fangs. Slimy black flesh oozed noxious filth.

  Neave propelled herself backwards, rolling up into a fighting crouch and grabbing for her axes. It was only then she realised the abomination before her hadn’t moved, and that she could hear Katalya laughing.