Blacktalon: First Mark Read online

  ‘Good enough,’ said Neave, parrying another heavy censer and lopping its wielder’s head off. She leapt backwards into the winds aetheric, just for a heartbeat, reappearing amidst a gale of wind and a crackle of lightning some thirty yards downslope.

  The skaven screeched with outrage and surged after her again.

  ‘Die-die, storm thing!’

  ‘Gnaw on its flesh-skin!’

  Neave turned and showed them her heels. She sprinted, fleet and sure-footed, between the trees, feeling the certainty of sanctuary growing with every footstep. Neave didn’t know where the strange sensation stemmed from, but she was utterly convinced that safety now lay within a stone’s throw. Had the situation been less desperate, she might have mistrusted the feeling more.

  ‘Right now, I’ve just got to go on faith,’ she said, seeing Ketto growing closer through the trees ahead. ‘Sigmar, lord, if you can hear me, please don’t let your servant fail you now.’

  Ketto stopped so suddenly that Neave thought he had struck an obstacle. She dug her heels in and threw her weight back, sliding to a stop amidst the loam just feet behind the beast. Katalya looked back at her. Neave saw with a terrible sinking feeling that, behind the crystal lenses of her cowl, all hope had gone from the girl’s eyes.

  ‘Sigmar can take me up after all, sky knight,’ said Katalya. ‘Your sanctuary is the grave…’

  Neave paced forwards, slowly shaking her head at the sight before her. The forest floor dropped away abruptly, plunging into a mist-filled chasm so deep that the bottom was hidden from sight. Nor could she see its opposite bank, except perhaps as a dim suggestion barely visible through veils of mist and shadow. A cold breeze blew steadily from the chasm’s chill depths.

  ‘There must be something,’ said Neave, straining her senses for some sign of a bridge, a stairway into the deeps, a hidden entrance, anything. She kicked at the loam, sending flurries of soil and leaf-mulch over the lip. She swept her surroundings with increasing frustration, eyes wide.

  ‘There is nothing but a chasm, and the ratkin, and a chance to die well,’ said Katalya, turning Ketto and walking her steed a little way uphill. ‘We won’t go over the edge.’

  ‘Maybe that’s just it,’ said Neave. ‘Maybe we do need to go over the edge… Or take a leap of faith… or…’

  ‘There’s nothing,’ yelled Katalya, suddenly furious. ‘You collapse, and you mutter – you say let us go to the forest spirits, you say Sigmar will help us, you say you have visions. It is all lies! Sigmar is a lie and so are you sky knights. You just steal my revenge. We will never slay the swamp king now, and the Mourne tribe will go unavenged because I listened to you, because Ketto trusted you. Stupid me, stupid Ketto.’

  ‘Katalya, I–’ Neave blinked at the ferocity of the girl’s outburst, the hurt and the misery she heard. Katalya had trusted her, she realised. She had hoped, just as Tarion had trusted and hoped.

  ‘Have I led you all astray?’ asked Neave, feeling something give inside her. ‘Have I wasted everyone’s time on madness and corruption? Am I broken, just like the whispers say, and all this is just madness and lies?’

  She closed her eyes for a moment as she battled despair. The best Neave could hope for now was that the Sacrosanct Chambers would sense her taint before she was reforged, and isolate her soul in some aetheric oubliette to prevent the corruption’s spread. Yet the fear rose in her that they would not, that by the very act of her death she would bear some touch of Chaos heavenwards and spread the rot of madness to her comrades and kin.

  This was the purgatory that Sigmar had consigned his warriors to, she realised with sudden shock. The choice of a true death was denied to her, no matter how worthy or necessary it might be. Now she understood only too well the discontented mutterings of her fellows around the camp-fire, and Tarion’s need for martyrdom to validate his Reforging. If this was eternal life, then it was as much a curse as it was a blessing, and it had been forced upon her without consent.

  As the anger and sense of violation chased one another through her mind, Neave heard again a child’s faint cries, and the creak of a fey voice amidst the branches. It seemed to be laughing at her, mocking her with gusts of cruel laughter that bore dancing blue sparks across her mind’s eye.

  Neave opened her eyes again and hefted her axes, her face drawing down into a thunderous scowl.

  ‘Katalya Mourne, I may have robbed you of your revenge, but I will not rob you of a good death,’ she said. ‘I’ll fight by your side, girl, I owe you that much. We’ll raise a mountain of dead skaven before we’re through, and I pray with all my heart that when you fall Sigmar will leave your soul to find its peace alongside the rest of your tribe. No mark is worth this.’

  Katalya looked at her steadily, and Neave’s heart broke to see the sad acceptance behind her eyes.

  ‘We fight, then, for the Mourne tribe. I will let you fight by my side. But when I die, sky knight, Sigmar will take me up, and Ketto too. We will deserve it more than you.’

  Neave was spared the need to answer by the chittering cry of Plague Monks pelting through the forest. They came at first in ones and twos, but their numbers thickened by the moment until a horde was bearing down upon Neave and Katalya. Behind them rolled the plague smog, as thick and foul as ever.

  ‘Come to your deaths, you filthy vermin,’ roared Neave, her voice the rolling fury of the storm. ‘If this is my last battle, then I’ll slay an army of you before I fall!’

  The skaven surged down the slope like a tide, and Neave and Katalya charged to meet them. Katalya clashed her vambraces together, sending a wave of jade energy racing into the enemy and blasting Plague Monks through the air. Neave lunged into the gap with her axes swinging, moving so fast the Plague Monks seemed almost stationary by comparison. Her first blow threw a skaven corpse high into the air on a trail of infected blood. Her second smashed a rat-man sideways into his fellows with bone-breaking force. Her third eviscerated a screeching zealot. Her fourth lopped the legs out from under another, rising into a spinning upwards blow that opened the chest of a fifth.

  Again Neave struck, and again, howling with rage. Lightning crackled across her armour and the fury of the gale screamed around her, lifting squealing rat-men from their feet and dashing them against tree-trunks like bursting sacks of offal. Dimly, Neave was aware of Katalya’s shrill whoops and the rattle of Ketto’s thorax as the tribesgirl and her steed fought against the swarm. But Neave was lost to battle-fury, channelling all her loathing and anger into fighting harder than she had ever fought before. Blood misted the air as she tore through the skaven like a living hurricane, moving so fast that her physical form became little more than a blur of lightning and bladed sigmarite.

  She ripped apart an entire rank of Plague Monks with a windmilling attack that left them strewn as bleeding body parts.

  She hacked down a chanting Plague Priest, bisecting the unholy tome he read from and his skull along with it. She slew dozens of foes, blasting more from their feet with aethereal lightning.

  The plague smog engulfed Neave even as she was lopping the head from another chanting Plague Priest. For a moment she thought the rat-man had unleashed some unholy curse upon the moment of his death, before she recognised the enshrouding fumes for what they were. Neave’s berserk fury left her as suddenly as it had struck, the tingle upon her skin warning of a foe she couldn’t fight.

  ‘Katalya,’ she shouted, retching and coughing as the fumes filled her lungs. ‘Kat, get back! Get back!’

  Neave windshifted desperately, leaping into the air in a crackle of lightning and blasting back into reality perilously close to the edge of the drop. Stone and earth fell away beneath one heel as it jutted out over the chasm.

  Upslope, she saw Ketto scramble from amidst the fumes in a tangle of chitinous limbs. Katalya clung to his back, and Neave had a moment to feel thankful that the girl was still wearing her alchemica
l cowl. She could see discoloured blotches on Ketto’s carapace, and the oozing froth that was spilling over his mandibles.

  ‘No,’ said Neave, accelerating into a charge again. As screeching Plague Monks burst from the fumes behind Ketto, Neave struck them down one by one. The tattakan staggered free, dragging himself to the edge of the chasm and turning at bay. Neave could hear Katalya gasping for breath inside her cowl and see the girl frantically slapping Ketto’s hide as though to reassure her ailing beast. Neave backed away before the rolling smog, her senses overwhelmed by its foulness, blisters rising on even her ensorcelled flesh as its magics worked to poison and destroy her. Another Plague Monk burst from the fumes and she struck him down. Another met the same fate, and another. Yet she had backed almost to the edge now, with tendrils of smog engulfing her, and she could see more skaven surging forward to attack. Neave screamed with frustration that she and Katalya would be defeated, not by some worthy foe but by this filthy alchemical cloud.

  ‘Katalya,’ she gasped. ‘I’m sorry.’

  Then the plague smog rolled over them again. Katalya gasped and coughed, hurling blasts of jade energy into the grey-green fog almost at random. Ketto gave a desperate shudder of his thorax, his legs giving out beneath his weight. Neave could see the rot creeping through his carapace even as she watched. She had no strength left to aid the poor beast, for her own body was succumbing as the foulness swirled around her. Verdigris crept across her armour and blades. Neave felt her skin churn as blisters rose and burst. Her breath rasped, fluid beginning to clot her lungs.

  ‘Sigmar,’ she gasped, dropping to her knees even as Ketto thumped to the ground beside her, legs twitching weakly. ‘Why…?’

  At first, Neave thought the roaring sound was the blood in her ears as the plague fever took hold. Only when she saw the smog stirring did she realise that a wind was blowing. Not just a wind, a howling gale that built by the second and drove the fumes up and away.

  Neave blinked weeping eyes, pushing herself swaying to her feet as the storm screamed around her. It must be the magic of the heavens, she thought. Her Stormcast comrades come to aid her in her moment of need. Yet the wind was howling up out of the chasm, and it bore upon it the smell of cold night air in wild places, of branch and bark, root and soil, rainwater on leaves and cold, slick stone.

  The Plague Monks recoiled before that gale, staggering and blinded as leaves whipped up and whirled around them like knives. Hundreds of vermin were revealed as the veil of smog lifted, a swarm so vast that she and Katalya could never have hoped to defeat it. Yet now the skaven were staggering and screeching, biting and scrabbling at one another as they tried to get away from the vicious winds.

  Neave sensed magic then of an entirely other sort, something primal and natural and filled with wrath. She looked back to see a mass of thorned vines rising from the chasm. Each was as thick as a tree-trunk, pale and luminescent, and they wove around each other to form a coiling ramp that spiralled away into the depths. Dimly, she saw figures flowing up that ramp even as it extended, lithe and graceful creatures as tall as a Stormcast. Their bark-like flesh was inscribed with flowing runes that glowed a cold blue, and their movements were only too familiar to Neave.

  ‘You… you took the child,’ she gasped, then coughed blood and staggered.

  The bridge of vines slammed into the lip of the chasm, digging deep and anchoring itself in place in time for the forest spirits to flow from its end with shrill screams of rage. Neave saw beings that looked more tree than spirit, flowing masses of bark and branch with glowing blue eyes. She saw beautiful creatures that seemed half-aelf, half-dryad. She saw tall and powerful warriors that looked carved from the mightiest ironoaks, and hissing terrors of thorny fang and lashing talon whose eyes shone with madness. More than all that, she sensed, or perhaps felt, the sorcerous song that rose from the woodland host. It was a thing at the edge of hearing, a keening, booming, swelling crescendo of life magic and song that flowed through their very being and drove back the magic of Chaos.

  ‘Sylvaneth,’ she gasped. ‘Forest spirits.’ Then the host was flowing around her, a woodland roused to fury that slammed into the skaven in a welter of blood. More spirits were emerging from the forest all around, she saw, hissing and keening at the damage the skaven had done to their beautiful trees. The sylvaneth fell upon the panicked rat-men, and suddenly the skaven numbers counted for nothing.

  Panicked, terrified, their unnatural frenzy broken and gone, the skaven fled in all directions. They squirted the musk of fear until the air stank of it, and tore at one another as they tried to be the first to escape.

  Neave ignored the carnage, instead limping to Ketto’s side. The brave beast still lived, she saw, though his flesh had rotted in vast patches, and his limbs looked brittle and broken. Katalya hung from her saddle, her cowl eaten through by the plague smog. Neave lifted her gently from Ketto’s back and cradled her in her arms, wincing at the blisters and weals that had been raised across the girl’s flesh.

  ‘I’m sorry, Katalya,’ she said, her voice raw. ‘I’m so sorry that I couldn’t protect you.’

  She was suddenly aware of someone standing over her. Neave looked up to see a tall sylvaneth staring down at her. Elegant like a barbed blade, the spirit was framed by her flowing mane of thorn-thick hair.

  ‘You the changeling-childe are,’ said the spirit in a singsong voice. ‘The one returneth which Wytha wilst.’ She bared sharp wooden fangs in a cold leer.

  ‘Help us,’ croaked Neave, feeling blood spill over her lips as she spoke. Her body ached in every joint, and her vision was swimming. ‘I don’t know who you are, or why I knew to come to this place, but please. Please. Help us.’

  With that, the last of her strength failed her and she slumped forward. Katalya’s small, limp body spilled from Neave’s arms as her cheek met the loam of the forest floor, and she looked at the dying girl with sorrow in her eyes.

  ‘Death heist nay a-claim ‘pon thee, deserven-though you might, she that a-failen,’ she heard the sylvaneth say. ‘Wytha hast what Wytha wilst. Taken now these.’

  Through a haze of pain, Neave felt herself being lifted easily by powerful limbs and borne towards the bridge of vines. She strained her neck, trying to see Katalya and Ketto, but she was surrounded by flowing barkflesh and coiling tendrils that carried her out onto the bridge and then down, down into the depths below. The last thing Neave heard before gloom closed around her were the shrieks of dying skaven as the sylvaneth went about their grim and vengeful work.

  Chapter Eleven

  Neave was carried through gloom and into shadow. Dark shapes moved around her. Branch limbs creaked like boughs stirred by a winter wind, while sibilant voices crooned in sing-song tones. She could feel her body attempting to heal, the sacred lightnings of Sigmar flickering and crawling over her flesh and across the battered plates of her armour. More than once she turned her head and coughed violently, expelling clots of rank matter. Each time, the creatures carry­ing Neave made angry sounds of protest, squirming aside to avoid the hacked-up foulness. Yet they kept carrying her, and with each such agonising purge she felt the ache fading from her joints and her senses swimming a little less.

  As Neave’s head cleared, she was able to grasp her surroundings. At some point her bearers had passed from the bridge of vines into a rocky tunnel. Perhaps ten feet across and the same high, it wound and wove, rising and falling as though made by some long-departed root coiling through the rock. The stone itself was a dull amber hue, studded with jutting crystals that glowed with an eerie jade light. Neave saw roots pushing through the walls and ceiling, undulating through the stone like serpents breaking the surface of a lake. These, too, glowed with a strange luminescence, and from them she felt an echo of the song she had heard when the sylvaneth first appeared.

  They passed through intersections where the tunnel split and split again. They crossed echoing caverns where ground-m
ist coiled and huge columns of tree-root punched through floor and ceiling, inscribed with glowing whorls and runic sigils. With a jolt of shock, Neave realised she had seen those designs before, in her visions. Moreover, certain chambers felt as familiar as they did alien; the sensation of blurring worsened here, causing her eyes to ache.

  Neave stayed carefully unresponsive, unsure as yet of these hosts-come-captors. Amongst the mists and shadows, Neave saw a great many living things moving; diminutive spites scampered through the gloom, weird little creatures each different from the last with their assortments of gangling limbs, toad-like faces, pixie wings, trailing tails, wicker-work shields, pointed red caps and more. Larger beings stirred at her passing. Things of coiling limb and jagged talon watched her avidly as she was carried through their domain.

  There was something hauntingly resonant about it all, something that gnawed at the back of Neave’s thoughts. Yet it remained elusive, no matter how she sought to bring it into the light, and eventually, head pounding and sparks bursting across her vision, she gave up.

  Neave tried to commit the route to memory as best she could, but she was still ill and wounded, and was forced to constantly push aside her fears for Katalya and Ketto. Had the sylvaneth recovered them from the battlefield, or had they abandoned her companions? And even if they had brought them hence, would either live after such long exposure to the plague fog?

  She briefly contemplated breaking her silence, but until she was sure of the sylvaneth she didn’t want to reveal the slow return of her strength. They had taken her axes at some point, and she was clearly being carried deep into some sort of stronghold. Now was not the time for rash action.

  Besides, Neave had a duty and that still overrode everything else. She felt no satisfaction in knowing that her visions had not been simple madness, or that they had clearly led her to this place. Instead, she knew only the sense that another locked door had opened, and that she must press on through it for the sake of her comrades and her hunt.