Blacktalon: First Mark Read online

  She knew she could not afford to antagonise the sylvaneth until they had given her the answers she sought. If nothing else, she needed to understand that which ailed her mind before she could examine again the revelations about Sigmar’s gifts that had struck her upon the precipice’s edge. They felt treacherously close to treason now the danger had passed, but Neave could not un-think that which had been thought. All she could do was set her deeper questions aside for now, and concentrate on her mark.

  At last, the sylvaneth came to a long stretch of tunnel dotted with recessed cave entrances. They halted before one of these and Neave felt, or perhaps heard, the song rise around her again. Thick, thorny branches were woven in a mass across the cave’s entrance, blocking it entirely. Blue sigils swirled across them. At the song’s touch, the sigils flared and the branches coiled aside, opening the way to the chamber beyond. Neave was carried across the threshold and dumped unceremoniously in a corner. The sylvaneth withdrew without a backwards glance and the branches creaked back into place.

  Neave was left alone with her thoughts.

  The cave was small, but not so much as to be claustrophobic. Glowing roots bulged through its ceiling and filled it with dimly pulsing light. Neave saw that water trickled through cracks high in one wall and collected in a natural stone basin near the floor, before overflowing and seeping away into the ground below. Neave limped across and cupped her hands, gratefully drinking the ice-cold water.

  She took mental inventory.

  Axes gone, helm ruined and lost, armour battered and still patched in places with brown rust. She felt weak and slightly nauseous, and her reflection in the pool revealed hollow eyes and raw patches of skin where blisters had risen and burst. Every part of Neave hurt in some fashion, and she was ravenously hungry.

  ‘Still, nothing broken, nothing beyond repair, except maybe my damn mind,’ she murmured to herself. ‘And at least I’m where I wanted to be. I think. Not much to do now but wait.’

  Neave’s voice fell dead in the confined space. She had always been one to talk things through with herself; it was a loner’s habit, she supposed. Still, she resolved not to speak aloud again in this grim little cell until she had someone else to answer her. She settled into a cross-legged position at the back of the cave and dropped into a trance, attempting to rest and recuperate. All the worries that had plagued her mind during her passage through the tunnels were pushed gently but firmly aside. Only the echoes of the vision persisted, and even they were muted and vague.

  Neave could not have said how much time passed before a dry rasp heralded the branches parting again. She opened her eyes in time to see a pair of dryads dragging Katalya into the cave. The tribesgirl was conscious and fighting her captors, but against the forest ­spirits’ wiry strength her efforts looked pitiful.

  Katalya was flung to the floor. She rolled over and spat at the nearest dryad, which fixed her with a cold stare. The creature looked like it wanted to do more, but a glance at Neave, who had now risen to her feet and balled her fists, dissuaded it. Instead, the dryads flowed from the cave with disdainful trills of laughter. Again, the branches wove together.

  ‘Katalya, are you all right?’ asked Neave, relief flooding her. She received a fierce glare, before Katalya pushed herself to her feet and threw herself at the branch door. She pounded her fists against the wood, clawing at jutting thorns and bloodying her forearms. Katalya screamed furiously as she attacked the wooden barrier, kicking and tugging at it to no avail.

  Neave rose and hurried to Katalya’s side, grabbing her shoulders and pulling her away.

  ‘You don’t have your vambraces, and even if you did you wouldn’t make a dent in that barrier,’ she said. ‘Kat. Katalya! Stop fighting.’

  ‘Never,’ spat Katalya, rounding on Neave. Fire flashed in her eyes, stoked hotter by fear and pain. Neave saw her skin was blotched and scarred, tainted still with a jaundiced tinge, and her eyes were bloodshot. ‘Who are you, telling me to stop? You leave your sky tribe. You take my chosen death from me. You tell me we have to come here. For what? Even if your Sigmar did not want me, I could have gone to my ancestors in the saddle, Ketto and me together, fighting a battle we chose!’

  ‘Katalya–’

  ‘No! Ketto is taken I don’t know where. We’re locked away in the dungeons of the forest spirits and who knows what they will do. You gave up. I saw you. You gave up on us, and now look where we are. I will fight, even if you won’t.’

  Katalya pulled away and Neave let her go, stung despite herself.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Neave. ‘I’m sorry they’ve taken Ketto. I’m sorry that they’ve taken us, but this is the place we need to be. I don’t mean you should give up your fight altogether, but cutting yourself to ribbons on that door isn’t going to get you anywhere.’

  ‘I should sit in the dark and do nothing, like you?’ asked Katalya venomously. Her eyes found the water basin, but she stayed leaning against the stone wall.

  ‘The water is safe to drink,’ said Neave.

  ‘How do you know? You say there is sanctuary and there is prison. You say there is a way, and there is a cliff. Everything you know is wrong.’

  ‘I can sense it,’ said Neave. ‘Just as I can sense that this barrier is magically warded, and would resist a dozen strong warriors with a battering ram. Just as I can hear and feel the two sentries waiting patiently beyond the door, just in case we should contrive some way to break out. Pick your battles, girl. You can’t fight the whole realm at once.’

  Katalya snorted, but after a moment she limped across to the basin and drank, tentatively at first, then greedily once she tasted the cold, clear water.

  Neave thought for a moment and was surprised at the frustration she felt. She could track a mark across arid desert for months, could run as fast as the wind and fight a dozen foes at once. But no amount of warrior skill could help her talk to this lost young woman. Neave tried to tell herself that she shouldn’t care, that Katalya was one mortal in a realm full of them. That she barely knew the girl. None of it mattered; for whatever reason, Neave had to admit that she cared what happened to Katalya. Enough mortals had died because Neave had chosen to act as a weapon and not a protector. She did not want that to be the way of things any more.

  ‘On the precipice, last I saw you and Ketto, you were both sorely wounded,’ said Neave. ‘I thought you dead, or near to it. How is it you’re standing now? Your flesh looks no worse marked by the plague smog than mine.’

  Katalya pointed with her chin towards the branch door.

  ‘Their magic,’ she said. ‘I don’t know what, but healing.’

  ‘I thought as much. I don’t think they mean us harm, or why would they have rescued us, healed us? They could just have left us to die on the edge of the ravine and never troubled themselves with a couple of interlopers wandering their woods.’

  ‘Maybe they just come to kill the ratkin.’

  ‘No, their leader knew me. If I’m right, she’s the same creature that aided Tarion. And if that’s the case, then they could just have swept me up and left you to your death. But they didn’t.’

  Katalya grunted. Neave could see the girl was worried sick about her steed, and didn’t dare entertain hope that Ketto might have been rescued and healed in the same way she had.

  ‘If they’re such friends of ours, why do they throw us in a cage?’ she asked.

  ‘The sylvaneth aren’t exactly known for their welcoming nature,’ said Neave. ‘I recognise the sigils here. I believe this is an enclave of the Dreadwood Clan.’

  Katalya looked at her blankly.

  ‘They’re the most shadowy and mistrustful of all their kind,’ said Neave. ‘They’ve little love for those of flesh and blood, no matter their provenance.’

  ‘This does not make me feel better about any of this,’ said Katalya. ‘And I don’t blame you any less.’

 
‘That’s your prerogative,’ said Neave, striving to clamp down on her own doubts. Yet even as she did, she felt again that strange sense of familiarity, that desire to trust her captors. It was maddening, jarring and illogical.

  ‘Katalya–’ began Neave. She was interrupted as the branches parted to admit the same Branchwraith that had stood over her on the precipice. Neave turned, meeting the creature’s gaze, then staggered as a tide of conflicting images flowed through her mind. Blue motes danced around her, and the cavern seemed to blur. She heard the cries of a child. She smelt smoke and tasted blood and ash on the air.

  ‘Assailed is your mind,’ said the forest spirit, her words echoing and warping as they reached Neave’s ears. ‘Wax and wane like the moons doth these seeings? Cursed, thinken you?’

  ‘How do you know what happens in my mind?’ asked Neave, struggling to push the visions back. ‘Was this your work?’

  ‘Ithary, I am, a handmaiden thrice-coiled,’ said the Branchwraith. ‘Answers more sprout never upon these thorned lips. I’ve only to taken you whence attend upon my mistress shalt you. There grow ripe the words you wish. Reap harvest if you darest.’

  Neave blinked, deciphering the spirit’s crooked speech. She nodded.

  ‘Take me to her,’ she said. She managed to straighten up, the muscles of her jaw quivering with the effort of holding her visions in check, and strode to the doorway. Katalya made to follow but Ithary hissed, coiling towards the girl with her talons extended. Katalya looked in panic at Neave, who raised a cautioning hand.

  ‘No harm comes to this young woman,’ she said to Ithary. ‘Or to her steed. If it goes ill for them, I’ll make sure it goes ill for you too. Not just your clan, Ithary. You, personally.’

  The Branchwraith gave a flowing gesture that might have been a shrug, then swept from the prison cell. Neave had little choice but to follow as best she could. Despite the jarring perceptions that clouded her senses, she still felt Katalya’s angry gaze boring into her back as she left.

  The feeling persisted, even after the branches slithered back into place.

  Ithary led Neave through tunnels at once strange and yet familiar. The deeper they went into the winding network, the more intense Neave’s visions became, and the closer to the surface they pushed. Shadowy figures flowing through the mist became lumbering raiders amidst the smoke of a burning village. Glowing clouds of insectile spites became plague flies, droning angrily through the air. Neave staggered more than once, and her efforts to memorise the tunnels quickly fell apart as her perception of reality crumbled.

  Ithary made no concessions for Neave’s struggles, rather seeming to enjoy them. The Branchwraith slowly outpaced her, dancing sinuously on through glowing caves and down winding passageways. Neave was able to grasp that the numbers of sylvaneth around her were increasing as they pressed deeper into the enclave. They passed through a huge chamber where strange plants rose high up the walls, festooned with hundreds of darkly glowing pods. They crossed a natural stone bridge, beneath which dense tangles of jagged black thorn-plants writhed and coiled.

  Finally, they came to the grandest chamber yet, and Neave had to fight to stay on her feet as waves of conflicting emotion flowed through her. The cavern’s ceiling was so high it was barely visible, half-veiled by glowing mists. Its walls were twisted and ridged as though molten rock had once gouged its way through the stone, and from them jutted hundreds of the glowing root systems. They converged in intertwined masses upon a huge throne of emerald crystal that rose, jagged and lit from within, at the chamber’s heart. A scent of cold rock and wet loam hung in the air, underlaid by something acrid like lightning or sorcery.

  Flanking the throne stood a dozen huge and powerful beings that Neave recognised as Treelords. Each was over twenty feet in height, their limbs and bodies powerful masses of heartwood and jagged black bark, their eyes glowing chips of blue ice. They held long, pale-blue blades that looked to be formed from polished wood, driven point-down into the bedrock of the cavern floor. Neave guessed that a single blow from one of those huge weapons would be enough to hack her clean in half, sigmarite plate and all.

  Though the Treelords dwarfed the figure that sat in the throne, she drew the eye in a way that even her enormous protectors did not. The being was long-limbed and willowy, her legs and arms ending in thorned talons that looked both dextrous and deadly. Blue-lit whorls and sigils covered her dark barkflesh from head to toe, drawing together in a vivid mass upon her breast. The figure’s face was an elongated mask of smooth blue-black wood, in which her slitted eyes burned blue beneath a crest of hair-like branches. Laid across the spirit’s thighs was a sickle-headed stave with a long wooden haft. Several grub-like creatures longer than Neave’s arm squirmed clumsily across the spirit’s body.

  ‘Wytha,’ the name came unbidden to Neave’s lips, and with it another surge of clashing mental stimuli that finally knocked her from her feet. She fell forward onto her knees, groaning and clutching her temples as a blizzard of blue motes whirled around her, and a thousand images and alien memories bombarded her mind.

  She looked up to see the spirit in the throne lean forward. A jagged smile split the smooth wood of its face, a wound-like slash lit from within by blue fire, just like its eyes. In a creaking voice Neave had heard time and again in her visions, Wytha spoke.

  ‘Good child… you do remember.’

  ‘I… remember?’ Neave hissed as fresh needles of pain shot through her mind. She pounded a fist against the ground, leaving a palm-print of crawling blue sparks that slowly faded away. ‘What is this? What have you done to me?’ she asked. The pain in her head was becoming intolerable, yet this was not like before. The visions danced out of sight, building and building like a dark wave that refused to break.

  ‘I?’ asked Wytha, recoiling with exaggerated surprise and placing one long-taloned hand upon her breast. ‘Child. I have done nothing that was not of your asking. It was your God-King… your Sigmar whose imperfect conjurations brought you to this.’

  ‘Please, it’s getting worse,’ said Neave. ‘I don’t know. Something… something about this place. I have to get out of here.’ She felt as though her mind was trying to tear itself apart, as though a crushing weight sat upon her chest and built by the second until she feared that her ribs would cave in.

  Wytha shook her head and drummed her fingers upon the arms of her crystal throne.

  ‘This will not do,’ she said. ‘Ithary! Why did you not tell me of the condition the child was in?’

  Ithary repeated her strange shrugging motion, and Neave felt a semi-coherent moment of hatred for the fey spirit.

  ‘Wrongsome twiste all’they seem to I,’ said Ithary dismissively. ‘Broken moreso this fleshcutting than the roots?’

  ‘You can see that she is, wilful girl,’ said Wytha. ‘Your spitefulness lessens you.’

  Ithary’s thorned mane shivered as though a breeze shuddered through it, and she narrowed her eyes at her mistress. The moment broke as Neave groaned again, trying and failing to stagger upright, resorting to falling backwards and attempting to claw her way hand-over-hand away from Wytha’s throne.

  ‘Please,’ she said. ‘If you know what this is… In Sigmar’s bloody name…’

  ‘Stay, child,’ said Wytha, her voice suddenly hard and commanding. Neave found herself unable to move, as though invisible vines had wound themselves around her with constricting force. Shuddering with agony and anger, she could only lie there, jaw working as she heard Wytha dismount from her throne and stalk slowly towards her. Taloned feet came into Neave’s peripheral vision, then moved around in front of her. Wytha’s shadow fell over her, and a long, thorn-like digit slid beneath her chin. Wytha tilted Neave’s head up, blue eyes staring deep into hers as the spirit craned forward.

  ‘This will not do,’ said Wytha in a soft voice, and through her agony Neave felt bewilderment at the tenderness she heard there
. ‘The sorcery of Sigmar’s Reforging jars with the old magics that long ago marked your soul. They fight against your birthright as though it were the taint of the Dark Gods themselves, and it tears you apart. Poor child, how you suffer.’

  ‘Old… magics…?’ gasped Neave through gritted teeth.

  ‘Oh child, you were my creature long before you were Sigmar’s,’ said Wytha.

  ‘I… am… Stormcast…’ hissed Neave.

  ‘You are, you are,’ said Wytha sadly. ‘But before, in your true life, you were so much more. That was my doing, sweet child, my gift to you, and now the debt is due. But what good are you to me like this? No wonder the summons did not work.’ Wytha shot a venomous glance beyond Neave. She assumed it must be aimed at Ithary.

  ‘Summons…?’ Neave fought against the pain in her mind, and the sorcerous restraints that constricted around her body. Yet more than that, she fought against the words she was hearing, and the creeping sense of dreadful truth they brought with them.

  She wanted to fight.

  She wanted to run.

  Instead she lay, and twitched, and felt the endless black wave rise over her, shimmering with motes of blue fire.

  ‘What the children of Dreadwood give, my girl, they give not freely,’ said Wytha, her tone stern. ‘There is a price to pay for your life, and you, child, were not done paying it. But no words of mine will convince you, will they? Sigmar’s brand is burned deep into your soul.’

  ‘By the… by his hammer… I am… Stormcast…’ said Neave, then gasped as fresh pain shot through her. Her breathing was becoming laboured. Her vision was turning grey-blue at the edges, like a spreading bruise.

  ‘Yet you were Dreadwood first, girl. And now, you will see.’

  With that, Wytha plucked one of the strange grubs from her body, piercing its fat flesh with her talons and making it squirm. She stroked the insect and crooned as she brought it level with Neave’s face, then with a savage twist she ripped the creature in half. Stubby legs kicked, frantic with death agonies. Its blunt black nub of a head thrashed this way and that, as steaming green slime spilled from the two sundered halves of the huge grub. Delicately, Wytha dipped her talons into the slime that spilled forth. Gently, she daubed the blood-warm filth onto Neave’s face like a mother nursing a sickly babe, trailing grue across her cheeks and beneath her eyes.