Blacktalon: First Mark Read online

  ‘You did not die for nothing,’ she spat, hooking a toe under one of the cultists’ corpses and kicking it into the air. The body flipped, limbs flailing, into a mass of enemies and drove them back. At the same time, Neave dived around the silver pillar at her back, hearing more arrows smashing against it as she went.

  Bloody and bruised, she rose to confront Xelkyn Xerkanos. Neave saw herself reflected in the crystal shards of her mark’s eyes, every reflection warped and subtly different from the one beside it. She screamed in pain. In one image her flesh burned with unholy fire; in another it crawled with crystal insects. In yet another, it was not her at all but Tarion reflected in the sorcerer’s gaze.

  Xelkyn favoured her with a leer and slammed the haft of his staff against the ground. Light pulsed from the well, and the energies crackling around the pillars billowed into a dome. Neave stopped, suddenly wary as she found herself cut off from the cult warriors, alone in this prison of crystalline light with he who she had hunted for so many months.

  ‘So obliging, spiteful huntress,’ spat Xelkyn, his insectile jaw mangling his words in a way Neave had long come to despise. ‘To spend your comrade’s life, just so you might offer yourself up to my master as a sacrifice…’

  Neave rose and paced warily around the dome, a hunting beast stalking the edge of its enclosure. Blood dripped from her wounds, but she ignored it, instead taking in every possible element of her surroundings. She kept her movements relaxed, her expression neutral, while within her mind she sought furiously for the nature of her enemy’s trap.

  ‘You have trammelled yourself in a prison of your own making, cut off from your followers, with the most dangerous close-quarters combatant that has ever sought your death,’ said Neave, her tone low and angry. ‘Hardly a masterstroke.’

  ‘And yet, the power that burns from the beyond in this place, the power I have conjured, that will spell your utter annihilation, huntress,’ crooned Xelkyn. The sorcerer kept his stave levelled at her with one taloned hand. The fingers of the other were twitching, she saw, working some incantation while he kept her busy with words.

  Neave tilted her head, frowning at her mark with scornful disappointment. Fast as lightning, she sent one of her whirlwind axes spinning across the dome. At the same time, she flung herself sideways, evading the inevitable blast of fire from Xelkyn’s staff.

  The sorcerer’s attack missed Neave and washed across the inside of the magical prison, blackening the crystalline light and sending cracks racing through it. In return, her axe lopped Xelkyn’s hand off at the wrist before crunching into the far side of the dome and dropping to the dirt.

  The sorcerer shrieked in agony, an insectile whine that set Neave’s teeth on edge and tore at her sanity. Cracks raced through the crystal dome, spears of light shattering free from it and spiralling away into the night. The cult’s surviving warriors massed frantically beyond, hacking and smashing, trying to ram staves through the gaps to blast her with fire.

  ‘Whatever you planned, Xelkyn, you’ve failed,’ snarled Neave. ‘And now, in Sigmar’s name, you die.’

  Neave Blacktalon launched herself across the dome with her remaining axe held high. She swept the blade down in a killing arc that Xelkyn blocked with his stave. Her weapon swung back and down, then back and down again, battering at the sorcerer’s guard with ferocious speed. Sparks showered them both as his stave was shorn in two, Neave’s fourth blow carrying on to gouge a bloody ­furrow in Xelkyn’s chest.

  Around them, the crystal prison shattered and spun away in a million shards of fractured light. Cultists and Tzaangor reeled, clutching at faces and eyes pierced by melting spears of energy. Neave raised her weapon again and brought it down in a savage blow that hacked deep into Xelkyn’s collarbone and half severed his revolting head. Shimmering blue blood sprayed her armour as her mark sagged, falling against her and clawing at the gorget of her armour with his one remaining hand.

  Neave looked down at him with pitiless eyes, raising her axe for a last, killing blow. Head lolling sideways, blood spurting in gouts, Xelkyn croaked something through a mouthful of ichor. Even Neave’s razor-sharp senses could not discern it precisely. She caught only a handful of words.

  ‘…not… the fate… has wrought… a curse…’

  With that, Xelkyn hurled himself backwards with a last burst of strength. Neave cried out in anger as he pulled her off balance, toppling forward, feet flying out from under her. The dying sorcerer cast himself into the yawning mouth of the well, into the pulsing, dirty light of raw Chaos, and as he went he dragged Neave Blacktalon with him. Her axe fell, splitting Xelkyn’s skull, yet even then she could not prevent his deadweight carrying her with him over the brink. Her stomach lurched with the sudden feeling of precipitous motion.

  Neave bellowed in fury as she tumbled into an impossible, burning abyss whose dimensions the well could never have contained. She plunged into raw madness and lies made of shadows and light. She saw Xelkyn’s body consumed by the raging fires of change, fires that swept through her own armour, her flesh, her bone and soul. In a white-hot wash of agony, she felt herself disintegrate.

  All is lightning.

  Burning light and arcing energy.

  Rending, and tearing, and hammering.

  The anvils ring with god-like blows.

  Thunder roils and rumbles.

  The two sounds are one, cacophonous, ominous, magnificent.

  There is pain.

  There is ripping and moulding, flesh knit from star-stuff and bones wrought from ferocity and a heart that pounds with the thunder of the heavens.

  There is a mind, again, an identity.

  There is realisation.

  A memory.

  A child is crying. She has lived this before, this Reforging, more than once now, and all is familiar, as much as such a process ever can be.

  But now a child is crying, and smoke is on the wind, and something terrible roars in a way that causes her soul to recoil.

  There is light, fiery and filthy with swirls of smoke, ash, other things. Fat motes that whirl and drone in defiance of the furnace wind, that smack against flesh like clotted hail, that bite and sting.

  Flies. The air is thick with flies.

  It is as though that one detail is the corner of something painstakingly lifted by a digging nail, a fingertip purchase upon an obscuring layer that she tears aside with increasing speed.

  She hears the child crying. She smells the smoke. This is not Reforging, but something else. She hears the child crying and she has to know.

  The veil is dragged aside, but it goes unwillingly. There is pain, somewhere in her mind, motes of light and fire that needle her more viciously the harder she tries to see. She ignores them, groans silently at the agony as she pushes on and her vision clears.

  There is a village, small and crudely built, nestled at the tapering end of a steep-sided valley. She knows that people live here: proud, simple people who live off the land and fight for what they have. She has seen such places before.

  A scattering of huts with black stone walls and roofs of scaled hide, hemmed in to the rear by craggy cliffs, and to the front and sides by a woven wall of thorny growths that look every bit as impenetrable as rock.

  A small waterfall plunges over the cliffs and wends its way out beneath the village’s living wall. Bulky riding beasts are tethered. Tall, gnarled fruit trees fill the valley, the fringe of a dark and sprawling forest.

  This is a good place. She knows this as surely as she knows who she is.

  But a child is crying and the air fills with smoke, the river turns cloudy with gore and black matter, and the trees writhe as rot climbs their trunks and fouls their branches. Flies fill the air in their thousands, a roaring wave that crests upon the cliffs and sweeps down upon the villagers in their homes. Dark figures stride from the storm, rusted axes in their fists. Huge, noisome th
ings lope and squirm on their heels, things that tear into the screaming villagers with tusk and tooth, tentacle and talon.

  She sees torches flung into huts, fire taking hold with greedy glee.

  She cries out without a voice as she watches bloated butchers hack down those who try to fight, and those who try to flee. The riding beasts are bucking and flailing at their tethers, yet there is a sickness among them. The flies settle in their thousands and begin to feed even as their victims roll their eyes and try in vain to escape.

  A sense of greater dread pulls her eyes helplessly upwards, to looming cliffs transformed from protective walls into the hunched silhouettes of hungry scavengers. The sky fills with racing clouds wrought in coiling light and fire. A huge figure is silhouetted against them, a shape that her mind tries not to see. She feels pain again, sharper now, and pictures needle claws digging through the soft flesh inside her skull.

  Angrily, she pushes the sensation aside.

  She has to see.

  With that determination, the figure swims into focus. A monster lurks upon the cliff edge, something with gangling, chitinous limbs, a flabby body bristling with spines and hairs, flesh by turns scaled and insectile, riddled with sores and busy with pustules. A multitude of membranous wings flit and buzz, half-folded in to its back. Bulbous compound eyes stare from above a reptilian snout crammed overfull with rotting fangs and slithering tongues.

  Yet it is not this revolting amalgam of fly and drake that fills her with dread, but the being that sits upon its back. Mouldering robes swathe this tall, cadaverous figure, fluttering in the wind and parting to reveal his famine-struck body and maggot-busy flesh. For a moment she takes him for one of the living dead, but then she sees his face, hidden deep in its cowl, his piercing, intense eyes, sore-riddled mouth, lank, greasy hair, and the tri-lobe rune of Nurgle writ in diseased flesh upon his forehead. She knows now who this being is, what he is, and as he watches the massacre of the village with detached fascination she feels her hate for him swell.

  Still the child cries, and at last she tears her attention away from the malevolent watcher on the clifftop. She casts around, her vision sweeping down fly-choked pathways, over countless acts of cruelty and violence as the villagers are butchered. Here a body lies sprawled in the rudiments of a herb garden, spine laid bare by an axe stroke, flesh swarming with parasites. There a warrior tries desperately to buy his family time to flee, only to be sent screaming to his knees as his attackers vomit streams of acidic bile across him. Elsewhere, a hut burns, and screams rise shrill and piteous from within as cruel laugher ­bubbles without.

  At last she sees the child, abandoned, swaddled, lying near a fallen woman at the village’s edge. She feels a wave of fear and empathy wash through her, a desperate desire to help. Surely, any moment, the invaders must see this poor, lost thing. She dreads what they will do.

  Yet other figures appear now, even as the vision begins to fade. She fights, resists, wanting to see the sinister creatures that slip from the eaves of the forest and dance in steps at once flowing and stilted towards the village. Through a veil regathering she sees the thorn wall part for the creatures, sees their eyes like blue fire flash in the gathering gloom. She sees them sweep the child up in their arms and bear it away into the forest.

  All is darkness.

  All is lightning, piercing the shadows with sudden, agonising ferocity.

  All is pain.

  She is Neave Blacktalon. She is reforged.

  Chapter Two

  Neave stood upon a balcony set high in the flank of the Thunderpeak. This stronghold was home to Neave’s warrior chamber, the Shadowhammers. It was part gilded castle, part vast lightning engine and part stony mountain, looming over a region of grasslands and farms within the innerlands of Azyr. It was tradition, after their Reforging in Sigmaron, for any Shadowhammers warrior to return to their stronghold in the Realm of Heavens before they began their hunts anew. It allowed time for reflection and reassignment, an opportunity to find one’s centre before stepping into battle again.

  Clad in a fresh suit of sigmarite plate, her helm and gauntlets set to one side, Neave looked down upon the sweeping vista that spread below. Morning light spread pale and gentle over farmsteads just stirring to life, walled villages beginning to bustle with activity as their inhabitants awoke. Watched over by the noble silhouette of Thunder­peak, and with the High Star Sigendil burning in the skies above, this was as safe a place as Sigmar’s worshippers could hope to live. Neave drank in the simple stirrings of life below, the sense of peace and civilisation.

  ‘It is all this that we fight for,’ she reminded herself. ‘This, and for all of the Mortal Realms.’

  Wagons rolled along roadways patrolled by Freeguild soldiers. Market traders hawked their wares from street barrows while children played in the dirt and farmhands plied their tools amidst golden crop fields. They went about their simple lives while zodiacal godbeasts and mystic constellations wheeled above them, and warrior demi-gods watched over their every move. Neave supposed that one could get used to anything, given time.

  Functional immortality, for instance.

  She took deep breaths, feeling the last of the Reforging energies flicker and twitch through her muscles. Sometimes the process took days.

  ‘New muscles,’ she breathed, shaking her head at the strangeness of that idea. ‘Yet they feel the same. They feel… familiar.’

  She held her hands up before her face, as she vaguely recalled doing after each Reforging. She marvelled that these were the hands that had held her whirlwind axes upon countless battlefields, had struck down one mark after another.

  ‘And yet, they are not,’ she said. ‘Nothing is the same but my soul.’

  Neave stiffened as the ghost of a sound reached her ears, as though it floated up on some rogue zephyr from amidst the villages below. For just a moment, she heard a child’s disconsolate cries. She smelt the faint tang of smoke, and raised a hand to her forehead, squinting her eyes shut at a dull stab of pain. Something flickered in the darkness, blue motes that stared back at her with frightening intensity.

  ‘Blacktalon,’ came a voice from behind Neave, shattering the illusion.

  She jumped, surprised, an unusual eventuality in and of itself. Neave opened her eyes, glancing over her shoulder to see Tarion standing a few paces behind her. He must have come down the spiralling marble stair from the chambers above but paused on the bottom step when he saw her.

  The Knight-Venator also had his helm removed, revealing short-cropped blond hair, lively eyes of emerald green and strong, open features. A tribal tattoo radiated around his left eye, a whorl pattern that he had once told her was sacred to the people he had been drawn from. Why such a marking of the flesh was repeated in Reforging was a mystery that neither of them had ever bothered to investigate.

  Neave supposed that Tarion had been handsome, in his life before. Now there was an otherness to him, to all of them that Sigmar had raised up, that made even his affable grin somehow unsettling and dangerous.

  ‘Admiring the view?’ he asked, joining her at the railing. Neave gave him a level look. He had seen her moment of discomfort, but he wouldn’t mention it. Tarion and Neave had been comrades for a long time, and he knew her well enough to understand that if it was important, she would raise it herself. Silently she thanked him for that, and shook off the strange fugue.

  ‘Just adjusting,’ she said. ‘You know how it is after the Reforging.’

  ‘New body, new senses, yet all the same,’ he said, nodding. ‘The familiarity of the unfamiliar, as I believe Lord-Celestant Starhelm once put it. I remember denting my helm the first time I tried to pick it up. Compensating for an old injury that I no longer suffered from, using strength I did not know that I had.’ He laughed softly.

  ‘It is five Reforgings for you now, isn’t it?’ asked Neave.

  ‘Five,’ he said. �
��A high tally in so short a span of years. And yet, what, this is your ninth?’

  ‘It is,’ she replied, nodding slowly. ‘It never gets easier, or any less strange.’

  ‘Still, one can get used to anything given enough time.’

  Neave shot him a glance of surprise. ‘Perhaps,’ she said. ‘Though frankly, I wonder whether we should. Sigmar’s gifts are not to be taken lightly.’

  ‘Well, then perhaps you should stop abusing the God-King’s generosity by dying so damned often,’ he said, offering her a crooked grin.

  ‘I serve in a uniquely perilous position, and some of us cannot just take to the air like a giant dandelwing when things get dangerous,’ she replied with a snort of laughter. ‘Besides, I have never once known a death when I didn’t take my mark with me before I went.’

  ‘Sigmar’s most dangerous blade…’ said Tarion thoughtfully. It was the name that some of their Vanguard Chamber had given to Neave.

  ‘You know that I dislike that moniker, Tarion. Let the grand titles be left to the grand lords, and let assassins such as us get on with our dirty work in peace.’

  ‘The chamber seem to like it well enough.’ He raised one eyebrow. ‘You’re a talisman to them, Blacktalon. You know that. You’re a great deal more than just an assassin. You embody their luck, their honour. You are first among your kind, the only one of them with the gift to truly windshift. You know how seriously we Hammers of Sigmar take such things.’

  ‘Why do you think I still let them call me it?’ she asked, stifling her amusement at his expression of surprise. ‘Oh, come now, senses like mine and you do not think I can hear them muttering that when I make my kills? I understand my burden well enough, and I fight to be worthy of it every day.’

  He put a hand on her shoulder, his heavy gauntlet resting for a moment on her sleek pauldron.

  ‘I know that you do,’ he said. ‘We all do. With the war in the Mortal Realms as fierce as it is, the enemies that Sigmar’s armies face every day? We are all of us exemplars. We can be nothing less.’