Blacktalon: First Mark Read online

  Pursing her lips, she gave a piercing whistle that she knew the beasts couldn’t miss. She turned to retreat, and the screaming cries of a ­panicked child rang loud in her ears. The stink of rot and woodsmoke filled her lungs, and the tangled branches around her seemed to darken and draw together. Motes of blue light danced across her vision as though she were about to pass out, and somewhere she heard a distant voice crooning words that she couldn’t make out.

  ‘No… no…’ moaned Neave, staggering against one of the trees. She recoiled as teeth tried to sink themselves into her gauntlet, their hungry pressure enough to dent the sigmarite and cause her to hiss in pain. That pain cleared her mind, however, just in time for Neave to see the hulking monster that loomed through the trees at her back.

  Snorting furiously, stomping the ground with hooves larger than a Stormcast’s helm, the Bullgor fixed its beady eyes upon her and bellowed a challenge. The thing was huge, easily twice her height and thrice as broad, its shaggy body a mass of heaving muscle and bestial rage. It carried an axe of prodigious size, but it was the horns that curled from its skull that it lowered towards her.

  Neave managed to throw herself aside as the Bullgor charged. Its hoofbeats shook the ground, and one horn-tip clipped her shoulder, sending her spinning away to roll into a crouch, arm numbed by the concussion. The Bullgor’s momentum carried it on into a tree-trunk, and the masticant’s eyes bulged with shock as it was cracked almost in two by the force of the impact.

  The tree creaked then crashed sideways into its neighbours. The Bullgor turned back towards Neave and bellowed again.

  ‘I’m ready for you this time, you reeking beast,’ she snarled. Yet the next instant her senses tingled, and she leapt clear as another massive axe slammed into the ground where she had been standing. Neave landed lightly, pivoting to see a second Bullgor emerging from the shadows of the forest. A crude spear whistled from between the trees and struck her square in the chest, smashing her from her feet. She hit the ground gasping, only the resilience of her sigmarite chest-plate saving her from broken ribs or worse. Hulking shapes lumbered between the masticant trees, and dozens of humanoid figures followed, Gors and Ungors braying for blood.

  ‘Sigmar’s throne,’ spat Neave, scrambling to her feet and breaking into a blistering sprint. More crude spears whistled down around her, thudding into tree-trunks and digging into the muddy soil as she ran. The bestial roars of her pursuers faded quickly as she outpaced them, cursing herself for her moment of weakness. Yet self-recrimination could come later. For now, the clearing lay dead ahead.

  She saw Tarion, wings spread and bowstring drawn back, standing at the clearing’s centre. Behind her, she heard the monstrous crashing of the Bullgors charging after her as fast as they could go.

  ‘The horde’s on my tail,’ she sang as she raced past Tarion and into the undergrowth on the other side.

  ‘Perfect,’ he shouted after her. ‘You bring the nicest gifts, Blacktalon.’

  Neave heard the hissing crackle as Tarion began to shoot, nocking, drawing and loosing with inhuman speed. Bellows of agony rose amongst the trees as his shots hit home, and then she heard the rush of his wings as he took to the air.

  Neave was already looping out and around, turning past the Rangers and Raptors waiting in their prepared positions, sprinting hard to clear the frontage of the Brayherd lines before she turned back south to encircle them. She heard the hissing storm as her comrades opened fire, the crackle and boom of dozens of lightning strikes erupting amongst the woodland. She felt fierce pride in her brothers and sisters at that moment, their dedication, skill and courage. She just wished that she did not also see the hazy suggestion of a huge monster lurking higher on the ridge, a fly-like thing ridden by a terrible being who could not possibly be there. The mirage was there and gone between the tree-trunks, but it left its mark upon her. A sense of shame tugged at her, and the fear crept through the back of her mind again that Xelkyn Xerkanos might have succeeded in his aims after all. She could not, would not let herself become a liability to these courageous warriors.

  ‘This can’t go on,’ breathed Neave.

  In the battle’s wake, she and Tarion helped to pile and burn the enemy’s dead.

  ‘They came straight on, just as you planned,’ he said, hefting another corpse onto the carrion mound in the clearing. The Brayherd lay all around, slumped amidst deadfall, sprawled over one another, feathered with bolts and javelins or burned by lightning blasts.

  ‘The Rangers did a phenomenal job,’ replied Neave. ‘I heard we lost eight of them, all told. Even with several more fallen from amongst the Palladors, that’s only a fraction of the force sent back to Azyr, for the cost of an entire warband.’

  Tarion dumped another Ungor onto the growing mound, and stepped back with a frown.

  ‘When did we become so detached about the casualties we sustain?’ he asked. ‘Does it not trouble you that we have come to treat death so lightly? I remember our first campaign, how horrified I was when I saw comrades falling, and how relieved I was to see them again in High Azyr.’

  ‘Not death though, is it?’ she asked, grasping a Bullgor by one shattered horn and heaving it towards the pile. Tarion moved to help shift the massive dead weight of flesh.

  ‘What else would you call it?’ asked Tarion, his voice tightening momentarily as he strained with the corpse’s weight. ‘The body is slain, then completely obliterated by the escape of the soul back to Azyr. Even our wargear is destroyed, nine times out of ten. I’d argue we Stormcasts die harder than most.’

  Neave and Tarion swung the massive corpse between them and threw it onto the carrion mound. It slid slightly, then fetched up on the jutting horns and fangs of its fallen comrades.

  ‘I don’t know – you do not see our enemies rising from the beyond to bring the fight to us again and again, do you?’ she said, nudging the heap with one foot. ‘Our souls don’t die, just our bodies. Ergo, not dead. That is the gift Sigmar gave us.’

  He frowned at her.

  ‘Doesn’t that cheapen our sacrifice?’ he asked. ‘I’ve died in Sigmar’s name several times now. I’ve felt my soul leave my shattered mortal remains and race back to the heavens. I’ve been reforged, certainly. But I still gave my life, and with each self-sacrifice I have lost a little more of myself. Memories, thoughts, feelings that I will not regain.’

  ‘Does it matter so much to you that you did?’ she asked. ‘Isn’t duty enough without the sense of martyrdom?’

  ‘Of course,’ he said, stepping back as one of the Rangers came past with a cannister of purified oils. The corpses of Chaos-worshippers could not be left to rot, lest their corruption seep back into the soil and worsen the taint already present. It was an order given to all the Vanguard Auxiliary Chambers since the first cities of Sigmar had been raised in the realms, and since that time they had carried the oils with them for purification burnings. Once the pyres were lit, they would hasten away in case the column of smoke brought fresh foes and gave away their position.

  ‘Well then,’ said Neave. ‘Reforging is a strange enough process without bringing concepts of reincarnation into it. It already raises enough questions.’

  He gave her a searching look, and she nodded in answer to his unasked question.

  ‘Let’s leave the burning to the Rangers and press ahead. There’s a lot of land to scout still between here and the Craven Steppes, and there’s a lot we don’t yet see.’

  Tarion clapped her on the shoulder and strode away to inform Danastus they were setting off. She looked after him for a long moment, feeling trepidation and gratitude at war within her. She knew better than to bear her burden alone, and she felt she could trust Tarion more than any other living being she had ever known. But all bonds had their breaking point, and the lonely, tired part of her soul wondered whether what she had to tell Tarion would prove to be theirs.

  Neave had n
ever trusted easily, had always wrestled with the fear that no matter how much a person might prove themselves to her, there was always the risk they might fail her, or she might drive them away.

  Risk her friendship, or risk failing in her duties to Sigmar? Truly, for Neave, it was no choice at all.

  Swift as the wind, she and Tarion sped off through the forest. Neave raced along its muddy animal tracks and wove between its tangled trunks. He flew swift and true over the canopy, keeping pace with her, Krien weaving around him like an errant star in the sky.

  The daylight lasted briefly in this part of Ghur, though no one had ever been able to provide a tangible reason why. Despite the days lasting far longer in the region around Excelsis, this stretch of the Coast of Tusks continued its attempts to verify the ramblings of local shamans that the night time itself was predatory, and quick to devour each new day.

  By the time the pyre smoke rose thick at their backs, and the trees began to thin around them into scattered copses, daylight was already fading from the world. Stars speckled a sky turned mauve and umber, and the twin bodies of the Hungering Moons rose over the jagged horizon, the one chasing the other like predator and prey.

  Tarion swept down in a long arc and alighted ahead of Neave, near a straggling copse whose branches wove black webs against the evening sky. Krien settled in the canopy above, light radiating from him and spreading around Tarion in a pool.

  Neave slowed her pace as she neared him, glancing with a hunter’s caution all around. The terrain here was turning to rugged grassland, interspersed by low, rolling hills and jagged-edged ravines. Strange crystal outcroppings split the skin of the plains here and there, rising hundreds of feet in height and seeming to twitch and shudder in the half-light. Theirs was the only visible movement, however. There was no sign of any far-ranging Palladors keeping pace with her.

  She and Tarion were alone.

  ‘Are you all right?’ he asked, the moment she reached him. Neave pulled off her helm and offered him a wan smile. She kept her expression calm, even though her heart was thudding with anxiety at what she was about to admit.

  ‘Honestly, Tarion? No.’

  He drew breath to speak but she held up a hand and kept talking. Now that the dam had broken, she needed to let it all flood out.

  ‘They were visions. You were right. Not just one, but two. I can only half remember it but the first was during my Reforging, I’m sure of it. What you saw, that was the second. And they have been echoing in my mind, and in my senses, ever since. I feel as though I’m going mad. I feel like there’s a wall collapsing in my mind and it’s letting things through that seem like visions but feel like memories, and yet it’s as though they aren’t my memories, like someone else put them there. Does that make any sense at all?’

  Tarion was still helmed, his expression hidden behind his impassive face mask. His body language was still, carefully neutral.

  ‘What have you seen?’ he asked.

  ‘It is fractured, like a broken mirror,’ she said, frustrated. ‘There’s a village, in a valley, upon the edge of a forest. I feel as though I know the place, as though it’s good, safe somehow. Only, it isn’t safe because a terrible cloud of flies sweeps down upon it and all of a sudden there’s Nurgle-worshippers rampaging through the streets, killing and burning. They have deformed monsters with them, hideous, chimerical things, and all the while, up on the ridge above the village a figure waits and watches.’

  ‘Who?’ asked Tarion.

  ‘A champion of the Plague God, sat astride the offspring of a dracoth and the most hideous plague fly ever to crawl from Nurgle’s garden. He frightens me, Tarion, actually frightens me, and I don’t know why.’ Neave was shocked at her own admission; she had seen so much horror, so much death, that she had started to wonder if anything truly possessed the power to frighten her any more.

  ‘Is there more?’ he asked. She nodded, ran one hand over her eyes.

  ‘There’s a child, abandoned near the edge of the village, and I keep hearing her cries. She sounds so lost, so damned scared. Any moment I think the raiders are sure to see her, but before they do, figures come from the forest, and they move through the wall, and they snatch the child up and bear her away. They are lithe, and they move strangely. I remember jagged limbs and dagger-like talons, glowing eyes and shimmering light playing over their bodies. But they aren’t clear to me. I could not tell you what they were. And then…’ She faltered, her mind refusing to focus on anything else. Pain flared in her skull.

  ‘Blue lights…’ she whispered.

  ‘Neave?’ asked Tarion, drawing closer. Her eyes snapped back into focus, and she stepped warily away from him.

  ‘Look, Tarion, we have fought together for many years now. You are my oldest comrade, or friend, or whatever it is that we are to one another. I understand that what I am saying now could make me sound cursed, perhaps mad or tainted in some way. But–’

  ‘Neave,’ he said, interrupting her. He removed his helm, and she felt her heart lurch at the honest sympathy and loyalty she saw in his expression. ‘Tell me what you need.’

  Neave blew out a long, slow breath, gathering herself. She smiled at him gratefully.

  ‘I need to know what this is. I don’t believe it’s entirely a vision, not like Hammerhand suffers from. I don’t feel like I’m seeing something that will happen, so much as something that has happened already. Like a memory, though I can’t tell if it’s mine, or someone else’s, if it’s real or if someone invented it and put it in my skull. One way or another, it is interfering with my ability to serve Sigmar. I’m the first of the Knights-Zephyros. I’m one of the Hammers of Sigmar. I cannot fail. I have to know what this is, what it means, and what I have to do to drive this curse away. I can’t risk taking it back to Azyr with me if I die, or… spreading it to anyone else, if it is truly some curse.’

  He nodded, staring into the middle distance where the last light of the sun set the horizon ablaze. Crystal outcroppings rose like dark spears against the ruddy light, clouds of insects emerging from their insides and swarming in profusion around them. Neave shuddered at the visual echo of swarming flies.

  ‘You know that I’m duty-bound to tell Danastus about this,’ said Tarion, and Neave felt a shock of icewater run through her veins.

  ‘We cannot, not yet. If we inform the Lord-Aquilor then he must, in turn, hand me over to the Sacrosanct Chambers for examination. There’s every chance that I would never come back, and Sigmar knows that if that was the only way to keep everyone else safe from corruption, then I would submit to their judgement without a struggle. But what if this is only the beginning of something, or a warning of danger yet to come?’

  He raised a placating hand before she could go on.

  ‘Blacktalon, I said only that I should tell Danastus, not that I would. I agree with you – it is too little to go on and too rushed an action. I could no more throw you to the dracolions than I could shoot an arrow through your heart. This matter remains between us for now.’

  ‘Thank you,’ she murmured, though the simple words didn’t feel anything like enough.

  ‘Are there any other distinguishing features you remember? Landmarks? Any idea which realm, even, this all happened in?’

  Neave told him everything else she could recall, fragments from her strange bird’s eye view and the vertiginous plunge that followed. Tarion’s face set in a stern frown as he committed every last nuance to memory.

  ‘All right, that’s more to go on than I feared,’ he said. ‘But still, in all the vast realms, we’re looking for a single place that may or may not even truly exist. I don’t think you should open yourself up to hope.’

  She shook her head.

  ‘I agree, it’s a tall order,’ she said. ‘But still. Where do we look first?’

  ‘You don’t look anywhere. The chamber can’t spare us both. Besides, until we know
what is happening to you, you’re better close to the chamber where you can call upon aid if you need it. Just try not to let anyone see… well, anything untoward, yes?’

  ‘If I’m staying with the Shadowhammers, what of you?’ she asked.

  ‘You’re fast, but you can’t fly,’ he said. ‘And you hunt alone. I have contacts. Brother Knights of the air. Swifthawk Rangers. Even the airship masters of the Kharadron, if I must, shifty duardin bastards. Tell the Lord-Aquilor that I’m ranging out on a hunch, that I may be some days. Meanwhile, I will shake every tree I can. If anyone knows of this place you speak of, I’ll find it for you.’

  Neave reached out a gauntlet and clasped it in his. She shot him a fierce smile of gratitude, the expression insufficient to express the relief and hope surging inside her.

  ‘You are a true friend, Tarion Arlor,’ she said. ‘Thank you. Be safe, and hasten back.’

  ‘Just keep whatever this is to yourself, and under control,’ he said. ‘I’ll be as quick as I can.’

  With that, he replaced his helm, whistled for Krien to follow, and leapt skywards without another word. Neave watched him swoop away south and west, vanishing into the darkening sky in the direction of Excelsis. Her hunter’s sight kept him in view a long time, and even when Tarion could be seen no longer, Krien still burned against the skies for a few moments more. At last, even he dwindled amidst the stars, and was gone.

  Chapter Five

  Tarion soared upon thermals of ensorcelled energy. He swept through banks of churning cloud and wheeled amidst crackling spears of lightning, for what fear had one of Sigmar’s Eternals for the storm?

  Below him, incredible landscapes unfurled. The topography of the Coast of Tusks was laid bare, jagged peninsula fangs thrusting savagely out into a ferocious ocean that gnawed at their cliffs with equal vigour. Vast herds of beasts roamed the grassy plains inland. Thundertusks and yarhi and the centipede-like tokkashotle grazed and fought and rutted as they pursued their nomadic existences. Packs of predators stalked them through rocky mountain passes and the edges of lambent swamplands. Sabretusks brought down the weak and the isolated from amongst the herds. Reptilian shekli burst from their trap-burrows to drag bellowing beasts down into nests swimming with exuded digestive juices. Once, far below him, Tarion witnessed the last moments of a duel to the death between two massive gargants, one clubbing the other’s skull in and hurling him from a mountaintop. The two had fought over a frozen rhinox carcass, he saw, and he envied them the simplicity of their battles. The war to reclaim the Mortal Realms had long ago become a complex and muddy affair. There were times when the vague memories he retained from his tribal life before Reforging seemed idyllic in their lack of moral quandaries or blurred battlelines.