Blacktalon: First Mark

by Andy Clark

  It had proved a useful gift.

  Ungholghott understood on some disinterested level that this knowledge – which he sought so that he might cure his tribe’s livestock and feed his people – had driven him quite mad.

  Nurgle’s generosity overwhelmed him completely, bursting the banks of his sanity like a river swollen to rancid flood. Ungholghott had been transformed into a vector for the very parasites and plagues that he once sought to prevent. He was pleased by this. It had happened long ago, and he was content in his role as a servant of Nurgle. He hoped to emulate his god’s largesse.

  The rat-creature was still talking, he realised. Excuses and blandishments spilled from it in a chittering stream. It was a skaven, some crawling, genuflecting envoy from the Clan Feesik. Its leprous body was wrapped in mouldering robes. It grovelled before his throne, casting nervous glances at Ungholghott’s bodyguards.

  His contempt for this creature twisted his lips into a sneer. It was laughable to even call the skaven allies, as though they were somehow equal partners in this war. As though the Clans Pestilens sought anything more noble or far-reaching than simple ruination for its own sake. Idly, Ungholghott contemplated how he would dissect this creature. He catalogued its pustulant organs in his mind, discarded its rheumy eyes as useless, dropped its fangs into a brass dish for later use.

  Lord Ungholghott took a deep, phlegm-thick breath and forced himself to focus. He loomed over the skaven. The rat-man’s words shrivelled like blighted crops before his intense stare. It fell silent, and he smelt the rank animal musk of fear that leaked from its glands.

  ‘Do the flesh-raids continue?’ asked Ungholghott.

  ‘They do, much-most highest festersome one,’ chittered the skaven. ‘Far-far across Verdantia, yes, oh, such plenty-much flesh bounty does Clan Feesik gather for you, greatest of–’

  Ungholghott waved a hand, a sharp gesture that choked the skaven into silence. Its snout bobbed nervously, nose twitching and fangs bared beneath its rotten cowl.

  ‘Have you been sufficiently circumspect?’ Ungholghott knew the answer to this question, but he asked regardless. The obvious had its place, he had found, in discussion with the lower orders of beast.

  ‘Veil-hidings we have scurried quick-fast behind, oh most foul, oh most rancid and reviled one!’ said the skaven, waving its hand-claws in a grandiose gesture. ‘Subtle we have been-been, yes, so cunning even the Clans Eshin could not have emulated such cleverness.’

  ‘Yet I hear reports of plague weapons being used upon the flesh-stocks,’ said Ungholghott. His yellowed stare bore relentlessly into the skaven’s beady red eyes, until the creature abased itself before him, tail twitching high with fear. ‘I hear that the Ravensbeak tribe were wiped out entirely by a malaise that turned their muscle to rot and their flesh to squirming pus. I hear that the stockade of the Strongblade tribe was overwhelmed by tentacled growths that slew half the flesh-stock. I hear these things, and many more. What I hear, rat, does not bring to my mind the word “circumspect”.’

  ‘Lies-lies!’ shrieked the skaven, springing to its foot-claws and dancing an angry jig. ‘Fake tales twisted by jealous rival-foes! Yes, oh foulest of filth-spreaders, yes, these are whispering-squeakings of Clan Morbidus! We are quiet-cunning and we gather-take the flesh for you as you command!’

  The skaven realised the scale of its outburst. Another wash of the fear-musk reached Ungholghott’s nostrils. The rat-man collapsed into an obsequious heap of rags and squirming flesh.

  ‘If you have rivals, and they are interfering with my plans, then that is as much your problem as if it were your own warriors performing these deeds, rat. Do you understand me?’

  The skaven drew breath to launch into another diatribe. Ungholghott’s glare persuaded it otherwise. It nodded instead, eyes wide. Its tail twitched ceaselessly.

  ‘Go,’ said Ungholghott. ‘Return to your burrows. Tell your kin that I expect a more restrained and respectful standard of service. I want my harvest brought in swiftly, quietly and without further complication.’

  The skaven nodded again. Ungholghott knew that it was already calculating how dangerous this alliance had become, whether now would be the time to turn its fellows upon him.

  ‘Tell them also that you have struck a bargain with me,’ he said. The skaven was suddenly very still, red eyes gleaming beneath its cowl. Perhaps not so rheumy after all, he thought. ‘Tell them that I will provide double the warpstone payment that was originally agreed, both for the flesh-tribes and for any monsters that you capture.’

  ‘Such generosity!’ squealed the skaven, now animated and gleeful. ‘Oh, most magnanimous master of mould, great-great producer of poxes, highest and most big-vast–’

  ‘NOW!’ thundered Ungholghott, slamming one fist against the arm of his throne. The skaven gave a shriek of terror and turned, whip-fast, scurrying out of the chamber on both sets of claws. It left a reeking trail behind itself that was soon lost in the maggot-thick filth of the audience chamber.

  Ungholghott’s bodyguards chuckled at the spectacle. Their laughter was basso, rumbling deep in their cavernous chests. Their flesh was all stitches and slabs. He had worked on them extensively.

  Ungholghott allowed himself a thin smile of his own. The flesh harvest would continue apace, and truly, what matter at this stage if his allies were careful or not? Already the harvest had been excellent. The life-pits seethed with packed-in cattle of every species. The meat-kilns flared night and day and the stitch-threshers lashed and sang, rendering living beings into useful components, then reshaping them into something greater.

  In many ways, Ungholghott thought, he was doing for Grand­father Nurgle what Sigmar had done for himself.

  He was Reforging.

  First the living creatures of Verdantia. Then the flesh-cattle of the neighbouring Jade Kingdoms. Then more, and more. There would be no limits to Lord Ungholghott’s generosity. All would feel its touch.

  ACT II

  Chapter Seven

  Neave Blacktalon rode the winds aetheric, thankful for the quirk of Reforging that had allowed her to truly windshift as the Palladors did. She rested little and kept one eye on her astral compass. She traversed distances each day that would have taken weeks for an army to march, and swept with ease through terrain that would have given even the most sure-footed aelf or stout duardin pause.

  When Neave made camp, she did so in hidden places. One night, she climbed high into the branches of a gargantis tree that stood sentinel over a deep ravine. Small simian things with bulbous eyes scattered through the branches as she climbed, then watched her warily until dawn’s light saw her moving on again.

  Another night, she found a cleft in a huge rock formation and scrambled deep inside, ready to fight any creature that might protest her use of its shelter. Other nights, she simply kept moving, running on through the darkness until dawn’s light welled over the horizon again.

  It was not a pleasant journey, for all that it had begun with such a sense of purpose. Neave was painfully aware that she had abandoned her post.

  During her hours of rest, she meditated upon her choices, and upon the nature of the mission she had undertaken. She interrogated herself fiercely, searching for any hint that her decisions had been made in error, or for selfish reasons, or that her ability to think rationally had in some way been corrupted by the visions she was suffering from.

  After each such stern inner conversation she returned to full consciousness more certain than ever that what she did was the right thing. Whoever he was, whatever significance he had to her, the Chaos champion in her visions was a mark that had to be hunted. She knew it as surely as she knew her own name, as certain as her loyalty to Sigmar and the heavens themselves. How the sylvaneth of the Dreadwood Glade came into matters, Neave was less sure, but she was determined to locate this Ithary and demand of her all the answers she had not given Tarion.

/>   On the sixth day, Neave neared the Brazenreach Realmgate and prepared herself to pass through it. It was neither a frequently used nor well-known passage; indeed, Neave was sure that, beyond the Shadowhammers and other Vanguard Chambers like them, few of Sigmar’s servants had ever had occasion to seek out or travel through this portal.

  The reason was simple; on the Ghurrish side, the Brazenreach Realmgate lay within the maw of a very active, very angry volcano.

  That did not mean that it was entirely unguarded. Neave was forced to dash between basalt outcroppings and craggy ridges on the mountain’s lower slopes, staying low to avoid the eyes of the duardin whose squat watchtowers studded the volcano’s flanks. She heard the clangour of forge hammers at work within those smoke-belching fortifications, and saw lava flows directed through a complex series of steam-locks to power the industrial workshops that lay inside.

  Picking her way along empty lava channels, leaping gaps over ­bubbling molten rock, Neave avoided the sentinels and made her way towards the caldera’s rim.

  At one point, she froze for long minutes in a shallow channel as an enchanted search beam leapt out from atop one of the watchtowers. Duardin voices could be heard, shouting back and forth in a dialect she was unfamiliar with. Yet their meaning was clear; they believed they had spotted something. When she sensed heavy footfalls approaching, Neave crawled swiftly from her hiding place and, with a prayer to Sigmar, dashed through a drifting cloud of fumes towards another ditch. For a heart-stopping moment, she was completely exposed, willing the search beam not to swing in her direction or a sharp-eyed duardin to spot her moving form. Then she was back into cover, crawling away arm over arm into a network of narrow channels and leaving her frustrated pursuers to shout to one another on the slopes below.

  Neave was nearing the top, with the heartbeat of the volcano thumping through her feet and the red-hot ferocity of its maw rumbling close above her, when she felt a sense of watchfulness steal over her.

  Senses tingling, Neave slid into a crevice in the rock and stared out from her vantage point. Though the heat haze made the air swim, she was high above the surrounding lands here and, with her exceptional eyesight, she could see for miles upon miles. Yet after long minutes of staring searchingly into the distance, she could make out nothing untoward, unless perhaps it was a slight speck that had drifted, there and gone, amidst the swimming grey of the far horizon. She shook her head, and wondered whether the visions were making her paranoid now, as well.

  ‘Please, Sigmar, don’t let them send me mad,’ she muttered to herself, tasting ash on her tongue as the volcano rumbled around her. The visions had bubbled beneath the surface of her psyche for days now, as though in setting out on her journey she had somehow done their bidding and appeased them. Still, as she slid out of the crevice and recommenced her hand-over-hand scaling of the volcano’s highest slopes, she could not quite shake off the echo of a child’s sorrowful cries.

  At the peak, Neave hauled herself up and stood before the unbridled fury of the volcano. Below her, perhaps a hundred feet down, a sea of lava bubbled and boiled. The heat was tremendous; if she had not possessed the blessed constitution of the Stormcast Eternals, Neave knew she would have been driven back from the edge, quite possibly choking and blinded by the poisonous fumes and billowing smoke.

  Instead, she took a deep breath, opened her arms out wide, and fell forward over the lip of the volcano into the caldera below.

  For a brief instant, the lava flashed up towards her, and Neave thought how much less terrifying this must be for Tarion with his powers of flight, his ability to bank up and away on the roiling thermals if he lost his nerve. Neave could not fly, she could only fall, and so she did, courageous and determined, straight through the Realmgate that shimmered like an invisible skin mere yards above the lava’s surface.

  Suddenly, blue motes billowed from the molten liquid, tearing her into the blackness.

  Wyrdlight shimmers. A child cries: lost, wrenching sobs dragged up from some deep well of sorrow too profound to be human. Branches shudder and rattle in the cold night breeze. Blue fire dances in firefly whorls through air made thick with ashes. Yellow eyes stare with hateful intensity. Blue eyes sear and spit amidst the darkness like the fury of the storm, then turn cold with hate.

  Neave emerged from furious heat and sound into the soft sighing of trees and a steady drizzle. She landed and rolled, coming up in a crouch with her axes drawn.

  She took in her surroundings quickly and found herself to be alone. She rose, standing upon a dais circled by four empty braziers inscribed with rampant beasts. She had emerged – fallen, in truth – from a wide stone archway that, from this side, appeared decrepit and utterly without purpose.

  Neave had transitioned from daytime in the Realm of Beasts to night in the Realm of Life, and with low, dense clouds gathering overhead she found little light to see by. Most would have been blinded entirely by the darkness, but Neave could make out the tall jesters’ pines that clustered close around the Realmgate, and the narrow path that wound away down the slope between them.

  ‘Well, Ithary, I’m through the damn Realmgate, for what it’s worth,’ she muttered. ‘Now, let’s hope I get more for my troubles than just rained on. Time to look beyond the river’s third winding, wherever in Sigmar’s name that is.’

  Knowing that she needed to get her bearings, Neave set off along the narrow path through the trees. She kept her pace slow and careful, watchful for any sign of danger or ambush.

  ‘You’re following a trail of visions and cryptic words from a forest spirit,’ she told herself. ‘You’re in territory you’ve never trod before, only heard Tarion speak of. And what can he see from up in the damn clouds anyway? Trust nothing, expect trouble, and don’t shame yourself or the Hammers, eh?’

  After an hour or more, Neave emerged onto a rocky promontory that jutted out over a steep slope. Scree and dirt dropped away before her, trees clinging tenaciously to the slope amidst tangled vines and outcroppings of lambent nightblooms. She took a deep breath, feeling the sharp tang of life magic in the air.

  As she stood atop the ridge, the clouds tattered apart, and slivers of moonlight fell through them. They revealed a sweeping vista that made her breath catch.

  Below her, the slope dropped away for hundreds of feet, down into lushly forested foothills that marched away towards a distant river valley. The river itself began in a series of waterfalls, its source lost amidst a chain of floating islands that drifted high and rootless in the night sky.

  ‘Beyond the third winding,’ she murmured, peering into the shadowed night. The river did indeed wind like a serpent as it made its way along the valley floor, but it did so only twice before it vanished through a cleft in a distant hillside and was lost to sight.

  ‘Well, looks like I know where I’m going at least,’ said Neave to herself. She rolled her shoulders, stretched the cricks out of her neck and set off again into the gloom.

  Dawn broke golden as Neave loped along the hilltops overlooking the river valley, finally reaching another crest where standing stones stood in a huge, creeper-tangled ring. Walking between the stones, she felt a strange sense of reverence grip her that had nothing to do with her faith in Sigmar. It was an older feeling, unsettling but somehow familiar.

  Neave crossed the circle and stood at the edge, looking out over the hilltops along the course of the river.

  ‘That’s…’ the words died on her lips, and her brows drew down in puzzlement. Ahead, the hills sloped away towards wetland plains, where jade outcroppings jutted up amidst swirling mists. Distance rapidly became hazy, the rays of sunrise falling like blood through the vapours, limning a suggestion of what might be a mountain or mountains in the far distance. Yet it was not the landscape that surprised her. It was rather the resurgent sense of familiarity that she felt welling up within her.

  The feeling was so strong that she put out
a hand to steady herself, leaning heavily against one of the ancient menhirs. Blue eyes flashed behind her own, and darkness raced up towards her. Neave snatched her hand away and blinked at the blue sparks that stuttered then faded where she had touched the stone.

  ‘What in Sigmar’s name is this?’ she murmured. ‘Have I been here before?’

  She hadn’t, she was sure, and yet the feeling persisted. For whatever reason, Neave knew this landscape, and she knew where to go. Yet there was more, she now realised. The mists over the marshes had a bilious tint to them, and a scent of rot rose up on the breeze. Her senses tingled as they detected the corruption of Chaos ahead, and Neave’s frown became a scowl.

  The next day and night passed Neave by as though she moved through a strange dream. As the hours passed and the sun rose fat and crimson through the sky, she felt more and more the sense of uncomfortable familiarity, as though she had looked upon these lands before through the eyes of one other than herself. When the hulking silhouette on the horizon resolved more definitely into a single mountain, the sense became stronger still. Neave knew before she even saw it that the peak would be split in two, as though some vast sword blow had been levelled at it by an angry god.

  Beyond that peak, she felt sure she would find answers.

  For all Neave’s sense of urgency, however, she was forced to slow her pace as she picked a careful path through the wetlands, for sinkholes and quickmud abounded. Coiling things squirmed through the ground-water, and more than once she had to discourage questing tendrils with her axes.