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Blacktalon – Extract

A Black Library Publication

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CHAPTER ONE

‘How long are they going to do this?’ Neave asked, squinting into the distance. The early morning light was dazzling but cold. Rocks dug into her belly, grinding against her Stormcast plate. Across the Ghurish plain, faraway figures circled around a collection of tents and rings. It could almost pass for a carnival, if one ignored the screams.

‘Until their Great Flayer comes,’ Shakana answered. She passed Neave her spyglass, pulling back under the false grass canopy that hid their sniper’s blind. ‘The Hidruspex will keep working on their prophecies until they’ve found whatever signs the Great Flayer is looking for this year. Then he’ll come out and read the Great Prophecy rendered by those signs, and reward whichever cultist found it.’

‘And we can kill him,’ Neave said, putting the glass to her eye.

Through the glass, the Hidruspex cultists’ camp clicked into view. At its centre, raised up over the rest of the camp, was a circular platform measuring some fifty feet across. Pennons streamed around it, each painted with messy scrawls of Chaos sigils that melted together into an eye-watering tangle of obscenity.

Around the central platform, unfolding like the petals of a monstrous flower, were eight smaller rings surrounded by fences of dirty bone. Four were aligned with the compass points and held cauldrons heaped high with red-stained resins. The others, knocked slightly out of alignment to skew the overall pattern’s symmetry, held an archers’ range, a pyre of wood and bone, and two great beasts of Ghur, each collared with a band of heavy, enchanted iron.

The nearer of the two was a massive yellow-and-black chitinous thing that resembled a spider, but with six gargantuan legs and six smaller, sharp-tipped piercing appendages tucked close beneath its belly. Swollen knobs capped its joints, dripping a clear, straw-coloured fluid that soaked its bristly fur and tiny, many-eyed head.

The other beast was shaggy, ursine, armoured with pebbled calluses across its shoulders and back and corded blue-white fur everywhere else. Patches of its fur had been shorn off, and the cerulean skin underneath was scarred with Chaos runes that wept watery red liquid. The beast snorted and swung its tusked head from side to side in constant agitation, as if trying to shoo away invisible flies.

South of the main camp, the cultists had erected a series of crude pens from bone and sinew, so raw that carrion birds still picked at the bloody flesh caught between the joints. People filled some of the fly-specked pens, while other Ghurish beasts were hobbled in others.

Adjusting the glass, Neave focused on the captives. Soldiers could be useful, if armed and freed to sow confusion. Civilians would only be slaughtered, though, and that was a higher price than she was willing to pay for such a small advantage.

She couldn’t tell which these were. There were humans, duardin, aelves. Some were old, some young. One cage of dripping bones held a willowy golden-haired Lumineth with a blocky, patterned bandage wrapped around her eyes. Another held a manacled Daughter of Khaine, her face hidden behind a snarling steel mask fused to her flesh. Those two, and a handful of others, seemed like they could fight.

But the rest? Neave had no idea.

As a rule, she paid little heed to the details of Chaos cults’ worship. There was no logic to their practices. While some might offer the illusion of sense, it was only a lure to draw unwary minds deeper into their madness, and she’d seldom found any strategic advantage to be gained by trying to decipher them. On the rare occasions that a Chaos cult’s beliefs might materially affect the Blacktalons’ mission, one of her companions could be relied upon to tell her what she needed to know.

‘Who are they?’ she asked. ‘Can we use them?’

‘They’re people that the Hidruspex believe are “touched by prophecy”. Seventh sons of seventh sons, babies born in full cauls, that sort of thing. One man was shot through both eyes by a chance arrow but lived, only to be seized by the Hidruspex.’ Shakana shook her head. ‘There are some true seers and diviners among them. I saw a glimmerwitch of Excelsis earlier, and a Khainite heart-eater. Mostly they’re prisoners, but there are a few who came by choice, believing this Great Flaying would assist their own prophecies. The captives might help us, if freed. I doubt the others would.’

‘And the beasts?’ Neave shifted the glass, focusing on the behemoths penned in the smaller, more ramshackle rings.

These didn’t look quite as fearsome as the two in the central arenas, but nothing that walked, flew, or swam in Ghur was less than lethal. Neave recognised venomous tsati birds in one cage, with their spiked blue legs and poisoned beaks, and a shaggy, eight-legged rhyrac that had already torn the floor of its pen to a shallow bowl of dirt in its distress at being confined. She couldn’t put names to the rest, but she could see their deadliness.

‘They’ve been captured because they have some association with prophecy, either in myth or reality. The Hidruspex dose them with all sorts of things to “enhance their powers” or “grant the true sight”. They’re shot with tsati venom and forced to breathe in burning visionweed, poor creatures.’ Shakana shook her head, her braids whisking quietly against her armour. ‘They’ve gone mad. They’ll destroy anything in their path if we set them loose.’

That sounded like the beginnings of a plan. ‘Would threatening their prophecy bring the Great Flayer out? If we disrupt the ritual and start freeing the captives…’

‘Maybe,’ Shakana said. ‘Some Khorne Bloodbound had a similar idea two or three months ago, according to the field reports I read in Hammerhal Aqsha. It didn’t go well for them. They weren’t expecting the Hidruspex to put up much of a fight, and their overconfidence cost them dear.’

Neave couldn’t help but smile. She sometimes teased Shakana for spending her time between missions studying their targets, whereas Neave herself preferred to do her preparations in the sparring halls. But there were, undeniably, moments when the studious approach had its benefits. ‘I’d like to think we’re more of a threat than some Bloodbound.’

‘One would hope,’ Shakana said dryly. ‘It’s still not much of a plan.’

‘It might be all we have time for.’ Neave drew the glass down and wriggled back under the ambush cover. ‘They’re going to start murdering captives soon, aren’t they?’ The arrangement of those arenas was too plain to mistake.

Shakana’s expression tightened. She never liked admitting to any exigency that might force them into a disadvantage. But, reluctantly, she nodded. ‘They’ll start with poisons, just as they do with the beasts. Tsati venom, visionweed smoke, whatever else they think will heighten their prisoners’ gifts. Then they’ll start the Running of the Fates – channelling their drugged captives through their monsters’ pens, shooting at them with mistletoe arrows, and otherwise narrowing their number. They hope only to wound their victims, but they don’t mind if some, even most, die. After all, a prophet who can’t see an arrow coming isn’t much of a prophet.’

‘I suppose that’s one way to test it.’

‘That’s what they think. Then the survivors run another gauntlet of those eight big rings, and whichever survive that ordeal are presented to the Great Flayer in the centre. Where they will be flayed, alive, by him. The Hidruspex consider that a great honour, naturally.’

‘Flay them?’ All she’d learnt about the Hidruspex had ignited a familiar ember of anger in Neave’s soul, but this final revelation blew it into flame.

She let it burn. The outrages of their enemies spurred her wrath, and the righteousness of that wrath made her a fiercer fighter. Neave’s faith was intertwined with her fury, and it was, she believed, part of why she’d been chosen as a Stormcast.

Almost all of her mortal life was lost to her, but that was one of the few memories Neave held: the absolute ferocity that filled her when she faced her enemies, and the quick sureness of her hurricane axes in her hands. She didn’t remember her foes’ faces, or the causes that had brought them into conflict, but she did remember the red joy of combat, and she was certain that Sigmar understood, and approved.

The God-King had once been a warrior himself. He’d recognised the purity of the battle-flame that burned in her, and he had blessed her for it.

Shakana glanced up, then took out her typhoon crossbow and began checking over its gears and sights as she frequently did. It was perfectly calibrated, as always, and in her hands had the sleek, patient lethality of a serpent at rest. ‘That’s what the Hidruspex do. They perform all these rituals to distil their victims’ prophetic gifts down to their strongest essence, and then they read the future from the secret maps of their skins. It’s the interior of the skin that holds their knowledge, you see. The secret side, the side facing the heart. Not the side that’s shown to the world.’

‘So we’ll want to strike before they start that.’

‘Our task is to slay the Great Flayer and stop his prophecy. So yes, we’ll want to strike before they start that.’

‘I meant–’

‘I know what you meant.’ Shakana gave her a sidelong glance, the beginnings of a wry smile teasing at her dark lips. ‘Yes, if we’re going to save the innocents, we’d better hurry. Don’t worry. I’ll be ready when the signal comes.’

‘Right.’ Neave touched Shakana’s shoulder lightly in farewell and wriggled backwards out of the sniper’s blind, moving as quietly as her heavier armour permitted.

It wasn’t that quiet. She could hear Shakana’s sharp inhalation behind her, and hid a little smile at the sniper’s exasperation.

Her best was never good enough for Shakana. Sometimes that irritated her, but today there was too much excitement coursing through Neave’s veins for her to mind.

A clean kill on a deserving target, one whose death unambiguously made the Mortal Realms better and safer for all its people, was all Neave could ask for. It was why she’d been reborn as a Stormcast: so that she could serve Sigmar, and his faithful, and all the Mortal Realms in this way.

There were times, rarely and privately, when she harboured misgivings about why she’d been chosen, and what the endless cycle of Reforging cost her. But when Neave was given an assignment like this – a good kill, a worthy kill – those doubts melted away.

This was why she served. This made everything else worthwhile.

But it also meant the Blacktalons could not afford to fail.

She slipped down the hill, using speed in place of silence. She wasn’t quiet; she was fast. A seam of rocks ran down the slope, washed down by the plains’ infrequent but torrential storms, and Neave stayed on the stones to keep the grass from swaying around her. The high Ghurish grass closed overhead, enveloping Neave in feathery green, and then she broke off to follow another spine of rocks towards the Blacktalon camp.

A tingle of magic passed over her skin as she crossed the unseen threshold of Lorai’s spell, and for an instant her vision clouded with a blue-grey haze of salt fog. Then it was gone, and she stood in a small clearing dotted with bedrolls, a soot-scarred fire ring, and scattered packs of supplies.

Hendrick sat on a rock near the firepit, sharpening his axe. Rostus squatted in the dirt nearby, playing with a deck of cards. The cards were tiny in the bald Stormcast’s massive hands, yet he flipped them with unexpected dexterity. He cut the deck, shuffled, and fanned the cards repeatedly, finding the same red fish card on every draw.

‘Are you practising cheating?’ Neave asked.

Simultaneously, Hendrick and Rostus both spoke – the former in affirmation, the latter in denial. Upon hearing Hendrick, Rostus gave Neave a wounded look.

‘I think it works better if you don’t practise right in front of your intended victims,’ Neave said.

‘Ordinarily I’d agree,’ replied Rostus, shuffling the red fish back into the deck before cutting the cards and riffling the halves back together again. ‘But with you lot, I just wait for you to die a couple times and you’re wide-eyed infants all over again. So, either you survive the mission, or I get to fleece you.’ He spread the cards out, offering them to Neave.

She shook her head. ‘Don’t let Shakana hear you joke about that. Anyway, there’s no time for card games. She’s finished scouting, I want everyone in position. We’re going to flush the Great Flayer out.’

Hendrick looked up from his work, his expression nearly as sharp as the axe in his hands. ‘You’ve laid eyes on the Flayer?’

‘No,’ Neave admitted. ‘But we think disrupting the ceremony is likely to force a fight. The Great Flayer and his cultists have put a great deal of effort into preparing for this gathering. They won’t stand by idly and see it destroyed.’

‘A plan after my own heart.’ Rostus put the cards away and lumbered to his feet. Sitting, he’d looked massive; standing, he was beyond that. Neave had never seen any other Stormcast who approached his size. It was like having a walking mountain at her back.

Once, she’d wondered why someone so huge had been assigned to an assassins’ squad. Then she’d seen him in action, and those questions had vanished. That wasn’t the sort of thing you forgot, even after Reforging.

‘Glad you approve.’ Neave looked around, though she already knew the Idoneth wasn’t in their camp. ‘Where’s Lorai?’

‘She didn’t care to let us watch her preparations.’ Rostus leant back, cracking his knuckles. ‘But she did say she’d be ready when you called for the spilling of blood. Said her little fish would taste it on the water-winds, so there wasn’t any need to go looking for her.’

‘All right.’ Neave checked over her own axes. She didn’t need to, really. They were extraordinary weapons, forged of sigmarite and starlight in holy Azyr, and could not be dulled or broken by ordinary means.

But she still brushed her palms lightly over the handles, just once, in the moments before an assault. Superstition, maybe. Or perhaps she’d developed the habit when she was a mortal, and her axes had been ordinary ones, and had kept it with her as some reflexive part of her identity ever since.

For that reason alone, Neave touched her axes. It wasn’t to make sure they were still intact. It was to make sure she was.

‘Are you ready?’ she asked.

‘I’m always ready.’ Rostus flexed his shoulders and cracked his neck: a double boulder-slide, followed by a thunderclap. Neave winced before remembering that Lorai’s magic would keep the noise from their enemies. Hopefully.

Rostus didn’t seem perturbed. ‘So it’s the usual? I go in and smash things, Hendrick pretends to be my sneaky second while actually being anything but – no offence, Hendrick, you’re fine at being second, you’re just not very sneaky – and then the rest of you sweep in and massacre our astonished foes?’

‘That does seem to be the shape of it.’ Hendrick stood, sheathing his axe on the opposite hip from his shortsword. When he was satisfied that the weapons were secure, he strapped an ornately scabbarded greatsword across his back. Not a trace of a smile broke the older Stormcast’s craggy, bearded face, but Neave saw the glint of good humour lurking deep in his heavy-browed eyes. ‘Is there anything else we should know?’

‘Be wary of poisons.’ Neave relayed what Shakana had told her about the Hidruspex’s fondness for tsati venom and other hallucinogens. ‘The prisoners may not be thinking sensibly. Spare whomever you can, but be aware that they may be erratic. Beyond that…’ She raised her fist in a ritual salute. ‘May the God-King be with you and lend his blessing to your blades.’

‘And yours,’ Hendrick replied, returning the gesture.

‘And yours,’ Rostus said. He saluted and lumbered off. Hendrick followed him, loping smoothly through the camp. Age might have stolen the colour from the Old Wolf’s beard, but it hadn’t slowed his step.

Neave waited until she felt the shiver that told her they’d crossed through the boundary of Lorai’s spell, and then she too left, running back along the brittle bridge of stones towards the enemy camp.

At the base of Shakana’s hill, Neave veered down another dry wash that snaked towards the Hidruspex encampment. Brambles tugged at the Stormcast’s cloak and lashed against her greaves as she raced to get between Shakana and Rostus’ anticipated line of attack.

She’d barely got into position when the first explosion sounded. A few seconds later, a second blast rattled the rocks underfoot and set the grass dancing over Neave’s head. Even before the rocks had settled, screams filled the air.

Rostus had arrived.

Neave burst through the last of the screening grass just as the screams changed in pitch, shifting from shock to rage and then a renewed wave of panic. That would be Hendrick.

A quick glance ahead confirmed it. Rostus was bulling straight through a phalanx of ritually scarred Hidruspex guards, smashing them aside like so many rag dolls clad in cloaks of human leather. Behind him, about fifty yards to the side, Hendrick had leapt from the tall grass to tear a second bloody path through the mass.

More cultists poured from the tents, howling in outrage that their sacred gathering had been disrupted. Only their guards had swords and spears. The others, interrupted in the midst of skinning lesser offerings, wielded flaying knives and hooked retractors dripping with mortal blood.

Their lack of weaponry didn’t seem to matter to them. Shrieking curses, the Hidruspex hurled themselves at the Stormcasts. Steel and bone blades screeched and shattered against sigmarite plate. Cultists clawed with bare fingers as their knives broke apart, heedless of their companions pulped beside them. The Hidruspex fell as fast as Rostus and Hendrick could cut them down, but their sheer numbers pressed the Blacktalons back.

She hadn’t heard surprise in their screams, Neave realised. Shock, yes. But not surprise. Somehow, they’d known this attack was coming. And the way the cultists were throwing themselves against the Stormcasts, with blind determination beneath their fanatic rage…

They were buying time with their bodies. Why?

Further back in the camp, horns blared. Other cultists rushed to the pens, snapping locks and throwing open gates.

The beasts of Ghur rushed out, bringing death on hoof and wing. Neave took a split second to watch them, calculating their trajectories so quickly that it took no conscious thought, and just as swiftly mapped her own course between them. She dived through the bleating, roaring mass like an arrow cutting through clouds, twisting her body and turning her steps to avoid the beasts by wordless, unerring instinct.

Trumpeting through the fleshy pipes of its throat sac, the rhyrac reared up onto its four hind legs and crashed back down, crushing the cultists who had liberated it under eight tons of enraged muscle. Gore spurted between its toes. Over its head, the tsati birds circled and cried, filling the air with flecks of feather and the pungent oily scent of their wings.

Hendrick backed away, slipping through the outer tents, but Rostus was bigger and slower and bogged down by the screaming swarm of cultists. The rhyrac shook red mud from its forefeet and stormed towards him.

Neave saw more Hidruspex hurrying towards the central arenas, herding captives before them. Some of these wore headpieces with crystal lenses around their foreheads and beads that jangled beneath their chins, and carried glass staffs filled with pickled eyes that sloshed up and down as they ran.

These appeared to be of higher status than the others. Whatever they were doing, it was likely important. Neave swerved towards them.

Rostus was on his own.

The tsati birds swooped down at Neave as she rushed the camp. Their iridescent wings beat a reeking vapour of oil and venom into the air, making the Stormcast’s throat tighten. If she’d been mortal, she would be suffocating. Their hooked blue claws, beaded with poison, stretched out as they dived.

Neave twisted away from their talons and brought her axes up in a steel-edged blur. Three birds evaporated in puffs of blood and feathers. She pulverised two more before the rest of the flock split around her, shrieking in dismay.

When she slowed enough to see the world again, the crystal-beaded Hidruspex leaders were almost out of sight. A knot of cultist guards were rushing to intercept her. Their faces were blistered and weeping where they’d been spattered by the poisoned pulp of tsati birds. One was breathing blood, his nostril half dissolved by the caustic toxin.

Neave leapt around them, dodging those she could, chopping down those she couldn’t. She vaulted over their knives and twisted around their spears, propelling herself off one cultist’s back to spring over the heads of two others.

Fast as she was, the guards complicated her pursuit. Amid the braying, bleeding mess, she’d lost sight of the cultists in crystal.

They couldn’t have got far. Neave spurred herself forwards faster. Swiftly, without breaking her momentum, she blocked a guard’s spear thrust with one axe, crossed the other beneath it to cut the woman’s throat, then bludgeoned the dying cultist down to trip the others. As the Hidruspex stumbled over their companion, Neave leapt onto a wagon piled high with untanned hides.

There. A crystal-topped staff bobbed between the tents, peeled eyes drifting like gelatinous bubbles along its length. Neave launched herself after it, kicking the wagon over in her wake.

She almost tripped over a panicked man. The Hidruspex had thrown their captives into the fray. Unarmed and blind with terror, they stumbled from their prison pens into madness. A careworn woman clutched at Neave and turned cataract-blue eyes up at her in supplication, but the Stormcast had no time to grant her succour, nor to listen to her prayers. Not when her prey was escaping.

Neave wrenched away, leaving the woman to fall beneath the trampling crowd. She caught a glimpse of Hendrick, then lost him in the confusion. He’d been running a parallel course, though, converging on the central dais.

Behind and to her left, the rhyrac bellowed another chorused cry, its throat sac rippling down the row of fleshy pipes. Rostus roared back at it, swinging his hammer at the beast. Blood painted the bare-armed Stormcast’s shoulders and streaked red across his bald head, making him look as savage as the monster he faced. The grass around him was littered with Hidruspex corpses, their limbs and heads crushed by the behemoth’s feet.

Rostus smashed his hammer into the rhyrac’s skull, silencing its trumpeting forever. As the massive beast slumped to its knees, then to the ground, the Stormcast strode past its ruined majesty towards the centre of the camp.

The remaining tsati birds came for him. They whirled at Rostus in a spiral of poisoned wings, shrieking in glee at having found a slower target. Neave saw the first birds begin to dive, and then she plunged into the midst of the cultists’ tents and lost sight of Rostus behind them.

The smoke from the incense cauldrons choked the spaces between the tents. In its velvet blue fog, people melted into apparitions. Cultist and captive blended together, equally indistinct.

A huge crashing noise boomed through the smoke, followed by another. Screams pierced it like pipes, high and shrill. The smoke swallowed it all, leaving dizzy silence behind.

Within the space of a few breaths, Neave felt her head grow light and her legs faraway. She couldn’t hear or feel her own footfalls. The cultists’ crystal beads chimed around her, too loud, from all sides. The ringing reverberated strangely, collecting hallucinatory echoes. Vast shapes lumbered through the blurring blue. Or maybe those were only Hidruspex tents, and they weren’t moving at all.

Chaos tricks. Neave slowed – she couldn’t trust her perceptions, and running blindly at full speed was a trap in itself – but didn’t stop. This wasn’t the first time her enemies had tried such tactics on her. She took a controlled breath, then another, extending her senses outwards once she’d steadied. Sigmar, show me the way through the maze.

She heard it in the rush of the sea. The deep, rhythmic throb of the tide reached her through the mist, steady as a heartbeat. That, too, was a phantom, but it was one Neave recognised. Lorai.

The Idoneth was sending her own spell through the Hidruspex’s illusions, creating a thread for Neave to follow.

She focused on the sound, increasing her speed as the crashing waves grew stronger and surer in her ears. Anything that approached her through the fog of incense, she kicked aside or cut down.

Some of the figures that fell before her might have been prisoners, lost in the haze or too drugged to distinguish an armed warrior as friend or foe, but Neave couldn’t spare the time for hesitation. The only mercy she could offer was a boot rather than a blade.

Ahead, a dais rose from the smoke. The crystal-beaded Hidruspex had gathered there in a double ring, passing their grotesque staffs from one to the next as they shifted ranks in an ever-twisting braid. They were chanting in a cadence that was hurried but not rushed: a song that had gone to a quicker tempo without altering its beat.

Neave leapt out of the incense like an avenging spirit, smoke curling off her armour. With two quick strikes, she beheaded one cultist and eviscerated another. She kicked the headless body into a third Hidruspex, sending the live man and the dead one pinwheeling together off the platform’s edge, then shoved through the gap she’d made in their lines to the centre of the dais.

In the midst of the cultists’ ring stood a tall, bony-knuckled figure clutching an eye-filled staff. Its face was hidden beneath a deep cowl of tattered human skins, damp and red-stained about the throat. The other Hidruspex hurried to put themselves between the tall one and Neave, but their leader didn’t flinch.

‘Are you the Great Flayer?’ Neave asked, shearing an axe through a Hidruspex’s upraised staff and into the man’s throat. Glass shards, pickled eyes, and blood sprayed across the platform.

The cowled figure smiled, showing rotten teeth, and pushed down her hood. She was an old woman whose missing eyes had been replaced by mismatched, pickled ones floating in oversized balls of glass. The raw meat of her sockets wept blood around the too-large orbs, and the blood ran down her wrinkles to fissure her face with lines of red, unholy wisdom.

‘No.’ The woman smiled, and the blood ran faster down her face. The innards of her eye sockets were magnified by the glass; Neave could see every distorted detail of muscle and nerve behind the bobbing orbs. Behind her, something enormous approached through the smoke. ‘I am here to deliver you to him.’

‘Then let him come and take me,’ Neave snarled, smashing the last of the woman’s defenders out of her way. The looming, smoke-clad apparition rose alarmingly high on the other side of the dais, but she stayed focused on her target.

The cultist’s ruined sockets widened in surprise around her borrowed eyes just before Neave’s axes took off her head. The glass orbs rattled across the wooden dais, leaving dotted trails of blood as they skittered into the fog. Then the half-seen creature lurched out of the incense smoke onto the dais, nearly tipping the platform over with its weight, and the remaining Hidruspex collapsed into panic.

It wasn’t just one great beast that had arrived. Both of the collared behemoths from the central pens had come to wreak havoc on their captors.

Roaring, the armoured ursine beast smashed a scythe-tipped paw into the nearest cultist, breaking the man into messy pieces that flopped loose in his ragged robes. The Hidruspex scrabbled away from the creature, only to find the black-and-yellow spider clattering towards them from the other side.

Its piercing legs lashed out, impaling two cultists on dripping spears. Only one had time to scream before it crammed both of them into the drooling lamprey mouth on its underbelly. The surviving cultists fled, vanishing into the smoke.

Neave was trapped between the monsters, and she still hadn’t set eyes on her quarry.

Suddenly the near-bear flinched, jerking its snout upwards in pain. Streaks of lightning seared through the smoke, and wet red blossoms spread across its side as Shakana’s shots struck home. The Chaos runes etched into its skin flared, burning the stubbly hair around them and making the creature bellow again.

Hendrick clambered onto the platform beside the wounded beast, using his axe to hook into the wooden boards so he could pull himself up. He landed in a crouch, blade ready, as more lightning flashed overhead. ‘Thought you could use a hand.’

‘A sword would be better.’ Neave turned her axes towards the spiderlike thing, which had drawn back to regard her with a glittering, monstrous intelligence in its multifaceted eyes.

‘I brought one of those too.’ Leaving his axe embedded in the platform, Hendrick rolled to the side as the bear-creature swiped at him. He slashed at its paw as he came back up, opening a gash down the pad and severing three toes. The beast roared and pulled its paw away. Hendrick stepped in swiftly, opening a second smile across its throat with a single smooth stroke.

As the hulking bear-thing’s life flooded out, the sigils on its hide finally smouldered into stillness.

The chitinous abomination jabbed at Neave with its sharp legs. It was still chewing on the robes of the Hidruspex it had seized earlier. The knotted tangle of their garments, dripping with effluvia, shuddered beneath its gnashing maw.

Neave raised a forearm to knock one of the spider-thing’s spears aside. Even with a glancing blow, it numbed her arm from wrist to elbow. Poison dribbled across her bracers, thick as pus.

She shook it off and darted between the legs, using her axes to chop a path between them so she could run straight to her enemy’s face.

And there was a face. It was wizened, tiny, almost completely hidden behind thick yellow-and-black bristles and the mound of faceted eyes that swelled over that wrinkled nub of flesh. But it was there, with an atrophied nub of a nose and a thin toothless mouth, and Neave had the sudden intuition that perhaps once it had been human.

She raised an axe to cleave it in two.

Then it spoke to her, and she froze.

‘Neave. Stormcast, Blacktalon. Sigmar’s chosen killer. Do you know who sent you here? Not your god. You were sent by the changeling fates. To be our tool, not his. You were sent because the future is in your skin. Because Sigmar’s doom is in your skin. Because–’

The creature’s face exploded.

Lightning danced over the sizzling stump of its neck and arced from leg to leg as the spider-thing, spasming, fell off the platform and back into the smoke. A second later, the typhoon crossbow’s boom reached her.

Neave looked down. A barbed length of black-and-yellow chitin jutted from her armour. The far end, still oozing ichor, had been snapped off by the beast’s sudden death and fall, but the tip was buried deep in the padding beneath her plate. With just a slight shift in weight, she could feel it scrape against her skin.

If Shakana hadn’t shot the thing…

She shook away the thought. Shakana had shot the thing. That was all that mattered. Near misses were a fact of life for the Blacktalons. And if it had killed her, then she would have been Reforged, as she had been countless times before, and she would have returned to her duties as she always did.

There was nothing more to it. Certainly there was nothing more to what the Great Flayer had said to her. That had been an attempted distraction, pure and simple, and it had failed.

But as Neave sheathed her axes, she touched them one last time, brushing her palms over the hafts to reassure herself that they, and she, were still there.

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A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION

First published in Great Britain in 2023.
This eBook edition published in 2023 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

Represented by: Games Workshop Limited – Irish branch, Unit 3, Lower Liffey Street, Dublin 1, D01 K199, Ireland.

Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.
Cover illustration by Anna Lakisova.

Blacktalon © Copyright Games Workshop Limited 2023. Blacktalon, GW, Games Workshop, Black Library, Warhammer, Warhammer Age of Sigmar, Stormcast Eternals, and all associated logos, illustrations, images, names, creatures, races, vehicles, locations, weapons, characters, and the distinctive likenesses thereof, are either ® or TM, and/or © Games Workshop Limited, variably registered around the world.
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ISBN: 978-1-80407-502-9

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

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To Peter, Alexander, and Catherine.

eBook license

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