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Blacktalon: First Mark – Extract

A Black Library Publication

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Chapter One

Far to the north of the city of Hammerhal Aqsha, amidst the thick, sulphur-fed groves of the Heironyme Jungle, a village stood in ruins. If the place had ever had a name it was gone now, buried beneath the drifts of blackened fronds and sulphurous dust that were slowly reclaiming its buildings.

The bloated jungle moon loomed over a clearing that contained a few dozen crumbling structures. They stood within a rotting palisade wall, just enough buildings to raise the ghosts of streets between them and lend the town an impression of civilisation, of imposed order. Yet the fields outside the walls were overgrown by anyoi trees and strangler’s twist, while the gaping hole in the village wall, and the hacked bones strewn amidst the ruins, put the lie to any notion that this tiny corner of Aqshy had been tamed.

Crouched amidst the jungle’s fringe, Neave Blacktalon studied the settlement intently. The nameless village and all its hopeful, pious settlers were long dead. Yet the prickle on her skin beneath her resilient suit of gilded sigmarite told her that something else had slithered in to inhabit the carcass of their butchered dream. Something that lit the night with eerie witchlight.

Neave’s senses were fully extended, alive to the slightest scent or sound, the merest vibration in the air. She reached out and felt the jungle around her, flitwings and diaphonids drifting through the canopy, treglyngs nosing between tree roots. She felt the strange movements within the slain village before her, long-limbed things stalking like wading birds, drums thumping a chaotic rhythm, unnatural beings cavorting. She sensed other movements amidst the jungle itself, but these concerned her less. Sigmar’s gift tugged at her, the siren sense of her latest mark close at hand, the quarry whose presence she would always feel, no matter how near or far, until she or they were dead.

Neave was one with the world around her, and she tasted the Chaotic taint that soured it. It gathered thick on her tongue and made her scowl with disgust and anger.

From her right, she felt gusts of air stir the jungle foliage. She heard the sounds of subtle movement draw closer, something large doing its utmost not to be heard. She scented the tang of ozone through the jungle’s sulphur. Curling her tongue, she gave a clicking signal: two low, quick sounds, a pause, then a third. The signal was returned, a moment before Tarion Arlor slid through the fronds of two anyois to join her.

‘Don’t tell me that Sigmar’s finest Knight-Zephyros needs that damned signal to verify it is me, Blacktalon. I know you heard my approach,’ said the Knight-Venator. Neave heard the smile behind the faceplate of his helm, and snorted with quiet amusement. Tarion was bigger than Neave, his bulky armour and its huge crystalline wings far less suited to slinking through the dense jungle.

‘Where is Krien?’ she asked. ‘Didn’t wish to tangle his wings amidst the foliage?’

‘He is on high, circling well out of sight,’ replied Tarion. ‘Star eagles are not noted for their love of confined terrain.’

‘Krien isn’t well known for his love of anything, save you,’ said Neave. ‘Sometimes I cannot tell if he’s your familiar, or you his.’

Tarion shook his head ruefully. ‘Damn bird is lucky he’s such a gifted fighter.’

‘We may need him to be so very soon,’ said Neave. ‘Xelkyn is here – I sense his taint. The conclusion to our hunt draws near, but something feels wrong. What did you see?’

‘Little,’ confessed Tarion. ‘It’s a clear night and the moon is vast. Even distracted by ritual and blinded by firelight, I could not risk them looking up and seeing my silhouette against the sky. There’s perhaps five or six dozen of his coven in the village. Stiltkin. Disc riders. Ogroids.’

‘I do not see any sentries,’ said Neave.

‘I did not spot any from afar,’ replied Tarion, shaking his head. ‘Xelkyn is arrogant. He no doubt believes himself hidden in this remote location.’

‘The sorcerer knows we hunt him,’ said Neave, not taking her eyes from the village, from the warped kaleidoscope of vivid light that welled up from its heart, the weird shadows that danced across its walls. ‘We almost had him in the Carathacium. You slew his Mutalith. He’s a toweringly arrogant creature, but his mind is a barbed maze. He has let us run him to ground, Tarion. There’s a trap here.’

‘Be that as it may, he’s conducting a ritual in there,’ said the Knight-Venator. ‘Look at the lights. Listen to the drums, the chanting. Feel the power gathering on the air.’

‘You think that slipped my notice?’ asked Neave wryly.

‘You know what I mean, Blacktalon. He may be summoning daemons, or opening a rent into the Crystal Labyrinth. If he slips away into the embrace of his master’s realm, he’ll be beyond even Sigmar’s reach.’

Neave cocked her head, listening intently to the timbre of the drums, the tone of the chanting, shrieking voices. Some sounded human, albeit rendered bestial in their frenzy. Others were cawing and avian. From amongst them she filtered another voice, commanding yet brittle somehow, as though an insect were trying to form human words with mouthparts not meant for the sound. She knew the hateful voice of Xelkyn Xerkanos, favoured covenmaster of Tzeentch and arch-traitor to Sigmar’s great city of Azyrheim, all too well.

‘He does not sound panicked,’ she said softly. ‘Tarion, he sounds angry. Spiteful. Determined. Whatever Xelkyn is conjuring in that village, it is not an escape route. It’s a weapon.’

‘What then?’ asked Tarion. ‘He’s your mark, Blacktalon. I merely hunt at your side.’

Neave paused and removed her helm, letting the foulness in the air wash over her skin, steeling herself against its touch. It thickened imperceptibly as she waited, like gossamer cobwebs caught on her flesh. She ran her gauntleted hand over her face, an unconscious gesture to scour away the invisible strands of Chaos magic that gathered there.

‘There isn’t time to seek aid,’ she said, replacing her helm. ‘Whatever Xelkyn is doing, his power builds by the minute. If we leave now, he will have completed his ritual and quite possibly vanished into the realmscape again long before we can return.’

‘There’s a lot of them,’ said Tarion in a warning tone. ‘You know we likely won’t survive a headlong assault.’

‘Neither will Xelkyn,’ said Neave, steel in her voice. ‘What’s wrong, Tarion? Afraid of death?’

‘Again? So soon after Gallowfall?’ he replied. ‘Could we not formulate some sort of plan that doesn’t involve a suicidal headlong attack on a Tzeentchian arch-sorcerer and his entire coven? Reforging has its price…’

‘And its boons. Did I not develop the talent of windshifting at will after my most recent reincarnation? What is that, if not a blessing from Sigmar himself? Besides, do you see another option?’ she asked, easing her whirlwind axes from their sheaths and spinning them in her hands, refamiliarising herself with their weight. She had fought with the weapons until they were as much a part of her as the hands that held them, but it was a ritual she often undertook.

‘No,’ said Tarion after a few moment’s frustrated thought. ‘If he knows we are coming then any attempt at luring his force away or splitting them up will only alert him to our arrival.’

‘Well then.’ Neave rose into a crouch. ‘Take to the air, do what Sigmar gave you the gifts to do, and if it is such a terrible inconvenience then… I don’t know, try not to get killed?’

‘Why in the realms do I hunt with you?’ Tarion hefted his bow as coruscating arrows of lightning crackled into being in his quiver.

‘Duty?’ suggested Neave. ‘Friendship? The deep-seated need to prove that you can keep up?’

‘Just give me a few moments to get into position, Blacktalon,’ said Tarion, and again she heard the smile behind the impassive mask of his helm.

‘Be swift,’ she said. Tarion spread the crystal-and-sigmarite wings that rose from the shoulders of his armour. Celestial energies glimmered through them, playing across the foliage like the promise of dawn, before he sprang skywards and punched up through the canopy with barely a rustle.

For all their repartee, Neave trusted Tarion more than any other Stormcast Eternal in all of Sigmar’s grand armies. He would cover her assault with a skill few in the Mortal Realms could match.

She glanced up, through the swaying jungle fringe, seeking the distant constellations that marked where the Realm of Heavens hung in the distant reaches of the void. Up there, somewhere, she knew that Sigmar looked down upon the realms and the battles his reforged warriors fought in his name.

‘Sigmar, watch over me now and lend me your strength, that I might do your will and strike down your foes,’ she murmured, before reaching out again with her huntress’ senses. She felt the winds aetheric as they whirled across the lands, gave herself up to their ensorcelled power, let them flow through her limbs and course through her lightning-wreathed soul. Her eyes crackled with barely restrained power, and her heart beat faster as the thrill of the hunt welled up within.

‘You may have laid a trap for Sigmar’s huntress, Xelkyn, but you had better be sure you don’t get caught in it yourself…’

Neave tore across the abandoned fields at such a pace that had any enemy seen her approach, she knew their eyes would have registered little more than a streak of displaced air and lightning. She cleared the village wall with an agile leap that carried her fifteen feet into the air, thumping down in the bone-strewn street beyond without missing a stride. Overhead, Neave caught a fleeting glimpse of Tarion, wings spread wide, storm-charged arrow nocked and ready to loose. The Knight-Venator was no longer trying to hide, and neither was she.

The street led towards the centre of the village, taking a left up ahead as it passed between the tumbledown buildings. In the distance, she saw Tzeentchian cultists clad in bright blue robes and grotesque avian masks wrought from gold. Their exposed flesh displayed forbidden markings and they bore the daggers and staves of minor wizards, while unholy fires sparked around them.

The enemy caught sight of Tarion. Shouting in surprise, they pointed skywards towards the swooping comet of the Knight-Venator’s star eagle.

‘Much too slow,’ hissed Neave as she bore down on the cultists like a meteor.

Tarion unleashed a volley of lightning-wreathed arrows with impossible speed. They shot overhead as Neave charged. The arcing shafts lit the night white with their fury, piercing robed bodies and throwing cultists backwards as though they’d been shot with a bolt thrower. One man slammed into a building wall and was pinioned there, dangling and twitching as lightning cooked his flesh and set fire to his robes. Another took an arrow to the face and was catapulted from his feet to crash through the sagging doorway of a nearby hut. Such was the force of his impact that half the structure’s roof came down upon him, burying the Chaos worshipper in an impromptu cairn.

Then Neave hit the cultists’ lines. She leapt and spun, pirouetting through the foe with her blades angled outward. Blood exploded in fans as her axes bit through cloth, flesh and bone. Tzeentch worshippers were flung away from her, crunching into the sides of the derelict buildings or rolling along the street to lie in crumpled heaps.

The survivors were still reeling, frantic, seeking their assailant even as she hit the building at the street’s end with her feet. Neave bent her knees, taking the shock of the impact and propelling herself back into the enemy like one of Tarion’s arrows. She struck the head from one cultist and lopped an arm from another as she flew, before landing in a roll and coming up in a fighting crouch.

One cultist remained standing, drenched in the blood of his fellows even as their bodies crumpled, spurting, to the ground. He raised his stave with shaking hands and pointed it in Neave’s direction. A crackling arrow slammed into his throat with such force that it passed clean through. She heard the man’s heart stop as celestial lightnings coursed through his body and killed him even before his blood began to jet from the wound.

Wordlessly, she raised an axe to Tarion in thanks, then sped on towards the heart of the village. The drums had increased their tempo and the chanting had transformed into warlike cries.

‘They now know we are coming,’ muttered Neave to herself. ‘It becomes more interesting from here.’

Neave rounded the corner between a tumbledown cottage and a mouldering tavern, and found herself confronted by a hellish spectacle. At the heart of the village lay a rude square, in the middle of which a well had been raised. Into the sulphurous dirt around the well, Xelkyn’s followers had driven nine tall silver pillars, each topped with an icon of Tzeentch, the Chaos God of change, fate, magic and mutation. Sorcerous energies crackled between the pillars, weaving a complex web of vivid blues, purples, greens and yellows that hurt Neave’s eyes to look at. A monstrous light beamed up from the well’s depths, hues of indescribable madness that seemed to crystallise and warp in the air as they rose.

Around the pillars was arrayed the remaining strength of Xelkyn’s coven. They packed the square to capacity, a throng of the deformed and the deranged all turning towards her with blades drawn and screams of hatred contorting their monstrous features.

With predatory speed she took in the enemies that confronted her, assessed which were the greatest threats, which would be the hardest to slay, which could be ignored or evaded altogether. The vast bulk of the enemy were human cultists like those she had already butchered, yet amongst them she saw knots of Tzaangor, blue-skinned and corded with wiry muscle, their bodies deformed with features both bestial and avian. A few hovered above their fellows, riding on fleshy, daemonic discs. They wielded twisted bows of silver and sinew.

Here and there, Stiltkin loomed, their bodies little more than masses of blue rags and dirty feathers, their masks beaklike. The weird creatures towered over their comrades on stilts of bone and gold sutured directly into the stumps of their legs, and they held long-hafted silver scythes which Neave knew from painful experience could cut through sigmarite with ease.

Most dangerous of all, several ogroid Thaumaturges rose like muscular islands amidst the press of foes, their flesh branded with glowing runes, their bull-like features and flowing manes crackling with power as they hefted sorcerous staves.

‘There,’ shouted Tarion from on high. ‘Amidst the pillars. Xelkyn.’

Neave saw her mark standing within the shimmering aegis of the pillars, looming over the well with his arms raised. Xelkyn was every bit as hideous as she remembered, with his spiralling robes of flame and light, his painfully elongated limbs, squirming mouthparts that dripped acidic drool, and iridescent eyes formed from fractured domes of crystal.

All this information flowed through Neave’s mind in a split-second. She didn’t even slow, instead angling her assault for a slight weakness that she perceived in the enemy’s lines, trusting that Tarion would cover her from on high. She was not mistaken.

As Neave charged, and the enemy raised their weapons to fight, a storm of lightning-wreathed arrows fell amongst them. Cultists and Tzaangor crashed to the ground, twitching and shrieking as their lives were snuffed out. One of the Stiltkin toppled like a tree as an arrow punched through its leg, sending its scythe blade swinging out of control to lop the head from a bellowing ogroid. Neave’s path was cleared amidst concussive blasts of celestial energy as she arced towards her target.

Still, the foe were many, the Stormcasts just two. Tarion could not suppress all Xelkyn’s coven at once.

‘Beware the soulfire,’ she shouted to him, catching flaring energies in her peripheral vision. Neave leapt aside as one of the ogroids hurled a ravening column of flame from the tip of his staff. The sorcerous energies bit into the ground, raising dust and steam as they blasted a trench where Neave had been. They clipped several luckless cultists, whose screams distorted into gibbering howls as their flesh melted and mutated beyond recognition.

Bands of cultists raised their staves and sent balls of magical fire leaping skywards, a meteor storm that set the air alight. Neave saw Tarion weave through the hail of projectiles, drawing and loosing arrows with inhuman speed as he did. His shots reaped a tally amongst the enemy, hurling more from their feet by the second. Yet they struck him in return, a blast of energy blackening his breastplate, another smashing shards of crystal from his left wing.

In response, there came a piercing shriek as Krien soared down from the night sky. The star eagle ploughed through the cultists’ ranks like a blazing comet, raking eyes and setting light to robes with his magical energies. A knot of Tzeentch worshippers scattered before the proud hunting bird, and Neave cut them down as she sprinted through their midst.

She dived beneath the swing of a Stiltkin scythe, hacking her attacker’s legs out from beneath it even as she heard the whoosh of its blade passing perilously close above her. Coming up in a headlong charge, Neave bisected a Tzaangor then spun around another as it swung its falchion at her.

The Knight-Zephyros moved so fast she knew her enemies would be fighting nothing but a blur that rendered even the most skilful of them clumsy by comparison. Yet they had the numbers, and she could not slow long enough for them to overwhelm her. She left her flailing attacker behind, hurling an axe spinning to thump into the face of an ogroid. As the monster toppled she leapt over it, snatching her blade free from its skull with a sucking squelch and a spray of golden blood.

Sorcerous fire blazed around her in an inferno, bolts of mutating energy missing her by the barest of margins. The pillars were close. Xelkyn was close. But the cult was surrounding her, contracting like a gnarled fist, massing between her and her mark. She could hear Xelkyn’s malevolent laughter ringing over the battle.

Tarion’s shadow raced overhead as he peppered another knot of enemies with arrows. His armour trailed magical flames and dirty smoke, and she could see lightning crackling around bloody wounds in his torso.

‘I’ll clear you a path – just end this before they overwhelm us,’ he shouted.

Neave saw Tarion draw a gleaming golden arrow from his quiver, star-fated sigmarite glinting in the witchlight of the pillars. Flames leapt around him. Tzaangor arrows punched through his body, each fresh wound causing Neave’s rage to burn hotter. Ignoring the pain, Tarion drew back his bowstring and loosed his enchanted projectile. It whistled down at a sharp angle, punching clean through the skull of the last ogroid and flying on with a mind of its own, through cultists and Tzaangor, leaving a bloody trail in the air behind it. A dozen foes fell at a stroke before Xelkyn snatched the projectile out of the air and snapped it with a contemptuous snarl.

The next instant, arrows and spellflame struck Tarion from three directions at once. His proud wings shattered. His armour was rent and torn, and his roar of pain cut out as a searing blast of magic blew his head from his body. Krien gave a dismal shriek as his master’s corpse fell from the air, discorporating into arcs of lightning and racing upwards into the void above. The star eagle followed, becoming nothing but a streak of light as it raced after its master’s unfettered soul.

‘May we meet beyond the anvils,’ said Neave, even as she charged through the gap that Tarion had wrought. Her axes windmilled, sending cultists and Tzaangor tumbling with heads and limbs shorn away. Moving at breakneck pace, Neave saw Xelkyn gather a shimmering ball of magical energy at the tip of his serpent staff. He hurled the projectile at her with a hiss and she slid beneath it. She launched herself back onto her feet in time to block the swing of a Stiltkin scythe, but she barked a cry of pain as a Tzaangor arrow punched through her ribs.

She spun, lashing out with her whirlwind axes, sending the Stiltkin toppling backwards and felling two more cultists before snapping the shaft off in her side. Another arrow whistled past her helm and shattered against a silver pillar. A third struck her breastplate and buckled, driving the air from her lungs. Neave saw enemies massing all around and knew she had seconds at best.

‘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.

Click here to buy Blacktalon: First Mark.

For Liz, thanks for all the encouragement, the support and the unending barrage of pony gifs…

A Black Library Publication

First published in Great Britain in 2018.
This eBook edition published in 2018 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.
Cover illustration by Vladimir Krisetskiy.

Blacktalon: First Mark © Copyright Games Workshop Limited 2018. Blacktalon: First Mark, 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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