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Callis and Toll – Extract

A Black Library Publication

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Chapter 1

In most circumstances, people drew back when Hanniver Toll entered the room. They saw his wide-brimmed, conical hat and his dark cloak, the livery of the witch hunter, and they gave him a wide berth, averting their gaze as if merely to look upon him were to invite a finding of guilt. Toll knew that his features made him look born to his vocation. Narrow, sharp, framed by white hair and all forgiveness weathered away by bitter time, they were a weapon of intimidation. Where he walked, crowds parted.

In most circumstances.

But not in the Perspicarium.

As he walked through the Stormkeep of the Hammers of Sigmar, none of the mortals who served in its halls even glanced his way. And like them, he was conscious of his diminutive stature when compared to the lords of the Perspicarium. The keep had been built on their scale. The doorways turned him into a child again, their arches high as the ceiling of his quarters, the handles of the doors themselves at chest height. The tapestries adorning the walls of the vaulted halls had been hung at a level whose ideal viewing presumed an audience at least a foot and more taller than Toll.

Conscious of his physical insignificance next to the Stormcast Eternals, he still moved through the keep with confidence. He strode past the columns of pink marble, head unbowed. He walked among giants who could shatter his armour and bones at a stroke. But what he did had value. It mattered. If it did not, he would not have been summoned.

He arrived outside the chambers of the Keeper Aqshian. A serf in sombre blue robes, adorned with the hammer-and-lightning emblem of the Hammers of Sigmar, bowed to Toll, knocked on the heavy, lead-lined door, and announced him. Toll removed his hat as he entered the chamber. The door shut with a muffled boom behind him.

Opposite the door, the windows of the chamber looked south, out over Hammerhal Aqsha. Perched atop one of the towering Pillars of Infinity, the Perspicarium had all of the city below it, a prospect of the gleaming and the grimy. The domes and the spheres and the spires of Old Town shone in the splendour of the day. Much further out, to the south-east, Cinderfall glowered under its perpetual ash cloud.

The chamber reflected the solemn work of the Keeper. Though light blazed from the chandelier that hung from the ceiling, the walls were dark. A map of the city dominated the wall to Toll’s right, dotted with pins of different colours, each signifying a point of concern. Bookcases and sealed vaults took up the other walls, and a ring-shaped desk, open towards the window, occupied the centre of the room. Reports covered its surface, and though they indicated a state of perpetual activity, there was nothing disordered about them.

Valius, the Keeper Aqshian, stood behind the desk. He had pushed his massive chair back against the windows, and Toll wondered how often it ever saw use.

‘Thank you for coming, Witch Hunter Toll,’ Valius said, his deep voice resonating through the chamber. Bald, white bearded, with a brow as deep as thunder, he held a missive in one golden gauntlet as if he could feel the texture of the vellum through the sigmarite, and it displeased him.

Toll bowed his head. ‘How may I serve, Keeper?’ he asked. He had met some Stormcast Eternals who had time for pleasantries before getting down to the matters at hand. Valius was not among them.

‘How well do you know the district of Cinderfall?’ Valius asked.

Toll stroked his chin, considering. ‘Enough to find my way from landmark to landmark,’ he said. He had had reasons, in the past, to call on specific addresses in Cinderfall. He had never had any reason to linger.

‘It may be necessary for you to deepen your acquaintance,’ said Valius. ‘Someone has murdered the Culverin.’

Toll blinked at the name. ‘I’m not familiar with this person,’ he admitted.

‘Nor was I until this morning,’ said Valius. His eyes narrowed with frustration, and for a moment, he looked as close to exhausted as Toll had ever seen one of the immortals. ‘He is, or rather was, a smuggler of considerable influence in Cinderfall.’

‘A smuggler?’ said Toll, puzzled. ‘Forgive me, Keeper, but he sounds as if he should be beneath your notice.’ And mine, for that matter.

‘Precisely,’ said Valius, and the frustration came through in a harsher tone to the rumble of his voice. He slapped the missive down on his desk. ‘That I have been made aware of such as he, and that I have called you here because of that, is but one symptom of the great ill that besets us.’ Valius paused. His gaze seemed to go past Toll, as if to take in a struggle so vast that mountains tumbled like pebbles in the clash. ‘The forces of Ruin and Death are tireless, witch hunter. Of this, I know that you need no reminding. They press us ever harder. The walls of Hammerhal Aqsha are strong and high, but the truest, most secure wall is our vigilance. And our vigilance is tested, and tested again. Our enemies seek to undermine us from within as well as break us from without.’

‘The activity of cultists seems to be growing,’ Toll agreed. If the cults were growing bolder and more numerous, he could only imagine how much more dangerous the greater threats, the ones only the Stormcast Eternals could combat, were becoming.

‘Not a week goes by that the Order of Azyr is not called upon to crush the dangers of the heretic and the witch. You and your fellow agents fight well and hard. Yet the danger ever takes on new, hitherto unsuspected forms.’ Valius’ lips formed a hard, grim line. ‘And so this worm of a smuggler has to come to my attention, and therefore to yours.’

‘I take it, then, that his murder isn’t just a settling of scores or competition for power.’

‘Should that turn out to be the case, I would mourn nothing except the time this death has wasted.’

‘But this murder seems like more than that.’

Valius nodded. ‘He seems to have cast a large shadow across Cinderfall. The Culverin gang is greatly feared. We do not know what the ganglord’s true name was, and whether the gang took its name from him or the other way around. What matters is that his legacy of fear remains. Though he is dead, the city watch reports that no one will speak of the Culverin. People saw his corpse and fled, pretending to have witnessed nothing. It would seem the undercurrents of Cinderfall are roiling, witch hunter, and I do not like that.’

‘It’s rarely a good thing,’ Toll agreed. ‘You would have me find out who killed the Culverin and why?’

‘Not just that,’ said Valius. ‘I have need of one of your more peculiar skills. It is the manner of his death that has drawn my attention. The corpse was left on display, impaled in ruins across from the Chapel of Molten Faith on Brassnose Alley. Suspended above the street.’

‘Across from a chapel,’ Toll repeated, dark possibilities opening up before him.

‘Directly across.’

Toll thought for a moment. ‘There is little tenderness in Cinderfall,’ he said, trying out an idea for them both. ‘A power struggle between or within gangs could lead rivals to kill in the most frightening way possible. As a message.’

‘It could,’ said Valius. ‘It could very well lead to that.’ His emphasis conveyed something much more sinister than Toll had suggested.

‘A message,’ Toll said again, realising what Valius meant.

‘Quite,’ said Valius. ‘The corpse was mutilated, and a sigil of some kind has been carved on its chest.’ Valius glanced down at the missive on his desk. ‘As the sigil has been described to me, its significance is unclear.’ He looked back up at Toll, his eyes grave and full of misgiving.

‘I see.’ The breadth of the Keeper’s knowledge was immense. What was unfamiliar was therefore very likely dangerous. Toll understood now, too, why he had been summoned.

‘You are, in the Order of Azyr, the agent who has made the most profound study of sigils, runes, symbols and their meaning. I say this not as flattery, but out of sympathy. Such work imposes a burden. It exacts a cost.’

‘One I have been willing to pay.’ He clamped down on memories before they rose. He would face them when necessary, and only then.

‘You have the Order’s gratitude. And you also have your orders. You must learn the meaning of the message, and what it might portend.’

‘I will not fail you, Keeper.’

In Cinderfall, the people did react to Toll as accustomed.

He entered the district as an invader. As he walked its streets, he was light and he was darkness, both equally feared. He was the beacon of authority that could not be questioned, and the shadow of judgement that could not be escaped.

The terror he brought rippled out from him with every step. It swept across the cobbled streets and through the air. Though it did not disturb the fall of ash that danced on the wind, it had visible effects in the people of Cinderfall. Toll walked down the middle of the roads, letting the district know he had come, and that it should take warning. It heeded him. Crowds cleaved in two before him like scythed wheat, pedestrians hurrying to either side of the street, pressing close to the building façades, seeking the false protection of shadows. If he must judge them, he would find out their sins of witchery, the crimes blackening their souls more surely than the ash grimed their flesh and clothing. The drivers of horse-pulled wagons turned their steeds around sharply, ignoring the curses of those people who almost went down, caught by hooves and wheels, or headed suddenly down alleys barely wide enough for their vehicles. Shutters slammed shut over windows, and from behind them, Toll sensed eyes watching him with anxious hate.

Toll was not fond of the district. Of at least one of the people who frequented the area, yes. But he disliked the taste of the air, and he distrusted Cinderfall’s currents of ambition and desperation. The foulness of the air lay on his tongue, rough and dry, grit crunching between his teeth. And the darker pulse of the district’s veins beat everywhere. He approached Brassnose Alley from the south, cutting through a maze of alleys and overpasses. The smaller lanes emptied themselves ahead of his arrival. But within his hearing and beyond his sight, in other byways than his, crime had its way, and tried to tempt him from his purpose. A pistol went off inside a squalid dwelling more fit for rats than for the humans packed into its tiny rooms. A window on its fourth floor flashed. Someone began to scream.

No one called for the watch. Not here. Justice would come from other, more brutal hands, if it came at all. Or perhaps the sound of that pistol had been its arrival.

Toll kept walking. His concerns did not lie here.

Nor did they lie in the darkness far below an overpass he crossed. Beneath him, the streets were no more than brick-lined pits. From the bottom, more than fifty feet down, in a night that never ended, came a feral snarl. Men shouted in excitement. Organised beast-fighting, humans gambling on the blood of animals who would tear them asunder given a chance. That was no small part of the appeal.

What do you think? Toll asked himself. Will we be fortunate and see the work done in a day and be washing off the stink of Cinderfall before dawn tomorrow?

He would have laughed at the foolish hope if he hadn’t wanted to keep from choking on the ash.

When Toll reached Brassnose Alley, he found two officers of the watch doing what they could to keep the curious away from the scene. In the hours since the discovery of the body, some of the fear of the death must have worn off. Perhaps they want to be sure the Culverin is dead. The officers had managed, at least, to keep the more morbidly persistent from clambering up into the ruins, but a small crowd remained, blocking the road on either side of the ruined house. As Toll approached, though, the crowd melted away. The people saw him, averted their gaze, and hurried off, fleeing even the possibility of his notice.

Off you go. Run away in case I see something that displeases me, and I send you to the gallows.

The officers saluted him. They looked relieved that their duties here might soon be at an end, and apprehensive that a witch hunter might want something, anything at all, of them. Ferrok and Haigus: a woman and a man, they were both of similar broad, solid build, with thick, massive hands that seemed more suited to wielding the hammer in the forge than the pikes of the watch.

Toll looked at the pool of dried blood on the street, then up at the swaying corpse. ‘The body has not been touched, I trust?’ he said. It hardly seemed necessary to ask, but in the unlikely event that the Culverin had been interfered with since being discovered, he needed to know that now, before incorrect assumptions sent him down the wrong path.

‘It has not, witch hunter,’ Ferrok answered loudly and clearly, as if the more emphatically she confirmed this, the sooner they would all be on their way.

‘Good. Remain at your posts while I make my examination. When I am ready, you will take the body down and transport it to the nearest watchpost.’

They nodded, faces set. They did a good job of concealing their lack of enthusiasm for the prospect.

Toll took out a leather-bound book and a lead stylus from the inner pocket of his coat. He opened the book to a blank page and made a quick sketch of the exterior of the house and the corpse’s position. Then he ventured cautiously into the ruins. Much of the house’s upper floor had collapsed in the fire, creating a slope of charred rubble leading upward. He paused at the foot of the slope and took in the ground floor, sketching now in more detail. Few traces that this had been a shop remained. To his right, a charred and flaking fragment of counter stood upright. Here and there were glints of metal, icons that had melted into blobs. He circled the ruins, looking for signs of recent activity. The ash near the heap had been marked by other footsteps than his, as he had expected, but the ground floor appeared otherwise undisturbed.

‘Why here?’ Toll asked the absent murderers. He thought of them in the plural. Getting the body into that position would have been very difficult for one individual. ‘Is Urvayne House significant? Did you pick it for its location, for what it was, or for convenience?’ An answer would have been nice.

He toed one of the metal blobs with his boot. It in no way resembled a sacred object. He could not tell what it had originally been. The lower floor, which had been where Urvayne had kept all the treasures he sold, had become a cramped space jammed with burned rubble. Nothing more.

‘Not a place conducive to symbolism in itself, is it?’ he said. He thought the absent murderers agreed. ‘The location, then, across from the chapel?’

The murderers played coy.

He started up the slope. Timbers shifted beneath his feet, and he checked each foothold carefully. Halfway up, the entire heap trembled, and a heavy beam slid down at him from the top. He jumped up to avoid it. When he came down, he plunged through splintered wood. He reached out as he fell, grabbed at wreckage that moved, but then it stuck and saved him from disappearing into the rubble. He dragged himself out of the hole and waited to see if the mound would move again. It kept still, daring him to trust it.

‘You dragged the Culverin up this?’ Toll asked the murderers. ‘You really didn’t care about the risks. You’re lucky you’re not all buried here.’

Yes, they were, the murderers agreed.

Toll climbed the rest of the way.

All that remained of the upper floor was a ragged platform running along the walls, with a larger section, about ten feet wide and five deep, where the façade had been, and from where the pole impaling the corpse projected. Toll made his way over to the front of the house, and found that part of the floor solid enough, though it creaked and vibrated with his movements.

He made himself a diagram of the layout of the upper floor, and then detailed drawings of each section of the platform as he advanced, recording the scene as it was before he altered it with his passage. The corpse swung back and forth, calling his eye, but he made himself focus on the surroundings first. In order to look at the corpse properly, he would have to bring it inside. He had to come to an understanding of the space as the killers had left it before he took any actions within it.

Toll examined the scorched, ash-covered floor. Boot heels had scuffed it, in some places violently, to judge by the sharp, pronounced lines of the marks. Large pools of dried blood covered the floor. Dark spatters had sprayed against the walls. At the edge of the floor, caught between a piece of fallen timber and a fragment of wall, Toll found a dagger. He pried it free. The jewelled hilt looked expensive. He glanced at the corpse.

‘Yours?’ he asked. He thought it might be. The blade had the look of a vanity weapon, a bit of a proud man’s ostentation. It was stained with blood. ‘You gave them a fight, then.’ He looked again at the blood. So much of it, spread so widely. The violence of the struggle must have been extreme. And the Culverin had died here, and not been dragged up to this location. From the number of scuff marks on the floor, Toll had been right to surmise there had been more than one attacker.

‘Why did they bring you here?’ Toll asked the Culverin. He thought some more. ‘Or maybe they didn’t.’ There had been no sign of a struggle on the ground floor. No blood at all. The fight had taken place entirely on the upper platform. An ambush, then? ‘Did you come here on your own?’

A stronger gust of wind swung the body hard, increasing the beat of the pendulum.

‘Not a good place for a meeting, I would think. You would have better, safer places for that.’ So why come here? ‘Were you following them? Were you watching something?’

Toll stood where the front window had been. He looked up and down the alley. The house had an excellent perspective on the Chapel of Molten Faith. Nothing else stood out, though that didn’t mean one of the houses next to the chapel couldn’t have been the subject of the Culverin’s surveillance.

Toll grimaced. The scenario, even in embryonic form, didn’t satisfy him.

‘Why were you the one watching the street? Why not one of your underlings?’

Pieces were coming together, but the picture they wanted to shape did not make sense. Not yet, at least.

You’ve only just arrived, Toll reminded himself.

He turned now to the corpse. ‘You can have my full attention,’ he told it. He found the best angle to see it on the edge of the platform to the left of the body. The pole projected several feet out over the street, limiting Toll’s examination. He would have his chance to look at the body closely when the watch took it down, but he wanted some first impressions, and to do some more sketching, before having it moved. The pole looked like it had shifted under the weight. If it had been standing straight up, that would have made it more feasible to ram the Culverin down on top of it. That would still have been the job of at least two people. Strong ones, too.

The Culverin’s eyes were wide open, frozen in agony. His arms, back, and waist had been slashed open.

‘Savage work,’ Toll muttered, eyeing the mutilations. At first look, he couldn’t even guess what kind of weapon had been used.

As for the sigil, he couldn’t get a good look at it from this perspective. He could make out an upward curve and a sharp line pointing his way, teasing him with the unknown.

‘All right,’ he called down to the watch. ‘Come and take him down.’

The officers made their way up to Toll. After some struggle, the three of them managed to shift the pole back inside the house and pull the Culverin up off it. The metal dragged against his skull, and they left a smear of his brain behind.

They laid the body out on the platform. Toll crouched over it and examined the wounds. Savage, he thought again. Many of the rents in the flesh were ragged, looking more like the damage done by claws than by weapons. But others did seem to have been done with blades. The flaying of the arms, for instance, he did not think could have been achieved by claws.

The fact that claws even entered his mind disturbed him. But he knew there were ways of simulating that effect. He thought of the beast fighting pits nearby, and considered the possibility that the assailants had brought an animal of some kind with them.

Not inconceivable, if not likely. ‘No paw prints in the soot,’ he muttered.

‘I beg your pardon, witch hunter?’ Haigus asked.

‘Nothing. Just half-ruling out a possibility.’ Too soon to dismiss anything entirely.

He had held off examining the marks on the Culverin’s chest until now because he wanted to gather as much information as he could before his mind ran off and obsessed about symbolism. The moment had come, and he focused on the sigil, if that’s what it was.

The male officer noticed his shift in attention and asked, ‘What does it mean?’

‘I will need more than a heartbeat to come to any conclusions,’ Toll said testily.

The officer took a step back, mumbling apologies.

A sinuous line curved down from just above the left nipple. It dropped down below the navel, then turned back up, stopping two-thirds of the way with a short, flat line to the right. Two long, parallel gashes cut diagonally upwards across the left-hand portion of the curve. The design was too elaborate to have been an accident of slashing.

Toll had never seen the sigil before. All the signs from every runic system he had ever studied streamed before his mind’s eye, entire languages in a flash, all memorised to precise detail. None of them matched this symbol. He turned to a new page in his book and carefully reproduced the sigil. The shape mocked him with its poisonous unfamiliarity.

Instinctively, he reached inside his coat to touch the amulet of protection he wore around his neck. A symbol against a symbol. A circle of lightning around a golden, imperturbable face against this sinuous wound. You are not the stronger one here, he told the sigil.

Toll straightened. ‘I’m done here,’ he said. ‘Take the body to the watch station. Do not dispose of it without my express permission.’ He looked down at the people still gathered to gawk. ‘And I want the names of everyone in that crowd. Especially those who have been here a good while.’

‘It will be done,’ said Ferrok.

‘Witch hunter, do you know what the sigil–’ Haigus began. Ferrok stepped on his foot, and Haigus realised what he was asking. He clapped his mouth shut, shook his head, and busied himself with helping Ferrok with the body. They did not want to know.

But I do. And no, I don’t know what it means.

That worried him more than anything else about the body.

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A Black Library Publication

First published in Great Britain in 2024.
This eBook edition published in 2024 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

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Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.
Cover illustration by India-Lee Crews.

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