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The Thorn Mile – Extract

A Black Library Publication

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THE THORN MILE

Rhuairidh James

The march had been the first mistake. On the first day, they’d left Black Eyrie hale and hearty, full of war songs, prayers and good cheer. The road coreward had once been an artery of trade and new visitors from the Strunmark realmgate; now, a mere few moons after the Six Days of Night, it was treacherous and uneasy ground. Ghur had never suited civilisation, but after that dreadful week, all the old spirits and animuses had awoken. Cattle grew restive and feral, farmers driven from their fields by long-fanged ungulates.

Below, the ground began to crack and grind, tectonic plates that Haldane and the Tempest Lords had once bound in place with ritual chains and now-forgotten magic restored to terrible wakefulness. Here, they had churned the grand mosaics that paved the road into strange, chaotic stories – a rocky gyre that made a mockery of horseshoes and sigmarite sabatons alike. Haldane kept his eyes on the path as he walked, looking for old friends or rivals he recognised amid the churned-up pictures. In a clearer spot, a leering drake caught his eye, a blue-armoured warrior leaping into its maw, hammer in hand.

‘Someone you know?’ Fitzroy’s hand was on Haldane’s gauntlet. The old man had always been small, never quite escaping the malnourished scrawniness of those brought up outside the city limits, made wiry and tough by a life of fleeing orruks, beastmen and the land itself.

‘Maklav. Never had a hammer. Did it with his bare hands,’ Haldane said. He’d once been feted as a poet, but since his third remaking, the words never seemed to come. Now, he picked each one with the same blunt precision of a sword strike.

‘Another case of artistic licence, eh?’ Fitzroy winked, and made a point of putting his boot on the Stormcast’s face as he walked on, turning to Haldane with mock horror. The old bastard loved his cruel jokes. Lifetimes ago, when Fitzroy had just been Piter – a halberdier in too-big breeches holding his spear like a broom, eyes white hot with righteous anger – he’d made a point of starting fights with Stormcasts, teasing and antagonising the ‘lightning men’. Haldane had come between him and a Retributor’s hammer, saving the latter’s soul and Fitzroy’s life, and forging a friendship that had survived the strains of the mortal’s long life and the Stormcast’s many deaths.

‘I’ll get a rise out of you one day, big man,’ Fitzroy called over his shoulder.

Haldane almost stopped himself smiling. His friend’s endless irritations were preferable to the cowed awe or – increasingly – uneasy disappointment of the other warriors sharing the road.

There were maybe five or six hundred men and women on the march, and a score more Stormcasts accompanying them: detachments from Ricoh’s Light Cavalry, Macarazzo’s Long-guns, Fitzroy’s own Fusiliers and a decent-sized contingent from the Black Eyrie Free Republican Guard. The latter were the hardest to face. The mercenaries were from out-realm, and while they’d seen battle in the Necroquake, none had been hit as hard as the Black Eyrie was during the Six Days of Night. Those unfortunates who’d signed up to the Free Republican Guard in search of hot soup and decent boots were turned unwillingly into battle-hardened veterans. Each wore their scars openly: here, a withered, ancient limb hanging awkwardly from a young body; there, white frostbitten handprints upon faces and ankles, from when the chainrasps had breached the first wall. They shivered in their furs by the campfires and stoves in the evenings, eyes dark and old. Haldane recognised some of them, vaguely, but the memories he clung to between Reforgings of bright-eyed recruits seemed out of place with the grim-faced individuals now before him. He imagined he looked much the same; in the quiet, still moments between battles, he too struggled to think of reasons to stay alive. The difference was, he would never die.

He kept his eyes to the road, tracing more forgotten battles. The moss and weeds that mocked the grand histories that once lay here seemed to match the holes in his memory. His reverie was broken by a rare familiar voice: Lord-Celestant Mhodrian – commanding, soft, patient.

‘Let’s hope it’s a triumph. For their sakes.’

Haldane looked to him and nodded. The Lord-Celestant had a practised gentleness, his manner unhardened despite countless Reforgings. He still disturbed the others. He’d taken to wearing his mask between battles now, and the soldiers muttered that he had been somehow deformed. But Haldane knew the truth: Mhodrian had awoken from his last remaking not recognising his own face. He had decided he preferred the mask.

Haldane was one of a small, carefully chosen selection of warriors that the Lord-Celestant had brought on the march – enough front-line fighters that every crossbowman, ranger and rifleman on the backline would see them do their gory work, but not so many that the halberdiers and swordsmen and spears felt outshone. Battles today took a different kind of commander: gone were the days of driving shaggoths from the city’s palisade walls to the cheers of the saved.

Those were the days commemorated in the road and the crumbling statues that lined it, Haldane recollected, back when Black Eyrie was not a city but a battleground – an endless push against the squirming, furious things that dwelt in the forest, driving his blade into the cable-muscled necks of vast orruks or marauding dragon ogors looking to avenge their fallen homeland, and perhaps their forefathers, upon the Stormcasts. Haldane had died for the city a score of times, laid low by hammers, axes, teeth, tusks, daggers in the dark. Each death brought changes to both the world and him. The other Tempest Lords spoke a little of the losses of Reforging – the hardening of spirit, the deepening of personal flaws – but you saw the truth of it in your mortal friends: the worry they kept in the back of their eyes, the sudden nervousness, faces filled with flickering, human expressions.

His last death had been the toughest. Haldane had heard that in some cities the Stormcasts had held during the Necroquake their bonds with their mortal kin had been strengthened. Black Eyrie was not such a place. The garrison of Tempest Lords was small, and had fallen quickly. He remembered the awful, betrayed look in the soldiers’ eyes as he was dragged down by the rotting dead, and their hard faces when he returned.

There was, thus, a need for a triumph – a battle that reminded the people of Black Eyrie how glorious victory could be; of just how effective the Tempest Lords were when given the time to leverage their intellect.

It had been Mhodrian who had picked the beasts – they bred uncontrollably in the wilds, and occasionally would coalesce around a shaggoth brutal enough to gain their respect. The force would meet the main herd just below the Thorn Mile, and return from the fens as brothers forged in battle. At least, that was the idea. As Haldane looked at the broken folk who marched with him, it seemed unlikely. It seemed that they had suffered from too many glories, not too few.

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A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION

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 Catherine O'Connor.

The Thorn Mile © Copyright Games Workshop Limited 2023. The Thorn Mile, 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: 978-1-80407-530-2

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