Callis & Toll: The Silver Shard

by Nick Horth

  ‘The men of lightning defeated them at the battle of Blistersand,’ said one of the Golden Lord’s hirelings, a pockmarked youth named Feghel, with an air of sage wisdom. ‘They killed an orruk the size of a mountain, so they did. My uncle told me. He fought there.’

  Howle snorted. ‘Your uncle’s a drunk or a liar. Besides, there ain’t no defeating greenskins, not for long. You just kill as many as you can. Enough that they don’t rise up again for a good, long time.’

  ‘There must be a hundred of those creatures down there,’ muttered Shev.

  ‘Then we are fortunate we have not stumbled upon a full war party, armed and ready for slaughter,’ said the Golden Lord. ‘We can avoid them.’

  ‘You think Occlesius’ tomb still stands?’ asked Shev.

  ‘It must,’ the masked man snapped. Shev raised an eyebrow. It was the first time she had heard him lose his composure. He shook his head, and glanced at her.

  ‘I apologise, Madame Arclis,’ he said. ‘It is simply that we are so close to our goal, and to be foiled in our quest now would be the harshest of punishments. Please, enlighten me. Where do you believe the tomb is located?’

  She turned, and scanned the encampment below. The orruks’ fires occupied a central square, what she assumed would once have been a plaza or some kind of forum. The buildings had once been impressive structures, towering spires and great archways of gleaming marble. Most had been levelled long ago, torn down and claimed by the ravenous wilderness. Yet not all had suffered such a fate. Far across the way, beyond the hollering bands of orruks, stood a building larger than any other. It was tall and angular, in the style of many Sigmarite cathedrals she had seen, but there was a wide range of clashing architectural styles visible even through the damage it had suffered. Sweeping buttresses supported a central spire, which tapered to an iridescent spiral of dully gleaming crystal. The windows were circular portals in the fashion of the ancient Azmahari churches. They were almost all smashed. The roof, meanwhile, seemed oddly organic – an almost chitinous shell of disc-shaped tiles, arrayed in yet more spiral patterns. There were many gaping holes in the building, and the main archway lay shattered and broken on the steps leading to the main entrance, but the place retained a sort of tragic grandeur despite the savage desolation around it.

  ‘If I know anything about Occlesius, it’s that for all his genius, the man was monumentally self-obsessed,’ she began. ‘There’s no way he would opt for a quaint, quiet burial place.’

  She gestured to the grand building across the way.

  ‘I’d bet a hundred gilden that we’ll find his mausoleum in there.’

  ‘I concur,’ said the Golden Lord. ‘Let us be cautious lest we bring the orruks down upon us.’

  He turned, and gestured their band forwards. Howle led them down the nearest incline, a steep ravine that dropped between the spines of two broken buildings, crafted from green-black stone. Everyone had their weapons drawn, a wicked assortment of blades of all shapes and sizes. Some carried crossbows and alley-pieces, but all those who bore firearms kept them tucked in their belts and holsters. A single shot here would bring hordes of greenskins down upon their heads. The drums of the orruks were like a hammer in their skulls, and their stamping feet seemed to echo around every corner. Silhouettes leapt and spun across the dusty road ahead as they crept ever closer to the orruk warcamp. They could hear the creatures’ idiot howls and the clash of weapons, and see glimpses of their bodies through the skeletons of the ruined buildings.

  Ahead, the cover of the ruins broke for a dozen or so paces, and to their left they could see the orruks’ camp. In groups of two or three they dashed across the open ground, fortunately bathed in shadows now in the receding light. Dozens of orruks were slumbering next to crude huts fashioned from cured skins and bound bone. These lairs were festooned with skulls and ribcages, some human but mostly the large, broad bones of fellow orruks – victims from an opposing tribe, no doubt. Other greenskins still capered, swirling around the campfires in their insane dance. It should, perhaps, have been a ridiculous sight, but their muscular, war-painted bodies and totems of bleached bone gave their display a kind of primal ferocity. As Shev watched, a fight broke out, and two enormous warriors began to clash their heads together violently, blood spurting from their brows and noses as they battered each other senseless to jeers of their kin.

  Ahead, a Kismenite with a short hunting spear and a forked beard bound with brass rings was gesturing furiously at her to move. She slipped out from the ruins’ shelter and skittered across the open ground, rolling into the shadows on the far side of the clearing. Her heart was hammering in her chest, but the orruks seemed oblivious to their presence still. Ahead loomed the great central tower.

  They drifted through the campfire light cautiously, approaching the structure. Howle was leading, and even Shev had to begrudgingly admit that the killer knew his trade. Despite his age, he moved with agile grace, hardly making a sound. As they neared the broken steps leading up to the ruined gatehouse, he dropped low and raised a hand sharply to signal them to halt. They crouched low, blades and bows ready.

  Ahead, two orruks rounded the corner, stumbling and teetering, clutching spears that ended in heavy, jagged shards of black stone. They were clearly inebriated, grunting at each other in their harsh tongue. They were perhaps twenty paces away, and getting closer.

  ‘Fill ‘em full of bolts,’ growled Howle. ‘You lot, with me. We’ll finish ‘em off.’

  A trio of leather-jerkined Excelsians crept forward, aiming heavy repeaters at the oncoming orruks. Others lifted bows, throwing axes and javelins. They waited until the creatures were only a dozen yards distant, still growling and spitting at each other. Howle swung his hand down sharply, like an executioner’s axe.

  There was a chorus of clicks, then thrumming strings as the archers released. Perhaps a score of bolts and missiles thudded into the greenskins. They grunted as the deadly torrent struck home, pitching them backwards. One twitched briefly, then lay still. The other roared in confused anger and staggered upright. Riddled with bolts, he brandished his spear. Howle was already moving, along with five other killers. They leapt on the remaining orruk, bearing him to the ground under sheer weight of numbers, though the bulky creature did not go down easily. One great hand snapped out to close around the throat of a sellsword even as the others drove knives and axes into the orruk’s torso, again and again. The creature’s crude spear jerked out, and Shev saw it punch right through the unfortunate man’s chest and through his thin chain surcoat. He gurgled and spat blood, and his two daggers clattered to the floor. But the orruk’s fury and impressive constitution could not save it. Howle rammed his saw-toothed blade under the beast’s chin, and its bloodshot eyes rolled up in its head. With a gurgling spasm, the creature finally became still.

  They all tensed, waiting for the inevitable shouted alarms. The killing had been quick, but hardly quiet. Shev tensed, ready to flee into the darkness. But no cry of warning was heard, no sounds of running feet. She breathed a sigh of relief.

  Howle and his surviving sellswords dragged the bodies behind a pile of rubble, including that of the unfortunate sellsword. Shev watched the killer with disdain as he rifled through the slain man’s clothes, pocketing a few copper coins and trinkets.

  Their bloody task complete, they moved on, breaking across open ground and racing up the steps to the ruined building, ducking into the safety of its shadowed hall.

  ‘Torches,’ hissed the Golden Lord. A flickering orange glow lit up the hall as several sellswords lit pitch-soaked brands or activated flare-stones. It revealed an utterly ruined chamber, blackened by fires and covered in scattered debris. Once, white-marble statuary and great, spherical glass cases had filled this entrance hall, populated with all manner of tomes and artefacts. Those relics had been smashed and torn apart, hurled across the room or burned. Holes were smashed in the walls and in the arched
ceiling high above. Spears of twilight illuminated gleaming shards of broken glass and crystal. Red-brown stains, perhaps dried blood or something even more repulsive, were smeared across every surface along with crude, scrawled depictions of slaughter and bloodshed, watched over by the greenskins’ savage gods. Shev’s heart sank to see such thoughtless, pointless destruction. How many secrets were once contained within these walls, echoes of civilisation and culture now lost forever?

  Two great antechambers branched off from this great hall, both of which were in the same sorry state. In the corner of one was a pile of fractured skulls and skeletons. Shev knelt down to examine them. They were mostly human, but there were some aelves and duardin bones too. There were scraps of fabric, decayed and faded by time, but with a hint of elaborate embroidery. These, she presumed, had once been the guardians or resident scholars of this place, trapped and slaughtered by the orruks or some other intruder many centuries ago.

  ‘No tombs here,’ came Howle’s voice, echoing despite his hushed tones. ‘And no treasures, either. Damned orruks have had their fun, and there ain’t nothing left for us.’

  The Golden Lord turned to gaze at Shev. She shook her head.

  ‘I’m telling you, Occlesius is here somewhere,’ she said. ‘We’re missing something.’

  ‘If you’ve led us all out here for nothing, I’ll gut you myself,’ hissed a grey-haired woman wielding a wide-bladed khopis. ‘Leave you to the greenskins’ mercy.’

  ‘Silence,’ barked the Golden Lord. ‘Spread out and check every inch of this place. Every wall, every corner. Go.’

  The sellswords filtered off into the gloom, leaving Shev and the masked man behind. His blank mask was still fixed upon her.

  ‘Madame Arclis,’ he said, ‘I hope you realise the gravity of the situation. I promised these men and women great rewards for accompanying me here, under your guidance. Should we emerge empty-handed they will desire retribution, and I will be unable to sway them from that purpose.’

  ‘Occlesius rests here,’ she said firmly, before striding away.

  It had taken years for her to pin down the location of Quatzhymos, from fragments of ancient texts, maps and spoken legends. Trying to piece together the history of the Mortal Realms was like grasping at smoke. So much had been lost in the horror of the Great Darkness, when daemon-kind had rampaged across the lands, slaughtering and despoiling all in their path. Entire cultures and continent-spanning empires had been brought to their knees, their monuments torn down and their great works of art and literature destroyed or consumed by fire. Little oral history remained, for the citizens of these once-proud kingdoms were either butchered or forced to join the Dark Gods’ mortal legions, devolving into little more than sadistic killers.

  Only amidst the ruins of murdered civilisations could scraps of the truth be found. Shev had travelled far and wide across the Beastlands, seeking out forgotten tombs, lost cities and hidden repositories, piecing together a fractured history of this dangerous land. She had walked within the Prism-City of Ghlour, waded through the flooded catacombs of Michramicae and breached the sky-vaults of the Cloud Kingdoms. In all those places she had found traces of the great Occlesius, traveller and statesman, inventor and philosopher. He had been welcomed as a hero wherever he roamed, granted the greatest honours and showered with gifts and accolades. Quatzhymos had been his home, and it seemed as though the ancient city had maintained strong trade routes and alliances with almost every major kingdom in this region. Experts from the city were valued as greatly as the mightiest warriors, depicted in great murals leading the construction of wondrous monuments and monolithic statues in honour of the gods. And then, in the blink of an eye, all that grandeur had been torn down, trampled and burned.

  As she crept through the dusty halls, the light from her torch illuminated ancient frescoes and murals, most of which had been smashed or scarred so badly they were no longer decipherable. She entered the great hall and gazed up at the ceiling, barely visible in the gloom. There was something up there, poking out of the darkness. A great hanging ornament trailed by cobwebs and ghostly-white with dust, but unlike everything else in this place it was largely intact. From a central disc of dull metal, broad enough for a person to walk along its length with ease, dangled six globes. Now she looked closer, she could see flickers of colour beneath the patina of dust. Clambering up a nearby column, she leapt across and grasped a handhold on a cluster of burned bookcases that were leaning against one another precariously. From there, she could reach a thin ledge that ran around the edge of the chamber. She hoisted herself up, and turned to face the device.

  ‘What are you up to now?’ shouted Kurdh from below.

  She grinned down at him. ‘Exploring,’ she said, and jumped from the ledge across to the hanging ornament. The entire thing groaned, swaying under her weight. For a moment she wondered if she had misjudged this horribly. A cloud of dust erupted from the hanging globes, drifting out over the chamber like a miniature sandstorm. She climbed onto the central disc and examined the structure. A track wound its way around the ornament in concentric loops. Each of the hanging orbs was attached to one of these tracks. She felt a tremor of excitement. She heard footsteps below, and saw the Golden Lord and several other sellswords approach.

  ‘The Liber Celestium tells us that there are eight spheres of creation,’ she told her audience, gesturing to the hanging ornament. ‘Aqshy, Realm of Fire.’

  She pointed to a red-gold orb, covered with rivulets of red crystal that shimmered like trails of lava.

  ‘Ghyran, Realm of Life.’

  The jade orb, bright and vigorous even in the gloom of the chamber. ‘Hysh, Realm of Light and Ulgu, Realm of Shadows. Diametrically opposed yet inextricably linked, they orbit one another, unable to escape each other’s pull.’

  She reached down, tugged at the chains that connected these two spheres. She rotated them to the right, so that they nestled next to one another. As she did so, they began to glow with a faint light.

  ‘Ghur, Realm of Beasts. Chamon, Realm of Metal,’ whispered the Golden Lord, shaking his head. ‘To think I missed this.’

  ‘You said eight spheres,’ said Howle. ‘There’s only six.’

  Shev laughed, and pointed a finger at the ceiling.

  ‘Holy Azyr, domain of the God-King,’ she said. ‘It sits at the apex of the firmament. Watching over all.’ A column of luminescence rose from the twin orbs of light and shadow. It bathed the walls of the structure in soft, golden light. Above, in the angular recess of the building’s roof, loomed an engraving of a flaming comet. As the light found it, it gleamed white-hot, so bright it almost hurt to look upon.

  ‘And below it all, Shyish,’ said the Golden Lord. ‘The Realm of Death. The land of endings.’

  He rapped his stave on the floor of the sanctuary, which began to glow with amethyst light.

  The floor creaked, and several startled sellswords leapt out of the way as a great aperture yawned open beneath them. An avalanche of dust toppled away into the darkness, and by the flickering torchlight they could see a stairway spiralling down. The steps were exquisitely carved from obsidian, through which ran veins of gleaming azure. Shev punched the air, unable to help herself. She felt that familiar shiver of anticipation run down her spine, and suddenly all the slog and toil of the past few years faded into insignificance. Before her companions could even react, she was bounding down the stairs, an eager grin on her face.

  Chapter Five

  The stairway wound down perhaps a couple of hundred paces, before ending at an archway of white marble. She wondered at the stonework. Images and icons had been worked into the structure and inlaid with gold and silver: soaring sail-arks drifting over a jagged mountain range; a city built within a molten waterfall; primordial monuments of forgotten gods beneath the waves; a clockwork metropolis populated by masked, robed figures. Places and realms that Occlesius had visited, perhaps?
Scattered memories from an extraordinary life.

  The room beyond the archway was a circular chamber, lit by several braziers that still smouldered with a pale blue light. Every inch of the room was covered in yet more frescoes, so many wondrous sights and images that she barely knew where to look. Three mirrors were placed at equal distances around the edges of the chamber, reaching almost to the ceiling. In the centre of the room, on a raised dais, was a large block of grey-white stone. Resting atop this oblong was a golden statue, laid lengthwise. It was a man, dressed in long robes and wearing a skullcap, his eyes closed in repose, his hands crossed over his chest. In one hand, he carried a small, circular device, a globe criss-crossed by bands of silver. In the other, he clutched an eyeglass.

  After all these years, she had found it. The last resting place of Occlesius the Realms-Walker. She thought of her father, the mortal who had adopted her, and felt a stab of sadness that she could not share this wondrous discovery with him. An explorer and cartographer of no small renown, Dedrick Reynheim had passed near half a century ago, yet the wound was still raw.

  Footsteps echoed behind her. She turned to see the Golden Lord enter the chamber, flanked by a dozen mercenaries. He barely stopped to look at the wondrous carvings, but instead simply marched across the room to the coffin.

  ‘You cannot know how long I have striven to find this place,’ he muttered. ‘So much I have sacrificed to be here now. So much I have lost.’

  With a triumphant growl, he raised his staff and brought it crashing down upon the lid of the coffin. There was a resounding crack, and the marble splintered and came apart.

  ‘What are you doing?’ gasped Shev, appalled at such carelessness. Not that she was averse to rooting through the treasures of the long-dead, but she believed you were supposed to do it with at least a certain amount of finesse.