by Warhammer
Marika took a winding course, through a thicket and down into a shallow river-ditch, then back up the muddy bank and through a stand of ironoaks into the dappled sunlight beyond. It took Romilla’s eyes a moment to adjust from the shadows of the forest to the glare of daylight, but as they finally did she felt weak with relief.
A clearing stretched before them, and there they were. Hundreds of men, women and children, battered and bloodied but alive. Many nursed injuries, broken limbs, bloody gashes and the like, but they were alive. They huddled around camp fires, some beneath makeshift shelters, and men and women of the watch and the militia moved between them with food and supplies. Romilla saw a handful of priests, too, figures festooned with faith-papers and tattoos who drifted from one huddled band of survivors to the next with healing poultices and words of comfort.
‘Bring him over here,’ said Marika, pointing to a fire that crackled in the shelter of a wagon piled with food. A few shell-shocked looking city folk huddled around the fire, but they made space for the newcomers willingly enough. As they set Bartiman down by the fire, an infant boy watched Romilla with big eyes. Shyly, he buried his face in his mother’s chest as Romilla and Eleanora sat down.
‘Thought we was all going to die,’ said the woman, holding her child close. ‘Thank Sigmar we didn’t.’
Romilla inhaled, then very slowly released that breath. She watched Marika attract the attention of one of the priests and send him their way with a satchel of medical supplies bumping at his hip. Romilla stroked a hand through Bartiman’s thin white hair, looked at Eleanora warming her hands before the fire, and allowed herself a faint, sad smile.
‘Thank Sigmar indeed,’ she breathed.
About the Author
Andy Clark has written the Warhammer 40,000 novels Celestine: The Living Saint, Kingsblade, Knightsblade and Shroud of Night, as well as the novella Crusade and the short story ‘Whiteout’. He has also written the novel Blacktalon: First Mark for Warhammer Age of Sigmar, and the Warhammer Quest Silver Tower novella Labyrinth of the Lost. Andy works as a background writer for Games Workshop, crafting the worlds of Warhammer Age of Sigmar and Warhammer 40,000. He lives in Nottingham, UK.
An extract from Myths & Revenants.
‘Oh, ware the day the fishing folk come,
To no barrier will they concede,
Their lures will entice both the strong and the frail,
And lo will the good fishes bleed…’
‘What is that ditty she sings?’
Ingdrin Jonsson had no idea at what age humans considered their offspring to be competent adults, as per Artycle Nine of the Kharadron Code, but the girl was as winsome and waifish a thing as he could imagine, and so addressed his question to the father.
‘Tis an old song, Master Jonsson,’ Tharril bellowed, his words timed to the rhythm of his oars and the crash of spray across his back. ‘Her ma sang it to her, as my ma sang it to me.’
‘It gives me the creeps.’
‘Any honest song should.’
Jonsson clung grimly to the port gunwale as freezing saltwater sprayed his face. It was not like plying skyborne currents. His dusky beard stuck to his skin and to his light sky-captain’s leathers. He could taste the ocean on his breath. Holding fiercely to the slimy wood, he peered back into their star-speckled wake. The surface of the ocean bulged and receded, as though something vast and primordial breathed. Where waves crested, they caught starlight. Where waves sank, they folded under, taking that captive light back with them to the depths. The oceans were realms within the realms, forgotten by time, history and gods. Ancient magic dwelled there, unformed, untouched by hands mortal or divine since the formation of the aetheric cloud itself. With every precipitating crash against the hull, he was reminded of its elementalism. With every tug of current on the keel, Jonsson conceded a little more that he had placed his fate in the hands of a dark and unruly god.
‘They crave what’s within, ’neath flesh and ’neath bone,
Sparing only the young…’
Tharril was effectively enthroned in the wooden prow of the boat, an oar in each hand, controlling the boom of the lateen sail with a pedal-like noose of rope about his left foot. Beneath the bench there was a massive warhammer, and in his lap, a spear. Tharril and his folk were fishermen, but there were plenty of fish around Blackfire Bight that would consider a single-sail like this one small prey. Jonsson too was armed, a skyhook on a strap across his shoulder and a privateer pistol loaded in his holster.
Thalia, the girl (Jonsson had also heard her father call her ‘spratling’ or oft times just ‘sprat’), sat against the starboard gunwale, across the centreline from Jonsson. A plaid net lay in sodden folds over her knees as she sang her ballad, extricating wriggling fish as long as her arm or longer. Silver, nightshade-blue and bone-white shimmered under starlight as they flapped and squirmed, only to disappear into buckets of cold brine. Jonsson watched as she pulled another fighter from the net. Smaller, this one, its tail barely reaching her elbow with her hand clamped expertly about its gills. She tossed it over the side.
The ocean accepted its return with a faint splash.
‘And when they grow old and grandchildren forget,
That will be the day when the fishing folk come.’
Jonsson wondered if he was paying Tharril and his girl too much to sail him out there, if they were just going to pursue a normal day’s take along the way.
‘Why do you throw back the small ones?’
‘They are young,’ she replied.
‘But why?’
She shrugged. ‘You just do.’
With a grunt, as disturbed as much by the company of the odd girl as by her brute of a father, Jonsson pried his fingers from the gunwale and leant forwards. His chest of equipment had been stowed inboard.
With exaggerated care because his hands were numbed with cold and shrivelled by salt spray, he worked the combination lock and lifted the lid. Unrolling the now-wet fleece packing, he assembled his zephyrscope and arktant.
Bringing the rubber eyepiece to his eye, he trained it on the twinkling dot of Sigendil. The night sky might vary from realm to realm, and even within a realm, and with the movements of Ulgu-Hysh within the aetheric cloud, but the beacon star of Azyr was a fixed point in every sky. With one eye on the High Star, he manipulated the sliders on his arktant to account for the position of the local constellations.
‘Can you hold this thing steady?’
‘Ha!’ Tharril barked, rowing.
‘Bokak,’ Jonsson swore, as a sideswipe wave spoiled his measurements.
‘What are you doing?’ Thalia asked.
‘Taking a position, girl.’
‘Why?’
‘Because!’
‘I thought Kharadron lived in the sky.’
Jonsson sighed. ‘Aye, girl, we do, seeking our fortunes on the aether winds.’ He leant across the open chest and winked. ‘But every now and again, some careless soul drops something.’
‘You are looking for treasure?’
‘It won’t look for itself.’
The girl sniffed, with the iron rectitude of the very small. ‘No one takes from the sea.’
‘Good. It’ll still be there then.’
‘No one takes from the sea.’
‘What about these?’ Jonsson nodded towards the nets and buckets full of splashing fish.
‘That’s what the sea gives.’
Her deathly earnestness brought a snippet of a smile to Jonsson’s face. ‘A sour face like that aboard an aether-ship is almost always a sign of something trapped in the ear. Very serious if left untended.’ He reached out as though to tug on her ear, but then pulled his hand back with a flourish at the last moment, presenting her with a copper comet and a toothy grin.
She frowned.
‘Hah!’ said Jonsson, slapping h
is thigh. ‘Would you see that? Somebody raised this girl right.’ He passed one hand over the other, the copper coin disappearing. Then he unfurled the palm of the crossed hand to reveal a larger, golden coin. The girl’s eyes lit up, as if in reflection. ‘A quarter-share, from the aether mints of Barak-Thryng, girl. Legal tender under any of the six great admiralties.’
‘Take the coin, spratling,’ grunted Tharril. ‘Afore he makes it disappear again.’
Jonsson winked as the girl scraped it off his palm.
‘What’s that?’ she said.
Jonsson followed her gaze down.
‘Now that,’ he said, patting the hard object that lay safe beneath the second layer of fleecing, ‘is something that will really amaze you.’
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A Black Library Publication
This eBook edition published in 2019 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.
Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.
Cover illustration by François Coutu.
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ISBN: 978-1-78999-418-6
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For my friends and loved ones; sorry in advance that this came out of my brain. I even made myself feel a bit sick a few times. Oh, and mum, you absolutely are not reading this one…
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