The Book of Transformations - Matt Keefe

by Warhammer

  She reflected that but for the alliance with the duardin, this town might well have choked on the dust and desolation that surrounded it or been overrun by the terrors that came at night. It was duardin fuel and ironwork that kept Lightsdawn together. That was part of the reason that Halgrimmsson had taken this road towards his distant karak; the column would stay overnight in the capacious cavern-barracks that his folk had dug out beneath Lightsdawn for just such a purpose, and would push on towards the Shuddering Mountains in the morning.

  Before then, Neave meant to have a conversation with their captive.

  Presently, Neave heard the armoured wagons rumbling up behind her. Several contained weapons and ammunition, she knew, another a complement of healers. Another was a heavy affair of iron spars and reinforced wheels with a blackened chimney protruding from its roof. That wagon housed a mobile forge presided over by Runesmith Gnarlhelm.

  Amidst them all, rattling along with a knot of heavily armoured Ironbreakers marching beside it, came the cage-wagon that held Xelkyn Xerkanos.

  Neave had been able to smell his acrid stench ever since Irongrief Vale. Now, as then, it swelled in her nostrils and coated the back of her throat until it made her want to gag. It was the reek of unfettered sorcery, of mutated flesh, squirming insects and caustic ashes.

  It was the scent of her mark.

  Neave matched pace with the cage-wagon, moving up behind it and pointedly ignoring the clanking Ironbreakers just as they ignored her. She stared in through the stout iron bars of the cage at the figure hunched within. Neave felt a violent surge of hatred swell in her breast at the sight of him. She pushed it down with an effort. This pathetic-looking pile of blue-and-yellow rags had cost her good comrades and caused grief and pain to both her and many that she cared about.

  ‘Xerkanos,’ she said, her voice cold as drawn steel. ‘I see you, sorcerer. I see you clearly.’

  Xelkyn Xerkanos unfolded from his crouch like a mutant spider emerging from its burrow. Insectile limbs scraped together, rune-wrought fetters clanking as he moved. The sorcerer’s face was a ghastly mixture of human and dragonfly, gross mouthparts squirming in a fleshy jaw, iridescent chitin bursting in ridges through tattooed flesh. Neave saw herself reflected in the lenses of his bulbous compound eyes, each mirror image subtly different and filled with a promise of violence and horror to come.

  ‘Do you, Blacktalon?’ he asked, his warped mouth mangling his words. ‘I wonder…’

  ‘You’re going to your death, you realise?’ she asked. ‘Whatever machinations you intended, they have landed you in chains and on the road to your doom.’

  It was a crude stab, and Neave knew it, but sparring with Halgrimmsson had worn down her patience. She wanted to jog a reaction from Xerkanos. Neave’s gifts allowed her to read the slightest nuance of posture, expression and response, even in a being as cunning and unnatural as Xerkanos. If he had anything to give away, she would see it, and in her experience his greatest flaw was his sense of smug superiority.

  Sure enough, there it was, a very slight twitch of knowing amusement in the stretched muscles of his cheeks, a minute trip of his ninefold heartbeat.

  ‘If you say so, Blacktalon, then it must be so,’ he said, and his voice was like knucklebones clicking and insect wings rasping together. ‘What is the might of Tzeentch when set against the pre-eminent majesty of your God-King, after all? How might a humble servant of the Changer of the Ways contend with so formidable a gathering of my master’s foes? Surely, this time, I am doomed.’

  He sounded defeated, she thought. Miserable, even. Neave knew better.

  ‘After all the times you scried the weave of the future to evade me,’ she said. ‘After the armies of cultists you raised and the powerful secrets you stole, you were cornered and defeated by a host of duardin.’

  ‘Prognostication is imprecise,’ said Xerkanos. ‘Fate is a scattered reflection on broken waters, not an image in a mirror, clear to see.’ There was nothing false about the bitterness she heard in his voice this time.

  ‘What were you trying to do?’ she asked. ‘What possible benefit could you derive from killing the duardin king?’

  No response. Xerkanos’ mouthparts worked, rasping one over the other in a cleaning motion. He twitched slightly beneath his ragged robes.

  ‘I don’t believe it, Xerkanos,’ said Neave, her words barbed with scorn. ‘I am not fooled.’

  ‘You have never been able to see the full extent of my schemes, Blacktalon,’ he said. ‘Just as your idiot god cannot perceive the true breadth of my master’s plan. But you tried. You tried to predict me, to pre-empt me. It is your instinct as a huntress. This was what made you easy to evade and to manipulate.’

  ‘Not so easy to evade that I didn’t slaughter your followers and foil your schemes at every turn,’ she said, and was rewarded by a spasm that raced, there and gone, across his features. Neave had learned early on that Xerkanos liked his plans to run smoothly, his enemies to flounder bewildered, and to know the full extent of their defeat before he crushed them. With Neave at his heels, he had been forced to rush, to improvise frantically. It had cost him, both in terms of followers and ruined plans.

  ‘Still you goad and second-guess,’ he said, his buzzing voice sounding part mocking, part sorrowful. ‘You believe that I am, what, conning my captors in some way? That I have some plan of escape that they are stupid enough to be an unwitting part of?’

  At the sorcerer’s words, Neave felt a couple of glares from the Ironbreakers. Just because they were ignoring her and the sorcerer didn’t mean the duardin were deaf to their conversation. She suspected Xerkanos was attempting to rile them.

  ‘I believe that you are a supremely dangerous being and that the Mortal Realms will not be safe from your taint until your head lies separate from your neck,’ she said in a low growl. ‘And even then, Xerkanos, you can be sure that I will see the body burned and the ashes salted and buried.’

  Xerkanos hissed for a moment with what Neave realised was laughter, but then he seemed to deflate. The sorcerer rested his gnarled hands upon the wooden boards of the wagon’s floor. His torn robes pooled around him.

  ‘You give me more credit than I deserve,’ he said bitterly. ‘I will not give you the satisfaction of knowing how, or why, but these duardin failed to dance upon their puppet-strings as they should have. This is no ruse, Blacktalon.’

  She stared levelly at him for long seconds, then Xerkanos hurled himself into sudden motion. He lunged towards the bars of his cage with an insectile hiss, blue sparks dancing to life at the ends of his taloned fingers. Chains rattled as they raced through the iron ring set into the wagon’s floor, then clanged taut. The runes inscribed along their length glowed with a baleful light and Xerkanos screamed in pain. His sorcerous energies died as suddenly as they had flared, and he slumped against the wagon’s floor.

  ‘X’thazk z’threkkis aeshlech g’zarr,’ he spat, a foul curse in a daemonic tongue. The beasts pulling the wagon snorted and reared at the unholy words, and even the Ironbreakers recoiled as if struck. Only Neave remained impassive, her eyes locked unflinchingly upon the Tzeentchian sorcerer. She caught the sound of scratching talons that all others surely missed in that moment.

  ‘Lady Stormcast, you are bothering the captive and that bothers us,’ grumbled one of the Ironbreakers, a champion or leader by his helmet plume.

  ‘My apologies,’ said Neave.

  ‘Save them and take them elsewhere, eh?’ said the duardin sourly. ‘We’ll be in Lightsdawn within the hour. Interrogate him then if you must.’ He glanced away towards where the light of Hysh was lowering towards the mountain peaks and the shadows were stretching long. It would not do to delay, that look said, for darkness brought death in this place.

  Neave inclined her head and picked up her pace, sweeping past the cage-wagon and leaving its mutant occupant in her wake. She had no desire to a
ntagonise the duardin further.

  Besides, she had got what she wanted, heard the sound that indicated the sorcerer’s true intentions. In the instant that Xerkanos had cursed and the wagon had jolted, Neave had caught the imperceptible motion of one of his talons dragging a long scratch through the wood of the wagon’s floorboards. She had seen him nimbly lever loose a splinter of ironwood and flick it back into the ragged material of his sleeve for later retrieval. A lock pick, she thought.

  Neave asked herself if she should warn the duardin, but she already knew the answer. Even if they would listen to her, even if they would halt their march long enough to search Xerkanos and remove the wooden jag from his person, she still didn’t believe that they would fully appreciate the threat he represented.

  She would let this play out. The moment that Xerkanos revealed himself and became a danger to them all, that was the moment in which her slaying him would be unavoidable and entirely justified. Even Halgrimmsson would struggle to gainsay a battlefield execution, though his pride and anger might push him to try.

  Neave wouldn’t make the mistake that the duardin had. She wouldn’t underestimate her mark.

  With that thought foremost in her mind, Neave settled in to match the marching pace of the duardin, holding position fifty yards ahead of the cage-wagon. She would know the moment when it came.

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  First published in Great Britain in 2020 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

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