Blacktalon (Warhammer Age of Sigmar) by Liane Merciel

Author:Liane Merciel [Merciel, Liane]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: Dark fantasy
Publisher: Black Library
Published: 2023-11-11T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

With Pelokoa dead, the remaining revellers at his Travelling Feast fell into a panic. The Blacktalons killed a few, but neither the servants nor the guests stayed to fight. They fled, and Neave let them go.

‘Pelokoa the Undying, the Ever-Eater, the Prince of Untarnished Perfection,’ Lorai read aloud from the scraps of burning parchment that fluttered from the ruins of the glutton’s pavilion. She plucked one and watched it burn between her bluish fingers. ‘No more. His engine of renewal is shattered. He will not be reborn again.’

‘Good. Then we’re done here.’ Neave’s wounds still pained her, none worse than the poisoned gash in her leg. Its false warmth had faded, leaving only the hot, throbbing agony of spreading sickness. She sat on the ground and unbuckled her plate mail, then reached for a bottle of blessed unguents she’d brought from Azyr. The fragrant, silvery ointment healed her wound, and soon the pain faded as the blessed enchantments drove the poisons from her flesh.

‘Perhaps not yet.’ Lorai let the last scrap flutter away into the air, burning to nothingness. The Idoneth’s eerie eyes, rings of grey and blue with a crimson centre, seemed to glow over her shimmering veil. ‘I wish to study his theatre.’

‘The place with all the jellied heads?’ Shakana’s nose wrinkled in disgust. Residual lightning flickered around her crossbow, leaping from its harness to dance about her armour. ‘What’s worth studying there?’

‘It is more than a macabre feast, and more than Pelokoa’s final gloating victory over his victims, though it is those things as well.’ Magic blossomed between Lorai’s hands in a ghostly waterfall that stretched and smoothed into a pane of undulating water. Its surface reflected an illusory image of the Sigmarite scholar who had been captured in the Blind Queen’s Maze and borne here by Pelokoa’s servants. ‘Why did he take this one? What did he hope to learn from her? The answer will be in that theatre, somewhere. I believe it would be to your benefit to find it.’

Neave stood and tested her strength, flexing her knee and lifting her other foot slightly off the ground so all her weight was on the newly healed leg. It felt as sure as ever, though she needed a few seconds to recover from the expectation of pain, even after the wound itself was gone. ‘If you think it’s important, we’ll look.’

‘I should hope it’s important,’ Shakana grumbled, as she led them towards the sprawling tent on the far side of the hill. ‘I would not choose to go back to that place otherwise.’

A few fleeing stragglers were still running from its door, but already the tent had the air of a place abandoned. The chalk-white faces painted on its hide walls fluttered in the breeze, their red mouths and empty black-smudge eyes somehow all the more monstrous for their childish simplicity.

Inside the tent, the air was heavy with the metallic odour of freshly spilled blood. Without a word, Shakana guided the Blacktalons through Pelokoa’s slaughtering grounds.

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