Hammers Of Sigmar: First Forged by Richard Strachan

Author:Richard Strachan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Black Library
Published: 2022-10-21T13:03:58+00:00

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

PATHWAYS

They covered twenty miles in no more than two hours, Machaera leading and the three Vigilors fanned out behind her on either side. She kept her bow unslung, held low in her left hand. Madra kept close, occasionally darting ahead to where the ground levelled out, to stand on some slight rise and stare off into the distance, whining. Soon the column had disappeared behind them, swallowed up by the vapour that hung heavy over these lands. The mortal troops were masked by the dip in the ground where the ancient riverbed lay. Ten thousand warriors, Stormcast and mortal alike, strung out in a body more than a mile long, and within a few miles it may as well have been invisible…

Of the realms in which Machaera had fought, she found Aqshy the most forbidding. Ghur was like a vast beast, slumbering and uneasy. Shyish was a dread wasteland of deep disquiet. Aqshy always seemed poised on the very edge of violence, though. The heat beating on your face, the feel of the quick magma broiling deep beneath you, the air itself flecked with smuts and ashes. It was a land that made her hand stray always to her blade, and that made action feel only a heartbeat away.

The plains they passed across only seemed flat and featureless from a distance. Up close, the ground was harsh and heavy going, near impassable in places. It was a brutal spread of ravines and deep gorges hacked into the crust, and rocks that were strewn around in razor-sharp outcrops. Over everything lay a bitter steam breathed out by the open earth. It was not like the smog of Hammerhal, impenetrable and smearing out visibility to no more than a few feet. She could still see the mountain against the horizon, the focal point of Gargants’ Hollow, but its rounded peak was hazy and unclear. The sky that held it in its clasp was as murky as a stagnant pond, and there was no sense of distance to it. The mountain could have been a hundred miles or just an arm’s length away. Here was where the Hammerhands would strike, though – the dominant feature of this abandoned territory. If the few and garbled reports they had received were accurate, then this was where the Khornate tribes had based themselves.

‘There’s nothing, Knight-Judicator,’ Myrina said, the Vigilor coming to rest beside a frayed clump of plains grass. ‘Dust and ashes, rocks and hard-baked clay. I doubt there’s a single living soul out here.’

The Vigilor’s voice sounded hollow behind her faceplate. Machaera nodded, her head bare. She raised a hand to shield her eyes and looked into the west, where the spheres of the cosmos were beginning their descent towards the realm’s far rim. The ground there seemed a patchwork of heavy scars and ragged tumuli, all covered in a frosting of grey ashes. She could hear the deep rumble of the earth beneath her, the quickened magma churning like a troubled ocean.

‘We’ll press on, Myrina,’ she said.

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