Inferno! An Age of Sigmar Collection by Miles A. Drake

Author:Miles A. Drake
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Black Library
Published: 2021-10-15T14:06:51+00:00

II

In the years since she left home, Shinua had lived alone and as she pleased, or near enough. She travelled the unmapped or faintly sketched places of the realm, and she sent her reports by courier to the free cities’ surveyors’ guilds. The pay was meagre, and the existence was humble; she slept in ruins or dunes or goatskin tents, rarely lingering on any frontier long enough to do more than render its topography. She mapped cavern systems and desolate mountain ranges, but all the while her life had been simple. She was alone, and her only real purpose was vengeance.

Now Nor was in her care.

The girl was hardier than Shinua had been at her age; she knew how to skin game, how to tie the net of a hammock in high branches. Talents Shinua had learned either from Halas or in training with the Freeguild. But she was another will, another knot of needs and whims. In the night, she sometimes cried out for her brother or grandmother. Sometimes she wept over dreams that she didn’t understand: ‘A horned god. A raven. A mountain upside down, burning to death.’ She refused to eat any meat she had not hunted herself.

At first, Shinua had considered leaving her with an orphanage or holy order. But Nor spoke regularly and matter-of-factly about her plots of violence against the God-King, and about the rituals of blood and bone that her brother had employed, that she would employ herself one day. ‘I will burn down the heavens,’ she said once, unprompted, over breakfast. The girl would have a difficult time, Shinua suspected, in the orphanages and academies of the free cities.

After cutting Halas’ throat and securing a skin of oracle bones from the Valorous, Shinua had indulged herself briefly in some giddiness of triumph. But that thrill faded quickly. She owed her old mentor three more deaths. Worse, the holy fires weren’t speaking futures as they had done for Nor’s brother, the Lordbreaker. After the first two little bones burned down voicelessly, without a word of prophecy, she had grown wary of wasting the entire supply.

So she watched, and she recorded – for a year, and then another. As they travelled, Shinua shared her maps and accounts with others who bore the tattoo of the eye. In the cellars of public houses, in stables, in bathhouses, she exchanged journals and ledgers. She compiled a more current almanac. From a bitter-mouthed swineherd outside Hammerhal Ghyra, Shinua learned the true names of an entire company of Hallowed Knights – and realised with mixed intrigue and discomfort that she might track down those immortal warriors’ surviving families, if she wished. She learned the heraldry of the Stormhosts; she learned to chart their organisation into chambers and companies, to read the symbology on their pauldrons and banners. She studied the sketches she had made of Halas’ armour – the scrollwork and icons; the awful, empty face of a mask – and she knew where he stood in the armies of the sacred.

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