Ravenor by Dan Abnett

Author:Dan Abnett
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
Publisher: Black Library
Published: 2011-02-24T16:00:00+00:00

Two

‘Screw this,’ said Madsen, turning and climbing back down the grassy slope. ‘It’s a waste of time.’

Carl Thonius nodded. They’d missed this beast-moot by several weeks. The vast stock yards were empty. A bitter gale swept across the derelict pastures where the tents and cage-pens had been pitched. Some rusting iron pegs and hoops and a copious amount of dried, white dung were the only signs that this area had seen any life in years.

The sky was grey and fast: sliced strata of cloud hurtling west across the salty margin, beyond which the dark ocean boomed and rattled.

‘We’ll push south,’ Madsen said. Thonius nodded again, but realised she had been directing the words at Ahenobarb and Kinsky. They were wandering the sparse moot-space. The psyker was saying something, but his voice was hindered by the wind. Ahenobarb hovered close to Kinsky, waiting, watching.

‘What did he say?’ Thonius asked, squinting.

Madsen looked at him. The wind tugged at her white-blonde hair.

‘The usual psyker crap, Mr Thonius,’ she said.

The Western Banks was hard, saline country, a ragged hem where the great plains of Flint’s largest continent met the uncharted sea. The planet boasted a few thriving colony cities down in the temperate south, but it was out here in the unforgiving west that the trade on which Flint prospered was conducted: stock, beast-flesh, meat.

Dynasties of stockmen, drovers and herders inhabited the great plains, dutifully following routes and trails established by their ancestors, driving the super-herds. Straight-horn, flange-horn, demi-pachyderm, the behemoth tuskers. Drove-dynasties specialised in one breed or another, catered their skills and disciplines to that breed, but all for the same purpose: driving them west each season for the beast-moots along the Western Banks.

Moot-towns studded the broken coastline like buckles on a tangled belt: Droverville, Salthouse, Trailend, Huke’s Town, West Bank, West Trail, Endrover, Fleshton, Slaughterhouses, Ocean Point, Mailer’s Yards, Beastberg, Great West Moot, Tusk Verge. To each one, at the close of each season, the stock was brought in to market. Off-world traders thronged around each moot, landing their fliers and bulk-lifters on the scorched commerce fields to inspect the best of the merchandise.

Nayl and Kara had headed up towards Huke’s Town and all points north. Thonius’s team was covering the southern reach of the Banks.

The wind off the foreshore was picking up.

Kys was waiting for them by the half-track they’d leased from a drove specialist in West Bank. Thonius and the three Ministry agents trudged down to join her on the bleak roadway.

She was looking out to sea. The dark ocean was crashing in onto the rudely worn rocks, each wave impacting with a sound of shattering glass.

They drove south along the coast highway, the sea on one side, the slipped, craggy land on the other. The road was unmetalled and raw. Several times they had to slow to overtake work gangs on foot. Some were freelance drovers, shabby in treated hides, trudging with decorated herd-poles held aloft towards the next moot. They looked like troglodytes to Kys: skin-clad, caked in dung and clay that had dried white, their leaders decorated with skulls and antlers.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.