Reclaimed Honour by Jacob Peppers

Author:Jacob Peppers
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: FMT
Publisher: Black Library
Published: 2025-04-29T00:00:00+00:00

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jacob Peppers is a fantasy author living in Georgia with his wife and three children. He is the writer of more than thirty epic fantasy books, including the bestselling series The Last Eternal and The Seven Virtues. ‘Reclaimed Honour’ is his first story for Black Library.

An extract from Callis & Toll.

She wished she had never heard of snow.

As dawn approached, the blistering wind of Cinderfall howled into Anthea Maroth’s face. Ash filled her nose and mouth. Hot grit stung her eyes. She gagged and staggered, and her foot slipped in the stinking filth of the gutter beside which she trudged. She dropped the handles of her cart and lurched into the wall of the block-long tenement. Rough, grime-encrusted brick slammed into her forehead and scraped her cheek. She doubled over, aged lungs wheezing and crackling as she hacked out gobs of ash-blackened phlegm, her chest aching with the scrape of the Cinderfall Rattle. People shoved roughly by, cursing her for blocking their way. She rubbed at her eyes. They watered ferociously. When she could see again, grey tears smeared her hands. She coughed again, and winced at the scraping in her chest.

She cursed the thought of snow.

Who had told her such a thing existed? She couldn’t remember, not after so many years. A tale told by one child to another, a thing to be wondered at and shared in the midst of smoke and night and the slow, inexorable extinction of hope. Someone had known someone who had known someone who had come from Ghyran.

It didn’t matter who. Someone had given her the story of snow, the white ash that fell from the clouds and turned to water on the tongue.

A thought to torture her as she spat the dry shards of Cinderfall from her mouth.

On both sides of the streets, the tenements loomed high, hulks of contained misery turning Hunker Alley into a canyon that pulled in the stinging wind.

Anthea caught her breath, then started dragging her cart down the street again. It lurched awkwardly forward. The wheels, coated with the thick, stinking slime from the gutter, slipped, and the cart weaved behind her for a moment, out into the street, narrowly missing a collision with a pair of horses drawing a cart in the other direction. The cart jerked as the horses started. The empty coffins in its bed bounced up and down with a hollow rattle. The stained sides of the cart had The Great Voyage painted in gilt lettering, their style ridiculously ostentatious in the eternal gloom and smothering squalor of the district.

‘Sigmar blast you!’ the driver yelled at Anthea. ‘Ash-worm!’

‘To the Rift with you!’ Anthea fired back, but the driver was already well on his way, and her voice cracked too badly to shout.

Ash-worm. The insult, as familiar as her own name, should not have stung as it did. But it did sting, and it ignited the old anger to hear it at the end of her shift, when she barely had the energy to plod her way back to her hovel.

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