Gilead's Blood (Warhammer Fantasy) by Dan Abnett & Nik Vincent

Author:Dan Abnett & Nik Vincent [Abnett, Dan]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Black Library
Published: 2011-01-14T16:00:00+00:00

VI

Gilead’s Swords

War tends to limit the length

of friendships.

My eyes may be old and clouded, but still I see doubt in your face. As if all I have told you this long winter night was nothing more than a tale-spinner’s fancy. Well, if you ask me, it is the curse of some souls to be born at the wrong time.

Consider this: had Gilead Lothain come to this world a thousand years earlier, in a better age, most likely his life and deeds would have been dutifully recorded and celebrated in the chronicles of his fair people, and earned him fame as a hero even you would have heard of.

But he did not. When he first drew sharp breath at the midwife’s slap, in the cold midnight of a bitter winter, his noble and ancient race was already waning. Their civilisation, which once had held the whole world itself as its domain, had become nothing but a shadow on the fringes of life. The elves were beings of the edge places, relics of a brighter time. Their blood was running slower and cooling, their traces vanishing from the land, supplanted by the coarse young tribe of man. The legacy of Ulthuan had been eroded by history, worn away by fate. Even the great elven chronicles were, by then, patchy and incomplete, those that were still maintained.

So Gilead Lothain, last lord of Tor Anrok, was never a celebrated hero. He never became the subject of popular story-songs, or verse cycles declaimed by courtly poets. His deeds were never bound in buckskin to take pride of place in a palace library. His name has never become proverbial, never alluded to in the great poems and sagas of our day. It is his curse to be nothing more than a story. A fireside tale told by old folk to the young. A memory, or the memory of a memory. All that the world has of him now is myth – at worst, ill-remembered nonsense; at best, half-truths swollen by imaginative retellings. The rest is blank, a ghostly trace, like a faint handprint in dust. A life imperfectly and fleetingly glimpsed every now and then in the dim forests of rumour.

Except here, at this hearth. There is truth here, what truth I know. A few fragments of his long, sad life that you can trust to be truer than myths. I have told you most of them.

The last is Maltane, or more properly the Battle of Maltane, also called the Tale of the Thirteen Swords. Or Twelve, or Fourteen, depending on which account you follow. Whatever.

So, if the steward brings me more wine, and my lamp’s wick and failing voice last, we’ll have that one, and it shall assuredly be my last. The land is full of myths, but few are truer or more worthy than this.

Winter had thawed to spring, and spring had ripened to summer. Gilead and Fithvael, riding as shadows at the edges of the estate of man, had roamed ever southwards, aimlessly, since the murderous deceit of Talthos Elios.

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