Traitors Gorge by Mike Lee

Author:Mike Lee
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Black Library
Published: 2013-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

The rain came suddenly, bursting from the clouds in a torrential downpour that lashed angrily at the sides of the gorge. Thunder boomed, rolling along the tops of the mountains and reverberating along Shaniel’s bones.

But it was not the sudden onslaught of the storm that roused the pathfinder from her meditations. A deeper, more distant sound was buried within the hissing of rain on stone and the knife-sharp whistling of the wind. Her other rangers heard it, too, many of them rising from their meditative positions and moving close to the mouth of the cave to listen.

Shaniel was already sitting close to the cave entrance, positioned so her slender back was to the rock wall and turned so that she could observe both the entrance and the interior of the cave itself. She cocked her head slightly to the side, concentrating on the sounds rising from the gorge. Her eyes narrowed in recognition.

The pathfinder rose smoothly to her feet. With a few softly spoken commands, her companions began checking their weapons and adjusting the settings on their cameleoline cloaks. Shaniel checked each squad in turn as she worked her way to the rear of the cave. Cold, blue light shone around a sharp turn in the rock, creating an alcove of sorts where the farseer and the squad of Warp Spiders waited.

Sethyr Tuannan knelt upon a small carpet woven of rich silks and inlaid with patterns of fine, glassy threads extruded from warp-reactive crystal. A small lamp rested on a delicate metal tripod nearby, bathing the alcove in its soft glow. At the very back of the alcove, half hidden in shadow, the five Warp Spiders sat facing one another in a meditative circle. The eerie song of their jump generators echoed faintly off the rough stone walls.

Shaniel knelt beside the farseer, her long rifle resting across her bent knee. ‘The battle has begun,’ she said quietly.

Sethyr nodded, her expression hidden beneath her war-mask. ‘For some minutes now, yes,’ she agreed.

The pathfinder frowned. ‘And nothing has changed? We must still take no part?’

‘Not yet.’ The pale mask turned to regard her. ‘Do you doubt me, Shaniel?’

‘I do not.’ The pathfinder paused, considering her words carefully. ‘But I can hear the war cries of the greenskins. The gorge carries their bestial shouts for kilometres, even through the clamour of thunder and the hissing sheets of rain.’

‘You have a flair for the poetic,’ Sethyr observed. ‘But I fail to see how this is relevant–’

Shaniel interrupted the farseer with a brusque wave of her hand. Nuance and circumspection were well and good in the tearoom or the garden, but not upon the eve of battle. ‘Just how large is the greenskin force arrayed against us?’

Sethyr straightened slightly, but conceded the pathfinder’s point with a curt nod. ‘Pedro Kantor has been fighting the orks here for many cycles,’ she explained. ‘He hunts them relentlessly, driven by guilt and the demands of honour, and he is rightly feared by his foes. Those he has not killed have fled before him, retreating through the mountains in hopes of escaping his reach.

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.