Pentimento, Nick Kyme [each kindness read aloud TXT] 📗

art,’ the killer replied, as if reading her thoughts, ‘and this my canvas.’

About the Author

Nick Kyme is the author of the Horus Heresy novels Old Earth, Deathfire, Vulkan Lives and Sons of the Forge, the novellas Promethean Sun and Scorched Earth, and the audio dramas Red-Marked, Censure and Nightfane. His novella Feat of Iron was a New York Times bestseller in the Horus Heresy collection, The Primarchs. Nick is well known for his popular Salamanders novels, including Rebirth, the Sicarius novels Damnos and Knights of Macragge, and numerous short stories. He has also written fiction set in the world of Warhammer, most notably the Warhammer Chronicles novel The Great Betrayal and the Age of Sigmar story ‘Borne by the Storm’, included in the novel War Storm. More recently he has scripted the Age of Sigmar audio drama The Imprecations of Daemons. He lives and works in Nottingham.

An extract from The Reverie.

‘We have to go,’ the ghost boy whispered into the darkness. The survivors huddled in the grain pit were vague shadows, their forms dusted by desultory strands of moonlight leaking through the wooden boards overhead, but he didn’t need to see their faces to know their fear. They reeked of it, just as the bodies littering the world above would reek of decay when the winter passed, assuming the wolves and carrion birds left anything for the Golden Season to thaw. Or maybe their killer would devour the dead first. Maybe that was why it had come to the village.

‘We must go,’ he urged. ‘Now.’

‘No,’ Padraig hissed. ‘It’s still up there.’

‘It’s sleeping,’ the boy said. Sleeping wasn’t quite the right word for what he sensed, but it was something his companions would understand, and the best approximation he could find for the ­sluggish emanations wafting from the destroyer above.

‘You can’t know that,’ Padraig protested.

But I do, the boy thought. Like Padraig’s fear, he sensed the beast’s fury somewhere deep inside himself, grasping it with an intimacy he couldn’t explain. It stank of charred meat and sour wine – a heady, sickening sludge of malice, yet only a vestige of the fury that had gone before.

The rage will return. He felt certain of it. The beast’s hunger for carnage was too fierce to be sated for long, no matter how much blood it spilled.

‘It will find us if we stay,’ he warned.

‘Ain’t found us yet,’ Padraig sneered, recovering a measure of his old belligerence. ‘Won’t find us now.’

The ironsmith’s son was twice the ghost boy’s age and many times his size, with a vicious streak that made them natural enemies, but he was only one of many tormentors and far from the worst. The boy had lived alongside these folk for more seasons than he cared to count, but they’d never shown him any kindness, least of all the red-haired trapper who’d taken him in.

Dead or alive, I’ll always be a ghost to them, he thought, weighing up the shadows clustered around him. He’d led them to this hideaway – saved them from the horror that had torn their village apart – but it made no difference. Nothing had changed.

He’d been no more than seven or eight years old when ‘Red’ Novak had found him in the woods beyond the village – a pale-eyed waif wearing the tatters of finery, half-starved and spattered with blood that wasn’t his own. Nobody had come looking for him so the trapper had claimed him as an apprentice, though a slave was closer to the truth. His master hadn’t even given him a name, though he’d lost his own, along with everything else from his old life except the Blade, which he’d been clutching so tightly it had to be prised from his grip. The dagger was an unusual weapon, its long silver blade set into a bone hilt carved with a corkscrewing pattern. Novak had taken it of course, but the boy had filched it back during one of his master’s drunken stupors. He’d kept it hidden under a loose floorboard in their hovel ever since, but this morning some instinct had compelled him to carry it. Perhaps the weapon had called to him. After all, they were both phantoms from another life. If this one ended today they would pass into the next together.

And into all that comes after, until there’s no more living or dying left in the world.

He ran a hand over the Blade’s hilt, drawing courage from its familiar whorled texture. Courage and something darker…

Novak is dead, he thought fiercely. The beast got him!

He hadn’t seen it happen, but he’d sensed the old monster’s death at the hands of the new. Tasted the bastard’s pain when it wrenched out his spine the way the fisherfolk boned their catch. It had felt good. Right.

‘Just,’ he breathed, savouring the fine word.

None of that mattered now, and yet… The cruelties had never felt so raw, as if all the misery and mockery of his life had been honed to a killing edge. Novak’s death wasn’t enough. Not nearly enough. He wanted to lash out at the dullards around him and–

It’s the beast, he realised, unclenching his fists. I’m drinking its dreams. Falling into them.

‘We’re safe here,’ Padraig was telling the others. ‘If we stay quiet it’ll move on. Leave us be.’

‘You’re wrong,’ the ghost boy said, rising to his feet. The joints in his cramped legs cracked and he almost stumbled. How long had they been down here, crouched in the darkness while the beast rampaged above? Six hours? Seven? Ten?

‘You’ll get us killed, ghost,’ Padraig growled, grabbing his wrist.

‘Can’t kill a ghost,’ the boy whispered. The urge to strike back was almost overwhelming – not with his fists, but with the purer, sharper force of his will. His spirit burned with it, kindled by the beast’s fury. It would be so easy to reach out with a barbed thought and pop this thug’s mind like a stray bug. So