Callis & Toll: The Silver Shard

Callis & Toll: The Silver Shard by Nick Horth, published in 2018, continues the partnership introduced in Horth's novella City of Secrets: Hanniver Toll, a relentless witch hunter of the Order of Azyr, and Armand Callis, the former Freeguild soldier who became his reluctant agent after stumbling onto a conspiracy in the city of Excelsis. Where their first outing was urban intrigue, The Silver Shard opens the map: a chase out of the City of Secrets and across the monster-haunted coasts and seas of Ghur, the Realm of Beasts, in pursuit of a prize that cannot be allowed to fall into the wrong hands.

Those wrong hands belong to Ortam Vermyre, the silver-tongued traitor of the earlier tale, who survived his fall and now seeks an ancient artefact with the power to reshape reality itself. Horth structures the novel as a proper pulp adventure: sea voyages, cutthroat privateers, lost places that predate the Age of Sigmar, and an escalating race in which Vermyre is always one cruel step ahead. The heart of the book is the odd-couple dynamic at its centre: Toll's flinty, ends-justify-the-means fanaticism set against Callis's stubborn, ordinary decency, each man sharpening the questions the other would rather not answer about what protecting civilisation actually costs.

The Silver Shard earned its place by showing what Age of Sigmar looks like at human height. No Stormcast demigods carry this story; it belongs to mortals with pistols, debts and doubts, and it did much to establish the tone later taken up by the wider Cities of Sigmar strand of fiction. For readers who want swashbuckling fantasy adventure in the Mortal Realms, closer in spirit to a treasure-hunt thriller than an apocalyptic war chronicle, it remains one of the range's most purely entertaining entries.