Bloody Books - CALLIS & TOLL: THE SILVER SHARD – NICK HORTH
We delve back into the Mortal Realms, and the Realm of Ghur in particular with Nick Horth's follow up to City of Secrets. This time out, Hanniver Toll, Witch Hunter, is in hot pursuit of High Arbiter Otam Vemyre away from Excelsis and and across every one of the elements to catch the chaos-worshipper before he can find an artefact of untold power (as they always are). Toll and his ex-Freeguild bodyguard Armand Callis are on a race against time, bestial enemies and the realm itself
City of Secrets was a great, if short, read. The Silver shard expands out to a full length novel and allows time to move around an impressive range of areas to explore with some fantastic characters, both new and old. We hit pure pulp adventure beats more than once as we take in the Wilds of Ghur, the storms of the seas and even, wonderfully, an abandoned ruin of a city. Traps are set for our heroes to overcome whilst the villain of the piece dreads his constant transformation.
We get further depth into Callis and Toll, not a full character study, but enough to fill in the gaps for these engaging heroes. Likewise, we get to explore a bit of the obsessive nature of Vemyre but this is an adventure tale at it's heart and those moments exist to raise the stakes or to allow some breathing room. The buckles are swashed and the momentum is paced beautifully as the band deal with each new horror the Mortal Realms places before them.
That is the core strength of the novel, being able to go globe-trotting with a group of adventurers after a wonderfully devious foe. Once more, the Age of Sigmar novels do a grand job in showing off the scope and promise of the setting without having to be dragged into large-scale epic battles. It shows another side of Age of Sigmar, punchy and adventurous without the grim-darkness that is prevalent since the second edition of the game. (I do have point out I do love those books as well, it's just impressive to be able to go a very different direction).
Highly recommended