HAMILCAR

Champion of the Gods

(David Guymer)

From the maelstrom of a sundered world, the Eight Realms were born. The formless and the divine exploded into life.

Strange, new worlds appeared in the firmament, each one gilded with spirits, gods and men. Noblest of the gods was Sigmar. For years beyond reckoning he illuminated the realms, wreathed in light and majesty as he carved out his reign. His strength was the power of thunder. His wisdom was infinite. Mortal and immortal alike kneeled before his lofty throne. Great empires rose and, for a while, treachery was banished. Sigmar claimed the land and sky as his own and ruled over a glorious age of myth.

But cruelty is tenacious. As had been foreseen, the great alliance of gods and men tore itself apart. Myth and legend crumbled into Chaos. Darkness flooded the realms. Torture, slavery and fear replaced the glory that came before. Sigmar turned his back on the mortal kingdoms, disgusted by their fate. He fixed his gaze instead on the remains of the world he had lost long ago, brooding over its charred core, searching endlessly for a sign of hope. And then, in the dark heat of his rage, he caught a glimpse of something magnificent. He pictured a weapon born of the heavens. A beacon powerful enough to pierce the endless night. An army hewn from everything he had lost.

Sigmar set his artisans to work and for long ages they toiled, striving to harness the power of the stars. As Sigmar’s great work neared completion, he turned back to the realms and saw that the dominion of Chaos was almost complete. The hour for vengeance had come. Finally, with lightning blazing across his brow, he stepped forth to unleash his creations.

The Age of Sigmar had begun.

‘Here we are then, brothers. Good food, good fire and a long night before you in the company of the greatest of Sigmar’s Knight-Questors. Where then to begin this tale? What was that? The beginning? That would be conventional. But I suppose even Hamilcar Bear-Eater can be conventional for just one night…’

Chapter one

I arced over the gurgling water like a zephyrgryph with his claws unfurled. The air was ice, the sky a weird shade of green, amber leaking into the night with the dawn. My face was the painful side of numb as my arms and legs paddled the thin air. All I could hear from beneath me was the creak of ice, the rush of the river and the wind slipping through my fingers. I started to laugh, my mouth thus conveniently wide for a roar of triumph as my boots slammed into the frozen slush of the Nevermarsh. Cracks spread through the frost-veined mud, but it was already hard as rock and did not break.

Just as well – sinking to my greaves in mud or getting into a tug-of-war for my boot was hardly the look I had been going for.

‘Yes!’

The cry exploded from my chest and I spun around with my fists in the air.

‘Let it be known that Hamilcar Bear-Eater is first across every river, first into every charge, first unto every blade!’ I bellowed.

Broudiccan’s slow handclap wasn’t quite the enthusiastic reaction that I felt the feat deserved. My second-in-command cut an imposing figure on the other side of the water, a fortress of a man in the thrice-blessed maroon and gold of the Astral Templars. His Mask Impassive, the grim facial covering of the Stormcast Eternals, was anything but; a gouge from a beast’s claw had cloven the stoic purple mask in two, leaving a disdainful aspect which suited his taciturnity to the ground.

If he thought he could leap twenty feet across ice-cold rapids then I would have very much liked to see him try.

‘Bravo, Lord Hamilcar,’ Frankos shouted through cupped hands, separated from the burly Decimator by the haggard width of a tree. ‘Congratulations on being the first of Sigmar’s Stormhosts to set foot in the Nevermarsh.’

Distinctions of age and experience counted for little within a company of immortals, but the Knight-Heraldor had always been possessed of a youthful effervescence that made me feel old. I nodded my thanks, pausing to glare at my second.

‘May the Heraldor Temples always proclaim it so,’ I bellowed back.

‘They shall, my lord,’ he cried with gusto. ‘They shall.’

Frankos was also quite unique amongst my warrior chamber in taking everything I said in deadly earnest. He continues to do so, in fact, even after the later reversal in our fortunes.

The sigmarite mountain called Broudiccan rumbled as the giant sighed.

His masked gaze slipped towards the frothing water.

Feral-looking birds with wicked red eyes twittered back and forth between the two banks. Their beaks were perfectly made for the stripping of flesh, the cracking of bone, and I suspected they could even chew the cure right off a man’s armour. Generally, the birds were happy enough scavenging for fish and insects amongst the densely tangled buttress roots that clawed out of the riverbank and into the water, but the Freeguild army I was leading through the Gorwood might as well have been one giant victuallers’ caravan for all they were concerned. More than one poor soldier had already lost a finger or an eye. Broudiccan swatted at one, which knew better than to test its toothed beak on sigmarite and flapped out of reach to shrill from the leafless canopy.

‘I’ll wait for the bridge,’ he grumbled, after a while.

I barely heard him over the white roar of the water, but I am a Stormcast Eternal, and my ears are sharp enough.

‘I wonder about you sometimes,’ I laughed. ‘Are you a plodding Knight-Excelsior, summoned to my warrior chamber in error?’

Broudiccan shrugged. ‘Even Sigmar can make mistakes. The pain of reforging is proof enough of this.’

‘Ha! Indeed. I remember my last day as a mortal, when I feasted with Him and ten thousand warriors in the Heldenhall.’ The memories of my mortal life were dimmer back then than they are now, jumbled like a stained glass window that had been broken and thrown back together, most of the pieces still missing, but this I remembered. ‘He has a delicate stomach. For a god.’

Frankos frowned at nothing. ‘I do not remember my final night.’

‘Parts of mine are a little blurry also. It was that aelf nectar wine. I swear there was nothing like it where–’

A racket worthy of Gorkamorka drowned me out as the rest of the army made their way through the trees.

I looked past the two Astral Templars, my sentence unfinished.

About nineteen hundred soldiers, two of the five Freeguild regiments of the Seven Words, had followed me into the Gorwood. Their baggage train and camp followers amounted to about the same again although I generally deferred the small details to Frankos and the mortal generals themselves. The fifty warriors of my Chamber, the Bear-Eaters, were strung out over several leagues of woodland. The trees that grew here at the boundary of the Low Gorwood were twisted runts compared to the predatory bowers that canopied the high slopes of the Gorkomon, but no less deadly. For all my efforts, the Gorwood was – and would always be – a wild place, home to as many hungry creatures as it had been when the Beastlord Uxor Untamed had ruled these heights. And I wouldn’t have had it any other way. The men and women that emerged wore a collage of colours – torn, faded, chewed on – over armour of tough leather and the occasional skin. There were a few wooden or leather shields, but most carried two-handed spears, javelins or hunting bows. Despite the cold and the predations of the forest they were still laughing – Ghurites all of them, none tougher – whistling catcalls at those behind and pointing at me on the other side of the river.

Coming in behind the vanguard was a trio of ogors in tattered surcoats, hauling a bridge of coppery lumber behind them. Their faces were snarled with effort, muscles standing like boulders from a mountainside. A few of the soldiers dropped their gear to run in and help push, the ogors hissing something that probably wasn’t all that complimentary through their teeth.

I put my hands on my hips and watched them, my heart ready to burst with pride.

I loved them all.

Only slightly less than they loved me.

‘Who is first upon the Nevermarsh?’ I called out to them, thumping my breastplate. ‘He who waits upon no man, beast nor creature of Ruin.’ I thrust my gauntleted fists in the air, wringing the musty stink of bear from my cloak.

‘Hamilcar!’

Cheers rippled through the treeline. The ogors took the opportunity to draw up and wipe the sweat from their sledgehammer-like brows, before readjusting the draw-chains wrapped round their fists.

I made a grand show of pulling off my gauntlets, rubbing my hands together and blowing into them, despite the fact I have little feeling for the cold. I am a champion of Heaven, and to be of Heaven is to be as cold as starlight. And yet it means something to the common soldier to see his hardships shared. Most Stormcast Eternals, broken from humanity in order to be elevated to that space beyond, would never even have considered such a gesture. There are better warriors than I in Sigmar’s Stormhosts. I’ll not name them, and I’ll only deny saying it should it get back to them. Let’s just say I have all the fingers I need to count them. But if you think that any of them can get as much as I can from a mortal man, then I would say you have passed too many times over the Anvil of Apotheosis, my friend.

‘The winter is cold,’ I yelled. ‘The Ghurlands are dangerous. But you know cold, you know danger. Every man and woman here is a veteran of the Gorwood. You have fought beside me against beastman and skaven and orruk, yet here you all are with me still. Why?’ My breath shrouded my tattooed fist in fog. ‘Because Hamilcar Bear-Eater is your brother and your champion, ahead of you every step of the way!’

‘Hamilcar!’

The cry came back louder now, men still spilling out of the forest to hear my words.

I unhooked the halberd from its bracket across my back. The black wood of the haft scraped over my armour as I drew it. The head sang as it came free. The blade was sigmarite, forged by the first of the Six Smiths under the Auroral Tempest, imbuing the metal with the storm’s vicious power. Bands of amber and violet rippled through the blade as I turned it and held it aloft. A pair of predator birds that I had managed to trap and kill myself dangled from the head on chains. Runes of my own inscription decorated the haft. They imparted no power I know of, and I had no idea from which ice hole of my memory they emerged, only that in those days you could not leave me with a flat surface and a knife and not return to find the former filled with the strange pictograms.

I had always assumed them to be a facet of my lost life as a mortal, which would of course prove to be correct, though I never gave it much thought at the time.

‘The Nevermarsh is another challenge again. No army of Sigmar has ever crossed its border, and yet…’ I spread my arms to indicate the river running across me. The soldiers chuckled, a few of them still shouting my name. A cloaked and helmeted veteran in a glittery cuirass of leather and glass and a rash of insect bites on his browned face choked with laughter. Even I didn’t think my remark was that amusing, but I acknowledged the old-timer with the point of my halberd. I recognised him from some battle or other, and I always liked to give the impression of familiarity with every woman or man who bore the Twin-Tailed Comet in my name.

‘This is where our enemies seek to hide from us, so this is where we hound them. We will run them to the ground, my friends. We will kill them, we will butcher them, and we will feed their bloody carcasses to the carniferns of the Gorwood!’

The bank erupted with a mighty cheer.

‘For Sigmar!’

‘Sigmar!’

‘For the God-King!’

My voice was the coming of thunder. I held the final syllable until my throat was hoarse and my body shook with passion.

I rehoused my halberd, leaving my fist raised in salute.

The men would all be warm now. If my Vanguards were right about the position of the hole that our enemy had found to hide in, and they generally were, then I expected the fire I had put in the soldiers’ bellies to last them until it was needed.

‘A good speech, lord,’ Frankos shouted to me.

I could almost sense Broudiccan’s eyes rolling.

‘Go and aid with the bridge,’ I told the Heraldor. ‘You’re as strong as any ogor, brother.’ One hand on the pommel of his broadsword, Frankos bowed low, his white crest bobbing in the frozen muck. I called after him as he departed. ‘Be sure that it’s good and flat. I would hate for Broudiccan to fall off.’

I chuckled to myself, Broudiccan still wearing that disdainful look of his.

Now ordinarily, these sullen spells were precisely the reason I chose the Paladin for my second. The long silences gave me more room to talk, but a man can only bear so much.

‘Spit it out, brother,’ I barked.

‘It is nothing.’

‘With you, it’s never nothing.’

The big Paladin grumbled. ‘You are like a boy on his first hunt, lord.’

I smiled wistfully. ‘You remember your first hunt?’

‘No.’

‘Nor I mine.’ I cocked a grin as though he had just made my point for me. ‘Every time is the first now. The realms are so vast, the enemy so numerous. It is always new.’

‘You are a Lord-Castellant, not an Azyros or a Venator to go seeking out new dangers.’

I blew out through my lips. ‘The best defence…’ Broudiccan’s eyes narrowed reproachfully, and I motioned towards the Freeguild further uphill, dragging the bridge towards us with renewed vigour. ‘They will work faster knowing I’m here on the far side. I don’t forget my calling, brother.’

Frankos had joined the labourers as I spoke, jostling in between the ogors and taking up some of the chain to help pull.

‘He is a bad influence upon you,’ said Broudiccan.

I laughed at that. ‘I suspect most would say it was the other way around.’

‘I have known Frankos longer than you. He is perfectly incorruptible. You, on the other hand, will do anything for an audience.’

I frowned across the water, but Broudiccan had nothing more to add. Frankly, I should have been astonished to have got as many words out of him as I had, but I was justifiably distracted by what happened next.

Lightning struck earth a few feet from where I was standing.

Not an actual lightning bolt, of course. Deliverance from the Celestial Stair remained as possible as it ever had been during the Realmgate Wars, but it had become rarer in those days as Sigmar’s wars spread his attention thinner. Azyrite energies crackled and burst as the Prosecutor furled his wings then stood. His armour was the black of freshly dug soil, richer in gold even than my own, and embellished with images and inscriptions as one would a tombstone. It put me in mind of the mortis armour worn by Xeros Stormcloud, my Lord-Relictor, who had earned his war name for the black mood that followed him wheresoever he chose to darken with his tread. Or so I chose to believe, and tell all who ask.

Despite having just risen, the Prosecutor dropped again to one knee. ‘Lord-Castellant, I bear an urgent missive from my lord, Akturus.’ His delivery smacked of some ritual phrasing, the effect only slightly ruined by the breathlessness that came with a long flight from the Seven Words. He presented a tightly furled scroll, sealed with a flickering Azyrite rune.

The scroll fizzled under my nose.

Now, it has never been any secret that I find the written word disturbing. Trapping a man’s words and thoughts, his soul even, on parchment or tablet still seems to me like witchcraft and I avoid it where I can.

An awkward second passed between us in which neither moved or spoke.

‘Urgent was Akturus’ word, lord,’ said the Prosecutor, the formality of his address slipping. ‘Not mine.’

I sighed.

If in doubt, bluff it out.

‘Read it to me as we go.’ I turned my back, picked a direction from the frostbitten scabgrass and sand-coloured rushes of the Nevermarsh in what I was sure was an authoritative manner and started walking.

‘Yes, lord.’

The sounds of hammering and sawing and the strains of an ogor working song faded quickly as I strode into the marsh, swallowed by the chirp of predatory birds and biting insects. I idly swatted at a few. Largely out of habit. Most things in Ghur would try to eat you one way or another, but there wasn’t much out there that would willingly make a meal out of the storm-fused flesh and blessed sigmarite of a Stormcast Eternal.

The realm’s erratic sun was just pushing over the horizon, kissing every leaf and frond with amber lips. It was beautiful. From behind me, there came a faint crack as the Prosecutor broke the lightning seal and unrolled the scroll.

‘Brother Castellant,’ he read aloud. ‘Praise Sigmar, for he has noted your abrupt absence and seen fit to reinforce the Seven Words until your prompt return. Lord-Veritant Vikaeus Creed did arrive this morn at the head of the Drakwards, Exemplar Chamber of the Knights Merciless, to–’

I grumbled under my breath, missing whatever it was that the Prosecutor said next.

Vikaeus and I had what you could call a history.

She thought me foolhardy and arrogant. Actually, she still does, and nor is she exactly wrong. Foolishness and arrogance are two of my finest qualities, virtues to which too few amongst the Stormhosts can lay claim. I, for my part, have always been underwhelmed by the Lord-Veritant’s much vaunted gift for prophecy. While it is true that she accurately prophesied the coming of the White Pox to the Valdenmoor, and foretold of Skulla Gashamna’s ascension to daemonhood months before Lord-Ordinator Vorrus Starstrike read it in the stars, her warnings of my imminent self-inflicted demise had thus far all come to naught.

‘Still waiting for that vermintide she foresaw swallowing the Seven Words, I imagine,’ I said.

‘The Lord-Castellant did not impart that detail, lord.’

‘I bet he didn’t. Did he impart anything else?’

‘Yes, lord. He asked me to tell you that he prays for your swift return, and to remind you that the slight raised against his honour still stands.’

I said nothing to that.

Akturus Ironheel commanded a warrior chamber known as the Imperishables, a force numbering some four hundred souls. As a Lord-Castellant, we were equivalent in rank, but utterly dissimilar in character. The Anvils of the Heldenhammer, the Stormhost to which the Imperishables belonged, were a force of black repute, assembled from the heroes of empires long-dead and hammered into being while the Mallus turned under a darksome phase.

Or so their lords-relictor claim, and good luck to them, for no one knows better the power of a fearsome legend than I.

‘It was meant in jest,’ I said. ‘He enjoys it.’

‘He has already prepared the ring for ritual combat, lord. All of the Seven Words are eager for your return.’ It could just have been me, but I was certain I heard a smirk in the winged warrior’s voice.

Akturus might have preferred sitting in a castle to taking one, and despised the untamed Ghurlands as much as I hated being bottled up in the Seven Words, but he was the most vicious and underhanded fighter I have ever had the misfortune to cross in all my centuries of war. I swear, he knew the weaknesses of aegis armour and the pressure points of a Stormcast Eternal’s body the way a Lord-Castellant should know bricks and mortar.

And he was touchy about the honour of his war name, as I had recently learned.

‘Not nearly as eager as I am,’ I said, though I would have rather challenged the entire Drakwards Exemplar Chamber than entertain Akturus in the ring. If there’s one thing people admire more than a victor, it’s a bold loser, and being batted around the Seven Words by a Dracoth or two would at least be a moral triumph of sorts.

The Prosecutor chuckled, which I took as more comradely than mocking. It was easy to forget sometimes that the Imperishables were as human beneath their armour as I.

I sighed. I supposed that my reputation could afford to suffer a knock or two, taken in good spirits.

Suddenly, I stopped walking, holding up my hand as I stared into the endless marsh. It was called the Nevermarsh for a reason.

‘The thought occurs. I have no idea where I’m going.’

The Prosecutor gestured back the way we had come. ‘This way, lord. I am not the only bringer of news.’

Chapter two

Augus Ayr Augellon, King of the Aetar, turned his hooked bill to me and shrieked. The two eagles perched awkwardly on the solid earth behind their liege scraped their talons through the frozen mud and bobbed their heads in agreement. The Eagle King stamped his feet, throat ribbing up and down, and issued a volley of scathing cries.

Ears ringing, I glanced at Barbarus.

In another life, the Knight-Venator had been hetman of a mountain tribe. He had called himself King in the Sky, demonstrating in abundance the vainglory that I look for in my Bear-Eaters. He had made allegiance with the birds of the air for tales of the world below his fastness. It had been the star-eagle, Nubia, who had come to him in that bygone age to warn him of the dawning of the Age of Chaos. The Celestial eagles enjoyed something akin to genuine immortality, and she was beside him still, pecking deliberately at the side of his helmet as Augus scraped at the ground and cawed.

‘He says that the enemy is less than half an hour away,’ Barbarus translated for me, hesitantly. ‘I… think he means flying, however. I’d say we could be on their encampment by evening. Unless night falls early today.’

That wasn’t as improbable as it might sound. Ghur’s amber sun was a wild beast, always looking to slip its leash. The experienced Ghurite knew to give sunrise a couple of hours’ grace either way.

Augus delivered another blasting shriek, which I took for a ‘yes’.

Barbarus pointed towards the hostile, climbing sun. ‘Both the Blind Herd and the Legion of Bloat are to be found that way. In strength.’

‘How many?’ I asked, directing my question at Augus. The aetar king gave an aggrieved caw.

‘Strength,’ said Barbarus, apologetically.

The aetar have many fine qualities, but high number counting is not one of them.

‘What of their leaders?’

Manguish, the Bloatlord, was a recent arrival in my territory. Hearing of the destruction of the Gorwood’s incumbent war bands he had brought his forces across the Nevermarsh in an attempt to carve out his own territory. He was nothing. If he had been unable to assert his will amongst his rivals, then he was certainly not going to start asserting it over me. Brayseer Kurzog on the other hand was an entirely different animal. Touched by the Changer of the Ways, he was a wily old goat. Literally, as it goes. He had been giving me the runaround for almost a year. Not that I wouldn’t rather be chasing his beast herds through the Gorwood than finding new ways to dodge Akturus or irritate the Listening Order back in the Seven Words, but enough was enough. I had a reputation to look to, and had finally driven both of them across the river and into each other’s arms.

The combined strength of the Blind Host and the Legion was going to be formidable. Four to five thousand was my estimate. Nothing my two thousand couldn’t handle.

Particularly with King Augus and his aetar on my side.

What little I knew of his people was gleaned from watching their darting shapes in the sky above the Seven Words.

Despite the obvious superficial similarities to the aetherwings and star-eagles that served the Celestial armies as scouts and spies, the aetar were an entirely distinct breed.

For one thing, they are bigger.

King Augus alone had a wingspan nearly double that of a Flamespyre Phoenix, and looked as though he could have taken off with a Dracoth struggling in each talon. His neck was clad in ceremonial armour of blued steel and topaz, and a circlet sat atop the scarred plumage of his head. Part of me couldn’t help but wonder how an eagle managed to get such apparel on and off, but the impatient rap of Augus’ talons on the ground was a neat way of convincing me to pay attention.

The Eagle King gave a petulant caw.

‘The Blind Herd had spear throwers and daemon riders,’ said Barbarus, after a moment. ‘They attacked his scout and he says he will not risk the lives of his people while yours, ours, remain far away.’

I nodded, understanding Augus’ reluctance. I had died once before and I don’t recommend it.

The aetar to Augus’ left decided to contribute then, the unexpected shriek making me wince. The king shrieked back, if anything even louder and clacked his beak menacingly.

I looked at Barbarus.

‘Parents and children,’ the Knight-Venator shrugged.

The bristling younger aetar did bear something of a familiar resemblance to Augus now I bothered to look for it. If anything, the beak and talons were even larger and more viciously curved than his. Both traits that I would later learn to be characteristic of the female. Aeygar Ayr Augus, I assumed, princess of the Gorkomon. She was similarly armoured at the neck and breast, but bore no other overt symbol of royalty. Having been startled once already, I decided I should probably appraise the third aetar as well, but it showed no immediate inclination of chipping in with an opinion. It appeared to be female too, but older. Her feathers were tawny, her eyes dimmer. A carcanet of fine stones and gold hung from her neck rather than the warrior torcs worn by Princess Aeygar and her father. A thin circlet lay on her head. Ellias Ip Augus, the queen. She watched husband and daughter quarrelling with such a tragically universal weariness of spirit that I could almost remember possessing children of my own.

‘Is that the entire royal family?’ I hissed towards Barbarus.

‘I believe so.’

Nubia tapped her agreement on his helmet.

‘Quite the commitment,’ I said. ‘For them all to be here.’

‘For us, the Nevermarsh is a week of toil through hungry forest.’ Barbarus indicated the three giant, bristling aetar. ‘For them, it’s a glide. They consider a Chaos presence here to be very much their problem.’

Whatever the disagreement had been about, Princess Aeygar reluctantly backed down, feathers ruffled, refusing to meet her father’s eye. Augus glared a moment longer, beak clacking open and shut.

‘Any idea what that was all about?’ I asked Barbarus.

Barbarus shook his head. ‘When they talk amongst themselves it’s too quick for me to follow. Something about her being young and rash.’

‘Rashness doesn’t spare the old.’ My laughter ran decidedly dry as King Augus swung his belligerent bead-eyes from his recalcitrant offspring and back to me. The musty scent of warm feathers and ingrained ordure enveloped me. I coughed and rediscovered my smile, wondering only after I did so what a creature accustomed to dealing with a hard beak would make of the expression. ‘Tell him that Sigmar is grateful for his people’s aid. Perhaps this day marks the beginnings of a better friendship.’

‘He understands the lang–’

Augus’ shrill rejoinder detonated in my face.

Barbarus coughed. ‘He says he seeks no friendship with Sigmar.’

‘Thank you, Barbarus. I got that one.’

The Eagle King stamped, scratched, swung his head, ruffled his feathers, the Knight-Venator and his amethyst-feathered familiar struggling to keep up. ‘He says he is old enough to remember the time before Sigmar. He watched the armies of Chaos and Destruction fight over the Seven Words. Five hundred years and no sign of Sigmar. He doesn’t celebrate the…’ he paused as though the words he had been bidden to speak were distasteful, ‘…the Man-God’s return to Ghur now. He’ll not perish with the beasts of the mud when he retreats once again.’

I smiled thoughtfully up at the old bird. I was starting to like King Augus.

‘I have enough friends anyway, and so does Sigmar. We are both hunters, Augus. Let’s hunt the Chaos beast together.’

The Eagle King made a grating caw that sounded like a bolas being swung over a warrior’s head and lowered his beak to me.

I had seen the aetar warrior display before, generally performed at outrageous altitude and speed, high above the balcony window of my chambers in the Seven Words’ keep. I understood that it was how the male aetar demonstrated their virility and prowess to potential mates and prospective rivals. Only hatchlings performed it on their feet, and I understood the very public concession that King Augus was offering to me now.

I butted my forehead against his beak, improvising a little with a comradely roundhouse across the wing. ‘That’s how the Bear-Eaters do it,’ I explained, in answer to his startled squawk.

Aeygar and Ellias, at least, both looked well amused.

Throwing his head back to issue a harsh hunting call, King Augus beat his colossal wings. It felt as though the Lord of the Aetar had just conjured a great hand from the air to bend me to my knees. I resisted, watching as first Augus, then his queen and his princess hauled themselves into the air. The latter threw me a parting look, which I interpreted as apologetic.

Children, indeed.

‘He says he’ll wait on your signal,’ Barbarus shouted over the shrieking of eagles and the hammering of their wings.

‘Is there a message you would have me bear back to Akturus?’ said the black-armoured Prosecutor behind me. He was looking up, shielding his mask’s eye slits against the low sun as he watched the army of the aetar take wing.

If I’m honest, I had quite forgotten he was there.

‘Tell him I’ll be back to beat him as black as his armour before he even knows it.’

Chapter three

The gentlest whisper of snow drifted between me and what I would later come to remember as Kurzog’s Hill. It was so unexpectedly pleasing that I had to stop for a moment to admire it before my army went and spoiled it. The hill was surrounded on all sides by a delta of small bogs. They were frozen over, lucent pools of amber beneath the intermittently setting sun. Sword grasses and spiny weedfronds grew to the height of men along the maze of paths that branched between them, rattling their sabres at the wind. For a second, I thought I saw a woman with a spear, watching my army from the grass. The Gorwood was a vast and uncharted wilderness, and I knew that there were a number of native peoples, like the aetar, who had never welcomed nor accepted Sigmar’s rule. Before I could dwell on it further, the figure was gone and I decided that it had been a trick of the breeze.

The strident cacophony of bone horns, pan pipes, war gongs, and man-skin drums drew my gaze upwards.

The Blind Herd brayed from the hilltop. Insults, I imagined, but a lack of familiarity with the Dark Tongue inoculated me somewhat against their sting. A smattering of ungor skirmishers armed with slings and javelins were getting their hooves wet, but most of Brayseer Kurzog’s bigger beasts had been positioned on the hilltop and looked determined to remain there. I counted about fifteen hundred gors, with a couple of barely restrained bullgors just to make my life more interesting. A small herd of centigors and a single tuskgor chariot waited on one flank. The beastherd bleated and jeered from behind the thinly spread line of the Legion of Bloat. Noisome champions of the God of Plagues, the blightkings’ armour was buckled where bloat or corrosion had caused the plates to warp. Pus leaked from cracked metal and fluid sores. Flies choked the air above scabrous, maggoty helms, and the hillside upon which they waited with grave acceptance of the coming battle was littered with the shrivelled corpses of flowering weeds. For all that the Plague Knights looked one solid push from collapse, I knew from experience that there were few things in the realms tougher than a devotee of Nurgle. They felt neither fear nor pain, they did not tire, and so close had they grown to death that it took a frightening amount of violence to finally push them over.

And by Sigmar, the smell…

Fortunately, the wind favoured us. The worst I suffered was the mulchy odour of the swamp itself, with only the occasional eye-watering gust from the hill.

Shielding my eyes from the low sun, I looked up. The disc-riding beastmen that had downed one of King Augus’ scouts earlier in the day crisscrossed the sky, shadowed by the lazy drone of pustulent rot-flies. I counted about a score of each.

Nuisance numbers. Nothing more.

With a decent corps of missile troops Kurzog and Manguish might actually have been able to make me think twice about taking their hill. I stress might. I’m not generally one for thinking more than once, and even that is largely something that I wave through as a formality.

The Slaves to Darkness had never really taken to ranged warfare.

In fairness to them, neither had I.

Confronted with the terrain I was going to have to fight them on, a small part of me did quietly kick the larger for leaving behind the Justicar Conclave that Akturus had offered me. Akturus did love his Judicators. Nothing threatened to bring the Lord-Castellant out in a smile like putting together a line of boltstorm crossbows behind a Liberator shield wall and watching a determined enemy make the hard running. His predilection for standing still is, I contend, why they call him ‘Ironheel’. As much as I enjoyed teasing him for it though, it was all in good humour, and I wouldn’t have minded one of his Thunderhead Brotherhoods just then.

I had five Vanguard-Hunters and Barbarus’ realmhunter bow. I didn’t see Brayseer Kurzog shedding too many fleas over that, and though I had over a thousand Freeguild archers their short bows were too limited in range, or power, to be effective.

‘Sly old goat,’ I muttered.

My gryph-hound emitted a growling chirp and bit my knee in answer.

Crow had the hind quarters of a Celestine Leopard, fur as smooth and as white as mother-of-pearl and with eyes of a fierce intelligence. His head was that of a bird of prey, plumage shimmering with the pale blue of the Azyrite dawn. Crow had been with me since my last reforging and subsequent return to the Ghurlands. After a hundred years, he continued to give the impression that he knew something important that I didn’t. I scratched him idly between the ears, and he released his beak from my knee with a low chirrup of pleasure.

‘I count barely three and a half thousand men and beasts. A bit less than I was expecting. Vaguely disappointing.’

‘It will be a bloodbath.’

No one but Lord-Relictor Xeros Stormcloud could say that and look as though he was fighting to keep himself from licking his lips. Like me, he preferred to go bare headed. Unlike me, his skin was dark and distinctly reddish. His head was shaved bald. The pieces of his fearsome mortis war-plate had been individually crafted by the Six Smiths to resemble bones, transforming the cruel-eyed warrior-priest into the likeness of a giant skeleton with the unholy face of an immortal. Glyphs of death, rebirth and the Storm Eternal had been carved into the skinned carcasses of rabbits, birds and squirrels, hanging from the many flesh hooks that projected from his harness. Lightning arced and crawled from his reliquary staff. The mummified remains of a human cadaver were encased within, behind a rippling screen of Azyrite force. It was wizened, foetally folded, clutching a sword in claw-like hands and bedecked in an elaborate – albeit largely disintegrated – headdress of animal skin, gold leaf and precious jewels.

I had no idea who the figure was. Xeros was always prophetically vague about the subject, which suggested to me that he was less than certain himself. I found that mildly reassuring, and not a little pleasing.

‘You need to look on the bright side, brother,’ I said.

One corner of Xeros’ mouth pricked into a smile, as if drawn into it by skilled flesh artists with needles. ‘I was.’

I felt myself deflate. The Stormcloud had that effect.

‘It was unwise to leave the Imperishables’ Justicar Conclave back at the Seven Words,’ he said.

‘Wisdom is for Sigmar, and he is welcome to it.’

‘Conquest and murder is Sigmar’s work,’ said Xeros, staring flatly across the snowy marsh, never raising his eyes to make contact with mine. ‘From across the Pantheon he drew the gifts that went into the making of the Stormcast Eternals, and from those who did not give freely enough he took, by deception or force. That is the god we serve, brother, and it is my great honour to do so. I would kill his foes in their beds, hack them from their mothers’ bellies if I could but tell friend from foe therein and Sigmar would not dissuade me from it. He would not care if we slaughter these beasts and their allies with arrow or hammer or with our own two hands.’ He raised his for emphasis. They were big, butcher’s hands, encased in osseous sigmarite.

‘You do like getting your hands bloody, Stormcloud.’

The Lord-Relictor’s eyes became glassy. ‘At least allow me to call upon the storm. Let me strike down the heathen beasts. I will purge the blight from their rotten flesh and purify their unclean souls. I will wrap the blessed rains of Sigmar about my fist and make of them a lash to flay the meekness from the proselytes to Nurgle’s despair…’

I did my best to ignore him.

I’d become rather good at it over the decades.

In his mortal life, Xeros had been a shaman and a vizier of formidable power. Beyond that he recalled little and shared less. I doubted it was pretty. The Relictor Temple and the Winter Fortress of the Astral Templars were rife with rumours. Ritual bloodlettings. Slave-taking campaigns that swallowed whole nations and put all but the bloodiest atrocities of the Ages of Chaos and Blood to shame. Orgies of human sacrifice that would conclude only when the knives of the priesthood were blunted and even Xeros’ fiery soul had been glutted on murder.

I believed them all.

‘…will sear their skin from their bones and make of them an ash that I might scoop from the soil and present to Sigmar as a token of my cleansing. I–’

‘No lightning,’ I said. ‘Not until I say so.’

Xeros turned his scowl heavenward. ‘The eagle-kin are faithless and untrusting barbarians. A wise leader would not place all his faith in them.’

I threw my arm around the Lord-Relictor’s shoulder and pulled him to me. ‘There you go again, Stormcloud, wishing I were wise.’

‘Hope is like the fires of Dracothion,’ said Xeros, blank-faced. ‘It burns eternal.’

‘Am I interrupting?’ grumbled Broudiccan, my faithful shadow coming up behind me in a clatter of heavy sigmarite.

With a broad grin, I released the Lord-Relictor, clapped Broudiccan gamely on the shoulder and waved for Frankos.

My Knight-Heraldor was busy ordering the Freeguild units into lines of battle. They were forming up into a crescent facing off against Kurzog’s Hill. The Astral Templars he had broken into retinues, spacing them amongst the mortal units to be the metal studs in my wooden shield. I, it went without saying, would be the boss. It was a difficult set of compromises he had to balance. Spread the mortal units too wide and he’d be unable to direct sufficient strength to break Manguish’s shield wall. And that was going to be hard enough as it was. Too narrow and he’d be inviting a counter-charge from those tuskgors and centigors. From what I could see he was making a more than decent fist of it, but then he had learned his business from the very best.

Seeing my summons, he dismissed the huddle of mortal officers that surrounded him, then hurried over. One of the soldiers stuck with him. It was the captain I’d seen back at the river, laughing at my joke.

Frankos greeted me with a firm handshake and boyish ebullience, nodding energetically to Xeros and then Broudiccan. He unclasped my forearm to motion towards the mortal captain. ‘You remember Hamuz el-Shaah, Captain of the Jerech Blue Skies?’

‘Of course,’ I lied.

The Blue Skies – named not, as I’d originally thought, for their perpetually sun-drenched desert homeland, but for the disposition with which they went to war – I did remember. They were the oldest Freeguild regiment in my service and the largest in the Seven Words, and had followed me loyally since Jercho. From the city states of the Sea of Bones to the drakwolds of Shyish in pursuit of the Mortarch, Mannfred von Carstein. To Azyr in failure. Then back to Ghur for the Gorkomon campaigns. A century of near-constant war. They had picked up men from all over in that time, but still drew their elite formations and officer class exclusively from the Lands of the Unsetting Sun. Hamuz was one such. His skin was a hard brown. A glassmark, a Jerech skin art that involves inserting thousands of small bits of glass into the skin to create an image, caught the light from the bare skin of his forearm. A woman’s face. A wife in their younger days, perhaps. Or a daughter. The golden handle of a quartz longsword glittered in an ugly sheath of Gorwood leather.

Crow clacked his beak from behind my legs as the man approached me. Hamuz gave the gryph-hound a wavering half-smile before dropping to one knee before me and lowering his gaze.

‘My lord.’

‘Up,’ I said, though in truth I’ve always enjoyed the mortals’ adoration.

The man stood and looked, eyes wide. ‘The men of Jercho wish the honour of fighting alongside you, lord. As they did at Nicassa, and at the Sunless Citadel, and in the siege of the Seven Words.’

So that was where I recognised him from.

‘Only the bravest and best are worthy of such high honour.’ I grinned at him and put my hand on his shoulder, bowing him under the weight. ‘So your men’s place is surely at my side.’

Hamuz quickly lowered his face. ‘We’ll not let you down, lord.’

‘I know.’ Still smiling, I turned to Frankos. ‘Your thoughts?’

‘It will be a fight, lord, but to strike a final blow against Chaos in these lands?’ The Knight-Heraldor looked earnestly up at the hill. ‘It has to be worth it. You will not find a man here who does not feel the same as I.’

‘It’s true, lord,’ said Hamuz. ‘This is our home.’

‘Hah! You are half a world from home, Hamuz.’

‘I don’t ever expect to see Jercho again, lord. Our home is where you say it is, and we’re ready to die for it.’

I felt warmth spread through my chest.

Keep your sigmarite-clad legions, your Extremis Chambers with their Dracoths and their Stardrakes. Keep the might and authority of Ghal Maraz. Keep it all. I have no need for any of it. It’s the faith and valour of men like Hamuz el-Shaah that hold the line against the forces of Chaos.

‘And I am here so that you don’t have to make that sacrifice.’ I nodded to Frankos. ‘Let them know we’re here, Knight-Heraldor.’

‘Gladly, lord.’

Frankos unclasped his war-horn from its bracket on his thigh-plate. It was as long as his arm, ivory, the features of a snarling beast picked out in gold and purple tanzanite. He lifted the mouthpiece to the slit in his face-plate and blew.

The sound was almost too sonorous and deep to be heard with mortal ears. It was the forewarning of a tremor beneath the earth, the build-up of pressure before a storm. It was a vibration in my belly, an ache and a joy upon the small bones of my ears. The swamp grasses bent. The snow eddied. Ice cracked where it had formed. The hide banners of the beastmen and the fly screens of the Nurglites fluttered in the sudden gust of sound, and their raucous chants and music fell silent.

Satisfied that I had their attention, I took a few squelching steps forwards, drew my halberd, and planted it firmly in the ground.

I took a deep breath.

‘Who leads this army?’

‘Hamilcar!’

The roar came unequivocally from nineteen hundred mortal throats, fifty Astral Templars thumping their gauntlets on their armour or beating weapons against shields. I spread my arms as if their acclaim were a mantle that a chamber serf could set upon my shoulders, and turned my face towards the foulsome host before me.

‘Hamilcar will take this hill!’ Leaving my halberd quivering in the mud I pointed towards the ranks of blightkings encircling the base of the hill. ‘You all know me. You know me by name and by my reputation in these lands and you know that I will do this. Spare us all the time and the sweat. Kurzog! Manguish!’ I barked the names. ‘Test the favour of your gods in battle with me here, now. If either one of you can best me, then my men will return to the Seven Words and trouble you no more. My word upon the might of Sigmar and the retribution of His hammer, your warriors will have the same amnesty when you fall.’

‘Four thousand warriors of the arch-enemy and you would spare them?’ Xeros hissed behind me. ‘They shall be scoured from the Nevermarsh. The ground they have soiled with their tread must be burned and salted lest blight fester there and again take root.’

‘Have you never heard of Tornus the Redeemed?’ I whispered back.

For it is important to remember that not all beastmen were born such. Most were simply men and women on the wrong side of a realmgate when the doors were sealed, twisted by the magic of Chaos, and few of them willingly.

The Lord-Relictor snorted. ‘You are not the Celestant-Prime.’

I looked over my shoulder, seeing Hamuz watching me, and winked. ‘That you know.’

‘The Celestant-Prime is taller,’ said Broudiccan.

My expression blackened. ‘He is never taller.’

‘I don’t think they are coming, lord,’ said Frankos.

With a parting glare I turned from Broudiccan to survey the hill. The beastmen shuffled apprehensively, huffing and snorting. My bluster, and their leaders’ unwillingness to answer it head on, had clearly dented their enthusiasm for the fight. There were no more jeers. The disc-riders zipped back and forth over a silent throng. Only the blightkings looked unmoved by the exchange, sagging mutely into their shields as though they intended to remain there whether we fought a battle today or not.

‘They are spineless cowards, as all followers of Chaos must be,’ I bellowed. It’s not true, of course, but it gives men confidence to hear the likes of me say it. Xeros, however, was nodding profoundly. ‘It falls on us to go to them then, and show them the courage of fighting men.’ I tugged my halberd free of the ground and raised it high. ‘But be wary. The ground is soft and I would hate for any of mine to lose a boot.’

A chuckle rippled through the crescent formation as men hitched up their gear to march.

‘Sound the advance, Frankos,’ I ordered.

‘Yes, lord.’

‘We should survey the battlefield a while yet,’ said Broudiccan. ‘I don’t know this Manguish, but how many months have we hunted Kurzog through the Gorwood? How many times has he ever offered us pitched battle so freely?’

‘He offers nothing,’ I said. ‘His back is to the wall. He has nowhere left to go now but the Well of Eternity, and I mean to pitch him in head first.’ I thumped Frankos hard across the back. ‘Now, Knight-Heraldor!’

‘Yes, lord.’

Frankos put his horn to his mouth slit and blew.

Chapter four

The oldest memory I have is of violence. I can’t remember who I was fighting, or where, or why. Only that the ground was frozen, the air so cold that it was like breathing knives, and the stars were out with us in force. Sigendil, the beacon star of Azyr, hung bright and fierce above our heads like a banner, and I remember the battle-lust that it gave me. When the high star took to the field, so too did we, the tribes of the Eternal Winterlands. I don’t remember why. For the glory of our tribe? For the notice of our gods? To display our ferocity before Sigmar’s shining herald, locking horns like rutting beastmen for the favour of our patron? To be honest, no one really cared what a few thousand barbarians in the back end of Azyr got up to at night; what matters is that we fought, and none better or more joyously than I. It’s why Sigmar chose me, why he re-made me in the manner he did. Despite what you may have heard about me, it’s all I know how to do well.

And anyone who thinks that immortality detracts from the thrill of it has never felt the hammers of the Six Smiths upon their soul.

But you came for blood, didn’t you? So let me show you blood.

I pulled my blade from the blightking’s belly, drawing out his rotten intestines like a string of butcher’s sausages. Even with his guts looped around his ankles, he fought me, looking to bludgeon me with his cleaver-like sword. I spun my halberd like a bladed gyre, switching hands, direction, speed, drawing the squalid blightking’s cyclopean eye to my blade when it should have been paying closer heed to my boot. I kicked the base of his shield into his greaves. The flat top tilted forward and exposed the mouldering iron of his helmet to my fist. His grilled visor was not rigid, like metal. Rather, it was hard and gelatinous, like clotted blood, and quivered with the impact of my punch. Yellow bile oozed from the breathing slits, his grille otherwise settling back into shape.

The blightking gurgled with amusement as I shook out my knuckles, his voice a liquid rasp. ‘In the demesnes of the Fenlords the name “Bear-Eater” is spoken with–’

I rammed my halberd through his mouth with a wordless yell.

Unoriginal, I know, but from the heart. Even so, I was somewhat regretful of his passing. To this day I occasionally wonder what it was that the Fenlords had thought of me.

His white feathers rippling with power, Crow bore another pustulent warrior to the ground. The gryph-hound broke open the blightking’s rib cage and started ripping out ulcerated lung tissue. The Chaos knight chortled wetly even as his limbs twitched and his chest wall was sprayed over the freezing ground.

I knew that Nurgle commanded jovial acceptance in the face of despair, and by his own tenets I supposed that the blightking died well.

‘I’d spit that out if I were you,’ I said.

Crow turned his viscera-stained beak to me and warbled.

‘Fine. But expect no sympathy from me in the morning.’

Funnelled right across the narrow approach to Kurzog’s Hill, Astral Templars and Freeguild soldiers were tangling with the putrid blightkings of the Legion of Bloat. The Bear-Eaters fought like barbarian kings of old, each warrior a champion unto the reach of his own blade. The mortal soldiers, though possessing neither the strength nor the ferocity of the Stormcast Eternals, were disciplined and inspired. Under their combined onslaught the Nurglites were taking an almighty beating, but they were proving as difficult to break as I’d feared. The occasional snap of lightning arced towards the heavens, the fiery marker for a hero’s passing. Whole blocks of infantry fought themselves into the mud. Groups of ungor and Freeguild skirmishers tussled in the gaps between them, arrows and throwing spears whistling back and forth through the flurrying snow. Horns blared. Drums pounded. Horses whinnied and screamed.

I raised my halberd in the air and yelled, ‘Hamilcar!’

For what am I to these men but Vexillor, Heraldor and Relictor in one god-kissed sigmarite frame?

Another blightking took up position against me in the shield wall. He delivered no battle cry to announce his arrival, to intimidate me or to bolster his own courage, or to drown out the sounds of Crow chugging down his erstwhile comrade’s insides. Just a grim acceptance of his lot as he hoisted his heavy shield.

‘Why do the beastmen not attack?’ Broudiccan shouted between apocalyptic blows from his starsoul mace.

Aside from the skirmishers nibbling at our proverbial coat tails, I could see that the Decimator-Prime was right. Kurzog was still holding his biggest hitters back.

‘The brayseer is as much a stranger to pitched battle as I am to the Grand Library of Sigmaron, brother,’ I bellowed at the top of my lungs. ‘He hopes the Legion of Bloat will bleed our strength, enough for him to prevail. Hah!’ Broudiccan obliterated a blightking’s shield with a trouncing blow from his mace, spinning its wielder neatly into my field of attack. My halberd sliced wetly through the warrior’s vision slit. Crow dragged him out of the line by the knee and finished the job. Another heaved up and raised his shield to replace him. I blew out through my lips. This was starting to turn into real work. ‘Stormcloud! I think we’ve been banging our heads long enough against this wall.’

‘Praise be to Sigmar.’

Denied the basic succour of conflagrating his enemies en masse with the balled fists of the Eternal Heavens, the Lord-Relictor had been battling alongside the men of Jercho. While they hammered the shield wall with pistol shot and courage, he had resigned himself to annihilating it piecemeal, his expression as thunderous as any storm of Azyr.

He lifted his reliquary staff skyward, his eyes taking on a crackling lambency as dark clouds boiled across the sky. The snowfall intensified, coming in flurries, the wind tugging on my bearskin cloak and long hair. A rippling sheet of lightning illuminated the swamp of struggling combatants and Xeros pointed towards the thunderous peal with his staff. ‘God of Thunder, God of War, show the infidel your hammer!’ A bolt of lightning tore from the heavens to explode against the tip of his staff. The mummified relic-king it held flashed against the back of my eyes as lightning whipped out from the Lord-Relictor’s staff. It arced around the Jerech as if repelled by their honesty and faith, crawled wildly over Broudiccan’s aegis war-plate, and cracked against the wall of blightkings like the whip-tentacles of an Azyr beast. Dozens were blasted from their feet, poisonous steam billowing from eye slits and the warped seals of ancient war-plate as they roasted in their armour.

The Lord-Relictor inhaled deeply, and grinned. ‘Bare your hearts on the altar of the God-King, unbelievers.’ He raised his reliquary to call forth another blast when a terrific shriek rang through the swollen clouds.

‘No more, Stormcloud. They saw.’

Another shriek echoed across the marsh, and this time a colossal winged shape clad in blued metal scales dropped beneath the layer of clouds. It was King Augus. I clenched my fist and roared in welcome as the King of the Aetar, my friend, descended on Kurzog’s Hill. Beastmen brayed in alarm, rattling up their spears, but Augus was just too skilled a warrior, and too large. He ploughed through the thicket of spears, scattering beastmen to the ground before rising again with a bleating creature struggling in each clawed foot. I laughed as two dozen magnificently armoured eagle knights broke through the clouds in an arrowhead formation. With the grace of a flock of aesterlings in flight, the formation split into two smaller ‘V’s. Half of their number tucked in alongside Princess Aeygar to strafe Kurzog’s Hill. The rest, led by Queen Ellias, flew after Knight-Venator Barbarus, coming about to engage the aerial screen of rot flies and beastman disc-riders that continued to harry my flanks.

‘He’s with me, Kurzog!’ I bellowed, shaking my halberd vaguely towards the hilltop. ‘You’re not the only one who can pull off a trick.’

As I sought without success to bait the brayseer into showing his face, I saw Queen Ellias snatch a daemon disc from the air, catch the flailing beastman rider in her beak and then shake it viciously to death. The plague drones and disc-riders had the aetar heavily outnumbered, but the eagle-kin were mighty warriors and ferocious when aroused to battle.

I found myself counting my good fortune that King Augus had satisfied himself with mere ambivalence towards Sigmar’s return to the Ghurlands. The thought of trying to dislodge them from their Gorkomon fastness was not one I particularly relished.

In response to their arrival, Frankos blew a resounding note on his horn and the Freeguilds redoubled their efforts to dislodge the blightkings and push on Kurzog’s Hill.

‘Broudiccan. Xeros. Men of Jercho. To me!’ I plunged into the hole that the Stormcloud had gouged out of the blightkings’ shield wall with his lightning. My halberd chopped hands from wrists, heads from shoulders, tentacles from wheresoever they sprouted. I clove shields and splintered armour. I stabbed and clubbed, driving on until I was hemmed in by the stink of it, my warriors wedging their muddy boots in the door I had forced open with my strength.

It was time to win a battle.

‘You challenged me, Bear-Eater.’

The bitter voice seeped from the crush of bodies around me, like juice forced from a rotten lemon.

Manguish the Bloatlord was as tall as I was, but twice as wide at the middle. He was a pox toad in slime-covered armour, a sloughing skin bladder wobbling from under his throat. The plating around his gut was warped hopelessly out of shape, slapped in sticky bandages and leaking a corrosive bile that had turned the ancient metal to yellow. One arm was a mess of tentacles wrapped around a spear. The other held a huge shield bearing the repellent icon of Nurgle. My eyes near wept to look at it. Simply being in the warrior’s presence made my throat sore. He leered at me. Helmet and face had rotted away, blurring any distinction that might have existed between the two, a squamous amalgam of metal, bone, orphaned teeth and a blubbery vocal sac.

‘I accept,’ he rasped.

I bared my teeth in anticipation and made to push my way towards him.

Before I’d taken one step, I was startled by a loud crack.

I’d grown accustomed to the periodic crackle of the Jerech pistols, but this was louder. From something bigger, and I had nothing bigger. The Gorwood was no place for the arcanery of the Ironweld, but the real reason I had none of their weaponry with me that day is that their black powder sorcery terrifies me more than any lord or daemon or god of Chaos ever could. No good will ever come of it, I tell you that now.

‘What was that?’ I yelled.

‘Nothing that I can see,’ said Broudiccan, a few strides behind me.

Crow gave a trilling bark, beak turned skyward, and I looked up.

An aetar fell.

She was belly up, wingtips rippling in the updraft, blood staining the downy feathers of her chest. My heart clenched like a fist around a good luck charm as I watched her corpse descend and then strike the snowy earth.

‘Ellias Ip Augus,’ grunted Xeros, smiling tightly as though that was one less annoying patch of grey in his neatly black and white realm.

Now don’t let this pillar of flawless machismo stood before you fool you into thinking that I don’t know the pain of losing a queen.

I don’t remember much about it now besides how it made me feel. Anger. Weakness. As though her death was my failing somehow, naturally turning the loss of another human being into something entirely about me. But such memories are mortal ephemera, baubles of gold dust and light, too fine to endure the Cairns of Tempering or the attentions of Sigmar’s Smiths. I’ve heard it said that a warrior can protect a thing that’s precious to him from Apotheosis. A child’s name. A lover’s face. A father’s gift.

Clearly, my queen was none of those things to me.

And yet Augus’ shriek cut through to it, to a grief I’d forgotten I held onto, and I knew without needing the entirety of my recollection that things were about to become dicey.

With a disharmonious creak of cloth paddles, an unlikely airship rowed into view, rising into the air from behind Kurzog’s Hill. It looked like an ironclad canoe with a sealed top, hung beneath a giant gasbag. A hunched and goggled pilot was enthroned at the rear behind a nautical wheel, adjusting the craft’s tailfin with an enormous lever and punching at an array of knobs and dials to bring flashes of green lightning and verminous squeals, followed by a brief surge of enthusiastic rowing, from the lower decks. Several of the creature’s kin, similarly outfitted against wind and cold, scuttled about the weather deck slotting long-barrelled firearms into tripod mounts and taking pot-shots at the aetar.

‘Skaven!’ I yelled.

If I distrust the Ironweld then you can well imagine what I make of the wild technotheurgical contraptions of the skaven race.

More of the obscene aircraft were rising from hiding places on the lee side of Kurzog’s Hill, shedding ice and woven mats of swamp grass with every stroke of their paddles. I scowled. That was how they had avoided detection from the air. Crackling gunfire riddled Aeygar’s eagle knights, forcing the princess into an ungainly climb. One airship almost capsized as it turned to target my warriors on the ground. Jezzails cracked and popped, one Stormcast Eternal disintegrating into lightning as his undying soul leapt towards the celestine vaults. His final conscious act was to angle his ascent through the airship that had slain him, but he was moving too fast. The airship yawed crazily as the lightning bolt ripped across its bows, paddling furiously as its pilot attacked his controls.

With a tumult of squeaking, the skaven poured out of the Nevermarsh.

They were beyond counting. Hunched, hooded, clothed in swamp-coloured rags and poorly fitted armour, weapons rusted and notched. The numberless majority anyway. Hundreds more scurried alongside the horde, clad in baroque suits of bronze studded with dials and valves like runes of power, armed with bizarre interbreedings of halberd and rifle. There were globadiers. Ratmen in homemade protective gear hauling dribbling fire throwers and rusty machine cannon. Warpstone-powered automata the size and build of bronze troggoths, bedecked in the emblems of the Clans Skyre, crushed the occasional clanrat as they clanked awkwardly towards the battle.

Broudiccan had been right, though the Six Smiths themselves would have a task in beating that admission out of me when my time again came.

I probably should have scouted the battlefield more thoroughly.

An answering bray came from the Blind Herd on Kurzog’s Hill, and I finally figured out why they hadn’t attacked yet.

They were attacking now.

‘Clever goat,’ I muttered.

From further down the hill I heard Frankos screaming for the Freeguild to turn and reform to face the skaven, but most were doing so already. There wasn’t much that could cover ground like a skaven horde on the attack, and that had a way of setting a person’s priorities for him. Beside me, Xeros’ eyes rolled back into his skull. The Lord-Relictor gibbered manically as he sent lightning bolt after lightning bolt crashing through the line of blightkings and into the gors now pounding downhill towards us.

Broudiccan grabbed me by the arm and hauled me back towards the dubious protection of the Jerech.

‘The battle is lost,’ he growled. ‘We must withdraw.’

I shook him off. ‘Hamilcar does not lose.’ I shouted it at the top of my voice, the Jerech heartening to it with cries of ‘Hamilcar!’ Such was the reputation that I had built for myself that even now, outnumbered and surrounded, they didn’t believe that I could fail. And I wouldn’t. I would drag victory from the gums of defeat, no matter how diseased, no matter how many pieces it came out in. I would have sooner gone back to the Celestial Forges for a century of agonies than walk back to the Seven Words from there and explain to Akturus and Vikaeus how I had marched two thousand men into a skaven trap.

Manguish the Bloatlord was still within my grasp and Hamilcar Bear-Eater would have his prey. I lunged for him with a yell.

The Nurglite was a blob of corpse flesh in armour and about as mobile. My first blow neatly skewered one of the bandaged splits in his armour and slid my halberd’s spike into his belly. He was remarkably stoic about it, even for a follower of Grandfather Pox. His throat sac quivered wetly, which I took for laughter.

‘You will need to try harder than that, Bear-Eater.’

‘We’re not even sweating yet.’

I ripped my halberd from the Bloatlord’s belly and spun it overhead. No blood trickled from the wound. A little pus. A solitary maggot. I chopped down. Manguish whacked my wrist with his shield, then thrust at me with his spear. I jumped back, but the tentacles with which the Bloatlord held his spear seemed to have several feet of length bound up in their coils. A few inches of extension saw me stabbed in the shoulder. The sigmarite shrugged off the blow, but even so, that had been too close.

I had a reputation to protect.

Manguish cackled. ‘The energy Kurzog put into laying this trap, it would have been simpler just to kill you.’ He gave a sigh of long and joyful suffering. ‘But what is done is done.’

With a roar, I went at him again. Woodsman’s strokes. Looping figures of eight. Looking to just lop bits off now, rather than waste time and effort piercing or impaling. Possessed of neither extraordinary weapon skill nor layers of guile to supplement his glaring immobility, the Bloatlord had little option but to give out as he received. Spear and halberd were hardly classic duelling weapons anyway and to any onlooker we must have looked like frenzied pugilists rather than warring champions, two titans thwacking one another with pointed sticks.

Not that anyone was watching.

The implosive retort of a starsoul mace told me that Broudiccan was quite busy nearby, while Xeros’ lightning continued to craze across my peripheral vision. Crow yipped and snarled, but muffled, as though his beak were full. Even the Jerech were too occupied to notice me, a cordon of glassy blades and leather struggling to hold back a rising swell of blightkings and beastmen and, already, skaven. Any other mortal regiment under any other commander would have broken by now.

But not my regiment.

Not while I still lived.

The ground beneath us shuddered, a blast of Frankos’ war-horn demolishing a massed skaven assault on the base of the hill. Men and beasts toppled all around me, and Manguish wobbled like a jellyfish in an earthquake. Freezing air billowed from my mouth and fogged about my beard as I hacked through the Bloatlord’s spear with a cry. Bits of tentacle flopped to the ground with the broken spear half, wriggling like beheaded worms. Manguish blubbered in fury until my backswing split his throat sac. Noxious air fled in a wheeze. He struggled to say something, black teeth sticking out of his lipless mouth clacking together. The flaccid skin of his neck quivered breathlessly. He retreated behind his shield as I drew my halberd overhead. I kicked his shield hard, knocking him down. He squirmed like a turtle on its back.

‘Bah. Try harder, he says.’ I unhooked my warding lantern from my thigh-plate. It was a beacon of Azyr, encased within ornate shutters of orichalcum and electrum and purple stones. The engravings depicted a diorama of winged warriors leading a retinue of mail-clad bears towards the High Star. ‘Crow will have to try harder than this when he comes to passing your brethren tomorrow.’

I unshuttered the lantern.

The globe of a warding lantern is more than a receptacle for the light of Azyr. It is a lens for the storm energy and purity of its wielder’s soul. I feel it uplift me. My aches diminish. The cold departs my skin as an inner warmth rises to displace it. Even the dents and nicks in my armour are glossed over. Where my soul’s fury alights on the impure however, flesh sizzles and armour corrodes.

The Bloatlord gurgled noisomely, but mercifully quietly. He was a puddle of fat and liquefied armour when I closed my lantern again.

I looked up at an excited chittering to see a particularly large skaven in red-brown armour pointing at me with a cleaver. Its warriors squealed, the glimpse of my light working the ratmen into such a lather that I wondered if some sorcery of theirs was affecting my lantern somehow. As things would turn out, that was horribly prescient, if premature. And so, holding the lantern towards the clawleader, I unshuttered it again. The big skaven shrieked as smoke poured off its fur. It dropped its weapon and fell, rolling through the snow until Hamuz el-Shaah, neither hindered nor healed by my light, stabbed it through the neck.

It seemed to be doing the trick as far as I could see.

With the demise of their leader the remaining skaven were typically swift in turning tail, but there were plenty more where they came from, all equally determined to get through. The Blue Skies were crumbling like stone before a chisel holding them off, and the verminous warriors were boiling through by the score. I beheaded one before it could reach me. Xeros obliterated another dozen, but the vermintide was coming in and it was unstoppable. That the skaven were trying quite obviously to get to me struck me as entirely within the realms of the ordinary, given my repute in the Ghurlands, and I didn’t consider it further.

‘Lord-Castellant!’ Broudiccan screamed. He was grappling with a blightking, his armour gashed and bloody. The starsoul mace throbbed hungrily in the mud that had been churned up beneath the two warriors’ feet. ‘Call the retreat!’

Before I could give that my blessing I heard an all-too-familiar bleat of laughter.

My face hardened.

Kurzog.

In defence of what comes next, you should understand that I’d had little practice in handling a personal nemesis. Mannfred von Carstein had been a pox on the Hallowed Knights’ house, not mine. The Great Red had been swiftly despatched. The battle of Gnarlwood had been too impersonal and too vast. Kurzog, on the other hand, had left me looking the fool a few times too many, and today was shaping up to be a bad day of a particularly brazen and noteworthy kind.

I spun away from my second and glared into the braying ranks of the beast herd.

Brayseer Kurzog was a hound in his master’s clothes. Goat-headed. Dreadlocked. Dark skin pierced with human bones. A tattered magister’s robe wrung the life out of too-broad shoulders and backward-jointed legs. It was torn open at the chest, revealing a wiry scruff of black hair. Tattoos moved about beneath it like armies through the Gorwood. He wielded a dogwood staff, scent-marked by his daemonic patrons and the demi-beasts of the dire wood, scratched with the ninety-nine secrets of the Architect of Fate. A hideous little tretchlet thing fluttered about his brow, shedding glitter, pausing every now and then to whisper something in one bent ear or to gesticulate furiously down at me.

I scowled at him and he laughed back, the breathless panting of a dog.

‘See great Hamilcar brought low. All his furless brought low with him. Glory day. Glory day! Tzeentch be pleased by this if you not so easy to trap.’

‘He is goading you,’ Broudiccan roared, forcing the blightking in his embrace to the ground.

‘I know he is. I’m going to rip his head off for it!’

‘Leave him. While we still have half a chance.’

‘And be forced to hunt him again? Never.’

Manguish was dead, but he was and would have always been a nothing. With Kurzog in the ground, I could at least claim to have achieved something there that day. Some burnish I could take back with me to Sigmaron.

I looked for the rest of my army, but my own determination to conquer Kurzog’s Hill had left the bulk of Frankos’ formations behind me. Everywhere in between skaven ran rampant, pulling down Freeguilder and Astral Templar alike. Beastmen brayed their victory. More than a few blightkings were still standing.

The remaining Jerechs, driven almost onto my toes by the mass of skaven, had to have been aware of what Broudiccan and I were arguing about, even as they fought for their lives. I could see the fear starting to weaken their sword-arms, the unconscious shift towards block over cut that was spreading through their line. They wanted my permission to live. They wanted me to let them run. Crow beat his tail sagely, looking up at me from the gutted remains of a bestigor with criticism in the frosty glitter of his eyes.

They all needed to be reminded of who I was. I am Hamilcar.

I could exhort green shoots from ice. I could talk a Kharadron longbeard out of his last copper comet, or a mother stymphalion from her nest. I was a one-man command echelon, and yes, I’ve convinced more than a few experienced soldiers who should have known better that a crushing defeat was a pyrrhic victory there for the taking.

‘You say you are here in defence of heart and kin in the Seven Words,’ I bellowed, at my most inspirational. ‘Leave now and you may live to see your loved ones again, see them perish in the battles to come. Or you can fight, and see this war ended for their lifetimes. Die here with me, heroes all, and maybe, maybe, feast with me in the Heldenhall!’

The soldiers erupted with savage cheering.

‘For Hamilcar!’ screamed el-Shaah. ‘For Sigmar and the Seven Words!’

The signature war-cry of the Jerech Blue Skies. It had always pleased me that they shouted their vindications in that order.

Broudiccan finally got an arm free and thumped the blightking he had been grappling with to the ground. He collected his starsoul mace with a grunt. I turned and brandished my halberd at Kurzog.

‘Kill the brayseer and all this is over!’ I roared.

‘Bull-head fool,’ Kurzog panted. ‘You would be good beastman, Bear-Eater.’

I took a step towards him, then felt Broudiccan’s hand against my back, shoving me on. I tripped over one of Crow’s disembowelled leavings with a curse and landed on my face in a clatter of sigmarite. A chittering wind swept over me.

Swearing at the Decimator, for Broudiccan had been trying to protect me from myself since the dawning of the Age of Sigmar, I rolled over onto my back.

Broudiccan was entangled with what looked like a shadow. The vague shape of something ratlike and humanoid moved about inside it, like some sort of scrawny creature being harried by a swarm of dark bees. A pair of slanted red eyes glowed fiercely within the head, but otherwise it was smoke layered in smoke. Broudiccan struck the creature with his starsoul mace. The weapon seemed to slow drastically as it hit the shadow, the weapon’s throbbing aura fading into the pits of Ulgu. The figure inside, a skaven I was assuming – and rightly, as I was later to learn – bent around the impeded mace and slammed a shadow-clad footpaw into the Decimator’s chest. The sigmarite cracked and staggered Broudiccan back a pace.

That, if nothing else, gave me reason enough to treat this creature seriously. I’d seen Broudiccan stand up on tables when he had supped too deeply – for my second became surprisingly extrovert when sufficiently watered – inviting hits from ogors and gargants and remaining standing.

Before he could even get both feet back on the ground the Decimator found himself fending off a flurry of blows, black knives wielded in paws, footpaws, tails.

A Jerech ran to his aid, hollering, quartzsword high.

A shadeknife nicked his arm before I, and no doubt he, had even seen it. The soldier dropped his sword immediately, convulsing as his veins turned black and his eyes clouded over. He keeled over, jerking about as his spine bent backwards. It snapped, but continued to contort until the man’s back was flat against the backs of his legs.

‘This one is mine,’ Broudiccan growled, to any other man who might be tempted to intervene, his heavy mace struggling to keep up with the shadow’s attacks.

‘Let Sigendil rise!’ Xeros boomed, striking his staff into the ground and jutting his forehead towards the shadowed rat. Twinned forks of lightning blasted from his eyes, but they sank into the shadow, slowing, dimming, emerging on the other side in full fury to pass harmlessly through Broudiccan and drive a dance of electrocution and death through the mass of skaven and beastmen beyond.

The shadow was unfazed.

I threw Broudiccan a look, but I had yet to meet the foe that the Decimator could not grind down through sheer obstinacy and this rat I expected to be no different.

Rolling back onto my knees, I ran straight into a sprint, bulling through a pair of bestigors as I went. I heard the muscular glide of Crow, gaining on me from behind, his four legs and Celestial grace tackling the icy incline more easily than I was. I was glad to have the gryph-hound with me. If he was still prepared to follow me, then anyone would. A towering bullgor in armour of blued iron and electrum stamped its shod hooves and snorted, steaming up the thick metal ring that pierced its nostrils. I drove it back with a flash from my lantern, and at last there I was, unimpeded before Kurzog. My nemesis. Chittering, squealing, braying voices hemmed us in. The clash of steel against quartz. The crack of lightning. The daemon familiar sat on Kurzog’s earlobe with crossed arms and crossed legs and whispered in his ear. Whatever it was made the brayseer chuckle. Crow responded with a low chirp.

‘You beaten Bear-Eater. And it so, so easy.’

With a roar, stung by truth perhaps, I drew back my halberd.

Kurzog extended an open hand.

A typhoon of blue fire ripped from the brayseer’s palm and hit me full in the chest. My halberd was blasted off to the side somewhere – I didn’t see it go – and I was flung back, going several feet before the spell burned out and dumped me to the ground in a crash of sigmarite. Groaning, I tilted my head back, my view of the battlefield upended. I saw Broudiccan, upside down, struggling against a shadow that had wrapped around his arms and chest. There was something pressed against his neck. I thought I saw a dark grin split the inky space beneath the creature’s eyes, and it sawed the object across Broudiccan’s throat.

‘Brother!’

Blood jetted from the Decimator’s helmet seals, arterial pressure keeping it spraying even as his armour and wargear dissolved into motes. There was a moment of transition where I could still see him, arms folded over his goliath chest, defined in lightning, and then it was over. Thunder rolled outwards in a wake that scattered snowflakes and crushed stone, and the soul of Broudiccan Stonebow leapt free of the shadow creature’s embrace, and the Ghurlands, and tore towards the celestine vaults.

I followed his escape with my eyes.

We are a fractious bunch, we Astral Templars, every man of us a conqueror and a king in life, slave to no whim but his own. Immortality can bond even such men as us. Either that or break us. And if there is one thing an Astral Templar can rail against more violently than the company of equals then it is being broken by a challenge.

Angry tears stung my eyes as I heard the cries of eagles. I looked up in hope, swiftly crushed.

King Augus was quitting the field.

A phalanx of eagle knights went with him, bearing the body of Queen Ellias back to the aetar eyries of the Gorkomon. A handful under Princess Aeygar were still fighting, flying circles around the ungainly skaven gunboats whilst picking off beastman disc-riders and rot flies. Barbarus’ arrows fell as thick as the storm rains over the Stromfels, his star familiar, Nubia, a twinkling incandescence in his wake, but they were too heavily outnumbered. I heard Aeygar shrieking for vengeance, becoming quieter as her eagle knights dragged her from the fray, after her father.

Part of me wished that Broudiccan or Frankos had had half as much courage in confronting me over my haste to do battle over this accursed hill.

The hircine dreadlocks and nine-pronged beard of Brayseer Kurzog filled my view. He stood over me, flanked on either side by burly gors. Black lips drew back to reveal a grin of predator’s teeth.

‘This time it is all about you. And you not even see it.’

Then he raised his staff and smashed it into my face.

Chapter five

I don’t know how long I spent unconscious, or where it was they took me in that time, only that when I did awake I was no longer in the Nevermarsh. I was somewhere underground, or so I judged from the abominable dark and the dank taste of the air. The floor that I was lying on was cold and smelled of wet stone, a film of water bubbling under my top lip with every breath out. It also vibrated slightly. A hum, similar to that which arced through the convalescent domes of the Sigmarabulum, ran through the uncut stone. The pitch was entirely different however, grating and disharmonious, a hellish chorale of belts and gears rather than the palliative hymns of Sigmar’s smithies. I sat up carefully, minding my head on the ceiling, my eyes adjusting to what light they could find. It was sickly and green, emanating from every surface as though the whole place had been daubed in some bioluminescent slime.

I was in a cell. In retrospect that was not entirely surprising, but it struck me as quite revelatory at the time.

The floor was noticeably uneven and its walls were haphazard, sort of bowl-shaped, as if a gouge had been taken out of the wall and some bars installed in the open side as an afterthought. There were cuts in the stone. I reached out my hand to run my fingers along one. Claw marks, I assumed, or teeth.

A skaven cell then. That, too, should probably have come as little surprise, but again my mind seemed set about taking its plight step by step.

Drawing my fingers from the claw mark on the floor, I brought my hand to my face. Despite the illumination, such as it was, I could barely make out the outline of individual fingers. I touched my chest, then my thigh, feeling the coarse weave of the padded gambeson that I wore beneath my sigmarite. They’d taken my armour. Like a blind man in an unfamiliar bed, I groped over the rest of my body and around the meagre floor space of my cell. My weapons were gone too. I reasoned that they would be somewhere nearby – they were bonded to my soul, and difficult to destroy or even damage so long as I remained in this realm. And knowing as much about the Clans Skyre as I did, which was actually very little, though give me five minutes and I could fool even a master warlock otherwise, I was sure that the opportunity to tinker with the artifice of the Six Smiths would be too great to resist. I convinced myself then and there that it was most likely my wargear that they were interested in, and that I’d been thrown into a cell while they figured out how best to make use of a Lord-Castellant of the Astral Templars. Unless leaving me to rot down here was simply Kurzog’s idea of payment in kind.

My hand moved to my face and I hissed. The brayseer had broken my nose. Dried blood had formed a ridged crust over my top lip. The skin around my mouth was bruised and torn.

Useful to know.

‘Akturus is going to love every minute of this story.’ My voice echoed back like a half-hearted impersonation of me.

A bit like Zephacleas Beast-Bane then, in other words.

I stood up, my body aching from however many hours it had spent unconscious on the hard stone, and walked unsteadily towards the bars. I found it strangely difficult to keep my balance, as though the floor was at an unnatural tilt, but fortunately my cell had not been excavated with a Stormcast Eternal in mind and I was able to keep a hand to the ceiling until I made it the handful of steps to where I wanted to be. I gripped the bars with one hand. They were cold and flaky with rust. I took another bar and tensed, the muscles of my chest and arms standing firm as I tried to bend them. After about two minutes of effort, I let go, breathing hard. They were too strong. Either that or I was still too weak from being beaten unconscious and dragged down to a skaven dungeon.

Pressing my face to the bars, I peered out.

The passage outside was of a similarly roughshod appearance to my cell, dug out of the rock by skaven teeth. It was empty. Not even sconces or brackets on the walls. That bemused me for a moment until I remembered that skaven preferred to function by scent and sound rather than rely on their relatively feeble sense of sight. It was actually a little humbling – though admittedly, only a little – to consider that when I’d fought the skaven on the Nevermarsh they’d essentially been doing it blindfolded. If I needed another reminder that I was incarcerated on their terms, then that was it.

Another ragged line of gouged out cells and corroded bars faced me from the other side of the passage, extending beyond my slime-lit bubble and on into actual darkness.

They were empty too.

I felt a fluttering in my belly that I didn’t much like.

‘I know there must be someone out there. Show yourselves!’ My voice rang down the passage, then back again, so weak it was almost unrecognisable as me by the time it returned. ‘I have the loudest voice in Azyr, you know.’ There was no answer. I growled. ‘No mountain can contain Hamilcar Bear-Eater!’

Nothing.

‘Do you not even guard me, Kurzog?’

Still nothing.

I sat back down, more or less where I’d started.

All my bravado seemed wasted with no one to intimidate or impress. I laid my hand on my stomach, unnerved by the sensation of butterflies batting about inside. I was reminded of something that Broudiccan had said to me. That I would do anything for an audience. Alone, I think for the first time since my reforging as a Stormcast Eternal, and perhaps before even that, I understood what he meant. I felt as if I’d been parted from a twin. Bereft of my better half. Discovering that my persona had been little more than an artifice built to appease the needs and expectations of others was disconcerting. Ordinarily I would have laughed it off, but I found that I couldn’t face the mirth of my own soulless echo just then.

And the reminder of Broudiccan only made me feel worse.

I couldn’t avoid thinking back to my own reforging.

A warrior’s death is never going to be a joyful experience, but my last one was about as unpleasant as a soldier of Sigmar can hope for. My body ripped apart by the Dread Abyssal Ashigaroth, my soul halfway down its throat before the pull of the Mallus dragged me from its gorge. Broudiccan’s end had been a peck on the cheek by comparison, but no matter the means of return, a soul’s experience on the Anvil soon renders the pain of its delivery insignificant.

Imagine that you are steel. Hot and impure. You are material, and to the Smith that is all you are. You are not a man to him. You are something to be worked, something functional yet wondrous to be remade. With every blow of his hammer you feel yourself broken, elements both precious and half-remembered coming off you in hissing sparks of mortality. Then you are turned and you are broken again. And again. And again. You are doused in steam, heated in fire, returned to the Anvil and the ministrations of the Smith once more. It can last for days or for decades. Time matters not on the Anvil. Vandus Hammerhand is said to have emerged from the Forge Eternal mere heartbeats after his entry, which is just one more reason why Sigmar’s golden boy and I will never see eye to eye. For the rest of us mere immortals it is a trial of endurance and pain, and it is the trial that makes us in the end. And when the Smith holds up his finished work to the light of the Broken World, most of us are less than what we were before, as anything that has been broken and remade must be. We are not perfect. Even Sigmar is not perfect. Grungni, as sure as Tzeentch has eyes, isn’t perfect and neither are his Six Smiths. But we are good enough to sheathe anew in sigmarite and send back to war.

Because war is like snow.

Even if you can’t see it, it’s falling on someone, somewhere.

A traumatic death and a lengthy reforging had left me damaged in more ways than I think I understood at the time. Nightmares of both had plagued me for years, and had only just begun to subside before Sigmar returned me to the Ghurlands, to capture the Seven Words alongside Akturus Ironheel’s Imperishables. It was one of the few subjects that I never talked about, but there are no secrets within a warrior chamber on campaign. They all knew. Broudiccan certainly knew.

Thinking of my steadfast second-in-command going through the same experience made my stomach knot. We have all gone through it once, of course, but the best of us need never do so again. This would be Broudiccan’s first return to the Anvil, and that he went in my stead left me feeling hollow.

Do you hear that sound, my friends? It is the Bell of Lamentation tolling for poor, sorry Hamilcar.

I sat there in my self-recriminations and silence for hours or minutes. As it was upon the Anvil, so too did time matter little in sunless solitary confinement. I had no way of knowing how long I wallowed like that before the sound of a key turning in a lock jolted me out of my misery.

I stood up quickly as a fantastically obese clanrat strutted past my cell. He was blind in both eyes, missing an ear and several teeth, and the right side of his face was a mess of milky white scar tissue that only enhanced his good looks. Despite being in the heart of his own lair, he wore an iron hauberk. Though if I’d been through what he apparently had, I think I’d wear one too. A fat ring of keys clinked from a leather belt that was almost white with the strain of closing around his belly. Given the well-known skaven proclivity for consuming one’s rivals, I assumed that this one had to be near to the top of his particular hill.

He sniffed at me and grinned, baring his teeth and chittering something to the two thugs that followed him in, which I somehow doubted would be complimentary.

They were big, broad across their shoulders, thick ropes of muscle rubbing together under their mangy brown fur. They were mostly naked but for fur and a bit of loincloth, their bodies covered instead in brands that reminded me of street gang tattoos or the tribal runes that I had idly painted into my own flesh. Theirs were crude and angular things, the horned cross of their repellent god drawn in various pigments and sizes. Unlike theirs, I did not know what mine were supposed to represent. Perhaps they depicted gods too.

I could, however, recognise low-lifes when I saw them.

Call it a gift.

While Milk Scar watched me, his heavies dragged another prisoner, one arm apiece, to the cell across from mine. I felt my chest swell. I’d been consciously captive for less than a day, or so I guessed, and I was already overwhelmingly grateful for the gift of another furless being. In size and proportion, he was clearly human. Judging by the scars on his flesh and the size of his bones, he had probably been a well-built one too until incarceration had worked its curse on his muscles. His skin, though, was a mossy shade of green, and his hair was the colour of autumn leaf fall. He appeared to be unconscious. If not for the fact that the skaven were bothering to lock him up and hadn’t already eaten him I would have thought him dead.

Squeaking at his henchrats, Milk Scar locked the cell door, then hauled himself around to go back the way he’d just come.

Something in me snapped at the thought of being left alone in the dark so soon.

I drove my arm through the bars and grabbed for the keyring hanging from Milk Scar’s expanse of waist. He didn’t so much as flinch, which was unexpected as the skaven aren’t exactly well known for their cool under duress. It occurred to me then that, blind as he was, he must have known exactly where to stand so as to be well out of reach should anyone take exception to their confinement. He turned his pearly eyes to me and snickered, air whistling through the gaps in his smirk. He chittered something I didn’t understand to one of his henchrats who then smacked me on the wrist with a wooden cudgel.

I made a barking noise, surprise and anger, and grabbed for the skaven’s club, but he knew his business and it was already out of my reach.

‘Bad dog,’ said Milk Scar in passable Azyri. ‘I do not like-take disobedience.’

‘My name is Hamilcar Bear-Eater, vermin.’

‘I know-smell who you are.’

‘And who are you? I would know the name of my captor.’ I pressed my face back to the bars and bared my teeth. ‘Before I eat him.’

The clanrat leered at me, tongue lolling over the side of his mouth. ‘Fool-fool. I am not your captor.’

I thumped the bars in frustration, the ratman tittering as he strolled off. ‘I will find a way out of here! I will walk out wearing your skin for boots and gloves and with your skull to sup from when I grow weary of slaughtering your kin. You hear me, rat? Answer me!’ His wheezy laughter faded as the dungeon door clanked shut behind him, leaving me again in semi-darkness.

When I had calmed down enough, I sat back down. I frowned through the bars. I frowned at the ceiling. I turned to frown at the other cell across the way.

‘Friend,’ I called over. Nothing. ‘Talk to me, brother.’

He was out cold, only the shallow rasp of his breaths to answer my welcome.

I sighed.

I wondered if his being imprisoned here where I could see him was a deliberate ploy on the part of my captors. That he had been badly abused, and over a significant length of time, was obvious. Was this the psychological equivalent of a torturer displaying the paraphernalia of his craft? Did they expect me to spend my hours of solitude henceforth consumed by the terror of what awaited me at its end? If so, then they sorely underestimated the fortitude of the Stormcast Eternals.

I may not have exactly edified myself with my response to captivity, but if there is one thing that unites all Stormcast Eternals it is our capacity to endure, and familiarity with, pain.

I looked forward to their attempt.

If only to give me someone to talk to.

The hours stretched by. I tested the bars one by one. I shook them, pulled them, threw myself against them. None of them budged. I tried scratching at the walls. Somehow I came to the conclusion that if a skaven could burrow through it, then so could Hamilcar Bear-Eater, but I lacked their claws, and I surrendered a fingernail long before the rock was ready to yield. Frustrated and bloody-fingered, I was the very model of a caged beast. My thoughts drifted from sullen defiance to my brothers, the Bear-Eaters.

‘They will come,’ I muttered to myself, quietly, so as not to disturb Zephacleas.

I had named my echo Zephacleas. It seems strange now, looking back, but it felt natural at the time.

Frankos had been far from me and the main thrust of the skaven attack when I’d fallen, along with the bulk of the Freeguild. The Knight-Heraldor had always been blessed with a cooler head than I would have known what to do with, and I was confident, as only I could be, that he would have been smart enough to get off Kurzog’s Hill before being overrun. Barbarus too. I hadn’t seen the King in the Sky after the aetar had abandoned us, and I could only hope that he had gone with them. And Xeros… Sigmar, I never thought I’d wish the Stormcloud well, but if the Lord-Relictor lived then there was no place in creation that the skaven could harbour me and hope to remain hidden from his stormsight.

I turned my gaze inwards.

Introspection had never suited me and I was about a century out of practice, but a Stormcast Eternal could always tell where he was. Every realm has a magical resonance that responds in its own peculiar way to the spark of Azyr we all bear within us. And the light of Sigendil shines upon us always, calling us to war just as it had in my mortal days. I was almost certain I was still in Ghur. I could sense the same savage gyres in the aether that my soul had felt as kindred when they had first met in the Free City of Cartha, but there was a scratching, chittering white noise running through it that gnawed at my confidence in that judgment.

‘Be alive, Stormcloud.’ I sat in silence for an interminable spell longer. ‘But pray Sigmar, don’t bring Akturus with you.’

The sound of the dungeon door being reopened startled me from my reverie.

How long had it been? Long enough to have become a moot consideration.

I was up and at the bars before Milk Scar had made the short swagger to my cell.

He looked pleased with himself. Never a promising sign in such a transparent sadist. In addition to his two thugs, who looked shifty and had their weapons out, he had brought two more clanrat guards with lowered spears to back them up. A heavy set of solid bar manacles fell from his paws and onto the floor beside him with a clunk. One of the spear-rats scurried closer to pole them through the bars and into my cell.

‘On-on,’ said Milk Scar. ‘Fast-quick.’

‘Why?’

‘We walk-scurry.’ The ratman bared his teeth at me, and clipped the ear of his spear-rat who obligingly prodded at the manacles until they butted against the outside of my foot. ‘To learn name of your captor.’

Chapter six

I put on the manacles. I stepped forward on command and let the nervous-looking spear-rat insert a locking bar through each wrist while the other attached another set around my ankles. These, at least, were linked by a short length of rusty chain rather than being a solid lump of iron, allowing me to move a little, even if it did force me to shuffle about like a monk of the Listening Order. The thought of beating the two ratmen to death with their locking bars did occur, but I am not nearly the unthinking animal that I like to be portrayed as. That they feared me enough to be so cautious was flattering, but I knew that killing a couple of clanrat guards was not going to get me out of that cell. And I did want to get out of that cell. I was curious to know who was mad enough to think that they could cage the Bear-Eater, and why.

After that, I allowed (though I was definitely stretching the definition of ‘allowed’ by this point) them to feed a metal rod through steel eyes in both sets of fetters and lock them together. By the time Milk Scar was satisfied enough to unlock the door I was trussed like a Sigmarzeit hog for roasting.

I still fancied my chances in a fight if it came to it, but fleeing a skaven warren in that state was hardly going to be the most glorious escapade of my life.

I was content to wait for my moment. For now.

The spear-rats both shuffled behind me as I stepped out of the cell and into the passage. One of Milk Scar’s henchrats approached with a hood, a look in his eyes that suggested he was wondering how to overcome the clear foot of disparity between his uppermost reach and the top of my head with dignity.

‘No-no,’ said Milk Scar, to his henchrat’s poorly disguised relief. ‘Our… friends want-wish to see him.’ His struggles over the word ‘friend’ suggested to me that Queekish had no proper translation for it.

Then one of the spear-rats prodded me in the back and we were moving.

Exploring the interior of a skaven lair was one of those rare experiences that I’d often found time to imagine but had yet to indulge. Like hunting vulcharc through the Crystal Labyrinth of Tzeentch, scratching my name onto the black stones of the Shrine of Elixia in the famous Hanging Vale of Anvrok, or conquering the Tattered Peaks of Ulgu where, I’ve heard, you can see older stars than any in Azyr. Naturally, then, I went in with certain expectations, all of which were grossly surpassed by the reality.

As soon as the door was opened, I gagged on the stench of rat. If my gaoler had soaked a cloth in piss and ordure, allowed it to marinate with wet fur and fouled meat, and then stuffed the finished article in my mouth the pungence could not have been more overpowering. It was almost enough for me to turn around and beg for the hood. The effect of the odour was worsened by the fact that my sense of smell, along with an equally disturbed one of touch, was almost all I had to go on. The same awful green half-light that had permeated the dungeons coated everything here as well, enough to see by, but only just; no colour there but green and the many shades of it towards black. The clanrat right in front of me was less defined than a shadow.

Even the main tunnels were narrow.

The skaven scurried on all fours and it was tight even for them. No consideration was spared for the eight-foot-tall Stormcast Eternal with fetters binding ankles and wrists, and the skaven behind me took every moment of struggle as fair excuse to prod me in the back with their spears.

‘Try that again and I will break your arms,’ I snarled.

They simply tittered and prodded harder. As if the passages were not cramped enough with just the six of us, we had to contend with a constant flood of skaven coming in the opposite direction, as well as plenty more trying to overtake us from behind. A thoroughfare through skaven eyes, or to be more accurate, skaven whiskers, seemed to be a survival contest of biting and clawing and bullying of the fittest. I’d taken more than a few claw marks, and a few more sly spear jabs I might add, before we’d even lost sight of the dungeons.

Very occasionally the passage widened, but if I was expecting any respite from the deranged horrors of skavendom then I was to be disappointed.

The tunnel seemed to have been dug with just enough deliberation to wind around a succession of larger natural caverns, widening as it did so – in this instance, into a vertiginous shelf of flat-ish rock overlooking the chaotic sprawl of verminous industry below. Scaffolding clambered up the walls, wreathed in the impenetrable toxic smog of the hell-foundries and machinery in its depths. The rickety platforms that had been built onto the very top of the scaffolds put me in mind of dead fish floating on a poisoned lake, and I’d seen more than a few of those in my time battling the Rotbringers of Ghur.

There are many horrors that I’ve borne witness to in my life, but the sound and vibrations of those skaven machines, ravening and consuming with neither animus nor soul, made me shudder.

Milk Scar moved unerringly through it all in spite of his blindness. He would scurry along, inches from a thousand-foot drop, whiskers atwitch at some change in pressure or humidity that I couldn’t detect. Then he would count out his steps before halting at a bustling intersection, sniffing both ways, then dashing headlong into a seething torrent of vermin – as if it were somehow preferable to the seething torrent of vermin that had been there two seconds beforehand. When he counted, I counted, doing my best to recall our route, memorising the rhythm of the landmarks, such as they were. A side-passage from which the unappetising stench of roasted flesh emerged. Another that went up, skaven scrambling over each other for claw-holds, the chittering and screaming of skaven barter echoing down. We went through a sprawling warren of hide yurts that I took to be the skaven equivalent of an embassy quarter. Beastmen brayed and jeered as I was led through, shaking their horns in a riotous display. I bared my teeth gamely and tried to clench my fists and flex my muscles. My fetters wouldn’t let me raise my hands above my waist, but I was pleased to see that the effort offended them enormously.

A scratch post, little more than a wooden stake that had been hammered into the ground and covered in claw-scratch writing, pointed off in a bewildering array of directions. Every indecipherable notch corresponded to a branching tunnel. The acrid stench of skaven scent markings pooled there at the confluence. I retched, rattling my fetters as I tried to cover my mouth. I clenched my jaw, trying to breathe through my gritted teeth, but I could still taste it.

The place was a maze, a labyrinth, a hundred thousand skaven or more fighting across it day and night, and I’d not glimpsed so much as a hint of a way out.

If I was to have any hope of getting out of there, then the one advantage I could rely on would be the cowardice of the individual skaven and the sheer anarchy of their society. If I tried to fight my way out now then as many would try to run away as try and stop me, and a hundred times as many again would be reliably oblivious to the fact that I was ever there.

That still left me with a task, but I would gladly leap across that river when I was good and ready.

After about half an hour of scuffling and scraping, I had a respite of sorts when Milk Scar stopped scrabbling along with such easy haste and began probing out the path ahead with his tail. I assumed that we had to be venturing into newer delvings, or perhaps into an area that he did not know so implicitly. The passages all looked alike to me, I confess, though I did start to notice something different in myself. The sense I had of the Ghurlands began to recede, replaced by the sense of something gummy and vile, chewing on me from within. Even the light of far Sigendil became briefly occulted, as if some miasma had passed between us. Even on my brief incursion into Shadespire, I had not felt so distant from my maker.

Once again, I found myself in the implausible scenario of fervently praying for Xeros Stormcloud’s wellbeing.

‘Here-here.’

Milk Scar gestured to a door that had been set into the wall of the passage. It shouldn’t have been all that sensational, but it was, and I only understand why it was when I realised that I hadn’t seen a single one since we’d left my cell. The skaven exist cheek by jowl, after all, and clearly placed a low premium on individual space. The door was covered in brass wheels and rods, all of them lit a metallic green, but there was no handle or latch that I could see. I wondered for a second if I might have been mistaken about it being a door at all, but then Milk Scar scuttled up to it and knocked. There was no answer, but as the gaoler withdrew his paw the wheels covering the door began to spin, bars sliding through tracks, and of its own inanimate will the door lurched outwards.

The sight of it made my skin crawl, and I turned to Milk Scar.

‘What are you waiting for?’ I said.

‘I not go-scurry in there.’ His spear-rats gave me a jab for good measure.

Rattling my fetters as I made to lift my hands in surrender, I shuffled inside alone.

Though the pervasive illumination persisted, it was somehow darker inside, as though this burrow was the source of all that was black and it was thicker here as a consequence. Numerous low-slung tables cluttered the floor, spilling over with bits of metal, springs and gnawed wires. Tools that no five-fingered, two-handed, or right-minded man would have any use for lay everywhere, discarded, half-made. The walls were clad in shelving, none of it level, an eclectic collection of rusty machinery and ancient tomes. Spidery text crawled down the books’ spines, and averse as I am to lettering of any hand or kind, these works had me looking quickly away.

Across from the door was a chaise. It was Azyrite quality, the makers mark glittering dully on one wooden foot. One of the many fine things that the skaven had looted from the Seven Words in their last unsuccessful raid, I suspected. I certainly doubted that there could be too many cordwainers of the Magrittan school on this side of the Nevermarsh. The fine cordovan leather was shredded, the seat sagging. At first I thought it unoccupied, but then I saw the two sinister red eyes that floated in the darker shadow above its cushions, the jagged chasm of a grin.

I started towards it without thinking.

The chains looping through my leg irons pulled taut. I yanked instinctively on my handcuffs to break my fall, only managing to rattle the connecting bar, and struck my head on the corner of the closest table. I groaned, more with embarrassment than with pain, as screws and washers and ball bearings all clattered over the floor, and over me, though the wetness spreading from my temple was reminder enough that even the Stormcast Eternals are not so mighty that they needn’t fear their own stupidity.

The shadow-rat tittered, like a cold breeze brushing across my gravestone.

‘Leave him, Malikcek,’ said another voice, nearby. ‘Leave us.’

‘That’s right, leave us, before I–’ I wriggled in a rattle of rods and chains and looked up, but the chaise was already empty. I blinked. The depression that the shadowy creature had left in the cushions slowly crinkled out. ‘What? How did he…?’

‘The gods have been harsh-cruel to poor Malikcek.’

Shrugging off the gash to my forehead, I tensed the muscles of my abdomen to draw myself upright and turned towards the sound of the voice.

The creature hunched amongst the cluttered arcana was skaven in size and form, but encased entirely in metal. Coppery whiskers protruded from a muzzle lined with diamond-edged teeth. White hairs tufted through gaps in the ironwork where plates had been misaligned or fitted together poorly. Even the master warlocks of the Clans Skyre, it seemed, were not immune to the freneticism and failure of detail that marred the products of their demented, but undoubted, genius. Even when it came to their own forms.

‘And as you know-see for yourself, Malikcek is cruel-harsh to the gods in kind.’

The warlock pointed at me, then gestured to the chaise.

His hand was an articulated iron claw, bolted onto the shell of his arm, and studded with crystals, lenses, and odd designs. Out of curiosity more than genuine obedience I manoeuvred myself towards the chaise and dropped into it. The warlock made no effort to assist me. Nor did he sit himself. He didn’t stir at all, just watched me struggle to perform his bidding, his eyes like captured ice within the dark confines of a metal helm. It took no special gift on my part to sense the power behind that gaze. I’ve fought many mighty beings in my time. Mortarchs. Daemons. All of them paled in comparison to what I felt standing before me in that warren, and though I’ve stood against or alongside greater powers in the years since and not been cowed, only once before had I experienced its like.

When I’d clasped the hand of Sigmar and been thrown to Ghur for the very first time. Where the power of the God-King was uplifting, golden light from horizon to horizon and the glory of the stars themselves, what I felt in the warlock’s presence was something smothering and dark. It was a patchwork of rust and shadow, scraps of power sewn together with a ratman’s infinitely imaginative spite.

It occurred to me that I, and the Seven Words, were in far greater danger than I had realised.

‘Why am I here?’ I asked.

‘Because I wished it. Because you are valuable to me.’ He tittered. It was a dry, retching sound, like a blade in need of oiling that wouldn’t come free of its sheath. ‘Because take-luring you was easy.’

I shook my head, trying to understand. ‘Kurzog said that it was about me. To capture me? Why?’

The warlock said nothing. His eye-glow was unblinking and his mask expressionless.

‘Who are you?’ I demanded.

He cocked his head. It was a skaven mannerism I was familiar with, but performed with a stiffness of movement more reminiscent of the newly animated flesh of a zombie or the bark of a slumbering treekin than a ratman. ‘In Blight City they call-squeak the Rat That Was, the Ur-Rat. To the Shadow Lords of Decay in the Realm of Ruin I am Outcast. In Phoenicium I am Life-Taker and Gnawing Winter. In the Fractal Fortress of the Legion of Fate I–’

I interrupted him with a chuckle.

‘They have a few good names for me there too.’

I had been expecting him to bristle. It is what most verminous maniacs would have done in his place, but he did not. He just studied me, as though I were a moving part in some mechanism of his and had just started running backwards.

‘What does your mother call you?’ I said.

‘Mother…?’ The warlock pondered the question, then performed another creaking laugh. ‘Ikrit is my name. Was. As good as any. Quicker to say than most.’

‘Why am I here?’ I said again.

Ikrit didn’t answer.

He clanked towards me, unclawing his huge mechanical hand one stiff-jointed digit at a time until his palm was open to me. I tried to draw myself out of reach – and you would too, under the circumstances – but my movements were hampered by my restraints, and by the back of the chaise. He laid his claw upon my chest. A frisson of power surged from the cold metal and into my skin. It was the wild vigour of Ghur. The steady life-pulse of Ghyran. The iron grip of Chamon. The enduring stasis of Shyish. More. Powers from realms I had never trodden and peoples I had never encountered, all somehow welded together and fused by skaven sorcery into that cold mechanical shell.

I understood then what I had felt from him before, and for the first time in my many lives, I think I felt afraid.

‘The lightning-god and his duardin slaves take-steal from all of Pantheon, and mix-meld to make something unique in the realms. And powerful.’ He tittered, excited, as he looked at me, his eye glow flickering. ‘First step is hardest, I know. Innovation not easy. But after that? What has been made once can be copied. What has been copied once can be made again. The lightning-god has a secret. I want-want.’

‘Why me?’

The warlock shushed me with a metal finger upon my lips. I growled and tried to shake my head, but for a skaven-sized creature Ikrit was obscenely strong. He pinned me down with one finger and bent in as if to sniff me in the manner of his race, but his ironclad snout emitted no mortal breath that I could hear, or feel against my face.

‘I ask-squeak the questions now.’

Chapter seven

Day and night didn’t exist in the warren, but the skaven had their own uncanny sense of routine. Sunrise came for me on the point of a spear in my ribs or in my back, depending on where my captors had left me to pass out the night before. There would be a squeak from the gloaming dark and then my two favourite rats in the eight realms would exchange spears for buckets. The first would contain a grisly slop that, the first time it had been spooned out and onto the floor of my cell, I wasn’t sure whether it was intended as a meal or a cellmate. I’d fought Chaos spawn with fewer tubes, eyeballs, and fingernails than one spoonful of what I reluctantly decided was breakfast.

For several days I refused to cooperate, and not just because I was waiting for my breakfast to make the first move.

For all our differences, you and I, we are more alike than not. I am a man still, albeit one who has passed through the Cairns of Tempering, and I would starve as well as any man would. I considered it. Death is never something to be welcomed, but when it ceases to be the end of all things… well, then certain unpalatable options become open to consideration. The only thing that made me hold my nose and eat was the knowledge that starvation would be a slow death, and Milk Scar undoubtedly had ways of forcing sustenance upon me were I to refuse indefinitely.

My brothers in the Hallowed Knights would have seen that as a capitulation, but that’s Hallowed Knights for you, bear them no mind. I prefer to see it as finding victories where you see them.

After all of that was dealt with, I would be taken to Ikrit.

We would always start with questions.

‘The Anvil of Apotheosis, how does it work-work?’

‘It is duardinium, mined from the heart of a still-living star by Grungni’s pick and kept alight by the prayers of ten thousand skink priests.’

‘How is the work-labour shared between the Smith-God and his servants?’

‘The Six Smiths are all just aspects of Grungni. If you look close enough you can see the differences in the character of the Stormhosts and the sigmarite they wear.’

‘The reforging – how does it hurt-feel?’

‘Like showering under starlight. Sigmar is a just and loving god.’

If you were to delve deep enough into the Well of Eternity, the font of all knowledge that resides at the heart of the Impossible Fortress, then you would surely find Hamilcar Bear-Eater shouting nonsense from the bottom.

With each day that this went on my lies became progressively more stretched and extravagant, until I was earnestly explaining how Sigmar had traded the mortal memories of the Stormcasts to Malerion in exchange for the secret of immortality and how every item of sigmarite was hand-nurtured from a single Dracothion scale. It is just not within me to keep quiet when invited to speak, and feeding my captor the most outrageous falsehoods I could imagine was an act of defiance. It was what got me through each day.

Ikrit, however, was unfazed by any lie. He would take his time to consider every answer, no matter how ludicrous, and then simply ask another question.

One time, I found him tinkering with my warding lantern.

The warlock had the ornate device held between a set of browned metal clamps, measuring, poking, poring over every groove and embellishment in the casing with a lensed instrument, which resembled a crystal butterfly that had been turned inside out. The lantern was glorious despite its confinement, and my chest swelled for the sight of it, the timely reminder that the same might also yet be said of me. My armour and my weapons are extensions of my soul. My warding lantern is an extension of Azyr as well, a sigmarite outpost of the Mortal Realms where I and the Celestial overlap, and I felt a glow simply from being near to it again.

‘How does it work?’ Ikrit would ask, as though speaking through his array of lenses to the lantern itself rather than to me. ‘Does energy come from within or is it sent-drawn from Azyr? Or from you? How does it chose-choose between those it heals and those it burns?’

I answered those questions in the same way as I had the others.

And regardless of how it began, how I chose to defy him, it would end with torture.

I call it that because I can’t think of any other word to describe it, but as soon as the implements were drawn and I was suitably restrained he would ask no further questions.

With tiny knives, he would cut into my veins and bleed me, filling vials that he would then subject to harsh lights and Chaotic energies. One day he neglected to question me at all, so excited was he by some new frolic he had in mind for us both. Between thumb and foreclaw of his gauntlet, he showed me what looked like a fleck of iron dust, explaining, so enthused was he, that it was a miniscule automaton of his own creation. Then he forced a vial full of the tiny constructs into my mouth and clamped my nose shut with his claws. Even a Stormcast Eternal cannot hold his breath forever. For days afterwards, I was laid low with hacking coughs and fevered dreams with the sense of things crawling beneath my skin. It was a period in which Ikrit seemed almost animated by what, in his words, his machines ‘told him’ about my body’s innermost workings. He would burn me, freeze me, hook me up via thickets of cables to spinning, ball-armed devices and jolt me with sorcerously generated power.

He wanted to trap the storm and measure it, to see where the man ended and the scaffolding of the gods began.

The worst days though were when he went into my thoughts, and with claws of Light and of Shadow dug deep into my memories.

I saw Ramus of the Shadowed Soul, the look in his mortis helm as I charged through the Bone Sea Gate to save his life. My old friend and comrade, Brakka, lost to the soul-mills for a hundred years and still counting, frowning at a beast spoor in the snow. Vikaeus, the Lord-Veritant, standing in the blustery great hall of the Seven Words in armour of ivory and azure and frowning up at me on my throne. Then Vikaeus again, same frown, but different. Her long hair was free, unbound, dusted with goldspar, a gown of sablewool and zephyrarch feathers arousing feelings in me that I was not sure one of the God-King’s blessed Eternals should be permitted to hold. The memory wasn’t one of mine, I was sure of it, but it tapped a wellspring of emotion that left me gasping.

And what I saw, Ikrit plundered.

‘You do not remember your life before,’ he said, withdrawing his gauntlet from my forehead so as to glare into my eyes. ‘There are times I think-wonder if it is the gods’ spite. They cannot stop me now, so they take-cheat from what was. Fool-fool. Superstitious, I am. Yes-yes. They do not have that power. Mortal flesh as ours is not built-made to be as we have become. That is all.’ Then he closed his gauntlet over my brow again, and I ground my teeth in readiness of more pain. ‘I thank you, Stormcast. I understand now.’

It was unusual for my captor to speak at all at these times, never mind so candidly about himself, but after the day’s trials I had not the energy or the wit to ply him for any more.

I would find out what he had in mind for me soon enough, of course, and pine for such simple torments as these.

Now that Ikrit had himself a newer plaything in me, my green-skinned friend in the cell across from mine slowly recovered his strength.

His name was Barrach.

‘How are you faring this morning, friend?’ I mumbled as I slipped free of unconsciousness for another day of the same.

That too had become part and parcel of my daily routine, and I measured the passage of time by Barrach’s progression from monosyllabic grunts to actual words, generally inviting me to shut my mouth and die.

‘Stronger,’ he grunted, balling up his fists, his voice like wind-blown leaves scuttling across the empty passage.

It did not seem to occur to him that he was recovering from his mistreatment in order to suffer more mistreatment once Ikrit grew bored of me. He was a warrior, and if nothing else, I could say that I knew warriors. We are simple souls, pleased by simple things, and he revelled only in his recovering strength.

‘You look it,’ I said, though in truth it was difficult to see much of anything in the dark. He sounded it. ‘How long have you been awake?’

The darkness shrugged. ‘A while. You were having a bad dream.’

In tried and tested fashion, I laughed it off. I doubted that Barrach could have seen my expression from over there, but mossy skin and autumnal hair generally went hand-in-glove with a variety of uncanny talents, so I thought it better to go overboard.

‘Nightmares dream of Hamilcar,’ I added.

‘You were calling out for someone called Broudiccan,’ he said, in a flat tone that made it plain that this was not an invitation to discuss it further. ‘I thought you were going to bring the guards.’

I scoffed, silently cursing my body for its aches as I stiffly set it upright. Had I not been a King of the Winterlands? The Winterlands had once had hundreds of them, of course. Kings, that is. Still, even reforged, you’d have thought that my body would have been more accustomed to lying on undressed stone.

‘I don’t know how you stay in such high spirits,’ said Barrach. ‘The warlock must be going easier on you than he did on me.’

‘You’re probably right,’ I said, cheerfully. Despite my admittedly well-earned reputation for vainglory, I knew the difference between inspiring by example and simply inspiring.

‘How do you still smile?’

Practice, same as anything, but I wasn’t about to tell him that. ‘Hope.’

‘Hope.’ He sneered for a moment, then fell into an aggressive, brooding kind of quiet.

I hadn’t told him in so many words, but I was actually passingly familiar with his people. I’d never seen them myself, of course – the green skin would have been an immediate giveaway otherwise – but as soon as he’d recovered enough to start talking in whole sentences, I’d recognised his stories of home. His tribe had once been native to the high slopes of the Gorwood, and had weathered the Age of Chaos in service not to Sigmar but to a Ghurite sylvaneth of, I’d imagine, some considerable power. I wasn’t about to call a man out on worshipping a treekin, as I’d probably put my faith in crazier things than that as a mortal. Better a slightly suspect axe than no axe at all, I say. Sigmar had left the Mortal Realms to look after themselves for hundreds of years, nobody was arguing otherwise, and beneath the heady summit of Mount Celestian there existed a great wilderness of gods and goddesses, demi-gods, greater daemons, zodiacal god-beasts and beings both ancient enough and powerful enough to live as gods and command the worship of men. I didn’t know which of those applied to our sylvaneth, for I’d come across her only in the last moments of her sickness. And that would have been after I’d slain the berserk Treelord that had slaughtered her followers and driven the remainder into the Nevermarsh.

I could see why hope would be the sort of word he might sneer at.

‘You’re a warrior, aren’t you?’ I said.

He grunted. ‘How can you tell that from in here?’

‘I can tell.’

I sensed the darkness unclench slightly. ‘I was more than just a warrior. I was Champion of the Wild Harvest.’

I tapped on my head, hard, because he needed to hear it. The scabbed over reminders of Ikrit’s most recent efforts brought out a wince of pain. ‘Being a warrior isn’t about what’s in here. We’re trapped. Unarmed. Underfed. Injured. My people will probably never find us, and neither will yours. Zephacleas will probably be named Lord-Commander of the Astral Templars and make me call him “lord”.’ I tapped my forehead again. ‘That’s what this says.’ I lowered my hand to my chest and tapped on my heart with my middle finger. ‘This is where heroes live. And it’s too stupid to care about any of that. It says that I’m going to kill Ikrit with my bare hands, and that you and I are going to fight our way out of this place together.’

Barrach snorted, the first real laugh I’d heard from him in our weeks together, and the smile it bid from me was equally unforced.

‘Does it say when?’

‘Soon.’

‘You’re a rare one, Hamilcar. You were a champion to your people too, I think.’

I waved, immodestly. ‘Every so often someone tries to raise a statue, but I always talk them out of it.’ I angled my face so that its profile might better catch the luminescence of the walls. ‘Can you imagine this in marble or gold?’

Barrach laughed. ‘My sister always told me I thought too highly of myself. I can’t think what she’d make of you.’

The affection in his voice was as clear as stars on a black sky. I found myself closing my eyes, as if I could feel the light against my face.

‘Is she a warrior too?’

‘In a way. She’s a priestess of the Savage Maiden.’ I’d never heard the name, but assumed that he referred to the god-sylvaneth who had died in my arms about a year before. I was pleased to see that his people had taken the small matter of her death well in their stride. He appeared to shake his head, remembering something. ‘We fought like spring and winter. Everything I did displeased her.’

‘Older or younger?’

‘Older. And didn’t she always remind me of it.’

My face softened, my smile growing brittle, though I wasn’t sure why. ‘I… I had an older brother. Three of them. I think. I… don’t remember much about them.’

But Barrach wasn’t listening.

‘The skaven came during the festival of midwinter, when the warriors plant our blades in the earth for the Season of War. I think it was her they came for. My sister.’ His gaze became distant. ‘I held them off. Long enough for her and her sisters to escape. They only took me because I was all that was left. They didn’t want to return to Ikrit empty-handed, I suppose.’

‘How did your sister manage to escape?’ I asked. ‘The assassin that came for me, Malikcek, he doesn’t seem the sort that it would be easy to get away from.’

A thin smile glinted at me from the dark. ‘We have our ways. The Gorkai are not easily found.’

I remembered the grassy woman that I thought I’d seen observing me from the foot of Kurzog’s Hill before the battle, but it didn’t seem important enough to mention at the time.

‘The warlock wants to make himself into a Stormcast Eternal,’ I said, snorting at the sheer audacity of his hubris. And trust me, nobody knows more about hubris than I do. ‘And he’s going to pick me apart until he thinks he knows how to do it. What would he want with you, or your sister?’

‘You really do think a lot of yourself. Are all Sigmar’s warriors like you?’

‘Oh no,’ I said, and no greater truth has ever been spoken.

‘Well–’

The creak of an iron door cut short his explanation.

He glanced at me and I nodded, motioning him back from the bars and out of sight. Milk Scar was more neglectful than cruel, drawing some amusement from the torment of his charges, but only where doing so required the minimum of actual effort on his part. I could just about see Barrach’s outline, an emaciated but still muscular shade hovering just behind the bars. The skaven would still be able to smell him of course, but if you think a Stormcast Eternal looks impressive then you should try smelling one through a skaven’s nose. Their attention would be wholly on me.

Milk Scar strutted between the rows of empty cells, keys jangling against his belly. He sniffed the air. His two henchrats chittered amongst themselves, apparently annoyed at finding me already awake and upright as if I’d made them carry their spears all this way for nothing. The nearest was clearly debating whether to stab me anyway, for the sake of his routine. Milk Scar shook his head and cuffed the ratman over the back of the head, then squeaked and gestured to me.

The henchrat scurried forward with the familiar bucket of odorific swill.

I patted my belly mournfully. ‘Alas, I’m still full from that mouthful of offal I was able to hold down yesterday.’ I held out my hands, ready to be cuffed. ‘I can’t wait to get started, I think Ikrit was really starting to get somewhere.’

Milk Scar snarled at his henchrat, then at me. ‘You think you are brave, Bear-Eater. You are a barking dog. Yes-yes. All yap and no fangs. I expected more fight-struggle from the great Bear-Eater.’ He bared his teeth at the luckless henchrat, who quickly discarded his bucket to drop my manacles on the floor by his footpaws and pole them through to me on the butt-end of his spear.

My sunrise.

I slid them over my wrists and walked to the bars where the ratman deftly fastened the pins. Milk Scar backed away, well beyond the reach of any lunging arms. Meanwhile, the other skaven dropped to his haunches to fasten my foot irons and lock them. By the time he had finished the first skaven was done with my wrists and was picking up the connecting bar from a loose pile of kit on the ground. I raised my shackles to allow him to feed the bar through the eyelet in my foot irons and connect them.

‘Stronger, you say, Barrach?’

‘Much,’ the answer grunted back at me from the shadows.

‘No squeak-talking,’ hissed Milk Scar.

‘Barrach…’

‘What now?’

‘Catch something for me.’

Yanking my hands from the forepaws of the ratman that was still fiddling with my shackles, I snatched the connecting rod from him. Before he had a chance to do much beyond squeak in alarm, I’d popped it from the eyelet in my foot irons and rammed Milk Scar in the chest with it. Hard enough to hurt, I’m sure, but I’m not in the business of spite for its own sake. I leave that sort of thing to the Celestial Vindicators. The blow punted the bulky ratman back and sent him tottering into the arms of an equally surprised-looking Barrach. The henchrat next to me snatched for the rod, only to give a muffled squeal of surrender as I broke every bone in his snout with a squeeze of my free hand.

Maybe there is a little of the Bladestorm in me after all. I’m not proud of it.

I let the stricken ratman slither down the bars. His comrade, though, hadn’t waited to see if he was alive or dead before bolting back down the passage, squealing his verminous little lungs out. I scowled after him, looking back to see Milk Scar hanging nervelessly against the bars of the opposite cell. His creamy white eyes bulged from their sockets. His tongue flopped out of his jaw, already turning blue. Barrach eased his bicep from the ratman’s throat.

‘Season of White Rest it might be, but that felt good.’

I snapped my fingers to get his attention. I would have clapped, but I was at a disadvantage on that score. ‘The keys.’

He blinked at me, confused, before my words hit home. ‘Keys. Keys. Yes!’ He dropped to his haunches, still holding Milk Scar’s neck in a lock, and fumbled around for the fat skaven’s keychain. The ardour of freedom made his hands shake and for a moment I actually thought he was going to drop the things, but at last he managed to get them free and into the lock of his door. He looked up at me.

‘You let them torture you, every day, until I was strong enough to escape. Why?’

‘I am a Lord-Castellant,’ I said, solemnly, as if that explained everything. It didn’t, of course, but it did cover the fact that I needed his help as much as he needed mine while at the same time definitely implying that I saw him as a warrior rather than another of Sigmar’s lost souls to be saved.

As I’d expected, the key stopped shaking after that.

Not bad for five well-chosen words.

I gestured with my fingers for the keys. ‘While it’s still the Season of White Rest.’

Chapter eight

The clanrat ran at me with a squeal, spear lowered, like a Freeguilder recruit on the training fields determined to murder a straw dummy. I disarmed him with a turn of my wrist, then riposted with an open hand that broke his neck and flung him ten feet back down the passage. He probably would have gone at least ten feet more had his body not been rising at the same time and struck the tunnel’s low ceiling.

Barrach looked duly impressed.

‘Which way?’ he said

A thoughtful warrior would have been made cautious by his defeat at Kurzog’s Hill, but I was not that warrior.

‘Just follow me,’ I said, already striking off down the tunnel and giving the spear I’d plucked out of the clanrat’s paws a practice twirl. Or as much of a twirl as was possible given the height of the ceiling and width of the passage anyway, which looked more like a knock-off duardin time piece trying to chime the hour. But I was in buoyant mood. There was an enemy in front of me, an adoring warrior behind me, and a weapon in my hand. It’s safe to say that I was firmly back in my element.

‘Ham-il-car! Ham-il-car!’

It’s possible that I got just a little overexcited.

I smashed into the mass of skaven coming at me with a roar.

I say ‘coming at me’ quite loosely of course, as I doubt whether they had any idea who I was or even that I was there at all. They were just scrabbling down the wrong tunnel at the wrong time, with far too many furry bodies behind them to turn away now. They squealed shrilly as I punched, kicked, head-butted, grabbed, twisted, gouged and even, when space allowed, stabbed my way through. I’d like to pretend that there was some skill to any of it, but to be honest I’ve waded through blizzards with the exact same waving routines of my arms and legs as I performed through that deluge of skaven warriors. Brute strength was my weapon, brute confidence my armour, and invulnerable as that ordinarily proved to be I still managed to suffer my share of scrapes before the flow slackened off enough for me to push into a more-or-less empty tunnel.

I looked around, straining my eyes in the dark. The alarm must have passed far enough back for the skaven to dart down side tunnels or to start circumventing the dungeon passages altogether. I sniffed at the sour tang that had impregnated the air.

‘The fear scent,’ said Barrach.

I crafted a grin that could have outshone the night sky of Azyr. ‘I just call it the skaven scent.’

‘You’re bleeding.’ Barrach gestured to the angry lattice of scratch and bite marks that had ruined my gambeson.

After several weeks of captivity, it was as closely bonded to my body as any artifice of the Six Smiths was to my soul, believe you me.

‘They’ve barely even broken the skin,’ I said.

‘At least let me take the front.’

I was tempted. It would take time for the skaven to muster sufficient courage – or for the fear scent to tickle the right whiskers – for any of the lair’s real warriors to start considering an escaped Stormcast Eternal their problem. I expected the reprieve to be brief even so, and the thought of Malikcek, or even Ikrit himself, being roused to my recapture made my skin come out in sweats. I ground my teeth and looked at the ceiling, heavenward, furious with myself for my body’s fear.

Misreading the expression entirely, Barrach scowled.

‘I’m still a Champion of the Wild Harvest. I can fight for my own freedom.’

‘I know you can.’ I shrugged, and tried to smile to make light of it. ‘And you will.’ I pointed back down the passage. ‘Don’t think that the skaven will only come at us from the front.’

Barrach clenched his fists in frustration. ‘Alright. What’s your escape plan?’

I had a plan, but whether it could be called an ‘escape’ plan largely depended on your definition of ‘escape,’ and mine was considerably broader than I expected Barrach’s to be.

‘Just stay close. Watch my back, and follow me.’

Holding my spear short, just below the blade, I hunched low and crabbed forwards at about as close to full-tilt as I could achieve. I mentally clocked the landmarks that Milk Scar’s daily traverses of the lair had familiarised me with as I hurried past them. The side tunnel from which came the waft of cooked meat. The clamour of a flesh market echoing through the ceiling. A succession of urine-stained scratch posts pointing this way and that. Some I ignored, some I followed. I couldn’t read the scratch-writing, obviously, and I suspected that half of the information was conveyed by scent anyway, but even I couldn’t slavishly observe the same route every day for a month and not have something of it sink in.

On the wobbly wood-planked causeway spanning Ikrit’s infernal hell-foundries, we met the first real resistance to our escape.

The rope bridge was barely wide enough for two of the bronze-armoured skaven warriors to cross safely. Or for three to cross unsafely, and so naturally that’s exactly how the skaven tried to do it. I bellowed a challenge across the chasm as they clanked towards me.

They moved in lockstep, their armour plated with dirt-caked cogwheels that ticked like the gears of a music box as they walked. Sigmar, but I hate these things. It was as though I was facing a single animate thing of brass and steel that had grown and absorbed these living rats rather than individual skaven warriors in armour of their own design. They squeaked and chittered like any rodent though, even as they lowered their wire-pronged glaive-like devices as one. A weirdly greenish energy rinsed the weapons’ copper hafts, causing the wires to stiffen and the blades to incandesce.

I bellowed loudly as I ran to meet them.

‘I fought in the purges of Azyr, and in the first battles of the Realmgate Wars. I have tasted the blood of Mortarchs and shed the souls of lords of Chaos. Run away, rats. You barely qualify as sport to me.’

I was taking a lot on faith that Ikrit wanted me back in my cell alive. More than he wanted a few hundred of his warriors, anyway.

Let this be a lesson to you about relying overmuch on faith.

The warrior in the middle of the front rank issued an angry squeal as he dragged his glaive out of position and jabbed it towards me. A bolt of dirty lightning blasted from it, passing nearer to my shoulder than my favourite chamber serf would dare scrub with a sponge, leaving blistered skin that crawled with residual warp power. I made a fist against the pain and roared as I ducked into the crackling thicket of humming blades.

‘I’m Hamilcar Bear-Eater. I am the storm!’

And in the most precarious position possible, where the mid-section of the bridge swayed with every crude gesture and mistimed breath, the shock-vermin and I came together.

My spear pierced the rat I had panicked through the chest and exploded from his back, into the throat of the warrior directly behind him. I made to tear the weapon free, but over the last hundred years or so I’d grown accustomed to handling the finest weaponry that a semi-divine Smith could craft, and neglected the fact that I was working with something I’d filched from a skaven corpse. The bottom of it snapped away in my hand, leaving me facing a hundred shock-vermin with a mouldy stick. I stove in a warrior’s helmet with said stick, splintering it completely and robbing me even of that, before wading in with my fists. The bridge bucked beneath us like a wild Dracoth, dislodging about a score of the skaven here and there before the survivors had the chance to huddle into the middle and hang on.

I pumped my fists in the air, wobbling the bridge gratuitously with my feet and laughing at the skaven’s panicked squeals.

‘Ha!’

I struck one cowering warrior an uppercut that lifted him from the uneven slats, arcing salmon-like over the rail before disappearing into the emerald miasma of smog and despair beneath us without so much as a squeak. Another squealed shrilly, the cogwheels on his armour whirring as if it was the armour and not him that sent his storm-glaive lashing for my foot. By this point, they had probably taken the view that they could lop off a limb or two without upsetting Ikrit too fatally. I drew my foot back sharply and the warp-blade obliterated the slat it had been standing on. A blast of warp-lightning shredded the boards to either side, then a singed rope snapped and we all lurched to one side.

I flung my arms around the guide line on the opposite side, but the skaven are a nimble lot and now that they’d already lost those slow or stupid enough to be standing on the outside edge, no more were lost to the drop. A chitter of consternation arose from within their ranks, culminating in some minor pushing and shoving until someone finally impaled the bright spark in front of me through the back. Green lightning ripped through the shock-vermin’s armour, melting the gears, and he clattered to the bridge under a cloud of smoke.

‘Fool-fool.’ The skaven shoved him unceremoniously over the edge and then we all went at it again.

‘Behind us,’ Barrach yelled.

I turned to see more skaven massing on the other side of the cavern. Not the bronze-armoured elites that had mustered to bar our passage, but clanrats, stepping unenthusiastically onto the swaying bridge, goaded on by the snarls and threats of their clawleaders. One spear-armed warrior appeared to panic as soon as he set paws on the bridge and tried to fight his way back onto the stone berm. A black-furred skaven with a scar criss-crossing his jaw shoved him off. The clanrat wailed until he struck a chimney stack with a hollow clang. The clawleader waved another dozen clanrats onto the bridge in his place.

I knew that I could fight those sorts of numbers all day, but I realised that I had already ridden my luck about as far as I could expect it to carry me. Even coming on one or two at a time, that many clanrats would eventually overwhelm Barrach, and I wouldn’t be having nearly so easy a time once I was being attacked from both sides.

And I wasn’t forgetting that this was a Clans Skyre lair. Surely I could only run amok for so long before someone thought to bring out a jezzail.

I took a fistful of the bridge’s load-bearing cables in each hand and flexed my biceps, drawing the cables in towards me until we both started to colour. The shock-vermin squealed in alarm as the cables whined.

‘No-no!’

I grinned. ‘Yes, yes.’

The shock-vermin were already starting to scamper back the way they’d come when Barrach made a noise as though he were passing a stone. Curiosity got the better of me. I glanced over my shoulder to see the human warrior’s skin coming out in scales that thickened as I watched into hard plates of bark, fingernails lengthening into claws. By the time he emitted a woody growl and straightened up again, he looked more like something crossed between a sylvaneth and a bonesplitter orruk than a man.

I let go of the ropes.

‘How long have you been sitting on that?’

His mouth creaked as the rigid parts forced a grin. ‘I told you I was Champion of the Wild Harvest, a warrior of the Gorwood Gorkai. Didn’t I?’

‘Impressive.’

‘Now can I take the front?’

‘Don’t let me stand in your way.’

Grabbing Barrach by the barky protrusions of his chest I physically lifted him up and swung him around me, switching our positions. He burst towards the still-wavering shock-vermin like water from a crumbling dam, and would have taken me right along with him if I hadn’t had the wherewithal to let go. Wooden fists clubbed bronze armour to bent gears and bits of spring. Iron hard plates of bark turned aside storm-glaives and claws. Six ranks had been bulldozed before the rest simply squealed surrender and fled. The clanrats on what was now my side looked far less confident about facing me than they had been ten seconds ago about facing Barrach. Having just watched him work, they were giving me far too much credit.

Not that I’ve ever let that stop me before.

‘Hamilcaaaar!’

Clenching my fists, I shook them above my head, bellowing like a gargant with a hangover, until the clanrats shrieked and broke, scarpering for the safety of the tunnels in short order.

‘Remember the name!’

I turned around to find Barrach’s wooden armour already sinking back into his green skin. His muscular form seemed much diminished now that the fury of his goddess, dead or otherwise, had ebbed.

‘The Maiden is flood and rainstorm, forest fire and predator’s teeth,’ Barrach breathed, sinking to one knee and wheezing. ‘Destructive, but passing.’

‘Can you call on her again? I have a feeling we’ll need her.’

‘For a shorter time, maybe. I…’ He shook his head. His green skin was paler than it had been, his expression drawn, as though the Maiden’s gifts had come from within rather than some divinity without. ‘I just need to catch my breath.’

‘I’ll take the lead for now then, if it’s all the same with you.’

I counted my steps as my twice-daily commutes with Milk Scar had conditioned me to count them, albeit more quickly as I was running this time and no longer in chains. We hadn’t gone far when the squeak and chitter of pursuing clanrats gave way to bovine grunts and ursine barks. The odour changed too, becoming less musty and acidic and more of a pungent, physical presence alongside us in the tunnel.

‘What in spring, summer and winter is that?’ Barrach hissed, covering his nose.

‘Gorwood beastmen.’ Kurzog must have set up home in this part of the lair only after my capture, thus coinciding with the end of Barrach’s own daily visits to Ikrit’s burrows. ‘Think of it as guest quarters.’

‘Is this part of your plan?’

I nodded. ‘Think about it. The skaven would never let an ally too deep into their lair, and for practical reasons alone they would have to be kept near the surface. Have you ever tried getting a beastman herd underground?’ I adopted a passable impersonation of someone who had once done just that. Barrach shook his head. ‘We have to be somewhere close to an exit,’ I concluded.

‘You think.’

I tapped my heart. ‘In here, remember.’

Barrach snorted. ‘I remember. So all we need to do now is fight our way through a beast herd.’

‘Do not fear,’ I grinned, already striding out of the tunnel and into the main chamber. ‘Hamilcar Bear-Eater will go first.’

Various ideas spilled through my mind as I went. From creeping through the beast camp yurt to yurt, to crafting a distraction of some kind and then skirting around the walls for an exit, but the key to looking like a leader is to think quickly and act decisively. The trick to accomplishing the former is almost always to make the latter as straightforward as possible. So without actually thinking all that hard about it at all I stepped into the wavering light of the Blind Herd’s dung fires, cupped my hands around my mouth, and took a deep breath.

‘Brayseer Kurzog! Did you really think that a few thousand skaven could keep the Bear-Eater from you?’

Barrach hissed, and shrank back into the deeper shadows of the tunnel mouth. ‘That’s your plan?’

‘Kurzog is a cunning animal,’ I laughed. ‘But he fears me like mortal men fear death itself. He will want me and me alone. Stay back. And while his eye is on me you can make your escape.’

‘What about you?’

‘Fear not. The chain has not been forged that can leash Hamilcar Bear-Eater.’

Further conversation was immediately curtailed as the yurt beside me was ripped down and a bull-headed bestigor stamped through, swinging a flail. I ducked back, the ridiculously heavy weapon tearing open the rock at my feet. I countered with a sharp blow to the ribs and heard bones crack. The bestigor slobbered over me, bleating with pain, and struck out with a forearm. I blocked it on the muscle of mine, then grabbed the beastman literally by the horn. It snorted and huffed and wrenched its neck muscles, but was otherwise helpless as I led it, struggling, like a show pony around a circle and then let it go. I jumped well clear as it swept its horns across my belly with a roar, inadvertently hooking the spear with which a surprised (and now upside down) ungor had been about to stab me, and then disappeared under the flailing hooves of the rest of the beast herd. One enraged gor, his antlers partially entangled with the leather strapping of another, strained for a long-handled battle-axe. I kicked his ungulate fingers away from the haft and picked up the weapon for myself.

‘Not exactly the work of the Six Smiths, but when in Blight City…’

I looked around for Barrach, but couldn’t see him. I grinned tightly, assuming he was halfway to fresh air by now, and worked the battle-axe through a few trial routines. ‘Just you and me then, Kurzog. Honestly, I’m hurt more than anything that you’d just give me up to the skaven like that. After all we’ve b–’

A force simultaneously boiling and freezing struck me in the back.

It threw me onto my face, and drove me over the ground until the skin had been grated from one side of my face and I lay inches from a dung fire.

Brayseer Kurzog stamped about behind me like a spiderfang shaman on a mushroom trip, long jigging chains of weird tattoos scrolling around the corded muscles of his arms. I had apparently caught him unprepared as he was garbed only in a scratty loincloth and a charm necklace, his nine-pointed goatee ritually braided as if for sleep. He still wielded his dogwood staff, however. It droned hoarsely as he spun it in his hands, still prancing, the tretchlet-like familiar railing and cursing at me from his shoulder.

With an ululating bleat, the brayseer lunged for me.

I rolled clear and the staff hit the stone where I’d fallen, annihilating a crater out of it the size of me and blowing out the dung fire. Waves of change shook the ground, staggering me as I scrambled to my feet and lifted my beastman axe to meet the brayseer’s backswing.

In any honest contest between battle-axe and quarterstaff, you would expect only one outcome, but I’d call Kurzog a thousand different names before I reached for ‘honest’. His staff’s true edge seemed to be half a hair’s breadth beyond the outline of the rune-carved wood, a layer of Chaotic force that was harder than sigmarite and hit like a thunderbolt crossbow. I wasn’t at my strongest, and I knew that he knew it.

It was the only reason he dared to face me one on one. Of that I have no doubt.

‘After all these years,’ I breathed, struggling to match the brayseer’s rabid pace. ‘This is the first time we’ve actually fought. I doubt even you could have predicted that it would go like this. In a skaven lair. In our underwear.’

‘Be silent!’

The brayseer beat aside a probe across the belly, then lowered his head, dislocating his hircine jaw, and brayed. A swarm of blue and pink flies poured out of his mouth and swept towards me, slamming into me like the palm of a glittering hand and hurling me clear across the cavern. Kurzog disappeared into the distance, the flies rustling over me, their wings buzzing, until I hit the hide wall of a yurt – which presumably smelled bad enough to make banishment back to the Realms of Chaos seem preferable, for the swarm didn’t follow me in.

I came up flailing, half buried in animal skins and missing my axe. I kicked the last flap of skin off my ankle and swatted at an incandescent blue fly that was still buzzing about my face. Kurzog came towards me with a breathy, barking laugh and my flapping hand transformed effortlessly into a rude gesture I had learned from the Bull Tide on the Amber Steppes.

The daemonic familiar squirreled viciously in Kurzog’s ear, and the brayseer took his staff across both hands like a crossbow and pointed it at me. ‘No, Oex’Xathane.’ He lowered the dogwood, apparently against his own arms’ better judgement. ‘Ikrit wants him warm. Until he can keep weapons from going back to Sigmar, at least.’

The familiar – Oex’Xathane, I presumed – practically bent Kurzog’s ear off to argue, but the brayseer shook his head, dislodging the winged creature to vent from a position a few inches above his shoulder. Apparently Ikrit’s interest in my wellbeing was not widely shared, which I wish I could say I found hurtful, but when you find yourself on the same side of the argument as a lesser daemon of Tzeentch you know you’re into some real uncharted wilderness.

‘I take it your true master has no great love for Ikrit,’ I said.

‘Kurzog got one master.’ The brayseer thumped his thickly matted chest. ‘Kurzog.’ He brought up his staff again and took a step towards me.

‘What does the warlock want from me? Tell me that, at least.’

The frenzy faded from the brayseer’s eyes. He passed his staff over to his left hand and planted it on the ground in a twinkling of braided beard-chimes. ‘You see, Bear-Eater. You see. After I give him you a second time, maybe Ikrit let Kurzog see it too. Kurzog like that. See you beg, maybe, before he break you.’ He swatted at the infuriated tretchlet with the head of his staff and brayed for his gors. ‘Take him. Do not br–’

A fist sheathed in hardened bark exploded from the brayseer’s chest.

‘–eak.’

Kurzog’s eyes misted over, his last breath relaxing out of his lungs as Barrach rotated his wrist – which was entirely unnecessary, but credit where credit’s due – and dragged his forearm out of the brayseer’s chest. He toppled over. Oex’Xathane looked pleased as the tretchlet thing dissolved into coloured motes and faded into the aether.

‘I told you to leave!’ I snapped.

Despite the wrathful demeanour I’ve cultivated over a century and a bit, I’m not nearly so easy to anger as you might think. Nothing endears a soldier like the belief that you are at least as bloodthirsty a maniac as the man in the other tent. On this occasion though, it was entirely genuine.

‘I’m not letting them take you again for my sake,’ said Barrach.

‘I had him.’

‘I saw. Come on, I can hold the Destroyer aspect for a little longer. With their leader dead we can fight our way out together.’

I had to agree that there was some sense to that argument, and was about to say as much when Barrach suddenly convulsed. At first I thought he was just fighting to hold onto his war form or had sneezed or something, but then I noticed the edged sliver of darkness propped against his throat. A pair of arrow-slit red eyes hovered above his shoulder, a dark void of a muzzle pressed to the other side of his face.

‘Surrender,’ said Malikcek, his voice like a whisper from Ulgu. ‘Now, or I kill-kill this one.’

‘Get out,’ said Barrach, struggling. But I’d seen Broudiccan held firm in that grip and knew that the Gorkai wasn’t going anywhere. ‘Kill him and run.’

This was grossly over-estimating my abilities at this point. I hold myself at least partially responsible, but the mortals I have dealt with have always had that tendency.

‘Always they squeak-say that,’ whispered Malikcek. ‘Warriors. Heroes. This thing they know-call courage. Lies. I smell his fear scent. I hear-feel his heart beat against my paw. He wants you to surrender.’

I met Barrach’s eyes and knew that what the assassin said was true.

‘Try me, Malikcek,’ I said, confident I could call the shadow’s bluff. ‘Ikrit wants him alive just as much as he does me.’

The shadow dipped its muzzle. ‘It is true. Ikrit wants the Gorkai alive.’ An almost insignificant twist of the wrist and Malikcek carved a thin slice across Barrach’s throat. He snickered cruelly as he let the human go. ‘But not so much-much as he wants you.’

The bark shrivelled from Barrach’s skin as his war form abandoned him, crawling for me on hands and knees before his elbows gave. He curled up onto his side, blood as red as yours or mine welling up from the hands he had clamped to his throat. The poison on the assassin’s blade was already causing his muscles to tighten. Fingers became claws as if, in desperation, he thought he might stem the bleeding by wringing his own neck. His arms bent and contorted. Joints reversed with sickening snaps of broken bone. His head ratcheted back, exposing his gashed throat to me for one last cruel spurt before I heard his spine break.

Malikcek floated over him.

I’d seen the assassin appear and disappear out of thin air, and turn aethereal at will, but seeing him simply move was somehow even more disturbing. He oozed through the air like a primordial slime, solidifying where he wanted to be with a hiss of amusement and a snicker of blades.

Even as I stand before you now, at my very best, telling this tale in my thrice-blessed, I’m not certain that I could actually best this creature. Then, I’d probably have stood a better chance of appealing to his better nature than I would fighting him.

‘What are you?’ I said.

He didn’t answer me, as I suspected he wouldn’t, but I had to ask.

‘Ikrit has been waiting. Ikrit hates waiting.’ I sensed something that was almost akin to envy in his voice as he went on. ‘This will all be over for you soon.’

Chapter nine

‘Move-move!’

Starting at the crack of their overseer’s whip, the thirteen-strong team of skavenslaves bent forwards and pushed. The unfortunates had been spread out between the spokes of a giant wheel that was laid flat on the floor of the burrow. Their forepaws were bolted to the spoke in front of them, their ankles locked to the circular rail that ran beneath their footpaws by a loop of chain.

The wheel itself was connected to some hellish contrivance that my captors had enthusiastically described to me as a ‘shaft’. The thing rose through innumerable tiers of false metallic flooring, like a menhir to the black gods of slavish automation and artifice. On each of these levels, more slaves toiled under the supervision of coated and goggled warlock-engineers. They fed stoves and pumped bellows, jumped up and down on see-saw-like assemblages of pulleys. They ran along treadmills, rubbing together giant wool-coated pads, making all of their fur stand on end and sending energy zapping through an array of bristling, copper-clad conductors. As the shaft neared the roof of the chamber it found itself slaved to a further array of belts and chains and a bewildering set-up of smaller wheels.

I didn’t get to see too much of it, fortunately, pinned as I was like the shiny bit on a Lord-Veritant’s staff at the very pinnacle of the skaven contraption.

My platform rose in a stepwise series of monumental clunks, each one apparently an even more goliath effort than the last. My arms and legs had been spread about as far apart as arms and legs could be made to go without breaking something, wrist bound to wrist and ankle to ankle by heavy chains beneath the platform. Even my gambeson, or what was left of it after my attempted escape, had been ripped off me, leaving my tattooed chest bare and goose bumping in the cold.

‘Stop-stop!’

Whips cracked again, echoing up through the tiers of scaffolding, and with a final weary clunk my platform sank back into its final stage and stopped.

I tugged on my arm restraints, but came closer to dislocating my shoulder than achieving my freedom. I let out the breath that I’d been holding onto throughout my ascent and tried to make my muscles relax. I looked up.

The chamber’s ceiling was an imperfect, slightly knobbled dome, still about a hundred feet above me and beyond even the most teeteringly high bits of the scaffold. The fact that skaven will flee in terror from any Freeguilder they don’t outnumber six to one, but will happily scamper along a length of mouldy wood a thousand feet off the ground never ceases to astonish me. For a race that is practically defined by its cowardice, they have a peculiar blind spot in matters of common sense and personal safety.

The roof itself was dark and metallic. I was no expert in these things, but I guessed it to be something along the lines of lead or tin or an alloy thereof, a few coloured spots of corrosion showing where the damp had trickled through. I was near to the surface. It would be full winter out there now.

The realisation that the days had continued to turn even without Hamilcar Bear-Eater out there to witness it actually came as something of a shock.

Turning my head from side to side revealed more of the same madcap skaven industry, if nothing of obvious, actual use. Fewer slaves toiled on these upper levels, with more of the work undertaken by engineers, which suggested that – whatever it was – it was presumably important. They wore rubbery suits that made them look like great auk in overly complicated helmets, and fussed over large, grumbling machines. The air was damp as well as cold, and the occasional spasm of dark green lightning would cut through the mist towards the arcing rods that the warlocks had positioned around their machines (the density of such instruments apparently denoted status), only very occasionally frying a slave.

I struggled uselessly as a gaggle of junior-looking engineers waddled towards me with armfuls of cables, most of my best insults sorely wasted on a race that didn’t even have a word for ‘mother’. Ignoring me completely, they fixed the cables to my platform. The shock of hammer blows ran through my bones and sparks sprayed over my body. The smell of metal solder filled my nostrils, and still I felt cold. Sniggering amongst themselves, presumably at my expense, the engineers withdrew to their machines.

‘Do not fight-struggle, Stormcast. It goes easier if you preserve your strength.’

Ikrit clomped towards me, slowly. Clad tail-tip to whiskers in iron and bronze, he looked awfully like a rat-shaped lightning rod to me, but as I might have expected he knew his machines better than I, and managed to avoid being incinerated by a stray bolt before reaching my side. Joints squealed as he reached out, rotating his wrist and brushing his gauntlet fingers over my shoulder and down my chest. My skin crawled from his touch. At my heart his gauntlet turned in order to hover, claws down.

He seemed to shudder in some kind of dreadful anticipation.

‘I feel like one of Xeros’ blood sacrifices,’ I said, trying to keep my voice from trembling.

‘Xeros?’

‘Lord-relictor of my Stormhost.’ And somewhere very close about now, I fervently prayed.

‘Sigmar accepts such bloody offerings?’

‘He doesn’t deny them, and the realms are vast.’

Despite lacking the breath with which to chuckle or a face with which to express much of anything, Ikrit nevertheless looked amused. ‘Yes-yes. They are. Ever expanding and ever changing as well, did you know? They make the gods themselves seem insignificant. Even they are inadequate to what they would rule. Many are the dark corners. Many are the hidden places. Even in those realms where the rule of one god is total – Shyish, Ulgu, yes-yes, Azyr even – their attention covers but fractions of what they claim is theirs. That is how Malikcek came to lose his soul to the Shadow Realm.’

I looked around for the assassin, but didn’t see him.

‘That does not mean he is not near,’ Ikrit whispered in my ear. ‘He foolishly accepted a charge to kill-stab a favourite of Malerion. He was good. A Deathmaster of Clan Snikch. He got in. Kill-stab the aelf. Yes-yes. Only then did Shadow God note his intrusion, and even then he could not block Malikcek’s escape. Not entirely. Part of Malikcek’s soul is forever his prisoner now. But where he was fool-fool in going in the first place, he was much-wise to come to me after. Long ago now. Before the Thirteen banished me from Blight City.’ His eyes glowered blue-white in what I rook for wrath. ‘What he had done, what had been done to him, it showed me what could be crafted from mortal souls. My magicks could not lift Malerion’s curse. I am not his equal. Not yet. But I keep it from claiming him totally, and in trade he serves me well. He find-brings trinkets from the gods’ tables.’ He tittered tinnily. ‘Like you-you.’

‘Like Barrach?’ I snarled.

‘Yes-yes. Malikcek killed him to spite me, I am sure. He hates me. He hates that I made him a slave. But he needs me more. More than I need him now he has made me strong. He knows this. He knows too there are more Gorkai in the Nevermarsh.’

‘You’ll never plague them again. I’ll see to it.’

Ikrit looked at me for a second, then emitted a sandpapery sound that I took for a laugh.

‘When you are finished with me I will be sent back to Sigmaron,’ I said, my voice rising as confidence returned to it. ‘It might be a hundred days or a hundred years from now, but I will return, and it will be at the head of a host the like of which the Ghurlands hasn’t witnessed since the Realmgate Wars.’

‘You are like Malikcek was,’ said Ikrit, giving me an almost fatherly pat on the chest. ‘Too confident of that which cannot be done.’

With that, the master warlock tilted his head back, his armour complaining, then lifted his hands above his head and slowly drew them apart.

In response, the roof began to grind open, snow billowing in through the widening crack, which at the very least confirmed my impression that we were close to the surface. At first I thought that Ikrit was physically opening the roof by sorcery, and that was very probably what he wanted me to think. But then I noticed the slave-filled running wheels on either side of the chamber, rumbling as they went round and around, drawing on chains and a system of cranks that ultimately resulted in the opening of the doors. In the flurrying sky beyond, I glimpsed what I initially thought was a flash of lightning and my heart lifted for a moment until I recognised that the energy was green-tinged, rippling up a coiled mast the height of a ballista tower. There were four of them that I could see, sited at the corners of the open roof and leaning slightly inwards. The charge that was being so arduously generated by the skavenslaves through the many tiers of activity beneath me was being fed up there. The coils glowed with it. Emerald lightning bolted from mast to mast, the snow sublimating into a thick green mist that smelled like a distillate of ozone and chlorine.

The first flake of snow fell on my bare chest and I jerked as though it were a messenger bird from Azyr come with the promise of freedom, pulling again on my restraints and Chaos take my shoulder joints as the snowflake slowly melted.

‘I understand now,’ Ikrit mused. ‘I have understanding enough of Sigmar’s process now to copy-take.’

‘Hah! Unlikely.’

‘You lie-lie upon my Anvil of Apotheosis.’

I bared my teeth in a semi-feral snarl. ‘Sigmar’s is bigger.’

Ignoring me, the master warlock gestured upwards with an open gauntlet. ‘There is my divine storm.’

‘Sigmar’s is… less green.’

‘I own-have every tool. All I cannot create here is the essence of Sigmar himself. That is what you will gift-give to me, Hamilcar.’

I laughed at him. It was forced, but I laughed, and of that I’m more proud than of any hopeless stand or pointless act of heroism in my immortal life. ‘For what? To create your own Stormhost?’

‘I do not seek-plan to conquer the realms. I do not have the hubris of a god. My ambitions are small. One Stormcast alone will suffice.’

‘Is that all?’

‘You think me mad-mad. You are not the first. But I have outlived them all. What is made can be unmade. What is unmade can be remade.’

‘You’re talking about the forging of a god, not some new blasting powder from the Ironweld quarter.’

‘Look at me, Stormcast.’

Against my better judgement, I did. His metallic frame bristled with unmelting snowflakes, cold and still as an iron mummy.

‘Thousands of years I have endured. I no longer know how long, what I was before, only that I am dead more years than I was ever alive. Secrets I gleaned from the Books of Nagash, plundered from the ruins of Nagashizzar during the Death God’s long exile in the Age of Blood. More still I learned from the children of the Oak of Ages. With what Malikcek brought back from Ulgu have I hidden my plans from the Horned Rat and his daemons. They hunt me still, yet I fear their vengeance no more than I fear yours. They are gods, Stormcast. They are not omnipotent. Is Sigmar better? Is he special? You think his works must elude me where those of Malerion and Alarielle yield their secrets freely? No. He is not special. He is just a god. And I will have-take what is his.’

‘Sigmar is almighty,’ I said, straining hard enough to lift my chest an inch off the platform. ‘Only Sigmar had the courage to fight back.’

‘The powers of all the Pantheon went into Sigmar’s Stormcasts. Did you know that? Few know that. I know that. The powers of the Pantheon will be part of me now. Soon. And more.’ Ikrit laid his ice-cool hand on my stomach, my belly retreating from the abomination of his touch. ‘And yet. There is something about Sigmar that feels special. Is there not? The status he claims for himself as god of gods. God-King.’ He snickered at that. ‘Take-stealing from him will be my greatest prize.’

He turned ponderously about and started to walk away.

‘You know I never gave you an honest answer to a single question before now!’ I yelled after him.

‘Yes-yes. I know. The light-fire of Hyish burns away all untruth.’ He stopped walking and turned back, laying his gauntlet over the handle of a large lever. ‘But my immortality is flawed.’

‘Whose isn’t?’

‘I persist in unlife. I wax and wane with the seasons and the dying of years. I remember nothing of what was.’

I snorted. ‘I almost hope you succeed, just to see your face.’

He looked back at me quizzically.

‘You think a Stormcast’s immortality is perfect, but you’ve looked inside my head. You know better than that.’

‘I want only your immortality,’ he said. ‘Give it willingly and you may survive. Others did, and I released them.’

I remembered the Wild Maiden, the sylvaneth I had found drained and slowly decaying in the Low Gorwood after inadvertently massacring all of her followers.

Not exactly an end worthy of song. Certainly not one worthy of my song.

‘Do your worst, Ikrit. You and your…’ I rolled my head to indicate the warlock’s sprawling apparatus, ‘thing. We’ll see who surrenders first.’

‘You are not the first to think that either. You too are not special.’

I like to believe that the words do exist somewhere, hidden deep in the bowels of the fortresses of Teclis or Tzeentch, guarded from the lore of men, to describe what I felt in the moment that Ikrit pulled that lever, but all of mine fall woefully short. It is a blessing of a kind, I think, for how can you properly recall a thing if you haven’t even the word to name it? Do beasts without words remember as we do? Do fish? Do birds?

I don’t know, but I will try.

The first sensation was light. Not light of the sun or even of moon and stars, but something warped and of the blood. I felt it coursing through me, filling me with pain the way my own storm-forged blood filled me with vitality. Had I the wit at the time I would have recognised that it was being fed into my body from those four gigantic masts on the roof, through the cables that Ikrit’s underlings had soldered to my platform. But I hadn’t, and I didn’t.

Imagine, if you can, being nothing more than a vessel for agony. Imagine it. Go ahead, try. I promise you that you’ll fail.

Time stretched to mean less than nothing and there were moments where I think I truly did believe that I had died and been returned to the Anvil of Apotheosis. I felt myself broken, much as I would have had I indeed been upon the Anvil, but the faith that I would be remade to the best of a demi-god’s abilities was absent. The Six Smiths are callous, it’s true, as only a minor divinity with a major chip on his shoulder can be, but they are prideful in their work. Ikrit was too, I knew that much about him, but his goal was not restoration. I felt him inside me, digging through my spirit to seek that which glittered, that which was Sigmar and thus unbreakable.

I’d like to say that I fought back, so yes, by all means, say that Hamilcar Bear-Eater fought back, but in truth I have no idea if I did or even if it was possible. Shocking and unlikely as this may sound to you, as long as that lever was down I think there was no Hamilcar Bear-Eater.

Some eternities later I heard a snicker of triumph. It wasn’t Ikrit’s voice as I had come to know it, but something younger, lived in, the way he remembered his own voice sounding.

‘There it is,’ he chittered. ‘Sigmar’s storm. It is mine.’

I felt the me in me pushed carelessly to one side, the broken glass from a dropped window swept from a fine floor, to expose the beauty of the mosaic beneath. It wasn’t my heart or my mind. It corresponded to no physical place in my body that I could point out to you now and say: ‘This. Here. This is where Sigmar lives in me,’ but nevertheless I felt Ikrit reach out for that thing and take it.

I’d like to say I fought back. And maybe I did. Something did.

Something indivisible and divine announced its resistance, and for one instant, like a shadow glimpsed by lightning, I was not the only one inside my body in pain. And believe me, misery shared is misery halved. Ikrit shrieked as though he’d been given a Chammonic lead purge. I felt his claws withdraw and heard something metal fall against something else metal and considerably more yielding. The lightning scoured my veins and for a split-second I was conscious of every crack and break in my being where the fury of the Storm Eternal could not be contained.

I opened my eyes and wept like a god new-born to the world, straining against my bonds with all the tempestuous might of Azyr.

All around me, glass shattered. Metal bent. Cables snapped and twanged, whipping about like the tentacles of an ocean kraken, decapitating those engineers who were too well armoured against random discharges of lightning to do anything sensible like duck. Lightning raced from my body and back down the lines that the skaven had used to hook me to their warp-lightning machines. Those I saw caught fire or simply exploded, throwing engineers and slaves alike through the air. Another, below me, vomited forth endless quantities of black smoke until the skaven on that tier were left flailing about, blind and gasping for air. More than a few took the long trip to the bottom as the entire house of cards beneath them began to come apart at the seams.

‘HAMILCAR!’

I roared until my throat bled, the chains binding my wrists beneath the platform yielding to my strength as the steel slowly melted before wave after wave of lightning. Suddenly I was free, my hands flying apart, shattered metal links raining down over the tiers of machinery that surrounded the shaft. Before I had much chance to do anything beyond shout about it, the world pitched violently sideways. There was a splintering crack, like the mast of a sail ship as it disintegrates under a lightning strike, and my stomach lurched. I heard the squeals of about thirteen terrified skavenslaves from far, far below me, and understood that I was about to be reunited with them very soon.

I bellowed the name of the God-King as I fell.

Chapter ten

‘Sigmar!’ I bellowed again, this time with feeling, as I dug my way free of the wreckage. If I thought that there was a snowball’s chance in Aqshy of him hearing me, then I would have cursed him for the fact that, despite everything, I was still alive.

Struggling to negotiate the release of my foot from the shattered ruin of the platform, I looked up. A fug of smoke now clung to the sagging bones of the skaven’s scaffold, any inclination it might have had towards rising for the open ceiling being slowly pummelled out of it by the snow. It was starting to settle, lumps of wood and metal and mangy fur covered in a respectful sheet of white. It reminded me of something I couldn’t quite fix in my mind. A mountainside after a battle. A barrow for a warrior. Something else I couldn’t picture. I shook my head. Pieces of thought crunched about inside like pebbles in a clay cup.

‘I’m going to kill you, Ikrit,’ I roared at the ceiling. ‘I’m going to destroy everything you hold precious.’

I pulled angrily on my foot, found that it was still chained to something buried under the wreckage and pulled again, harder, discovered this time that the chain was actually just bitten between two mangled bits of wood, and fell backwards when it gave. I rolled down the heap to land in a puff of snow at the bottom.

I lifted my face from the floor and blew snow from my beard.

‘Death is too clean,’ I growled under my breath. ‘I’ll feed you to Crow. No. Better. I’ll hand you to the Hallowed Knights. Half an hour in their company and you’ll be begging to be eaten by a gryph-hound. I know I would be.’

The tormented scaffolding above me creaked as if it were trying to find a comfortable position in which to die. The occasional despairing squeak of a trapped or injured skaven echoed down through the blizzard.

There was no sign of Ikrit, though.

I didn’t recognise the feeling that swept through me. Looking back, I think it was relief. I looked at my hand. It was shaking.

I needed to get out of there.

Out.

The thought ran round and around in my head like a fever dream.

I squinted into the thickening snowfall, trying, and mostly failing, to shake off the memories it evoked. The feel of the raiding season’s first snows on my hand. Watching the sun sink below the far peaks through a bitter flurry. The pride and power as a circlet of frigid metal was set upon my head.

‘Gah!’

I slapped furiously at my head.

The memories came in bits and pieces, a lot like I felt. I couldn’t seem to get rid of them, so I ignored them instead, something at which I was highly practised, and I had better luck with that.

I set my hand against a rusty steel upright that was currently listing at an uncomfortably steep diagonal and followed it with my eyes. I’d seen the sky when the roof had opened. I knew that there was a way out up there, but I can’t say that I thought much of trying to climb back up there, even if the structure wasn’t in the throes of coming apart. As if to prove the wisdom of that, the whole edifice gave a shuddering groan and sank another few inches towards me, snow wheezing through the compacted girders and beams.

I was going to have to find another way out.

Remembering my original plan of escape, I staggered away from the wreckage in the vague direction that Malikcek and Kurzog’s beastmen had dragged me, pausing occasionally to smack my head against sturdier-looking beams in an effort to unclutter my thoughts, flinging out my hands to rid them of pins and needles. None of it helped. I spotted the tunnel I had come in by and stumbled towards it, tripped like a drunk over a buried piece of planking and went flat on my face.

‘I’m going to tear you apart,’ I growled, spitting snow. ‘Limb from limb.’

The wall was trembling slightly as I pulled myself up. I sniffed, smelling smoke on the faint wind that blew through the tunnel. It looked as though whatever Ikrit had tried to do to me had backfired even more spectacularly than I could have hoped for.

I didn’t know the half of it, of course. If I had then I probably would have devoted more energy to getting out of there than I already was.

The Blind Herd’s camp was still the closest thing I had to a reliable way out, and with any luck the death of Kurzog and the current state of confusion would be enough for me to get past them. I had a vague intuition of the route back to the beast camp from where I was, having been in and out of consciousness as Malikcek had dragged me along it. But it turns out that thinking a thing and knowing a thing are even more different than usual when you’re staggering about with a headache through a skaven lair that was rapidly filling up with smoke.

It was almost enough to make me wish I’d just let Akturus Ironheel beat me in front of everyone and never left the Seven Words.

I stumbled through tunnels, fell into branches and out of them, tripped, got up again and ended up going sideways at one point, I think just for the support of the wall. Scratch posts and scent marks screamed meaningless directions at me, as useful as a buzzing chorus of birds hawking at me in aelvish. Shrieks echoed through the labyrinth of tunnels, but surprisingly few skaven crossed my path beyond the occasional half-chewed corpse. Every so often I heard claws scrabbling, but it was always from a parallel passage or a branching tunnel. At one point I came to a narrow hole in the wall onto a downward-sloping tunnel that I felt certain would lead me to the beast camp, only to recoil from the heat of its burning and convince myself that it had never been the way after all. I swayed towards the next tunnel just as the one behind me collapsed, pelting my back with grit and stones. I barely noticed. I took my head in both hands as if that might stop my vision from swimming. I growled, then roared, and smacked my forehead over and over with the heel of my palm.

‘Focus, Hamilcar. You entered the gladiatorum with Lord-Celestant Pharakis with a worse head than this. And won.’ Actually, it was more of a draw, but I maintain that the Knight-Excelsior had fiddled the chamber’s restorative properties in his favour somehow. ‘Concentrate.’

I stumbled on with the deliberation of a drunkard trying too hard to walk straight. I did my best to concentrate, but forgotten old memories continued to force themselves over what I saw.

A tunnel mouth became the entrance to a cave, bedecked in luminescent beetle shells and pink-glowing gemstones, a thick carpet of skins and furs laid out before it. ‘The nuptial cave,’ I mumbled to myself. Sigmar only knows where that knowledge came from. The same place, I presumed, that knew that pink stones represented fertility, the shells protection, and the skins hearth. ‘I carved those skins myself,’ I muttered, turning away. A clanrat slumped over a broken barrel with half its face opportunistically chewed off became a grey-haired man, his old skin thick with tribal tattoos and a bearskin over his shoulders, face down in a frozen ale spill on a stone slab. ‘Her… her father.’ I pounded my head with my fist and stumbled on. ‘Whose father?’ With every ounce of my willpower, I denied that the greenish gloam of the ceiling was interspersed with the twinkling starlight of the Eternal Winterlands.

It might have been more memories – albeit more recent ones and thus coming at me unnoticed – that did eventually bring me into tunnels I recognised, if not the ones I’d been trying to get to.

Again, I had that curious sensation of stepping out of the Ghurlands and into some other place, even as my toes and knuckles scuffed along simple, unchanging stone. It was like crossing a waterfall, knowing that what you had left behind you was still there, scant feet away, but that it had been obliterated by the roar of water. I was glad of the sense, in a strange way. It was real and familiar, even if I found it difficult to describe. With everything I’d been thinking and feeling since pulling myself out of Ikrit’s warpstorm, I’d actually started to worry that the warlock had damaged me somehow, but here at least was some evidence that my senses as a Stormcast Eternal remained intact.

I was in Ikrit’s tunnels.

The door to his warren had been left ajar.

‘Strange. I didn’t think it could be opened from the outside.’

I listened, and though my hearing didn’t come close to the acuity of even a one-eared skavenslave with his head in a bag, I was relatively confident that there was nobody inside. I looked over my shoulder. The corridor behind me was empty. Finding my way back towards the beastman encampment from here would be much more straightforward than doing it from the storm chamber. I’d done it close to a hundred times by my best count and, thanks to Milk Scar and his counting, I could do it with my eyes closed. Whether I could do it with my head spinning and the earth shaking all around me was something I looked forward to finding out.

But the lure of that open door behind me made me turn back.

A nervous prickle ran down my neck.

‘Curiosity will be the death of me.’

Steeling myself for the worst (about as well as you might imagine, given I could barely stand unaided), I went inside.

The place had been completely ransacked. Books had been torn from shelves, instruments and tools swept from the benches and onto the floor. A clanrat in relatively ostentatious dress comprising red and grey rags and a bronze sash, presumably one of Ikrit’s trusted lackeys, lay dead on the floor with his chest torn open. I wondered who would have the means and the sheer brass balls to break into Ikrit’s burrow and murder his underling. My list of culprits amounted to Barrach and Kurzog, both of whom seemed unlikely, considering. Blinking quickly in an attempt to settle my wandering vision, I went further in. I wasn’t sure what I was looking for, or if I was there for any reason at all other than to sate my curiosity, but then I saw something glittering amidst the debris that snatched my breath away.

My warding lantern.

It was on its side, still held in the clamps in which I’d seen it last. Clearly it was not what whoever had ransacked this place had been looking for, as it had been discarded along with everything else. Yearning burnished my chest with its warm glow, and drew me down to my knees beside this unsullied part of me. I freed it from the rubbish and practically tore it out of the warlock’s unsightly clamps. As ornate as a Lord-Castellant’s warding lantern might appear, its housing is sigmarite hewn from the molten core of the Mallus itself and I knew that the warlock’s rusted iron wouldn’t so much as scratch the gilt work. And I was right. The restraining rods snapped and crumbled as I pulled the lantern free and crushed it to my chest.

No new mother ever held an infant with such fierce pride.

I threw my head back and laughed. ‘Praises to the God-King!’ The blessings of Sigmar did indeed reach into the darkest corners of the realms. It looked as though someone owed a certain Lord-Relictor of the Hallowed Knights an apology.

I couldn’t see any of my weapons or armour lying around anywhere, which was sort of disappointing but not entirely surprising. Either they hadn’t interested Ikrit as much as the more arcane properties of my lantern had, or he had other burrows scattered about the lair where he or his underlings could work on them in peace. I didn’t spare too much energy thinking about that. The lantern was more useful to me just then than weapons or armour, in any case. Against creatures as steeped in the Chaotic as the skaven, the light of a warding lantern is deadlier than any halberd, and more than that, after everything I’d just been through its healing powers were exactly what I’d been praying for – the light of Azyr being a more reliable curative than successive self-administered blows to the head.

After the horrors of Ikrit’s warpstorm, I’d almost forgotten the savaging I’d taken beforehand in my thwarted attempt at escape. It was unsurprising then that I was a little shaky on my feet. Given everything I had endured over the last few days it was a wonder that even a Stormcast Eternal as robust as I was still upright. I certainly would have enjoyed watching Vandus or Gardus get up after all that and saunter out with half as much panache as I had managed so far.

I convinced myself that was all there was to it.

As you might by now have gathered, I’m incredibly good at that.

I pulled back the lantern’s shutters.

I was screaming before I really knew what had hit me. The lantern fell from my hands like a comet released from Heaven. Everywhere its light touched, it burned, as though I’d just walked into the jaws of a magmadroth or fallen into a lake of acid. I flapped wildly, bending backwards, away from the pain, until I fell over and from there curled onto my side. That only made it worse, exposing the entirety of my back to the light. Batting about blindly behind me, I found the lantern. My fingers closed over the handle and my first instinct was to hurl it as hard and as far from me as I could, but I fought it down, suffering the extra seconds of agony I needed to manipulate the catches and slide it shut.

The light snuffed out, and I slumped to the floor, gasping and breathless, steam curling off my reddened skin. A rainbow of weird and wonderful colours blurred across my eyes as I shifted to look accusingly at the lantern in my hand.

‘Ikrit! I’m going to strangle you with your own tail!’

I lay as I was for about a minute before I felt as though I’d mustered enough strength to stand. I may have been a little unsteady, but for better or worse the lantern had at least burned away some of the memories that had been fogging up my thoughts.

I cast a glance in the direction of Sigendil, the beacon star, dimly visible in the uncanny pseudo-realm that Ikrit’s warrens comprised.

I felt as though it was mocking me.

‘Is that the best you can do, a direction?’

Sigmar does answer prayers, but more often than not I am the answer. I should have known better than to expect more, but my experience on Ikrit’s Anvil had shaken me to my core. There have been many times over the years when men and women like you have asked me ‘where was Sigmar when this, that, or the other apocalypse fell?’ The answer is that while Sigmar might intercede on our behalf less than we might like, I assure you that he does so far more often than you think. He is simply subtle about it. We would all love to see Sigmar smiting his own enemies so that the likes of you and I do not have to, but if the God-King were to take to the field today, then tomorrow it would be Khorne, and the day after that we would all be wishing he had remained in Sigmaron ignoring our prayers.

I was bitter and hurting, however, and none of that was of any consolation. In spite of everything, though, I held onto the lantern. Whatever Ikrit had done to it, it was still a part of me, a part of Sigmar – and if push came to shove I could still hit something with it.

A rumble passed through the rock walls as I stumbled through the open door, the tables behind me rattling amidst the piled rubbish. Dust drizzled on me from the ceiling of the passage outside as I fled back for the common tunnels. Freed of the incessant distraction of lost memories filling my head in response to every little thing, finding the beast camp from Ikrit’s warrens was simplicity itself, like tracking back to a campfire after relieving yourself in the woods.

Don’t try that in the Gorwood though, just a little friendly advice.

I frowned at the unexpected, if not unwelcome, sight.

Where I’d been expecting to see a large cavern filled with the hide yurts and dung fires of cavorting beastmen, it was now… well, it was still a large cavern filled with hide yurts and dung fires, but it was as though a stampeding herd of ghroxen had just gone over it. The straight gouge of flattened tents and scattered fires went directly towards a wide tunnel, angled steeply downwards. I could smell the cooler, fresher air blowing from the mouth of it. I knew that it couldn’t have made much of a difference to the abusive stink of the beast camp, but to me, then, it smelled like the Stromfels after the first snows.

‘That’s the way out, then.’

A few of the dung fires to either side still flickered damply, fallen poles and lines casting wretched shadows that crawled over the cavern’s walls. I checked over my shoulder as I walked past a small tent, and almost rounded on it, lantern raised like a stone club, when what I would have later sworn was a shadow crept through the flap. The flaps never even rustled in the breeze though, and by the time I had my lantern up to brain the thing the firelight had moved on and there was no shadow there at all. I laughed hollowly. The echoes made it sound as though a few score men shared my black humour and that cheered me somewhat. Even so, I found myself scratching the burnt skin at the back of my neck, as though I were being watched, clutching my lantern close as I started walking for the tunnel.

If I’d run, maybe things would have been different.

Chapter eleven

I ploughed near naked into the thick snow, like a wild gryph-charger into icy surf. It was packed up to my knees, forcing me to wade as I pushed myself on into the freezing cold. From the severity of the sudden incline and the sharpness of the air, I gathered that I was somewhere high on the side of a mountain. Knight-Venator Barbarus and the other winged scouts I had despatched into the Nevermarsh had never reported any mountainous regions, but it was a vast landscape. That’s why it was called the Nevermarsh. I think it was the Vanguard-Raptor, Illyrius, who had first named it that, complaining to me that it ‘never ends.’ I faced up to the grim likelihood that I was a long way from the Seven Words as I slipped and skidded on down the mountainside, snow flurrying about my bare chest and wild mane like nipping white birds with a numbing poison in their claws. I had no idea of where I was going. No hope of getting there before I froze to death, anyway. But I am Hamilcar Bear-Eater, King of the Eternal Winterlands, and I wasn’t about to let something like that slow me down.

Shadows prickled at the flurrying snow ahead of me. Barren trees, clinging to the lower slopes of the summit like frozen candelabra with their crooked branches bent towards the sky. I struggled towards them, thinking that shelter from the blizzard might keep me going for a few minutes longer at least, long enough to think of an actual plan if I could just get my head out of the wind, although even to me that seemed unlikely. It’s easy to laugh off the inevitable when there’s an army behind you. It’s just as easy to do it without one, of course; it’s just pointless. No, realism was the order of the day. I was going to die on that mountain, and I was determined to do it as far away from the skaven lair as I possibly could. It was conceivable that one of Ikrit’s minions or Kurzog’s beastmen might stumble across me before I froze to death and I wanted to fend off the possibility for as long as I could.

Keeping half an eye alert, I watched the flurrying snow for any sign of Ikrit’s clanrats or the Blind Herd. They had almost certainly left by the same tunnel I had, but there was no sign of them anyway. Given the conditions, however, that meant little. I had no way of knowing how big a head start they had over me and with snow coming down the way it was, two hundred beastmen could have been coming straight at me in tuskgor chariots with bells on the wheels and I wouldn’t have known about it until they were trampling over me.

With a teeth-chattering growl, I barrelled on towards the trees.

I’d rather go out to a beastman’s hatchet than the cold anyway. It’d be quicker, and quicker better suited my preferences just then.

Up close, the trees were gnarled and horribly twisted things, clad not in bark but something that looked like ice. I couldn’t tell if they were even alive at all but, accustomed as I was to the hostile flora of the Gorwood, I made sure to keep my distance. Unlike the honey traps of the Gorkomon’s leechwood pines and carniferns that would lure anything with warm blood and a pulse onto their roots, these twisted runts hardly invited my approach. They emanated a cold so piercing that I had to check my fingers to be certain that they hadn’t been cut on it, and even seemed to shun each other’s company, their branches angling sharply to avoid encroaching on another’s canopy.

If anything, it was actually colder in the forest than it had been further up the mountainside. Hugging my arms to my chest and gripping the bicep of the opposite arm, I gave a great huff of mist.

‘No changing my mind now.’ As a rule, I never change my mind once it’s set. Utter commitment to any course, however unwise, is what has won me half my battles, but in this case the decision to stick was made for me. I’d be half dead well before I made it back to the tunnel, and I knew it.

I hadn’t gone far into that eerie forest when a lonely shriek, as of a hunting bird, echoed from the sky. I ignored it at first, crunching over hard ground, before I realised that the voice was that of a hunting bird I knew personally. A smile stretched across my numb face like faltering ice, and I looked up into the snow.

I don’t know why it came as such a surprise and a relief that they had been looking for me all this time.

Isolation from my brothers must have affected me more deeply than I had realised.

‘Aeygar!’ I yelled, my voice echoing with wild joy between the trees, the mountainside and the low ceiling of the sky. I waved my arms overhead, though I doubted even the eyes of an aetar would have been able to pick me off the mountain in such a blizzard. ‘Princess! Hamilcar is here!’

‘You should not shout-shout like that. Not on a mountain. Thought you would know better.’

The voice whispered from a position right behind my ear, and I took my warding lantern’s loop handle in a firm grip and spun round with a roar. The lantern whooshed through the flurrying snow. The voice snickered amongst the lonely trees.

‘It’s going to be like that then, is it?’

‘Run-flee, Bear-Eater. Give me the challenge of hunting you.’

‘Considering you’ve bested me twice already, you’re strangely reluctant to show yourself.’ I flexed dramatically, and bared my teeth in what I hoped was the right direction. ‘Does Hamilcar scare you, assassin?’

‘You amuse me. Is not often I enjoy a challenge for challenge’s sake.’

I glared into the woods, but it was hopeless. The whole mountainside was swamped by black clouds and thick snow. If Malikcek was lurking out there then he had a few thousand square miles of shadow to choose from. ‘Ikrit’s probably dead, you know. I heard him fall. If I were you I’d get as far away from this mountain as my legs could carry me.’

‘You think I fear wrath of your god? See me, Bear-Eater. See me if you can. The gods have done their worst to me. Run-run now.’

‘Hamilcar isn’t afraid of the dark.’

‘Run-flee. Run-now. Or I will take you back to Ikrit instead.’

I turned on the spot with a snarl on my lips, but the voice seemed to be coming from everywhere at once. If Malikcek wanted to kill me then I was perfectly minded to let him take his best shot and get it over with, but I just didn’t have it in me to make it easy for him. Surrendering to the cold or even one nameless beastman out of a herd was one thing, but giving in to this cocksure little rat who’d be bragging about the day he slew Hamilcar until the day of my reforging?

Over my immortal body.

‘You should know, Malikcek,’ I bellowed, pointing myself downhill, ‘that my performances in the Azyrheimer marathons are the stuff of legend!’

With that, I was already tearing off downslope, slipping and running in roughly equal measure, occasionally flapping my arms for balance and yelling ‘Aeygar!’ at the top of my lungs. I heard her shriek again, but it was further off now. I sucked in a deep breath, only to lose it all to a heart shock of astonishment as Malikcek stepped out of the darkness in front of me. His blades back-and-forthed over my bare chest like gardening shears, and he sniggered as he sank back into the shadows and I ran straight through him, clutching my ribboned chest in one hand and waiting for the poison to take effect. As it had with Barrach, and with the Freeguild soldiers on Kurzog’s Hill before that.

A gruesome death if ever I’d seen one, but if going through it could erase some of the horror of being eaten by a Dread Abyssal then I would have considered that good value.

But nothing happened.

I started to laugh. ‘I should have known. Your poison is less impressive against the mettle of a Stormcast Eternal!’

‘A tool for every task, Bear-Eater. Ikrit would not believe you had escaped and been killed-slain by some mad-fool beastman if I return you with bones broken by my poison. Would he? His wrath would be mighty.’

‘Then why kill me at all?’

The wood snickered. ‘You talk-squeak too much. I told you to run-flee.’

Malikcek swept out of the darkness, like a bat transforming into a soulblight even as it dropped out of the sky. His knives were a blur and it took every ingrained scrap of skill I owned just to survive the first seconds of our exchange. I parried a blistering sequence of blows with my lantern, and was about to praise Sigmar for the unsung durability of his craftsmanship, when a tail looped about the back of my leg and yanked it out from under me. I hit the ground in a crack of ice, the assassin fading from the air above me and reappearing almost immediately bestride my chest. His knife was at my throat, another pressing into my belly. His tail wound tightly around the wrist of the hand that held my lantern until the fingers turned as blue as the trees that surrounded us.

I bared my teeth, fighting to keep them from chattering. ‘You aren’t bad against a half-dead Lord-Castellant.’

‘I already took you at your prime. Do you forget? Killed your second and lots-many of your men. Took you alive for my master.’

‘With a little help from the Blind Herd and the Legion of Bloat and a few tens of thousands of warriors.’

‘You walk-scurry into Kurzog’s trap because you thought you were invincible.’

I grinned fearlessly. ‘I am invincible. I believed that even before Sigmar made it true.’

‘We see now.’

I saw the arm inside its sleeve of shadow tense, but before it reached the blade at my throat, something howled and slammed into him from behind. Malikcek squealed in surprise, moulting into shadow before exploding back into tangibility a few feet further off from me, cloak flapping, lips drawn back over a snarl.

A woman stood over me, ivy-skinned and russet-haired. Even given my usual keen eye for the small details, something about that combination was strikingly familiar. She was clad in a few pieces of bark and circlets of thorn, and spun a branched spear through both hands like a tightrope walker about to perform for a hungry crowd.

‘He is mine,’ she said, her voice the dry-throated snarl of unseen predators in the woods.

My eyebrows lifted. ‘Yours?’ I wondered what I could have done to attract her attention – beyond the obvious, that is – but could think of nothing.

Malikcek flew at her with a snarl.

The pair of them exchanged blows with such ferocity that it was almost as if they simply lashed their weapons about without any real inclination of hitting one another at all. I might have convinced myself that that were the case were it not for the rapid-fire snick of metal on wood and the woman’s occasional grunt of effort. Slowly, though, Malikcek forced her on to the back foot. The skaven was faster and better. I was mildly relieved to note this, given that this was now the third time he had beaten me.

‘Hehehe. This was good-fun, but done-finished now.’

The woman propellered her spear, her eyes flashing to amber as she emitted a droning hum from her mouth and the air exploded with mosquitoes. Malikcek flapped his paws, squealing, as the woman backed off under the cover of the swarm and into a tree. And I do mean into a tree. She stepped through the ice-clad trunk and disappeared as if it were a curtain. Malikcek squeaked in confusion and annoyance.

‘Do not celebrate, Bear-Eater. She run-leaves you to me.’

‘I don’t think so.’

With an ululating scream, the woman leapt out of a wholly different tree. From the way she carried through the air it looked as though she’d taken a good run at it, but heavens knew from where. The pitch and volume of her war-cry made even me, hardly a stranger to loud noises, wince, but Malikcek with his sensitive skaven hearing was positively poleaxed. He hit the ground like a crying baby, which would have been amusing had it not carried him under the sweep of the woman’s spear. The effort broke her war-shout and Malikcek recovered quickly enough to kick her legs out from under her. She landed on her back just as Malikcek sprung to his feet. He reversed his grip on one of his knives and stabbed for the woman’s chest. She sank into the hard ground, leaving Malikcek’s knife to crack the ice. He hissed in annoyance, the canopy above him rustling as she dropped out of it, spear point-down to skewer the assassin from crown to crotch. He dispersed before she got near and she landed where he had been standing in a feline crouch.

‘Sigmar in Heaven, this is going to go on all day.’

Creaking and sore, I got up, watching the fight as it moved away from me. Idly I reached up to take a branch. It was cold, but brittle, and snapped off more easily than something of actual wood would have. The cold bit into my skin, spreading slowly to my wrist and up my forearm and I actually laughed aloud as I felt the branch beginning to transform my hand into ice. Hefting the branch overarm, I hurled it with all the venom that Ikrit, the cold, and several weeks of captivity had left me of my strength.

I would have made a magnificent Prosecutor; I think we can all agree on that.

The impromptu javelin impaled Malikcek through the shoulder blade and pinned him to the trunk of a tree. He shrieked in agony, bursting into nothingness with a fading cry before the warrioress had a chance to react. I grinned, raising my fist in salute, then grunted as I felt something punch me in the back. It barely hurt, but for some reason my next breath came raggedly, my knees shaking, and I almost fell back against the tree behind me. I looked down and around to see the hilt of Malikcek’s knife sticking out of my back. Malikcek’s hand was attached. It looked even uncannier to me somehow, now that the shadow it wore had been given proper definition by my blood.

‘That hurt-hurt.’

‘You look good for it,’ I admitted.

‘My soul is imprisoned in Ulgu, a plaything of the gods. I cannot die-die. Not here. Not to the likes of you.’ He twisted the knife, driving it up into my lungs, making me open my mouth in a breathless gasp. I shaped it into a big, oval grin.

‘I’ve… had… worse.’ While I had him pretty much exactly where I wanted him with his knife in my back, I lifted my lantern and, one-handed, thumbed the catch. ‘Have you?’

Then I slid the shutter.

Malikcek shrieked and evaporated, taking the knife with him, which I wasn’t exactly sure was a good thing or bad, but was as painless a method of removing a blade from a body as I knew. I couldn’t be sure exactly what became of him because the world turned white, searing hot, as though my face were being held against the surface of a star. Light streamed through every jagged, half-mended crack that Ikrit had left of my being to burn me from the inside. The knife wound in my side knitted shut and melted closed at the same time, as if it were some kind of contest to see what could hurt me more. Then something stepped in front of the light, cutting it and filtering it so that I was griddled in stripes while the rest of me suffered the bittersweet agony of being plunged into the sudden, bitter cold of the mountain.

The woman stepped on the lantern, forcing it under the snow and deadening the light, not quite enough to kill the pain but enough to let me concentrate on something else. I looked up and along the length of a spear.

‘My name is Brychen, priestess of the Savage Maiden. I am looking for my brother.’

‘Barrach,’ I murmured.

‘You know him?’

‘The skaven held us in the same dungeon.’

The cold tip of her spear burrowed into my collar. ‘Yet you fled without him.’

‘He died.’

I felt a flicker of emotion run down the haft of the spear. Her bark creaked, becoming spiny and thick, circlets of thorn lengthening to grow along her arms and legs in spirals. ‘How?’

‘Fighting.’

‘How very like him. I hope that made him happy.’

I thought about how the Gorkai champion had gone, bent double and practically broken in half by Malikcek’s poison and decided to say nothing. It wasn’t the sort of thing a sister needed to hear. Particularly not one as wrathful as this one. ‘Now that we’re all happy about which side we’re on, perhaps you could remove your spear?’

‘What did Ikrit want with you?’

‘You know of him?’

‘The Wild Harvest kept him at bay for many seasons, but when the Maiden left us…’ Her attention strayed for a moment, and had I any strength left in me at all then, even with the wan pain of my lantern in every muscle, I would have easily taken that spear from her. I hadn’t though, so I didn’t.

‘I am Hamilcar Bear-Eater,’ I said. ‘Lord-Castellant of the Astral Templars and the Seven Words. I expect you will have heard of me.’ Strange as it might seem to you, in those days the Mortal Realms were rich with folk who had long forgotten the name ‘Sigmar,’ much less ever seen one of his celebrated champions in the flesh. ‘He wanted what the God-King has given to me, as he did with your brother. He failed. With us both, I think. Take solace in the fact that he suffered for his pride.’ I knew I would. ‘He’s dead. I’m sure of that.’

‘Dead?’ she scoffed. ‘Hardly. If it were so easy that you could do such a thing, then someone else would have done it before now.’

‘You think any of this was eas–’

Before I could argue it further, Brychen had already pushed her spear into me, running between the thick tendons at the base of my neck, through my throat, and pinning me to the ice. The pain was as overwhelming as it was unexpected. I made several short, terrifically painful gulps for air, but nothing went down. The bloody neck wound frothed with my escaping breath.

‘Do not think of this as an act of malice,’ said Brychen, crouching beside me and cupping the back of my head with one cool, woody hand. ‘The Harvest takes life. That is simply what it does.’ My lips moved furiously, but my head was already beginning to feel heavy, my vision clouding. ‘I know what you are, Stormcast. I followed you from the Gorwood and watched your battle with the skaven and their allies. I know that a Stormcast’s gifts will return with him to his god on death. I will not let Ikrit keep even the smallest seed of you.’

The distant cry of an aetar echoed around inside my head, always distant, always fading, as the back of my head sank to the ice.

Chapter twelve

It occurs to me now that I’ve spent a good portion of this tale describing how badly things have hurt. I wouldn’t want to describe what followed and have you accuse me of exaggerating my suffering to make for a better story. While that is certainly the sort of thing that I would do, I am also a master storyteller, my skills honed by a thousand firesides in Shyish and Ghur and Azyr, and I would be far more subtle about it than that. To spare myself the charge of embellishment, and you the ordeal, I’ll skip over the details of the reforging that followed my death beneath Brychen’s spear. Know only that it was by far the most painful of the procedures that I had yet endured upon the Anvil, as if the Smith did not remake me so much as bash the pieces of me together until they fused into a rough approximation of the hero I had been before. Yet there was a bliss of sorts, throughout the pain, to being once again in the charge of a master maker.

And when I opened my eyes for the first time after my third death, the last thing I’d expected to see was the inside of another cell.

‘This is someone’s idea of a joke, isn’t it? Zephacleas! Are you out there?’

I stood up. The movement caused me no pain. I felt strong again, but not quite yet myself. Things could become lost in the reforging, I knew, but whatever I thought I was missing I couldn’t place. I pushed the heel of my palm into my chest, like a hypochondriac feeling for a lump, but it eluded me, whatever it was. I shook off the empty feeling with a conscious shiver.

Soul searching never had been my strongest area.

I looked down at myself, my restored body clad in a fur-lined gown. The weave was finer than anything that mortal hands could match, even if they had access to materials as flawless as these. The lining was from the fur of no beast that ever lived in the Mortal Realms, I’ll tell you that.

The cell I now found myself in was practically luxurious compared to the one I had gone to such extraordinary lengths to escape. The floor was flagged and even. There was a cot with bedding, large enough for eight feet and four hundred pounds of Stormcast Eternal to lie comfortably. A plain-looking chair stood with its back to the dressed stone of the far wall. There was even a basin with taps for hot and cold running water, practically unheard of luxuries even in the rarefied echelons of the Collegiate Arcana. The bars were celestite. That was strange. The seraphon starmetal was too astoundingly rare even for the accoutrement of Lord-Celestants, but it was well-known about the celestine vaults that Grungni and his Smiths were able to source enough of the material for their own private needs. They vibrated musically. It was actually quite pleasant, but I expected it to get tiresome quite quickly.

‘A better class of prisoner then?’ I mused aloud. ‘Or a better class of captor?’

‘You’re no prisoner in my house, Hamilcar Bear-Eater.’

On the other side of the bars was a guard room, typical of the form. A single three-legged stool stood in front of a no-nonsense, steel-clad door. A duardin sat in it, slouched forwards, elbows on his knees, studying me intently and drawing the eye in kind.

The absolute size of him was oddly difficult to be sure about. He seemed to fluctuate between a roughly duardin-sized core of strength and something far larger than the room he occupied. That duardin centre was fantastically well muscled, stoking an ember of manly envy even in me, which you should know is the sort of thing I don’t admit to lightly. Even the plain workman’s leathers he wore couldn’t mask that kind of obvious power. His beard was the grey of good iron, split into two plaits that wound Sigmar alone knew how many times about his waist until they lay thicker than mail. His ruddy cheeks were blackened by soot and years, and by an implacability of expression that made him impossible to read.

‘That’s me,’ I shrugged. ‘The Bear-Eater. I talk before I think. And that’s if I think.’ I wrapped my fingers around the quietly singing starmetal and eyeballed the duardin through the bars. ‘It’s been over fifty Ghur-years since I’ve walked the rings of the Sigmarabulum. I’m sure every guest chamber in the Aetherdomes is barred with celestite these days.’

The duardin frowned. The room darkened with it, the very walls about me seeming to bow under some inward pressure. ‘Your reputation for tomfoolery goes before you, Hamilcar.’

‘Though it is an almost unheard of phenomenon, you have me at a slight disadvantage, then. Who are you?’

‘My name is Ong. I assumed you’d heard of me.’

I know a little of the duardin tongue. It’s not nearly the secret language so many of the Dispossessed clans seem to think it still is, and it’s a handy tongue to have a grasp of in Azyrheim where almost all of the bawdiest ale houses are duardin free-houses. The name meant ‘One’. My heart gave a traitorous little flutter. I did indeed know this duardin, for his name had been beaten into my armour, although not in a form that I or any Stormcast Eternal I knew of could read or speak aloud.

‘You are one of the Six Smiths,’ I said.

The duardin (the god, actually – though I suppose he must have been duardin once), Ong, produced a grimace and pushed his tongue against the gap left by a missing tooth. ‘I always hated that name, you know. It was Grungni as coined it, of course. As if he owned us. Never thought it’d catch on the way it did. Are you aught more than Sigmar’s will, lad?’

‘Some would answer yes.’

‘Aye, they would, but I didn’t ask them.’

I shrugged. ‘I’d say no.’

Ong clapped his thigh and nodded, grinning with the same meagre apportionment with which he had earlier frowned. The pressure on the chamber eased slightly and the celestite again began to sing. ‘Good answer, lad. Good answer. The right answer too, for what that’s worth. Under better circumstances, I think I’d have enjoyed having you about my Forge to put the realms to rights. Your legend around here doesn’t quite do you justice.’

‘You’ll hear a better class of story beyond Sigmaron’s walls.’

I never did understand why, but the Astral Templars aside, my fellow Stormcast Eternals never exactly took to me in the same way as the soldiers of the mortal races had.

Yet more evidence for the imperfection of the reforging process, I suppose.

‘Aye, I did hear that, but I can’t leave my Forge.’

It sounded like my personal kind of hell. ‘Why not?’

‘Busy.’

‘Then let me out of here, and I’ll show you all the best drinking halls in Azyrheim.’

‘After Sigmar has rid the Mortal Realms of Chaos. Maybe.’ This struck me as the godly equivalent of ‘when Aqshy freezes over’. The Smith’s frown deepened. ‘How do you feel?’

‘Feel?’ I felt as though there was a gaping hole somewhere in my chest, not that it was any business of his. ‘You put a bear in a cage and ask him how he feels?’ I rolled my wrists and made fists, my intention being to show how strong I felt, laugh it off, but some ligament of the soul, unconnected to any muscle, twanged and drew my face into a grimace.

Ong leant forwards. ‘What?’

I tried to smile. ‘If you weren’t right here in the room with me I’d say you hadn’t done your best work here.’

The Smith didn’t react to the insult. He reminded me a little bit of Ikrit in that respect, the way he would hold himself apart and grill me, uncaring of the answers I gave. But it was no dearth of emotion that made Ong inscrutable: it was the depth of it. Ikrit aspired to be a god. He masqueraded as a god. The Smith was a god. The thoughts inside his head passed a long way beyond my notice, and what he felt had an equivalent gulf of travel, and had to be powerful indeed, before it would show on his face.

‘What makes you say that?’ he said

‘It hurt. More than usual. And I feel…’ I hesitated, unsure what to say to get me out of here and back to Ghur the fastest. I settled for, ‘Different.’

Ong eased back on his stool, big hands clasped over his big knees. ‘I’ve never received a warrior in my Forge as broken in spirit as you were. The lords-arcanum almost threw you out, you know, before you even got near to my Anvil. They’d never seen anything like it, actually thought you some trick of the Dark Powers. Nor would it be the first time they’ve tried to sneak a corruption into the Forge Eternal.’ He held up his forefinger and thumb, an inch apart, the calluses almost touching. ‘This close to returning to the Cosmic Storm, lad, that’s where you were. Maybe you’d have preferred that. Many would. But we are what we are, and we do as that demands of us.’

I shrugged. It was all the opinion I had on any of that.

‘Remake the fallen,’ Ong pronounced. ‘That’s my task here. Repetitive, aye, it can be that, but never dull. You, though.’ He shook his head, pulling back his lips and sucking in through his teeth. ‘You can’t make right what isn’t all there. So my mother used to say.’

‘You had a mother?’

‘Once.’

I grunted. We had that in common.

It didn’t make me feel especially godly.

‘I’m not one for buttering words, Hamilcar Bear-Eater, I don’t get a lot of company down here, so I’ll just lay it out for you. I couldn’t reforge you right. Nor even close to right, since we’re being honest with one another. Only to the best of my ability, and that sits ill with me.’

‘I feel fine,’ I lied.

‘You ain’t anywhere near to fine. I wouldn’t allow an arrowhead to leave my Forge so imperfect.’

Every word he spoke was a pump at the bellows, drawing the air out of the room. I took a step back from the bars and spread my arms.

‘Come in here with me and we’ll talk about imperfect.’

Ong’s stolid frown cracked and he gave a dour chuckle. ‘Under better circumstances, aye. But when was then ever better than now. Never, I think.’ The false mirth faded and the walls again darkened, curving inwards to enclose us. ‘I take pride in my work. I’ll not have you walking the orrery bastions of Sigmaron bringing shame on me.’ He jabbed his thumb into his chest. ‘There’s a reason that I’m called “Ong”.’

‘So Sigmar doesn’t know I’m here?’

‘Reforging a warrior’s a tricky process, particularly after the first time. Can take days.’ He shrugged. ‘Can take centuries.’

‘Centuries?’

I didn’t know much about the affairs of gods, and I didn’t much care, but the idea of spending a hundred years or more in that airless cell had me practically scrabbling at the walls right then and there.

‘Release me to the Castellan Temple now. I’ll bathe in snow water, eat my own weight in meat, drink ’til I pass out, and then forget this conversation ever took place.’

‘Don’t try to intimidate me, lad. I’m not some hardlucked tinkerer looking to eke out some prospect in the Ghurlands, there to be browbeaten by some near-immortal I made.’ He thumped out those last words on his chest, and the walls and ceiling grumbled with him. The shadows cast by the bars of my cell pirouetted and stretched.

I held his stare, refusing to be cowed.

‘It’s for the good of the Stormhosts that you’re here. And if I do ever need to explain to Sigmar why you never emerged from the Forge, and don’t think you’re so important to him that I ever will, mind you, then I’ll answer him truthful – and believe you this, Hamilcar Bear-Eater, he’ll take my word on it. He’s a wise god, is Sigmar. He knows that when it comes to this Forge that Grungni and we Smiths know best. Until I can figure out what’s been done to you, and how to fix it, you’re going nowhere.’ He waved his hand vaguely. ‘I can’t guarantee you won’t break up into lightning the minute you’re beyond the Sigmarabulum, maybe take a whole command echelon and a ward of Azyrheim with you as you go.’

‘And how long will that be?’

‘Until I know more, I’d just be guessing.’

Ong stood up, shrinking and hardening as he did so, locking onto the form and size of an abnormally muscular duardin even as he walked towards the door behind him. The knock coincided perfectly with his arrival, and he opened it onto three Stormcast Eternals.

A young duardin stood with them. He said nothing, but his eyes carried a crackling intensity that was almost as terrible to look at as the demi-god Smith upon whom he waited. Perhaps even more so. The duardin nodded and withdrew, much to the apparent relief of the three Stormcast Eternals that had accompanied him. They filed inside.

Pulling up my chair and turning it backwards like the show-off I was, I planted myself in it. ‘You’ve surpassed yourself, Ong,’ I said. ‘You’ve managed to put all my favourite people into one room.’

Chapter thirteen

‘What brings you back to the Sigmarabulum so soon, brother?’ I said. ‘Broudiccan wagered me you’d be back in the Aetherdomes in a year. I gave you eighteen months, and reminded him that Sigmar had given you the easier bits of the Ghurlands.’

Zephacleas Beast-Bane broke into a huge, gap-toothed grin wholly at odds with the sombre grouping he was a party to and the ceremonial attire at which he occasionally scratched. His hair was long and bound in thick braids, as was his beard, something which I’d often teased him over – prissying up like a Zephyri aelf maid come to watch the trooping of the Freeguilds. He puffed up his thick chest and stroked his braids lovingly, his battered, brutal features creasing still further. ‘The ladies love a man who knows how to look after himself, my friend,’ he said.

I grinned, aware Zephacleas was purposefully derailing my line of questioning with his absurd answer, but I did not care enough to challenge him. ‘Where I come from they prefer one who can kill a ghyrcat with his bare hands, and still yomp it up the mountain to the cave afterwards.’

‘I can do that.’

I snorted. ‘You? You’re practically civilized. Made for finer things.’

Turning an interesting shade of purple from the effort of containing a laugh, the Lord-Celestant of the Beast-Banes took a standing position behind Ong’s stool and strove to look severe.

The sallow figure at the Smith’s left hand sighed wearily.

‘This might just pass more easily if you restrict yourself to answering the questions posed,’ said Ramus.

I recognised the Lord-Relictor despite the fact that I’d never actually seen him without armour before. The sallow features, the monkish haircut, the desolate stare – it was all much as I would have deduced from the skull-faced helm of his mortis plate. I do him something of a disservice because the Shadowed Soul actually had a vestige of a personality, which was more than can be said of most Hallowed Knights. I had always thought of him as something of a repressed psychopath, wanting nothing more than to throw off the trappings of the warrior-devout and launch his own vindictive crusade on Nekroheim. I respected him enormously for that and would have joined that mad venture of his in a heartbeat had he but asked, and brought twenty thousand mortal swords along with me.

Which only made the fact he never had more hurtful.

‘Why not ask the High Wind to stop blowing while you’re at it,’ I replied.

‘Interesting choice of metaphor,’ said the third Stormcast, at the Smith’s right hand. Lord-Veritant Vikaeus of the Knights Merciless, Chaos-seekers and witch-burners extraordinaire.

She was garbed in robes so white they almost called tears from my eyes. Her hair was the black of moonless skies and worn long, drawn from her face by a crown of blistered sky ice. Her sword belt was bare, as were those of the others, but unlike Ramus and Zephacleas she still held the abjuration staff of her office in one cold white hand. It’s a thing of particular beauty, Vikaeus’ staff, clad in nacre and mirrored glass, the lantern at its top ensconced like a pearl within its shell by a halo of cometry ice. Knowing how many daemons it had banished to the Realms of Chaos only added to its lustre, although the unwelcome reminder of how my own warding lantern had burned me did tarnish it somewhat. I averted my eyes, while obviously trying not to look as though that was what I was doing, but found that I wasn’t really looking at the staff anyway.

My eye was drawn to Vikaeus herself, the shape of her unarmoured figure, as if hypnotised by an arcane rune in some tome of secrets. I found myself studying her face, noticing, as I had somehow failed to notice before, the freckles that spread across her nose and cheeks like the constellations of my mortal sky.

‘What?’ she asked, testily.

I blinked, taken aback, having somehow managed to forget there were three other Stormcasts and a demi-god in the room with me.

‘Nothing,’ I said.

‘Nothing?’

She watched me through narrowed eyes, clearly expecting something more from me than that. I fidgeted on my seat, which was suddenly no longer as comfortable as it had first looked. ‘I was… wondering what brings you to the Forge Eternal?’ I said, because the only sure form of defence is all-out attack. ‘What calls a Lord-Celestant, Relictor, and Veritant away from Sigmar’s wars?’

‘They’re here at my inviting,’ said Ong, and despite being the only one seated amongst a group of warriors twice his size, the Smith dominated the room like an unsheathed blade. ‘I’ll be asking the questions. But these three…’ Ong raised a hand from his lap, gesture enough to identify and quell the three Stormcasts stood about him. ‘They know you best. They’ll help me be the judge of your answers.’

‘Know me best? These three?’ I gave a derisory bark. ‘Hardly! Ramus and I fought together once, a hundred years ago. Zephacleas? He and I have barely crossed paths since Sigmar unleashed his first storm. He had some walkover at Mandrake Bastion or somewhere like that.’ I waved my hand dismissively, which brought a wry chuckle and an eye-roll from the Beast-Bane. Of Vikaeus, I said nothing, which she noticed, and glanced at Ong with a frown. ‘Where are my Bear-Eaters?’ I declared, changing the issue and throwing up my hands as if I had just then run out of patience. ‘Where are Frankos and Broudiccan? Where is Thracius or Barbarus, Kanutus or Brakka?’

Vikaeus and Zephacleas shared a look.

‘There are gaps between these bars,’ I growled. ‘I can see you.’

‘The Bear-Eaters are not available,’ said Vikaeus.

‘What could be more important than deciding the fate of their Lord-Castellant?’

‘They fight on without you, believe it or not.’

‘I don’t believe it! Don’t tell me your much-prophesied vermintide is actually happening at last?’

‘My abilities are not on trial here, Hamilcar,’ Vikaeus answered with a sigh.

‘Trial?’ I rose out of my chair and kicked it from under me. I pointed an accusing finger at Ong. ‘Give me a trial by combat or none at all. Come on, Smith, what do you say? Man versus god, give it your best try.’

‘The Bear-Eaters aren’t your concern just now,’ said Ong, calmly, and his voice had the same effect on me as a bucket of cold water would have on a hot blade. Belligerence rose off me like steam and I sagged forwards onto the bars, dispirited. ‘Tell me what happened after you left the Seven Words.’

‘You couldn’t get even that much from Xeros and the others?’ I said.

‘Just answer my question.’

With an exaggerated sigh, I told them. Of the alliance I’d struck with the aetar, impressing King Augus with my head for heights, my casual attitude to the authority of the God-King, and my ability to swallow an eighteen-inch-long ringtail worm (a delicacy, apparently) without chewing. There were certain details I thought it best to haze over. No one needed to know, for instance, how my impending honour bout with Akturus Ironheel had brought forward my departure by a week or two, saying only that the two Freeguild regiments that had been ready to march at the time were more than adequate to the task.

‘Do you know how many of the nineteen hundred that marched with you returned to the Seven Words?’ asked Vikaeus, softly. If I’m honest, I hadn’t thought about it. I lifted my eyebrows to invite her to tell me. ‘Less than five hundred, led by Captain el-Shaah.’ The name meant nothing to me, but I knew how to bluff it, and did.

‘A good man and a good soldier,’ I said, squeezing a tear from my eye and rubbing it on the back of my hand. I sniffed and raised the damp fist in the rough direction of Sigendil. ‘Praise Sigmar that he wasn’t taken from us too soon.’

‘He demanded I mobilise another regiment to go after you,’ said Vikaeus.

‘The noblest of Sigmar’s people, the Jerech.’

‘Akturus was going to lead it.’

That one caught me off-guard. ‘Akturus Ironheel?’

‘I dissuaded him.’

I frowned at her. ‘You know how long I spent in that lair, don’t you?’

‘What happened when you brought Kurzog and Manguish to battle?’ said Ong, hammering that line of questioning down.

‘They outnumbered us three to one,’ I said, ‘and had a good position, on top of a hill surrounded by marsh. I went in first.’

‘Of course you did,’ said Ramus.

I cracked a grin. If there’s one thing I like better than a good battle, it’s talking one. ‘So as I said, we were outnumbered five to one…’

I told them how I slew Manguish the Bloatlord in single combat, sparing no details and creating a few more where embellishment alone seemed insufficient to the story at hand. I spoke of the timely arrival of the aetar to turn the battle in our favour, and of the skaven ambush that swung it decisively back against us again; how Augus had quit the field and abandoned us in the wake of Queen Ellias’ death. Zephacleas and Ramus both scowled at that, but Vikaeus simply nodded as if this were not news to her. The aetar had always regarded the Stormcast Eternals of the Seven Words with a blend of indifference and distrust – a step up from Beastlord Uxor who had occupied the fastness before us, but only a small one. Their disinterest had bred a certain disillusionment on our own side, and it had only been my urging and persistence that had made an alliance possible. Akturus had been against it from the start. As had Vikaeus.

‘You never saw the ambush coming?’ Vikaeus asked.

‘That’s why they call it an ambush,’ I explained with exaggerated patience.

‘You didn’t scout around the hill or the surrounding marsh before committing two whole regiments and your entire warrior chamber to a full-frontal attack?’

I shrugged, making it look nonchalant. ‘I didn’t have much daylight left. You know how it can be in Ghur, you think you’ve got an hour and then suddenly the sun’s galloping over the horizon.’ Zephacleas was nodding sagely, as I knew he would. ‘I couldn’t give Kurzog the chance to slip away under cover of darkness.’ Coming off the top of my head as it did, I was fantastically proud of that justification. I was hardly going to tell them that Broudiccan had argued for sending Illyrius and his Vanguards around the hill and I’d overruled him in favour of a straightforward head-on assault. ‘I would have done the same thing,’ said Ramus.

‘And I,’ said Zephacleas.

‘It is certainly in his character anyway,’ said Vikaeus, with distinctly milder praise than the others.

‘This took place before his capture,’ said Ong.

‘You make it sound like my fault,’ I said.

‘Why you?’ Vikaeus asked.

I spread my arms theatrically in a ‘who else?’ sort of gesture that had Zephacleas covering his mouth to smother a laugh.

I winked at him.

‘They did try to take you personally during their earlier attack on the Seven Words,’ said Vikaeus.

‘Stop trying to call it an attack.’ I waggled my finger at her. ‘You can’t say your prophecy came true that easily. It was a raid at best, and I was the only one that did any real fighting.’ I had challenged the entire horde to single combat and won, sort of, which did more for my reputation around the fortress than every other triumph before that put together. ‘I was just in the right place at the right time.’ Now I thought about it, though, Ikrit had spouted some nonsense about choosing me because I was predictable and easily trapped, but I decided to keep that to myself.

Nobody knew how to talk down their foes like Hamilcar Bear-Eater.

‘And what d’you know of the one that took you?’ said Ong. ‘The assassin.’

I didn’t answer that one right away. There was something about the way the Smith put it that made me think he knew at least part of the answer to it already. ‘His name was Malikcek.’ I held the demi-god’s gaze as well as I could, but it was like waiting for a reaction in the face of a moon. If the name meant anything to him he didn’t show it.

‘And he managed to take you?’ said Zephacleas, with heart-warming disbelief.

‘My back was turned.’

‘Take this seriously,’ Ramus sighed.

‘He was as good as anyone I’ve ever fought before. Strong and quick. He killed Broudiccan.’

Zephacleas tightened his fist and made the sign of the hammer against his chest. He must have known already, but I appreciated the gesture.

‘Much is demanded…’ Ramus began.

‘Stop talking now, or forever live with the consequences,’ I said, glaring.

‘What happened to you after your capture?’ said Ong.

I took a deep breath, primarily for effect, before continuing. I told them everything that occurred to me about the skaven lair and the warriors within it, and of the warlock master, Ikrit. Again, I watched Ong for a reaction to the name, but he gave none. While Ong remained impassive throughout my tale, however, the three Stormcast Eternals grew progressively more animated as I spoke.

‘He sought to recreate the Divine Storm?’ Ramus snarled, before I had even come to the part of my escape.

‘Such an act cannot go unpunished,’ said Vikaeus. ‘Do you remember anything about where the warlock’s lair might be found?’

‘It was a mountain. Somewhere beyond the borders of the Nevermarsh.’ I remembered hearing Aeygar’s cry, somewhere in the sky, looking for me, so however far the lair must have been it was not wildly beyond the reach of the Seven Words.

Vikaeus turned to Ong before I could speak.

‘I will lead my Exemplar Chamber and every warrior Akturus can spare into the Nevermarsh. We will find the mountain and bring the entire peak to the ground.’

I felt my thoughts drift and found myself watching her lips very closely as she spoke. There was something about hearing her harangue the Smith for bloody retribution that took me back.

‘No, you won’t,’ said Ong, flatly, as though that were that, drawing my attention firmly into the present. ‘We’re not done here just yet.’

Vikaeus bowed her head stiffly.

I went on, but there wasn’t a great deal left to say after that. The failure of Ikrit’s machine, my flight, my fight with Malikcek on the snow. I told it all with a brevity that left the Stormcasts who knew me more troubled than anything that I actually had to say. It was understandable. Ordinarily you’d have had to gag me to stop me talking about myself, but I was growing quite bored of this entire exercise.

‘And you are certain that he was trying to kill you?’ prodded Ramus, trying to elicit just a little aggrandisement from my lips.

‘Call it a feeling,’ I said.

‘Would he not have returned you to Ikrit alive?’ he said.

‘I don’t think he likes Ikrit very much.’ Ikrit had told me something about this, which I remembered, but I was getting a bit too stormy under the skin to be as obliging as the Lord-Relictor might have liked. ‘If Malikcek thought he could survive without Ikrit’s help then he would. He’s certainly not above giving his master a sly knife in the back when he thinks he can get away with it.’

Ong nodded slowly, considering that. It was his first obvious reaction to anything I’d said since Vikaeus and the others had entered. ‘Could come in useful.’

‘Good. Can I go now?’

‘Not yet.’

I scowled.

‘So he killed you?’ said Ramus, persistent as a plague drone at a window, as always.

‘No.’ I dragged my gaze from the granite solidity of the Smith. ‘That was a woman who just happened along.’

‘She just happened along?’ said Vikaeus.

I made a show of looking around my cell for the echo.

‘Think about it, Hamilcar,’ said Ramus. ‘If this woman was in the area, then if we can find her people we might just find your warlock.’

‘They’re nomads,’ I said, dismissively. ‘She’d followed me all the way from Kurzog’s Hill, I think. She wanted to get into the skaven lair herself and find her brother. He was a guest of Ikrit’s too.’

‘And she killed you?’ said Zephacleas.

‘Not man enough to be killed by a girl, brother?’

The Beast-Bane shrugged. I got the impression that he was starting to tire of this too.

‘Either way, she distracted Malikcek long enough for me to use my warding lantern. It burned me too, of course, but I was a dead man on that mountain anyway, and it was all I had to hand that could touch him.’ I shrugged. ‘And then she killed me. To stop me and my thrice-blessed falling back into Ikrit’s claws.’ I stopped talking for long enough to take in everyone’s expression. Aghast. Even Ong looked stony.

‘I don’t hold it against her,’ I said. ‘I would have done it myself if she hadn’t come along when she did.’

‘It’s not that,’ said Vikaeus.

Ong leant forwards, resting elbows on his knees, and sitting his bearded chin on a perch of his fingers. ‘Your own light burned you?’

‘Did I not mention?’ I’d skipped over that on purpose, of course, and kicked myself for letting it slip then. ‘Ikrit had been tinkering with it for weeks. He probably broke it somehow.’

‘It is not so easy to tamper with the works of the God-King,’ said Ramus.

‘If only,’ I said, with feeling.

‘And yet it burned Malikcek as it was meant to,’ said Ong. ‘It left this mortal woman unharmed as it was meant to.’ He studied me with an intensity I didn’t like.

‘Enough!’ I slammed my fists against the bars, briefly upsetting the star-metal’s calming trill to a higher register. Warriors without peer that they all were, Ramus and the rest didn’t bat so much as an eyelid between them.

Ong belatedly arched an eyebrow.

‘I am a Lord-Castellant of the Astral Templars and you will send me back to my Bear-Eaters.’ I gripped the softly vibrating celestite and growled. ‘Before I’m forced to raise my voice.’

Zephacleas glanced at Ong. ‘You haven’t told him?’

‘Told me what?’ I said.

‘Yours was a hard reforging,’ said Ong. ‘You had to be passed through the soul mills many times before you were in a fit state to be cast to the Forge Eternal.’

The Beast-Bane looked apologetic, which wasn’t a favourable expression on that smashed brick of a face. ‘You’ve been dead five years, brother. The Bear-Eaters are no more.’

My mouth hung open for a beat.

This was the sort of thing that happened to men in nightmares.

‘No,’ I hissed. ‘I don’t believe it. Even if it has been five years.’

‘It is true,’ said Ramus.

‘Yours was never a large chamber,’ said Vikaeus. ‘More of a Brotherhood that never disbanded. A personality cult. Heldenhammer, you didn’t even have a Lord-Celestant. And with you, Broudiccan and Xeros all slain in short order…’

‘Xeros fell?’ I couldn’t say why, but that news cheered me just a little.

‘Those who survived fight in the livery of the Heavens Forged now,’ said Ramus.

‘Never heard of them,’ I muttered. ‘Whose war-name is that?’

‘Frankos,’ said Vikaeus.

‘Frankos?’

She nodded.

‘He blows my trumpet!’

‘You will have to find another warrior to do that from now on, because he is Lord-Celestant Frankos of the Heavens Forged now.’

Don’t misunderstand me: Frankos was as fine a choice as any to take command of the Bear-Eaters in my absence. He had a breezy confidence that reminded me a little bit of myself, while his apparent youthfulness endeared him to the common soldiers in a way that few Stormcast Eternals could ever dream of or even wish for. But I was feeling quite cuckolded, and publicly, over this development, which wasn’t putting me in the most charitable of moods towards my younger replacement. After all, in a century and a half of warfare and all the long decades of campaigning before the Gates of Azyr were cast wide, Sigmar had never made me a Lord-Celestant.

‘When I received this summons, Frankos all but begged to be allowed to attend in my place,’ said Vikaeus.

‘You dissuaded him, I see.’

‘I did.’

‘Of course you did.’

‘Things go badly in the Gorkomon, Hamilcar. The skaven and their allies have overrun every outpost, camp, and trail lodge in the Gorwood. Their attacks on the Seven Words itself worsen by the day. The fortress relies entirely on the Azyr Gate for its reinforcement and supply now, but wars rage across the mortal realms and there is little additional aid that Sigmar can spare to one of Heaven’s farthest-flung bastions. Even with the Heavens Forged and the Imperishables strengthened with additional conclaves we barely hold the outer walls.’

‘Just how big are the Bear-Eaters…’ I gritted my teeth. ‘…the Heavens Forged now?’

‘Over five hundred swords.’

This got better and better. ‘All the more reason to send me back,’ I said.

‘You are one warrior, Hamilcar. Do you honestly think that you would make the difference?’

She could have been speaking of any warrior, but the words hurt me more than they should have. More than the same truism coming from Ramus or Zephacleas or even Ong would have managed. I swelled my chest, folding my arms over it as if to obscure the conspicuous wound she had landed on me.

‘Are we talking about the same Hamilcar Bear-Eater?’

‘I’m sorry,’ grunted Ong. ‘Believe that or don’t, it’s up to you, but you’re not going anywhere until I decide what’s to be done with you.’

‘How many times do I need to say it – I’m fine.’

Before the god could answer, Vikaeus struck the ferrule of her staff on the ground, the shutters of her abjuring lantern falling away to let the Light Celestial burn through the encrusting rings of ice. It speared through the celestite bars, making them sing, and driving me back from them with a roar of pain. I tripped over the chair that I’d just kicked over, tangling with it as I fell. With no greater warning, the light was shuttered again, leaving me gasping in agony on the floor of my cell.

‘A little warning next time, lass,’ said Ong, in the same tone that I might have used had someone lit a pipe in my bath chamber. ‘You left your sovereign at the door.’

‘I knew that his light could not harm you,’ said Vikaeus.

Ong’s brow furrowed. Storm clouds gathered. ‘Well, however it was done, it does seem to about settle it, doesn’t it?’

Unpeeling myself from the ground, I tottered back towards the bars. I gripped them and stared at my judges and accusers, my so-called brothers and sisters, with what I intended to be naked ferocity, but which my scorched hair and bloodshot eyes probably rendered closer to lunacy. ‘Then send me alone. No warrior chamber. I’ll be an Errant-Questor. I’ll go after Ikrit and Malikcek myself, and never go near another stormhold until they are both dead.’

‘Errant-Questor,’ Ramus mused, as though it was something he was surprised to have never considered before. ‘Interesting.’ I’d known that the Shadowed Soul would be intrigued by that before I’d said it. He would have taken the vows himself had he not allowed his desire for vengeance to become confused by duty and guilt.

‘I don’t see you as the solitary type,’ said Vikaeus, slowly.

Ong nodded his agreement. ‘I was barely able to put you back together again the last time. I don’t know what’ll happen to your soul should you be killed again.’

‘Then I won’t get killed. We all win.’

‘No, lad. No. I’ve got to see if what this mad warlock’s wrought can be undone, or if there’s a flaw in you all that’ll need to be changed in later Strikings.’

‘I’ll not wait out the Age of Sigmar as a prisoner of the gods,’ I hissed, knowing how Ramus, at least, would take those words. I extended my hand to him. ‘Help me.’

The Lord-Relictor’s face was torn although not, apparently, quite badly enough. ‘Forgive me. But if a reforged soul should display a flaw then it is the task of the lords-relictor to catch it before it can do harm. My duty in this matter is clear.’

I shifted to Vikaeus, but my words suddenly dried up in my mouth. She regarded me in turn, a man struck stupid by the beauty of a woman as men like me have been since before the World-That-Was, without recognising the emotional sledgehammer that had just struck me in the gut or even (which was worse somehow) noticing it at all.

Now you are probably wondering what it would eventually take for me to realise what Vikaeus had been to me in life. You are thinking that Hamilcar Bear-Eater is a champion fool as much as he is one of Azyr, and you would be in some fine and celebrated company if you did so, believe me. But you have to remember that these feelings were as unfamiliar to me as they were to Vikaeus. Much easier to dismiss them as arcane fancies, scattered through my memories for some fell purpose of Ikrit’s than to acknowledge them for what they were.

‘You… wish me to intercede with the God-King on your behalf?’ she said hesitantly, scrutinising my face like an autist faced with a Mask Impassive. ‘I cannot. Ong is right to fear what has been done to you, but Sigmar is compassionate, and he has always held you in peculiar esteem. I fear he would not judge you as objectively as he should.’

I worked my tongue in a bid to moisten my mouth, maybe even remind it how to talk.

That left Zephacleas.

‘Don’t even ask,’ he said.

‘I’m a child of ice wastes and wild stars,’ I said. ‘You can’t keep an animal like me in a cage.’

With a rumbling sigh, the Beast-Bane walked towards my cell. He held up his hand and grunted as I took it in mine, the muscles of our arms bulging as we each pitted our strength against the other’s grip. A strange look of discomfort crossed his face as my hand edged his down, and he drew his hand sharply away.

‘And he calls me imperfect,’ I said, throwing a nod towards the seated Smith.

‘Get better, brother,’ Zephacleas said, still staring at me, but with a drifting tone that implied he suddenly wished to be elsewhere.

‘If I get any better then Sigmar will need to make room for me in the gold chair.’

Zephacleas’ smile was equally contrived, but we are Astral Templars – lying to each other about what we’re really feeling is part of what we do best.

I glanced unconsciously towards Vikaeus.

‘We will find a solution,’ she said.

‘You can’t just…’

‘We’re done here.’

Ong’s voice struck like a gavel as he rose from his stool, the three Stormcast Eternals dissolving into crackling zephyrs as he did so before dispersing onto the aether winds. I stared at the after-image that Vikaeus had left in the air, a longing that I couldn’t explain pulling on my chest.

‘What did you do to them?’

The Smith gave a snort, puffing out his chest and stuffing his thumbs under his belt. ‘You think I’d just invite those three into the Forge Eternal? No one gets to see the Six Smiths, lad, not even the lords-arcanum of the Sacrosanct Chambers. That’s one of Sigmar’s rules, and doesn’t he have plenty of them.’

‘But…’ I gestured pointedly to where the three warriors had just been.

‘More of the soul gets lost to the Anvil than you’d think,’ said Ong. ‘More than Sigmar would like you to think, that’s for sure. Enough to make a passing forgery from what’s left behind.’ He shrugged. ‘The storm remembers.’

I felt myself deflate, feeling as low as I had when I’d first found myself so utterly alone in Ikrit’s dungeon. ‘Nobody knows I’m here, do they?’

Ong puzzled over me for a moment, as though a piece of ore had just claimed it was lonely.

‘Nobody outside these walls.’

I looked up at him, my light-sore eyes hardening into a glare. ‘Don’t get too used to my company, Ong. It’ll take more than a demi-god to keep Hamilcar Bear-Eater down.’

Chapter fourteen

For a being of cold starlight and the slow Celestial cycles, I had some crazed dreams that night.

I dreamt of old stars. Oceans of ice. Wind in my hair, cold on my face, warmth in my blood. I dreamt of Vikaeus again. As she had been.

Her skin was not as pale, her hair less dark and rubbed with goldspar, clad in bearskin and decked with jewels, or what passed for them amongst our people, which meant bright shells and feathers, polished stones, painted teeth. The sun rose behind her over the summit of the snow-draped mountain that our tribe had lived on and worshipped, lighting her up like a goddess. I dreamt of a heart melting for the knowledge that this vision before me was mine and mine alone. ‘You are usurped, my king,’ she recited to me, her voice dripping like honey. ‘The sun rises. The rule of the Day Queen comes.’ Lucidity dissolved into a riot of feasting and fighting, women in Day armour of cured hide and ribbons that their mothers and grandmothers had tended for these once-in-a-generation hours of day, commanding their menfolk to fetch them ale, bathe their feet, and embarrass themselves performing feats of strength for their pleasure. I dreamt of odd things. Unexpected things. The warm taste of ale in a woman’s mouth. Being dizzy from too much dancing.

It was enough to stir me from my sleep but could not rouse me completely.

I dreamt of monsters. Long hunts across the eternal wildernesses in search of forage and game. A father, a huge man with arms like tree trunks and a laugh to break ice with. Brothers. I dreamt of the ogor frostlord and his raiders who had been tracking the same prey as us. He was mounted on a white bear the size of a Dracoth, draped in the tattooed skins of men and beasts and wielding a lance of solid ice as long as three men. I dreamt of teeth and white fur, my father’s screams, the memory of blood as I chewed the white bear’s ear off even as it shook my body in its jaws.

‘My Bear-Eater,’ spoke the thunder as it all went away.

It sounded amused.

I woke for a spell after that, and in that limbo of half-sleep I felt myself sealed within a seed pod of the kind that the sylvaneth use to nurture the young of their kind. Chittering voices came to me from the outside, muted by the viscous fluids of the pod, drowned out by the warped, but strident, pulse of Life.

I startled awake, kicking off my bedsheets and beating the foot of my cot with my heels – convinced, for reasons I could not quite divine, that there were rats at the end of my bed. The dream fog cleared from me as I came fully awake, but the corrupted throb of the Life song was more cloying. I sat up slowly, brushing off the hair that sweat had matted to my face. The room was too dark, too airless. The walls were too close. There were no windows. That was what it was. I swung out of the cot, intending to go to the wash basin and see if I could figure out the cold tap when I noticed the intense-looking duardin from before stood outside the door of my cell. The way he crossed his arms over his chest emphasised his incredible musculature, and somehow made him appear ten feet tall. The shadows cast by the thunderstorms in his eyes did the rest.

‘Ong sent you to watch me sleep?’ I growled, slightly unnerved, the restless night making me snappish.

He shook his head. His beard was well-kept and tawny-coloured. A pair of thin-framed spectacles sat on his bulb nose. Lightning flared across the inside of the lenses.

‘You came to watch me sleep because you wanted to?’

Without answering, he slotted a key into the lock of my cell. The door sang like a seraphon choir as it opened. I frowned at the strange duardin. Power swept through the open door of the cell like the winds of a coming storm.

‘You are no duardin,’ I said.

He regarded me sternly.

‘Do you serve the Smiths?’

Finally, he spoke. ‘Not exactly.’

Where the chamber’s walls had previously shaped themselves to Ong’s moods, they shuddered to this duardin’s. Thunder peeled. Rain hammered upon the roof of the realm. I narrowed my eyes against the sudden gale.

‘I feared as much,’ I said.

I wanted to ask who he was, what god he served, why he had been sent for me and how he had managed to breach the Forge Eternal, but I sensed that the delay would have been my death. His power was sublime.

I felt it the moment that my punch made contact with his face.

Lightning bolted between us. His spectacles shattered. I knew I had no right even to be entertaining the idea of challenging a semi-divinity of this order, but surprise could be a powerful weapon.

The duardin stumbled back, storm clouds gathering about his shoulders like a cloak. I followed through the cell door, not giving him a chance to recover. An uppercut lifted him off the ground. He didn’t go far. It was as if he weighed twenty times what he appeared to. The flagstones split beneath him as though I had struck them with a starsoul mace.

When I got to the door, I dragged it open.

‘Whoah!’

I wobbled over the threshold, my hand still gripping the door handle for dear life as a sort of multi-dimensional vertigo crashed over me.

The Forge Eternal, even just Ong’s sixth of it, was a labyrinth of staircases and columns, celestine pillars carved with stylised duardin faces and crackling lightning forges. Trying to take in the entire vista at once was like trying to capture the entirety of the night sky. From where I stood, clinging to the door frame, it appeared as though duardin in work leathers and aprons blitzed up and down golden staircases, trailed by lightning, blithely unconcerned by the others doing the exact same thing on the flip side. Other sets just hung unsupported, or terminated mid-step only to emerge from behind an obstructing pillar elsewhere, going down where before they had been running upwards. Where walls were visible through the layers of lightning stairs and supports, I saw only storm haze and smoke, duardin and humans and the occasional aelf labouring like ants alongside the Smiths’ lightning automata in the creation of weapons – and beings – of power. If there was a ceiling, or a floor, then I couldn’t see one. Ordinarily, this was the sort of topsy-turvy stuff that I couldn’t get enough of, but it made my stomach roil.

Concentrating solely on the steps in front of me, I started running. Corposant lightning flickered about my feet, the view about me blurring as the stairs swept me through the labyrinth at mind-bending speeds. Just as it had been when fleeing Ikrit’s lair I had no idea what I was doing, but Ong was about to wake up to the same fact that the warlock had before him, and that was this: confinement does not a cooperative Hamilcar make. I would find Ikrit or Malikcek, preferably both, and beat the answers out of them if I had to before returning to Sigmaron in triumph. That was my plan – staggering in ambition, light on detail. The way I liked them. Focusing on the end goal made all the steps I had to take along the way seem individually smaller. Small enough to be ignored for now.

Just think about the glory.

The sound of heavy booted steps whisked up (or possibly down) the stairs towards me. I tensed, ready for a fight with anything this realm within a realm could throw at me, but the pair of duardin in leather jerkins and gauntlets simply tugged on their beards and grunted ‘lord’ as they flashed past, as though Stormcast Eternals in bed robes ran up and down these stairs all the time. I had visions of more broken warriors like myself. Retinues of them. Conclaves. Chambers. Lost in the Forge of Ong and running for all time like lightning gheists in a bottle. The feeling came over me with such force that I dived headlong for the next door I saw and slammed it behind me. I leant my back against it, my mind a whirl of speed, the terror of a trapped animal tight about my chest.

‘I should have expected that you would do something like that.’

I gave a shout of alarm and raised my fists.

I was in an armoury. Dummies and racks stood in rows in the dark, the storms within them subdued, their final colours muted, awaiting bondage to the souls of Stormcast Eternals as yet unstruck.

The duardin stood in front of me, his expression stormy as he removed his now unbroken spectacles. Lightning flared behind his eyes. Recognition struck me like a bolt from above, and I dropped immediately to my knees.

‘S-Sigmar.’

The duardin touched his face where I had struck him. ‘A good blow, Hamilcar. But you are not a god.’ He drew his hand from the unblemished skin. Lightning played about the fingers as he extended it towards me. ‘You have not earned the right.’

A bolt of lightning tore from the duardin’s open palm. He did not summon it as would a Lord-Relictor or Sacristan. Rather it was as though he ceded a tiny, infinitesimal portion of his being to become lightning. The bolt struck me, and in that heart-flash of divine communion we were connected. My chest. His hand. My soul.

My god.

The duardin had been seared from existence, burned away in full by the soaring majesty of a man, bearded and great, clad in armour of burnished gold and auroral light. In physicality he stood little higher than I did, and yet I looked up. The gaze that met mine was luminous and ancient, curious and wise, wrathful as the stars, yet with a capacity for empathy and courage that barriers of realm or race could not deny. He looked like me. All of that, and more yet that I could not now describe, I felt in the cosmic eye-blink that it took for his lightning to leap fully from his gauntlet and into me.

After that, I am not sure what happened.

I must have flown backwards, cracked my head against the door that I had entered by and been thrown unconscious for a spell. I recalled none of it.

I came to lying on my chest, surrounded by a golden nimbus that might have been the antipodal opposite of the foul luminescence to which I had awoken in Ikrit’s lair. Lightning played across my fingertips, flashing between my eyelashes and the flagstones on which I lay. They had been dark when I had entered, granite grey, pleasing to its dour custodians, but now they were lustrous, marble white and veined with silver. The dummies that surrounded me, stick figures mere moments before, were now clad in the finest suits of thrice-blessed armour, and the weapon racks were full. Light lanced in through windows that had assuredly not been there, but it was not a kind light. It was the light of epiphany and judgement, damning me to glorious blindness while the greatest being ever to claim the Mortal Realms his own stood scant feet from where I lay.

‘Grungni forged you in my image,’ the light intoned, and trembled with the weight of its own words. ‘Not as I am, nor as I would wish to be, but as a memory of something that once was.’ It walked towards me, the light, until he reached out to tilt my face towards his with storm-wreathed fingers. My illumination brought with it a savage pain, tempest and thunder. And yet barely a fraction, I knew, of the boiling heart of the storm of storms he contained.

I must have made a sound, for the God-King looked fleetingly downcast, and withdrew his hand from my chin.

‘So it is true. That which I gave to alloy your mortal soul to mine has been broken. There can be no succour for you in Azyr.’

I shook my head, scrunching my eyes against the incandescence of the Storm Eternal. Denying his charge was the hardest thing I had ever bidden myself to do, and yet I did so all the same.

‘I am still me, sire.’

‘I grieve for what has been done to you, Hamilcar Bear-Eater. As if an injury has been done to a son of my own flesh and blood.’ Eyes of raw, torrential energy became darkly brooding, as if recalling a time when the mortal injury had been done to his inconceivably distant self. ‘But Ong is not wrong. What has been done to you is a threat to the very existence of the Stormhosts. If it can be repeated. If Ikrit succeeds…’ Sigmar looked at the floor and breathed a sigh that carried on it the woes of the eight Mortal Realms. ‘All the long centuries that I left the realms to the mercies of Chaos, allowing them to suffer and change while Grungni and I laboured to perfect the first Stormcast Eternals. It will have been for naught if the skaven, Ikrit, can create a host of his own corrupted design.’

I made to ask him what he knew of the warlock. Like Ong before him, Sigmar had referred to him by name, and with a casualness that spoke of prior familiarity. Before I could muster my courage, the God-King had turned his radiance from me and gestured towards an armour dummy upon which a harness of highly ornate and unusually heavy aegis war-plate had been assembled. It looked like the bastion armour that Broudiccan had worn, albeit far more elaborate and fine.

With the light on me diminished, I took a shuddering breath and sat up.

‘It is exquisite,’ I said. ‘Fit for a Lord-Commander or Celestant-Prime.’

‘Watch,’ rumbled the storm.

Nothing happened, but just as I dared to open my mouth to say so the harness began to change colour, shifting from a drab, even cream to sun-bright amethyst and dazzling gold. Beastmarks displaying snarling bears arose from the previously solid metal of the left pauldron and right poleyn. The cloak thickened to become fur and a necklace of long, grizzly teeth formed a ring around the gorget and a matching bracelet around the cuff of each vambrace. It was conspicuously more magnificent than anything I had worn as a Lord-Castellant of the Astral Templars.

‘You are Lord-Castellant no more,’ said Sigmar, drawing the thoughts from my head like bolts of lightning to a rod. ‘The lord of no Stormhost may command you.’ He tossed me a helmet. I caught it between my hands, residual lightning flaring from the eye slots, and looked down into a Mask Impassive that glittered purple. A golden halo swept around the face-plate, a single piece of metal swept into the form of a rearing bear. The feature most striking to me, however, was the lack of the coloured plume that would have indicated chamber allegiance. ‘You have fallen and been remade by my grace. You are Knight-Questor now, appointed by me, beholden to no cause or duty but the geas I lay upon you now.’

I positioned myself so as to be up on one knee, and lowered my head anew.

‘Find Ikrit. Learn his secrets. Destroy every trace of his work. Kill him if you must, but bring him to me alive if you can. I am far from the first to have fallen foul of his avarice.’

‘Sire?’

‘The name “Ikrit” was not unknown to me. Tyrion. Alarielle. Even Nagash. He has crossed many whom I would prefer to call ally.’ He spoke the names of gods as though they were petty lords or counsellors on whom he might call in passing. I nodded as though this were commonplace in my experience. ‘They are but the ones I know of, and even they do not speak of it freely. Can you imagine Nagash admitting to a mortal skaven violating the sanctity of Nekroheim and escaping with the direst secrets of undeath?’

‘I cannot,’ I said, honestly.

‘It sets a black precedent.’

‘You fear that other mortals will attempt the same.’

The brilliance sighed. ‘We all were mortal once. Even Nagash was once a living man, if you can believe that now. I am told this Ikrit is almost as ancient, even if for the moment he lacks our power.’

‘Told by whom?’

‘My brother and sister gods despatch agents of their own to capture him and his assassin. In secret, of course, but little transpires in the realms that the stars do not observe. Malerion has pursued him longest. Decades, at least.’

‘As has his own Horned Rat.’

‘Indeed?’ Sigmar turned to me, and I winced. His genuine surprise was like a tsunami wave, violent and unexpected. ‘No one else tasked with bringing in this quarry knows him as well as you can claim to, Hamilcar, for good or ill. It will be I to claim the warlock, and it will be you that brings him to me.’

I nodded, rising from my knee, but keeping my head bowed.

‘Why the deception, sire? You are the God-King. Why come to me in disguise?’

‘You are best-placed to find Ikrit first, Hamilcar, but I cannot have it known that you are on this quest. The injury that has been done to you is too great. It would weaken the resolve of the Stormhosts if it were to become known. When Ong finds you missing he will come to me, and I will claim ignorance. The Smiths are proud. Better for them to believe you headstrong and resourceful than that I work to the common good behind their backs. I will have no choice but to send hunters after you.’

I snorted. The hunter had not yet been reforged who could bring down Hamilcar Bear-Eater.

‘Where should I begin?’

‘Ghur.’

I nodded. I still had allies there that I could call upon. I was thinking of Frankos, Akturus. Perhaps even el-Shaah.

The radiance before me splintered around the sharp edges of something metallic as the God-King held forth a weapon. It was a halberd. It was my halberd. I held out my hands, palms flat, as Sigmar laid the haft across them. Closing my left hand to grip it, I ran my right along the shaft towards the blade, reacquainting myself with every notch and carving the way a blind man would a trusted staff.

‘You remade it.’

‘Ong thought it unsalvageable. I found another Smith.’

I did not enquire further, which I regret now, but at the time I could not have been any less concerned with the internecine struggles of the gods. Standing stiffly, as though I had been crouched in obeisance for a thousand years, I gave the weapon a practice twirl, stabbing finally at the armour dummy, holding the long-handled weapon unwavering in one hand.

‘As good as new,’ I said. ‘First forged under the Auroral Tempest.’

‘A more belligerent storm does not exist in Azyr.’

‘I am glad you did not insist on a Questor Warblade. I don’t think I would feel the same warrior with any other weapon.’ I lowered the halberd’s blade point to the flagstones.

‘What is it? You have doubts.’

‘Never.’ Despite what I said I touched the fingers of my left hand to my breast. The position matched about as closely as I could hazard to the injury in my soul. But how do you even go about explaining such things to a god? It was my god that addressed me now though, not Ong, and I felt that I owed him something of the truth. ‘I have been remembering things from my old life. Feeling things.’

‘What manner of things?’

I thought of Vikaeus in her Day armour and grew inexplicably defensive.

‘Things.’

A smile shone upon the God-King’s face, sunlight glimpsed through a break in the storm. The burn it inflicted on me was fleeting and light, an uplifting trill of power that cascaded between my ears and in the palms of my hands.

‘Then perhaps what Ikrit has given you is not wholly a curse.’

I smiled back at him. I was helpless to do otherwise.

‘Then I am ready.’ I threw the fabulously ornate helmet that Sigmar had given to me over my shoulder. I would wear the armour with pride, but the God-King himself could not make Hamilcar Bear-Eater cover his face with a helmet.

Knight-Questor Hamilcar Bear-Eater, I thought.

Lord-Celestant Frankos of the Heavens Forge didn’t sound nearly as impressive to me now.

‘Send me back, sire.’

‘And so that is the story of how I knocked out Sigmar Heldenhammer, and incidentally of how I came to be named Knight-Questor. Now pass me that cup, mortal. Recounting my triumphs is thirstier work than winning new ones. What is that? Speak louder, friend. You want to hear more of that tale?

Very well, there is still some night left…’

Chapter fifteen

One of these days, I am going to sneak a body out of Azyrheim, and it is Sigmar I will be going to for help moving it.

Sigmaron is without any doubt the mightiest fortress in the Mortal Realms. Perhaps in any of the realms that float in the aetheric cloud this side of the Great Nothing. Raised at the dawning of the Age of Myth and extended and fortified over aeons, it eclipses such pretenders as Hammerhal or Nagashizzar in every conceivable aspect. Its strength can be rivalled only by the molten fury of the Brass Citadel of Khorne, or the madness-inducing structures of the Impossible Fortress. ‘Impregnable,’ then, is a word that fits neatly alongside it. And yet neither the storm golems that stand sentinel of the Forge Eternal nor the Paladin Conclaves that patrol the walls and grounds of Sigmaron even noticed my passage. The Freeguilder companies that warded the First City below – tens of thousands of men-at-arms in a city of untold millions – simply waved me past. Even the star titans that watched over the Realmgates, capable of sniffing a single corrupt thought from a puritan’s mind, let me pass unchallenged.

I took a deep breath of the stale, subterranean air and grinned as I started down the marbled steps.

If you’d told me just six months ago that I would return to the Seven Words and be glad to see the place, then I would have laughed, and cut your ale ration for a month as a precaution.

The two Judicators in basalt-black armour at the bottom of the flight lowered their boltstorm crossbows.

‘Sigmar,’ breathed one. ‘He has come back.’

‘That’s right, brothers. Knight-Questor Hamilcar Bear-Eater walks amongst you.’

The Realmgate snapped shut behind me, the sudden quenching of its link to the Celestial Realm plunging the underground chamber into a wobbly, torch-lit darkness. I stood with arms spread to better display the magnificence of the armour that Sigmar’s gift had bestowed upon me.

‘Summon the Heraldors and Vexillors of your chamber that they might proclaim the good news to every ward of the fortress and into the wilds of the Gorwood beyond. Have the Angelos Conclaves take wing, and carry the word to all who shelter from their skaven oppressors.’ Fists clenched, I shouted to the cavern’s distant walls, bringing a flutter from the torches. ‘The Bear-Eater. Has. Returned!’

As my eyes adjusted to the gloom, I saw that the torches were held by a pair of Liberators, behind the Judicators, who carried them in their off-hands in place of shields.

One stepped towards me. His black helmet was almost invisible in the dark, torchlight crawling over the golden edging and the strange pictographic symbols that decorated his gorget.

‘Sheathe your warblade, my friend,’ I cried. ‘Look past the magnificence of this holy war-plate if you are able, ordered for me alone by the God-King himself, and see that it is I, Hamilcar.’

‘You have been absent for five years, lord,’ said the Liberator, sheathing his blade with apparent reluctance. ‘We had hoped… I mean, we had thought that Sigmar had bidden you do battle in some other land.’

‘Some distant land,’ murmured his brother, softly.

‘It heartens me that my absence has been noted and mulled over, mourned even, by those forged under a different storm.’ I looped out an arm and, before the Liberator could react, hugged him to my breastplate. I felt him cringe, as if he could shed his sigmarite layer and ooze out through my arms, which I put down to an aversion to emotion typical of Anvils of the Heldenhammer.

I was in a good mood, and determined to let everyone share in it, whether they had been forged under a darksome phase of the Mallus or not.

‘Come!’ I barked. ‘I have passed beneath the gaze of the solar wyrm Agraphon who wards the Seventh Gate and crossed its threshold. I would feel the icy breath of Ghur on my face, and see its mountains one more time.’ I brushed past the Liberator, who still appeared somewhat stunned by the passion of my greeting, and between the two Judicators before they had a chance to decide what to do with me. ‘Knight-Questor Hamilcar Bear-Eater will be about his sacred task,’ I thundered, just as I was hitting my stride.

The title of Knight-Questor actually conferred few privileges over and above that of Lord-Castellant, except when dealing with those of even higher authority, which I have to say I was looking forward to enormously. I had yet to tire of announcing it to every warrior I passed.

‘I have been set a geas by the grace of the God-King himself, and by the Twelve-Pointed Star I will see it done.’

I stopped sharply and turned back.

The four Anvils of the Heldenhammer stood there like the recently animated dead in a puddle of torchlight.

‘Is it still winter?’

‘No, lord.’

‘I suppose even I can’t have everything.’

‘Lord?’

‘Carry on.’

And with that, I left them to it. I had rarely ventured into the endless maze of catacombs that plumbed the Gorkomon during my time as Lord-Castellant of the Seven Words. I have little sense of direction in such spaces, and have no taste for confinement. But I had been Lord-Castellant.

I knew the way.

The Seven Words, as you may know, is a serviceable pile of fortifications situated upon the craggy lip of the Gorkomon, but as much of it exists inside the mountain as upon it. The first folk to build here had been duardin, but next to nothing was known of them, all trace of anything beyond their mere existence obliterated by millennia of serial reconquests. They had built the Seventh Gate, we think, linking the surface fortress to Azyr, but why they had built it so far underground and what the purpose of the rest of the labyrinth had been were mysteries lost to the Age of Chaos. Xeros, in one of his more lucid phases, had once told me that the old duardin had crafted worms of iron and steam to carve these tunnels, and that in the millennia since their makers’ demise the machines had burrowed on without purpose. But, the odd moonclan aside – left over from the last bloody change in occupation but one – nothing was ever found down there. I happily put the theory down to the Lord-Relictor’s usual inability to cope with too many days spent in one spot without blood to spill.

About twenty minutes and several equally awed and speechless Anvils of the Heldenhammer later, I strode through a flat dolmen of stone and into open air.

A small amber sun winked in a clear blue sky. The brightness fair kissed my eyelids, like a journeyman lector alighting once again upon hallowed soil. Summer, then – but sitting less than a mile below the highest point in Ghur, there was enough of a chill in the air for me to consider it homely.

It smelled of night soil, of livestock and dray beasts, beasts for hawking and hunting, of men and duardin and aelves. It smelled of tanneries and sawmills, butchers and brewers. Life, then. Vigorous and barely tamed. Ghur. Dogs barked from higgledy-piggledy little streets that scrambled along the clefts and crags of the Gorkomon. Children played there. Drays rattled over broken cobbles, hauled by men, by horses and by placid half-tree, half-beast things native to the Gorwood. The clash of steel rose from the Freeguilder blockhouses. Pennons bearing the fortress’ seven rings alongside the emblems of Azyr fluttered in a gale that could have knocked a grown man over, but which for the Seven Words could be considered gentle.

The Seven Words was a frontier fort in every respect. Every man, woman and child, regardless of species or trade, knew the precariousness of their adopted home, and they lived fully in the knowledge that death was at best one more day away.

My kind of people.

Despite an enviable position in command of the mightiest peak in Ghur, the Seven Words was almost laughably indefensible. The walls, for instance. For reasons known only to the old duardin who had built them, they were far too long, defending vast swathes of icy rock on which a flock of an Azyr breed of goat now dutifully grazed, presumably thankful for their security. Its situation several miles above the cloud layer also left the fortress entirely dependent on a network of messenger forts and watchkeeps for word of the Gorwood – a network which, if the Vikaeus-thing were to be believed, had been completely overrun by Ikrit’s skaven. And then of course, there was Ghur itself. Ever hungry, birds, insects and small animals chiselled away at the fortress almost as quickly as it could be repaired.

Hearing the mournful cry of an aetar, I looked up.

Shielding my eyes against the low sun, I caught a pinprick of something dark and shiny against the awesome blue of the sky, and followed it as far as I could manage with my eyes until it disappeared into the high crags.

At its summit the Gorkomon was encased in ice year-round, the source of the summer snows that would occasionally blanket the Seven Words. The timing and depth of which was a source of great interest to the gamblers amongst the local population, myself included. Even I, after a second attempt on the summit (coming, coincidentally enough, on the same night as my first summerfall revel), had accepted that the final few hundred feet of the Gorkomon were unconquerable.

There was a reason that the aetar had looked ambivalently down from their fortress-eyries on a hundred changes in ownership of the Seven Words.

My gaze dropped to the keep. Ostensibly the last and toughest redoubt of any fortress, this keep was a silver tower built upon an Ironjawz scrapfort built upon the rugged square block of a duardin keep-hold. It was a record of the disparate peoples that had fought here, foolishly tried to live here and ultimately died here. It was the single most anarchic thing I have ever seen – and I had once spent the night in an Ironjawz camp – and naturally I thought it was wonderful. Useless at what it was meant to do. But wonderful.

Crossing my arms, I looked out over the mess of wards and defensive works towards the main gate. From there, a bridge flew across to the shoulder of the neighbouring peak. The mountain had not had a name when we arrived, but Broudiccan, in a rare moment of high levity, had dubbed it the Morkogon. It had stuck. That solitary approach was the Seven Words’ one true concession to actual defensibility, being as it was the only decent way in or out. There were plenty of indecent ways of course, and all I needed to do was find myself one of those and–

‘Hamilcar!’

The shout from the streets below interrupted my thoughts before I could finish.

A big, bald-headed man in soiled overalls, stained red up to the elbows, stood on the cobbles outside a slaughterhouse, caught mid-hurl with a bucket full of offal. The bucket dropped from his fingers and clattered across the cobbles. He backed away from it, slapping his hand to his mouth.

‘Hamilcar!’ someone else yelled.

I didn’t see exactly who, because before I had realised what was happening there were men and women piling into the street, abandoning their animals, throwing open their doors, looking up and pointing.

‘Hamilcar is back!’

I raised my hand immodestly and the cry became a cheer.

‘Hamilcar!’

Then a chant.

‘Hamilcar! Hamilcar! Hamilcar!’

Then a wave that wasn’t really words at all, but a rush of raw emotion and sound, worship in the mindless roar of the sea. I thought about what Sigmar had said to me, that he had been mortal once, that all the great divinities of the Pantheon once had been, and wondered for a moment if to these people I could actually be a god. If the Wild Maiden could do it and Ikrit could aspire to it, then why not Hamilcar Bear-Eater? Laughing at the absurdity of the thought, I raised my palms in an appeal for quiet, but, as I had known it would, the recognition only spurred them to greater volume. My name came faster and faster, and my grin grew broader and broader.

I hadn’t realised how much I had missed this.

‘Yes!’ I bellowed, shouting over them all. ‘You are saved now. Hamilcar has returned!’

The roar that greeted that declaration made what had come before sound like a ripple of applause through the Collegiate Arcane’s private galleries (so I’m told – a friend of mine has been there). The crowd suddenly rushed towards me. A narrow staircase meandered its way from the inner wards to the catacombs’ entrance, warded by a pair of Liberators in black aegis war-plate and shields. The crowd forced them aside. And I waited for them, arms spread as if to welcome a horde of my children. We laughed and cried. I patted heads and brushed fingers that were raised to mine, allowing the amethyst and gold of my thrice-blessed to be kissed and prayed upon until it felt as though I had been manhandled by half of Ghur.

And I milked every moment of it.

‘Who will hold the Seven Words where all before have tried and failed?’ I bellowed.

‘Hamilcar!’

‘And you all will hold it with me.’

Their cheers were deafening.

‘For the God-King!’

‘Hamilcar!’

I wasn’t here to save them, of course, unless I happened to do so indirectly, which wasn’t impossible, but I couldn’t help myself.

‘Hamilcar!’

‘Hamilcar! Hamilcar!’

I leapt off the last step and into the Seven Words proper, a grin as broad as the sea gates of Stardock on my face.

The sloping courtyard was strangely empty of people but for a single Stormcast Eternal, walking towards me with the metronomic clack-clack-clack of a castellant’s halberd on stone. A blazing sun masked his face. Golden serpents coiled about his forearms and legs, their distending jaws the plates for elbows and knees. A thick yellow and black cloak rippled out behind him in the seven winds, a warding lantern rattling against his thigh.

The crowd around us grew suddenly quiet.

As if a grownup had just entered the fortress.

‘You are late, Hamilcar Bear-Eater.’

No two Stormcast Eternals are alike, not even two Lord-Castellants, but like me, Akturus Ironheel knew how to make an awesome first impression.

He let his halberd droop a fraction so that its blade turned towards me.

I felt my shoulders sag.

Akturus’ eyes glinted inside his golden mask.

‘I have been waiting five years for this.’

Chapter sixteen

Sometimes I wondered if Akturus and I had been adversaries in another life. He was the sort of man that made you look over your shoulder just thinking about him. Up close he smelled of death (the permanent kind) and stone (the sort they bury you under), and no power in Azyr seemed able to eradicate it from his soul. I knew, of course, that amongst the Anvils of the Heldenhammer discussions of their mortal existences were considered taboo, but to me that was like waving red meat in front of a bullgor.

‘I think that you must once have been a duardin king, brother – cruel to your people and miserly with your gold, until a bold king of the Winterlands brought you low.’

‘Only human warriors can be reforged into Stormcast Eternals,’ Akturus replied flatly.

I shrugged. ‘So we are told, but it wasn’t so long ago that we didn’t know about the Sacrosanct Chambers.’

Make of that what you will.

Akturus sighed as a pair of Retributors heaved the throne room’s great doors shut behind us. The bang echoed through the blustery grey chambers.

The décor was much as I had left it.

Animal skins and throws were much in evidence. Faded orruk murals and a mad collage of glyph art daubed the crumbling stonework, picked out here and there with my own illiterate markings. I would have expected my old quarters in the keep to go to Frankos, since the Lord-Celestant now had the title and the swords, and lacked Akturus’ maudlin aversion to fresh air and natural light. And sure enough, if the Ironheel had spent half an hour in this hall since my ill-fated excursion into the Nevermarsh, then he was covering his tracks as well as any Vanguard of the Astral Templars. You could even see the rounded impression of one Hamilcar Bear-Eater in the furs heaped over the wooden throne at the far end. The surrounding flagstones were still littered with cracked bones. Beastmen and skaven – though I’d let it be known about the keep that they belonged to little children who didn’t say their prayers to Sigmar. I felt a lump forming in my throat. Crow had been chewing on them on the eve of my departure.

Time is an elastic thing in the soul-mills. Knotted. Looped. Able in the same stretch to be both very, very short and very, very long. It had been a handful of weeks. It had been five years. Standing here now in my own lightning-forged skin, in a room essentially unchanged, it felt like yesterday.

The single addition that had been made since my regency of the Seven Words had ended was a brightly coloured silk blanket, laid out on the floor and surrounded by scattered cushions. Tassels wound with gold thread flapped in the winds from the chamber’s enormous windows. A fine collection of clay pottery held the four corners down.

‘Sit, brother.’

Akturus folded himself neatly onto one of the cushions and reached for a decanter of wine. It had been sculpted into the form of a swan, or something similar to it. It had been painted black, the carved details of the bird neatly done in gold. He glanced at me, pointedly, jug hovering.

Without making too great a fuss about it, I sat.

The alternative would have been to settle our differences back in the street.

After everything I’d been put through over the last month or so, getting my pride bruised in an honour match with the Ironheel didn’t come with quite the terror that it had. Be that as it may, however, everything I’d been through had come about precisely because I’d been avoiding such a public thrashing, and I didn’t want to cheapen my ordeal by just giving into it now.

Dipping his head a hair my way, Akturus poured himself a goblet.

‘That’s not from Ghur,’ I noted, though I knew full well that the Lord-Castellant wouldn’t answer.

I must have sat through this ritual a thousand times.

The cup is always the same distance away. The decanter is at the same angle, in the same hand, resting against the inside of the wrist in the exact same place. A precise measure is poured, always the same. Then he sets the decanter down, exactly where he picked it up from, as though this is a work of seraphon astromancy rather than the libation ritual of a dead civilization. With the same hand, free now, he reaches for the spice bowl. He takes a spoonful. The spice is dark orange and fragrant. Always the same blend. I have no idea what’s in it, or where it comes from. He smooths it level with the sigmarite of his little finger and then sprinkles the spice into his wine, muttering as he does so in a tongue that I have never heard spoken outside of his company. The spoon is then dipped into the wine for a single stir around the inside of the cup. Then he withdraws it, taps three times on the rim of the cup, and returns it to its resting place against the lip of the spice bowl.

Once that was done, and only then, would he lift his eyes to me and allow for whatever war or pestilence or death I had come to report.

I closed my eyes in prayer.

A thousand times and one.

With smiling eyes, Akturus reached up to undo the clasps at the back of his Mask Impassive. It came away in his hands. A high gorget of smooth black sigmarite and some gold banding kept the rear of his head enclosed. His skin was dark brown, freckled with motes of flickering cerulean that had appeared as a manifestation of his second reforging. The smile, as I had already known, did not reach far beyond his eyes.

He may as well have kept his mask on.

Setting the golden plate in his lap he delicately picked up the goblet, closing his eyes as he inhaled the spiced vapours.

‘It is from Shyish,’ he murmured in answer, his voice like a gentle wind through a door just opened. ‘The vineyards of the Blacksun Cape produce some of the finest varieties of grape in the Mortal Realms.’ He raised the goblet in a ritual toast to ancient gods and drank, leaving his lips stained black. ‘One of few tangible benefits to Sigmar’s truce with the Undying King.’ Holding the goblet in both hands, the way I might brandish the skull of an enemy or a trophy cut from a foe in battle, the Lord-Castellant offered it to me.

‘The finest grapes in Shyish would be wasted on me,’ I said.

‘The Cape has converted more with its gifts than any god still living.’

‘I’m a trueborn son of Azyr, my friend.’ Setting my gauntlet fingers against the goblet, I pushed it gently back towards Akturus. The Ironheel produced a stiff grimace of an expression as our fingers touched. With Akturus this could mean either great amusement or deep outrage, but I suspected the latter. It was the only condition under which I had aroused any expression in him before now. ‘I have butchered my palette with raw meat and too much ale.’

Implacable once again, Akturus returned the goblet to its proper place.

‘It is good to see you again, Hamilcar.’

Now, it’s fair to say I couldn’t have been more surprised had he swept up his goblet to throw the dregs in my face.

Akturus and I had spoken, at best, a dozen times during the siege of the Seven Words and the preceding campaigns against the beasts of the Gorwood. Half of those had been me insulting him for tinkering with siege engines and making prayers to Sigmar while my Bear-Eaters had just gone on ahead and assaulted the walls. For the Imperishables, battle was a thing of lines and formulas, something to be won through precision and patience rather than a hero’s valour. During the years of consolidation and re-building that had followed that conquest, he had become as irritating and wearingly soul-sapping as a pebble in my boot. All that being true, however, if you could pick one warrior to bury in a dark, hard to reach place to make damn sure nothing murders you in your sleep, then I can guarantee you that it would be Akturus Ironheel.

‘I heard that it was you that tried to go after me,’ I said.

Akturus nodded.

‘The Jerech, I could understand. But you….’

‘We made a good pairing here, for all of our…’ He hesitated, the shape of his mouth trialling various choices, ‘differences. But Frankos is…’

‘Frankos,’ I concluded.

Again, Akturus nodded. ‘Yes. He is a good warrior. A fair leader. The Freeguild like him, but they do not respect him as they did you. He tries too hard to be you, and he looks to me for authority even though he is Lord-Celestant now, and commands a host larger than I.’ It was unlike Akturus to resort to physical gestures, so when he raised his hands to indicate his surroundings I read plenty into the Seven Words’ current situation. ‘That is why I find myself here, enthroned in your old seat, and not him.’

‘I like what you’ve done with it.’

‘The people sense it,’ Akturus went on, ignoring me. ‘Freeguild and citizens alike. He does not inspire faith. Not even with ten times the warriors that followed you.’ He sighed, shaking his head. ‘You have been here a day. Half a day even. Yet morale is already higher than it has been since the news of your capture in battle. How do you do it, brother? I ask you honestly.’

‘Honestly? I think it’s equal parts being good and being liked. You are good, brother, though Sigmar help you if that leaves this room. Perhaps you could give being liked a try?’

‘I am reminded of something that Lorrus Grymn used to say of his partnership with the Steel Soul. What was it?’

I put my face in my hands and groaned through the gauntlet fingers.

‘That one was the sword and one the shield.’

‘You disapprove?’ said Akturus.

Without peeling my hands from my face, I nodded. ‘All the time. All the time.’

‘Well, I have always felt that you are the carrot, brother, and I am the stick.’

For the first time in my life, I found myself laughing at something that Akturus Ironheel had said. ‘I think I like that.’ I straightened up, then sighed. ‘But you should know. Sigmar didn’t send me here to re-join my old Stormhost.’

And thank the heavens for that. The idea of having to take actual orders from an actual Lord-Celestant made me feel unwell.

I spread myself, pivoting side to side so as to better show off my new armour.

‘I noticed,’ said Akturus.

‘Sigmar has named me Knight-Questor. I am above such authority now, beholden only to the geas he has placed upon me to find the skaven’s leader and show him the God-King’s justice.’

The Ironheel remained impassive.

‘What?’ I asked.

‘When you first arrived in the Gorkomon, I had already been campaigning against the Untamed for several months. Do you remember what you said?’

‘I… don’t.’ I shook my fist towards the twinkling light of Sigendil, visible through the windows, even by day and in this foreign realm. ‘The things we must surrender unto the Anvil of Apotheosis.’

‘You told me that you came with the authority of Sigmar, that I was to disregard the fact that I commanded four hundred souls to your fifty and cede complete authority to you.’

I shrugged apologetically. ‘The memory is all gone, brother.’

‘It was only after the conquest when Vikaeus and the Knights Merciless joined us that I learned he meant for us to share joint command.’

‘Sigmar knows the strengths and weaknesses of men,’ I said, sagely. ‘He would have known that I would try to trick you, and that you would fall for it.’ I frowned suddenly, unsure how much I was pretending to be remembering. ‘Probably.’

‘Must I mention the Stardrake that you claimed to have left in Azyr because it was too big to pass through the Realmgate?’

I barked with laughter.

I’d forgotten that one.

‘My new position suits me, I won’t deny. Not that I didn’t have my doubts at first. Hamilcar? The Bear-Eater? Me? Fighting his battles alone with none to carry the tale of them? But to walk my own path, my way? Yes, I think I could get used to that. But this is no Celestial Drake, brother. This armour I wear now is a gift from Sigmar himself.’

‘As is mine,’ said Akturus, mildly.

I made a dismissive noise. ‘Yes, yes, all we bear is made and given by the grace of the God-King, but this was a gift, given from his keeping and into mine. He saw my halberd remade, when even the Smith himself had said that it could not be done.’

‘So you will just leave?’ said Akturus. ‘You will build the hopes and faith of those under my ward, only to knock it down, and make the task impossible for whoever is charged with its repair when you are gone?’

It wasn’t that I didn’t want to save the Seven Words. On the contrary. I wanted to do it myself, single-handed and in full view – maybe give in and let them build their statue. But I couldn’t, and not just because Sigmar had given me a sacred quest. Sigmar could give me an order with about as much expectation of being obeyed as Frankos of the Heavens Forged. My immortality, and perhaps even the health of my soul, depended on my finding Ikrit and Malikcek, though I could hardly say that to Akturus.

My… affliction was one of the few tales I was content to keep between myself and my god.

‘I don’t want to, but I must.’

‘Why?’

I did a passable impersonation of someone who was justly appalled. ‘Sigmar has given me a sacred quest.’

‘Then just wait here. Hold the Seven Words with me. The skaven will surely come to you before too long.’

‘And they will be led from the front, you think?’

The muscles in Akturus’ jaw seemed to unclench one by one, and he appeared to shrink an inch in height. ‘You are a Knight-Questor. I am a mere Lord-Castellant. Who am I to argue the writ of the God-King?’

‘That’s the spirit, brother.’

‘At least if you are successful then some good may come of it. Perhaps if word can be spread that that is what you are doing, and why you are leaving, then the populace will take heart. Yes. I will see to it that Frankos begins spreading word of your new status immediately.’

‘Good.’

This was, frankly, more like it. Spreading the glorious word of my adventures and glories was exactly the sort of thing that Frankos should have been doing.

‘What can you tell me of the skaven?’ I said, leaning forwards. ‘Anything to suggest where to start my quest?’

Akturus shook his head solemnly. ‘The vermintide began shortly after you were lost to the Nevermarsh. First it was the logging camps in the Low Gorwood, then the watch forts and winter lodges in the heights. Those few that were able to outrun it brought stories of a horde without number, of slave-taking and murder, and feasting on the flesh of the dead. I have sent warriors to hold the Gorwood, but they never brought a single clanrat to battle.’

That would have been at Vikaeus’ urging. Akturus’ instinct would always be to draw behind a shield, wait for the enemy to show his colours and then grind them under his Thunderhead brotherhoods. Had it been me I would have had Prosecutors constantly in the air. I would have despatched dozens of Vanguard sorties into the High Gorwood and I would have led them myself. But then one of us had been lured into a trap, captured and killed. The other hadn’t. I kept my opinions to myself.

‘So where were they?’

‘Elsewhere. Always. All my retinues ever returned to me was ill-tidings of some other distant redoubt aflame. I stopped sending them out, and instead called all who had not yet fled the forest back to the Seven Words. There is nothing left for the skaven to pick at, and while the Azyr Gate remains open then we can outlast them. If they wish to take the Seven Words, then they will have to come to me.’

I smiled, that being the sentence that will forever characterise Akturus Ironheel best.

‘This amuses you?’ said Akturus, inexpressive.

I bared my teeth. ‘Eagerness for the fight, as always. Go on.’

‘That is all.’

‘What of the skaven leader? Ikrit?’

‘I have not heard the name. The skaven come in the night and strike as a tide, withdrawing with the dawn. I have seen or heard nothing to speak of a leader.’

I gave a melodramatic sigh. ‘Then I should probably move on. I am but one man, am I not? Perhaps the skaven will not melt from me as they do from the brotherhoods of the Imperishables.’

‘One can but pray.’

‘Hah!’ I reached across and thumped Akturus roundly across the pauldron. ‘Hamilcar is back in the Ghurlands now. Your need for prayers is passed.’

I rose, and Akturus stood up after me. I extended my hand, but for some reason the Lord-Castellant hesitated before taking it. When he did, his grip was unexpectedly tentative, as if my vambrace had been scratched with unwholesome runes.

‘I will bid you well then, Knight-Questor,’ he said, with stiff formality. ‘But if it is all the same to you then I will pray to the God-King, and implore him to send us more swords.’

‘Ask him for Lord-Celestant Settrus, perhaps. Then at least you will have a proven warlord in charge.’

I liked Settrus. He could be stiff, but he suffered no nonsense and made things happen. Even I minded my manners when he was nearby.

‘War is not confined to the Gorkomon or this corner of the Ghurlands,’ said Akturus, as though this was somehow news to me. ‘He marches instead with the remainder of the Imperishables to bolster the garrison at Glymmsforge.’

‘He has a special loathing of the Undying King,’ I recalled.

Akturus nodded.

I released my grip on his forearm and nodded back. I hadn’t been expecting this particular farewell to be hard. ‘Keep your lantern to hand, brother. The assassin, Malikcek. Be wary of him. These walls, your guards, they will not stop him getting in here if he or his master should wish it.’

‘I am always wary.’

‘If he can scale the walls of Malerion’s palace, walk the Black Maze, evade the mirror-traps and the shade-hounds and almost get back out alive, then he can break into the Seven Words.’

‘I know how to hold a castle, Hamilcar.’

Before I could try another avenue of persuasion, I heard a commotion from the other side of the doors. Voices, raised in argument. Armoured bodies scuffling in a hallway. I turned, just as the doors were thrown open and Frankos of the Heavens Forge shouldered his way between the two Retributors trying in vain to keep him out.

I was aware of my mouth hanging open.

Frankos?

The Lord-Celestant looked exactly as I remembered him. The face of a child-king, the purity of a child of Dracothion. His beatific features were unworn by any duty or care or the passing of the centuries. His hair was the gold of Sigmar’s throne. His eyes were light. And yet, he was different. His breastplate – though I challenge anyone to look directly on that much gold in direct sunlight and make out much – depicted the Anvil of Apotheosis, the Heavens Forge, six lightning bolts shooting from the centre to form the spokes of a Celestial ring. His cloak dragged across the ground. It was heavy, woven not of cloth or hide, but hammers.

He looked as though he had been encased in an idealised statue of himself.

Or me.

‘Frankos?’

‘Hamilcar. By the God-King, it’s true.’

The Lord-Celestant’s sternness evaporated into something luminous and he extended his arms, brushing off the Anvils of the Heldenhammer as he strode towards me and drew me into his embrace. I laughed and met strength with strength, crushing his breastplate into mine and knuckling his perfect hair. Almost as soon as I did, however, he pulled back, pushing me off as if I had just grabbed his face and tried to kiss him.

Frankos has ever been an open tome. The kind with woodcuts, in fact. If there is a thought in his head or a passion in his heart, then it is there for the realms to see and to make their peace with. What I saw on his face then was an inarticulate mashing together of horror, disgust, and a hatred of himself for harbouring such a base response towards a mentor and a brother. It was as if he had reached out for his best friend and found a daemon masquerading in his skin.

I had done my best to forget everything that Ong and his caricatures – and yes, even Sigmar himself – had tried to tell me about the injuries that Ikrit had caused to my soul. Because any problem that can be readily ignored was never a problem at all. Now I thought about it, it occurred to me that Zephacleas had behaved somewhat oddly when I took his hand. And the Anvils of the Heldenhammer that had greeted my arrival through the Realmgate had definitely been feeling something other than awe at my presence. Frankos had always been difficult to ignore. That was what had made him such an exceptional Heraldor; why he may yet make a worthy successor to me as Lord-Celestant.

He didn’t even need to speak to reach you exactly where your heart beat.

‘What?’ I said, not sure I wanted to know, but knowing that I needed to ask. ‘What is it?’

‘It is… difficult to describe.’ Frankos backed off, staring at me as though to catch me in some unclean act. ‘It’s like looking upon a holy vessel, taking it up in your hands, only to find its contents befouled.’

I snorted. ‘No offence taken.’

‘My lord. Forgive me.’ For once, Frankos’ golden tongue failed and he stuttered, bowing low, ostensibly in apology, but with every outward appearance of simply not wishing to look upon me a moment more. ‘Pray… I meant no–’

‘It’s alright, brother. I was joking.’

‘I felt it also,’ said Akturus, behind me.

So that was what the expression had been when our fingers had touched. I felt an odd sort of triumph at the fact that it had just been my poor broken soul, and that I had not unwittingly offended him again in my brief stay.

‘You see now why I can’t stay,’ I said.

‘I do.’ Akturus turned to the Retributor who was still filling the doorway like a storm cloud. ‘It is alright, Kephos. The Lord-Celestant will not be staying long.’

‘Your will be done, Lord-Castellant.’

The door was closed very deliberately behind him.

‘By all that is good and glorious,’ Frankos declared, rounding on me as it shut. ‘What has been done to you, lord? What wickedness could the vile skaven be capable of inflicting that even the blessed fires of the Anvil itself cannot undo?’

I could still hear grumbling from outside, but ignored it. It was probably just the Retributors again, complaining about Frankos.

‘I cannot discuss it,’ I said. And preferred not to. ‘Only that Sigmar has charged me with bringing the warlock responsible back to him in Sigmaron.’

‘Then by the Twelve Points of Sigendil and the eternal fires of Dracothion you shall go with every sword, hammer and bow of the Heavens Forged beside you.’

‘No,’ said Akturus, calmly. ‘He will not.’

‘You dare give me orders? I am Lord-Celestant in the Seven Words, and the warriors of the Heavens Forged are mine to command.’

Akturus raised an eyebrow.

I took an unconscious step back.

‘He goes for the very jugular of the beast,’ Frankos cried, articulating with a grabbing motion of his hand. ‘The Astral Templars would join him in the hunt. Share the danger, and the taste of blood when it is spilled.’

That was Frankos, ever willing with a turn of phrase.

‘That’s enough,’ I said. ‘Akturus is right.’

‘He’s–’

Whatever the Lord-Celestant had been about to declaim was cut short by a severely disgruntled Retributor.

‘There is a runner from the Realmgate, Lord-Castellant,’ he said, pushing the door aside. ‘Vikaeus Creed has returned with a Thunderwave Echelon of Knights Merciless. She urgently requests the presence of both you and Lord-Celestant Frankos in the High Hall.’

Vikaeus.

Sigmar had sent Vikaeus after me.

The thought both thrilled and terrified.

I was thinking of a cell with a view in the Forge Eternal, and the centuries I had to look forward to spending in it.

‘You are welcome to join us, lord,’ Frankos said, sternly, spreading his glare evenly between Kephos and Akturus.

‘No, no,’ I said, declining as naturally as I could. ‘She asked just for the two of you, I’m sure she has her reasons.’

‘Come, lord,’ said Frankos. ‘You are only just arrived, she cannot know yet that you are here or she would have summoned you as well.’

Of that I have no doubt.

‘She’ll know where to find me.’ I took his pauldron. He cringed, doing a poor job of hiding it. ‘I’ll be out there, with them, where I belong.’

Frankos bowed low.

‘I will have Kephos escort you back to the wards,’ said Akturus.

‘No need,’ I said, waving the offered Retributor off. I was already eyeing the door he was standing in. ‘I remember the way out.’

Chapter seventeen

Lord-Veritant Vikaeus swept into the keep like a cold wind. The Dracoth she rode padded over the cracked flagstones with the cool deliberation of an alligator returning to water. Its scales were the blue of Celestial hoarfrost, its armour white, tack and harness glittering in the torches that burned sporadically in the handful of sheltered sconces about the disarming chamber. With cold-blooded patience it surveyed the weapons benches and alcoves, and the chipped stone columns that lined the east wall. I hid behind the farthest column and tried not to breathe. While the Dracoth satisfied itself, two Concussors in the frost-white bastion plate and silver trim of the Knights Merciless drew in alongside. They had their lightning hammers drawn and their Sigmarite Shields raised. They all had their helmets fitted. That confirmed my worst suspicions.

The Knights Merciless donned their war-masks only when in hostile lands, or in the dispensation of Sigmar’s justice.

They were here for me.

Vikaeus swung one foot out from the stirrup and slid down the Dracoth’s scaly flank, landing in a clump of sigmarite that she nevertheless made graceful. Drawing her abjuration staff from its saddle sleeve, she left a lingering hand on the beast’s jaw as she turned to scour the chamber’s crannies with habitually suspicious eyes.

The sight of her stole the breath from my lungs, even reaching into my veins to pick their pockets too. My blood felt thick. The pounding of my heart left an echo in my head. Part of me was tempted to hand myself over there and then, simply to know what it would feel like to have my gaze returned. I had to physically put my hand on my breast and push myself back into hiding.

‘I am sorry, Cryax, I know. But this is not Sigmaron. You will have to remain here.’ Vikaeus turned to the two Concussors. ‘I will not be long.’ With that, she turned and strode away, behind another column and out of my view.

‘Welcome back, Lady Vikaeus,’ came another voice that I couldn’t see the owner of from where I was hiding. A mortal by the sound of it, a woman, and walking towards the Lord-Veritant from the door to the main halls. ‘The lords Frankos and Akturus await you in the High Hall.’

‘That is swift. Good. What I have to say to them is urgent.’

Her footsteps thudded further into the obscurity of the keep, and I felt myself breathe easier with her gone. I glanced back to see the two Concussors still idling by the open gate where Vikaeus had left them.

‘Strike,’ I swore.

As I watched, one of them slid from his saddle and approached Vikaeus’ Dracoth. The Paladin caught its bridle armour almost playfully in one hand and whispered something that I assumed to be reassuring in its ear. What words might reassure a Dracoth I had no idea, and less interest in knowing.

Only the purest of spirit or the noblest of purpose could hope to tame a child of Dracothion.

Naturally, then, the Celestial beasts had never had much truck with me.

Cryax swung its armoured head towards me and snorted, a preternatural cold freezing the moisture in the air and causing it to fall as ice.

I drew quickly back out of sight, armour clanking softly on stone, cursing under my breath.

‘Strike it until it sunders.’

I was tempted to just march up there and bluff my way through, on the off-chance that Vikaeus had not shared the reasons for her pursuit of me with her Extremis Chamber. A few self-congratulatory backslaps and a bellowed welcome here and there had seen me this far through the keep, after all – but somehow I doubted whether the Knights Merciless would fall for it as readily as the keep’s mortal soldiery and servants had. And the longer I thought about it, which is why thinking for too long about anything is rarely a good idea, the more I appreciated that Vikaeus would have had no need to explain why she was hunting me in order to let her warriors know that she was hunting me.

They were called the Knights Merciless for a reason, after all. A Knight-Excelsior might burn an innocent’s house down to destroy a corruption in the wood or the stone, but only a Knight Merciless would make sure the innocent was still inside.

Lacking a better option, other than trying to force myself through the arrow slits, which hardly qualified as better, I was about to follow through on that first impulse and brazen it out when I saw the mortal steward that had just admitted Vikaeus walking towards me.

I looked quickly around and saw the smaller door behind me that led to the servants’ stairs.

‘Dracothion’s breath.’

The woman walked past my hiding place without noticing me and continued on to the door. She was clad in the purple doublet and trews and steel breastplate of an armed retainer of the Astral Templars. Not all Stormhosts had the same custom of taking on the best and the fiercest of the mortal Freeguilds – in fact, most didn’t – but we always saw it as a way of keeping alive certain traditions that would have eventually died if they had been left in the care of the immortals. It was obvious to me that, consciously or not, most selected men and women that reminded them in some way of themselves. This woman was grey-haired, but there was a firmness of muscle to her still and a martial pride in her carriage. I knew her, or a younger version of her.

‘Nalys,’ I hissed. The name arrived with me just as she pulled on the latch. One of Barbarus’ chosen ones. Prideful then, fearless and loyal.

‘Lord Ham–’ she began, before my hand could smother her mouth. ‘Why are you hiding in a corner of the disarming chamber?’ she hissed, after I’d drawn my hand away.

‘The ways of the Stormcast Eternals are not for mere mortals to follow,’ I said, smiling. As I’d hoped she smiled along, assuming that it was just me fooling about at one of the other chambers’ expense, as usual. ‘I need you to do something for me, Nalys.’

The retainer straightened. ‘Name it, lord.’

‘See those warriors out there?’

The mortal craned her neck back around. ‘The Concussors. Yes, lord.’

‘I want you to tell them that Vikaeus’ audience with Frankos and Akturus is going to take longer than she had expected. Tell them to stable the Dracoths and return here to wait for her when they are done.’

‘And is it going to take longer, lord?’

‘The trick to making people believe in you is to believe in yourself, Nalys.’

‘Yes, lord.’

‘Believe it…’

‘Yes, lord. I will, lord. Her audience is going to take longer than expected.’ Sucking in a big breath, the armsman stuck out her chin and marched back towards the front gate.

I was counting on the fact that the Knights Merciless, like most Stormcast Eternals, would have forgotten the retainer’s existence the moment she had stepped out of their eye line. With any luck they wouldn’t notice that she was coming from the servants’ stair, whereas Vikaeus had departed by the main doors. I crossed my fingers. I was probably worrying over nothing. They probably wouldn’t even recognise she was the same woman as before. I watched from hiding as Nalys relayed my message. After a brief back and forth, which my heart spent most of firmly in my mouth, they turned their mounts about and headed back into the wind.

I grinned as I watched them leave.

Stormcast Eternals, and exalted heroes like the Paladins of the Exemplar and Extremis Chambers are the worst for this, have always underestimated the worth of the mortals amongst them.

I crossed Nalys’ path as I made for the now unguarded door. She winked at me. I thumped the sign of the comet against my breastplate. And then we were off on our separate ways.

The low sun and stinging wind stabbed my eyes the moment I stepped outside.

To my right, the two Concussors were leading Cryax and their own mounts by the bridles towards the stables. Built by visiting duardin masons in the Azyri style, and to Dracothion scale, the stone outhouse looked more like a fortress than the keep it was attached to. It was well kept, but empty. Quiet, save for the desolate scratch of a single stable boy’s brush. Neither the Imperishables nor the Bear-Eaters – nor the Heavens Forged, apparently – benefitted from the might of any Celestial beasts in their number. The stables had been constructed on Vikaeus’ order.

To my left, the rock of the Gorkomon rose sheer and impenetrable, breaking through the Seven Words’ meandering inner fortifications, buildings clinging to it all the way down to the outer walls and the Morkogon Bridge.

The front door.

My way out.

I hurried down the granite steps and through the inner bailey, waving casually to the duty watchmen, who waved cheerfully back as I ran under the portcullis and into the wards. I clattered down worn steps. Hurtled along fiercely sloping streets. Street vendors and townsfolk, beggars and urchins, haunted-looking souls that must have been war refugees from the Gorwood outposts; they clogged the narrow lanes like moss in a gutter. None of them so much as pulled a leg out of my way as I barrelled through them. Quite the opposite, in fact.

‘Hamilcar is here!’

‘Praise Sigmar for you, Hamilcar!’

‘Tell the vermin that the Ward of Akenfel sent you with their blessings, Hamilcar.’

Akturus or Vikaeus would have walked down the same streets and found them suspiciously deserted, but for me the crowds came in force. At every street corner they mobbed me. Out of every pile of stones dedicated to Sigmar or Gorkamorka, or to the scores of local deities to wind and tree whose worship persisted, they flocked. Under the warmed terraces of every blacksmith and brownsmith and shoer of horses, they rejoiced in my name.

‘Hamilcar. Hamilcar. Hamilcar.’

I cast a furtive glance back towards the keep.

My plan to slip out of the fortress unnoticed was not exactly falling within the vague outline I had plotted for it.

Responding to the acclaim with a painted grin and the occasional flexed bicep – for some appearances need to be maintained – I pushed through the adoring crowds as quickly as I could. I waded through a hundred or so well-wishers, gathered outside a building fronted with the emblem of the Grand Conclave where soldiers and officials were parcelling out food, and onto the one real road in the Seven Words, which the first occupiers from Azyr had endearingly called the Bear Road. The cobbles were broken and clotted with weeds, flanked by crumbling stonemasonry that rolled down the steep incline towards the gatehouse. Beyond that massive piece of stonework, designed and built by Lord-Ordinator Ramhos of the Anvils of the Heldenhammer, the horizon bristled with peaks. The dark stone and crag ice of the Morkogon loomed largest, its goliath bulk studded by the occasional stray cloud.

I got my first glimpse of Frankos’ Heavens Forged.

If the Vikaeus that Ong had conjured for my interrogation in the Forge Eternal had spoken a word of truth then there were upwards of a thousand Stormcast in the Seven Words, and by the looks of it half of them were on the Bear Road. At least a hundred and fifty Heavens Forged and their retainers marched up and down the wide road, coming in and out of larger buildings that the command echelon had apparently requisitioned to serve as garrisons and district command posts. The frontages had been draped in anvil and lightning bolt heraldry. The battlements positively glittered with amethyst and gold.

A smaller, grim-looking detail of Liberators and Judicators stood behind a stockade at the near-end of the road, towering over a small crowd of jeering townsfolk.

‘This is our home,’ screamed one, a young woman with mud streaks on her face.

‘Those driven from the Gorwood are found homes by the conclave representative, or by the temples, while we are thrown out of ours,’ shouted another, to much grumbling assent.

‘Where is Frankos of the Heavens Forged?’

‘Where is the justice? Where is Sigmar?’

Squaring my shoulders, I strutted towards the stockade. ‘What’s going on here?’

The Liberator-Prime was a huge man in shining amethyst plate that looked as though it had never seen use in battle. His hair was long and red, his beard wildly unkempt. Both straggled in the wind. He had probably gone unhelmed in an attempt to put the mortal townsfolk more at ease. A worthy effort, if undermined somewhat by his divine stature and heroic build.

‘It’s Frankos’ orders,’ he grunted, chewing on the words and spitting them my way. ‘He needs barracks for a strengthened garrison on the main gate and outer walls, as well as the roads cleared for the movement of reinforcements.’

‘I wasn’t talking to you, brother.’

‘Sigmar bless you, Hamilcar,’ one of the men cried. ‘Sigmar bless you!’

Someone in the crowd wept.

‘I am sure a compromise can be reached.’ I turned back to the Liberator-Prime. ‘I will escort these good folk as far as the gatehouse, let them collect whatever sundry belongings they have left in their homes. When they see the necessity of what our worthy Lord-Celestant does, I have no doubt they will be obliging.’

I studied the Liberator-Prime’s barbarian features, but it wasn’t a face I recognised. Some of the new blood with which Sigmar had founded the Heavens Forged, then. He must have been either newly struck (for the realms had not stopped producing heroes with the advent of the Age of Sigmar) or from a retinue shifted wholesale from some other broken chamber to Frankos’ nascent command.

He looked uncertain.

‘You don’t think you’d be better used on the wall, than stood here guarding against your own people…?’ I left the question hanging.

‘Wullas,’ he grunted. ‘My name is Wullas. Hearthshorn.’

‘Well, I am Hamilcar. You will have heard of me.’

I made to push past, but the Liberator stood stubbornly in my way. My pauldron banged into his breastplate, and I watched him visibly recoil, the same surge of emotions as I had earlier seen on Frankos defacing his barbarian features. The Judicators beside him turned their heads sharply towards me. The Justicars have always had a keen sense for the evil in a man’s soul, bettered only by the gryph-hounds and Celestial dragons of Azyr. Whether that is because men and women with such an attunement are chosen for the role, or because the ability was an ingredient of their forging, I don’t know. Nor do I much care. Whatever the reason, they sensed something in me, sensed it more keenly even than Wullas Hearthshorn who was retreating, horrified, from my touch. Both of them snatched up their skybolt bows.

I felt my expression blacken.

I have never been quick to anger, not in any life that I recall, but I felt something in me rage at the warriors’ disrespect.

‘Do you not know who you face, new-forged? I fought the Barrel Kings during the Cleansing of Azyr, and spoke for the Stromfels Gargants when Sigmar himself demanded their strongholds burned. I was there as the first of the Astral Templars set foot in the Ghurlands. I fought in the Gnarlwood, and won glory there when more than half of our brothers fell. I fought single-handed against the Mortarch of Night. I slew the Great Red. I freed the untainted lands beyond the Sea of Bones from a soulblight curse and unified them all under Sigmar’s banner. One hundred thousand soldiers and wealth unseen in the Mortal Realms, united in common cause by my word.’ I tapped my boot on the cobbles. ‘You are receiving this belated education on the very street that bears my name.’ I shoved him back, sending him stumbling. ‘Who am I?’

‘Hamilcar!’

The answer came not from my own lips, but as a throaty cheer from the scores of townsfolk that had congregated in the street behind me. More, I saw, were wandering in from other streets to see what the commotion was about.

‘Who am I?’ I yelled again, spittle flying from my mouth.

‘Hamilcar!’

‘Who is the chosen son of the God-King?’

‘Hamilcar!’

‘Who goes wherever he damn well pleases, and ruination come to those who disagree?’

‘Ham-il-car!’

The people screamed boisterously. A few of the bolder men and women threw stones that banged off the Astral Templars’ armour. I was left with the distinct feeling that this discontent had been fermenting for quite some time before I had stuck my boot in it.

‘Seize him,’ Wullas bellowed to his retinue. ‘On the orders of Lord-Veritant Vikaeus.’

‘Wha–?’

There was a fluttering of wings and I looked up sharply as an aetherwing with the silvery white colouration of the Knights Merciless flew overhead in the direction of the keep.

‘Of all the Lords-Veritant in Sigmaron, Sigmar had to send this one,’ I snarled, watching it go.

Wullas drew his warblade from its sheath.

I backhanded him across the jaw before I knew what I was doing. He reeled back, and I looked at my fist in astonishment.

I had no idea why I had just done that.

‘You would draw against your own, brother?’ I said, backing steadily away.

‘I know not what daemon inhabits your skin, Bear-Eater, but you are not one of mine.’ He grunted something to the Judicators who lowered their bows. ‘Vikaeus insists you be captured alive.’

‘Good of her.’

‘I doubt that it’s mercy.’

‘You don’t know the half of it.’

Wullas gestured to his Liberator retinue and started towards me, sword upraised. ‘With me, brothers. Kill him only if you must.’

Chapter eighteen

You’ve never seen a Stormcast Eternal at full tilt. I see it on your faces. You’re thinking of the armoured warriors you are familiar with, mortal knights in iron plate. Don’t. Cast the image of such encumbered warriors struggling towards battle from your mind. We are something other. Imbued with the might of the Cosmic Storm. Elevated by a spark of the Celestial divine. We are capable of feats no mortal being could contemplate, matching blades with the greater daemons of Chaos, or sprinting in full plate and panoply as though girded by nothing but the lightning of our creation. The closest mortal analogy for being in the path of such a warrior is to be a foot soldier before a heavy cavalry charge. Put yourself in that place. The ground shakes. You feel it in the wall of your gut. Fear takes you. All the lies you have been told, all the lies you have allowed yourself to believe, taking up your meagre arms and joining a war fought between gods, they are exposed for what they are, burned away by the Light Celestial. There is nothing you can do. Not against this. Stand firm and die. Flee and die. This is above you. It is greater.

That is what it is to face a Stormcast Eternal.

Tradesfolk and Gorwood refugees screamed as I peeled off the Bear Road and tore down Warder’s Score.

Named in remembrance of the sacred lanterns with which Akturus and I had purged this particularly narrow and winding corner of the Seven Words, it was home now to chandlers and tallow makers, taper weavers and glasswrights. They scattered as I hurtled through, upsetting carts and stalls, unfinished candles spilling across the street to be crushed into wax crumbs by the Liberators pounding on my heels.

I flashed past a lighter’s shop, distantly heard the keeper hurling curses at the warriors behind me. The mould boy in the adjoining yard pelted them with hot wax from his stove, while his friends screamed insults that even I had never heard of.

If my heart were not already practically aflame with the aetheric energies of the storm it was pumping, then pride would have burst it.

A retinue of Heavens Forged pursued me through their streets, and yet without any need for an explanation the townsfolk had chosen to stand by me regardless.

I whooped as I rattled fully armoured round a tight bend.

An old woman, face wrapped in a scarf, pinched by the wind, pushed a handcart filled with animal dripping for tallow out of a gate and into the street.

I roared as I veered round her, hearing her shocked expletive as she drew back into her yard just in time to avoid being crushed by Wullas. The Liberator-Prime smashed her handcart to smithereens and splattered his immaculate war-plate with fat.

Under other circumstances I would have found it funny, but someone was going to get killed.

I bared my teeth, the wind whistling through the gaps as I thought.

About a hundred yards ahead of me, the score took a sharp bend around the jutting rocks of the Gorkomon. A gulch of about ten to fifteen feet separated the cobbles of Warder’s Score from the next meandering shamble of rooftops.

I leapt it with ease, landed heavily into a roll and immediately resumed running, tearing off to the left, away from the gate and back towards the horizon-obliterating enormity of the Gorkomon.

Wullas sailed over the gap behind me, haloed in red hair and lightning discharge from his unsheathed warblade. He landed on his knees and rolled, coming up after me in a sprint. He was good, but then I would have expected no less. He was a Stormcast Eternal. Better, he was an Astral Templar.

‘Surrender,’ he snarled. ‘There’s nowhere for you to go.’

Now I knew he was new-forged. There were a thousand ways out of the Seven Words, and they were just the ones I knew about.

The row of rooftops ended abruptly in a sheer slab of Gorkomon.

I ran into it and pushed off, using the borrowed momentum to hurl myself clear over the street and the crowds stood in it, gaping. I didn’t bother with a landing, instead banging onto the opposite rooftop on my back. I rolled like a log, roofing slates breaking under me, until I ran out of push.

I looked back.

I’d been hoping that Wullas would have been so hard on my heels that he’d just slam into the rock face, but I’d overestimated his ability to keep pace with the Bear-Eater. He was far enough behind that all he had to do was angle himself to the roofline and throw himself over.

He bellowed, legs scissoring the thin air, then crunched into the roofing slates two-footed.

I rolled out of the way as he struck with his warblade. The lightning-charged sword tore a hole in the roof, powdered slate and mould spores falling over the screaming family huddled in their one room below. Somewhere in the ward a hand bell was clanging for the Freeguild. Some patrolman screamed out in the mistaken belief that the skaven were inside the fort.

I kicked Wullas between the legs, but as he was fully armoured my toe-cap thudded hollowly against it. He grunted, drew back his arm to strike me again. I got fingers around his wrist before he could angle it properly. He snarled down at me, but whatever bewitching power my soul held over my brother Stormcast it was less debilitating second time around. We struggled for a moment until I heard the thump, thump, thump of his Liberators joining us on the roof.

A look of triumph displaced the warrior’s scowl.

I wasn’t having that.

With a roar, I threw all my strength into Wullas’ shoulder, rolling us both off the roof and into the street below.

The ground was not a great distance away, but I made sure that he hit it first. My bastion armour slammed into him a moment later, winding him enough for me to drive my fist through his teeth and smack the back of his head against the road. Cracks splintered out through the already broken cobbles and the Liberator-Prime’s eyes blazed once with lightning before rolling back in their sockets.

I bared my teeth, heart thumping, as I wound my arm back to finish him off.

Townsfolk pointed and screamed. I hesitated, looked at my bloodied fist, then at the man beneath me. I staggered to my feet, working towards a sprint as Wullas’ enraged Liberators began jumping down.

We were not in the gladiatorum now. I would not fight myself bloody, then emerge onto the Sigmarabulum all smiles to trade bragging rights for a night of ale out of Makvar’s or Gardus’ or Imperius’ war chests.

And yet, something in me had wanted nothing more than to smash Wullas’ skull into the ground.

Ikrit hadn’t broken me – he’d made me more me than I’d been in two hundred years.

Another street swept past me on my right. Gor Lane. A switchback of scattered housing all the way to the Morkogon Gate. I caught something out of the corner of my eye as I charged past, people scattering. It was white and muscular, loping towards me like a great cat in pursuit of some foundering prey beast. I heard a warbling cry and risked a look, just as the gryph-hound leapt.

Its jaws clamped over my wrist, its weight dragging us both to the ground.

My pauldron hit the ground first. Then my face. Blood splattered. My own speed sent my body tumbling forward over the cobbles, only for the savage anchor of the gryph-hound’s beaked jaws to drag me back. I screamed as my full armoured weight yanked on my shoulder socket. The gryph-hound ripsawed from side to side on my arm. It dragged me back. I stuck my boot heels into the cracks between the cobbles, but it was too strong. Powerful muscles rippled under the snowy white feathers of its massive forelimbs and thick neck. I slid myself around so as to kick the dumb beast in the head, knowing that I had mere seconds of grace before the Liberators caught up to me and my quest was finished before it had even begun.

Recognition hit me like a troggoth with a grudge.

I recalled the scruffy-feathered foundling that I had seen scavenging around the Aetherdomes of the Sigmarabulum after my return from Cartha, plagued by nightmares, my own hounds slain. Eyes as bright and wise as Sigmar’s own. Feathers like Winterlands snow. I remembered nights curled up against the cold, journeys across bog and desert and oceans of bone. The battles we fought together at their end.

‘Crow. By Sigmar.’

In answer to his name, the gryph-hound yanked on my wrist and twisted. I screamed, spots exploding through my eyes.

‘It’s me, Crow!’

‘Here, Crow.’

Letting go of my arm with a snarl, Crow padded round me, flicking his twin-forked tail and clacking his beak.

‘Surrender yourself to me, Hamilcar.’

I turned, sprawled on the cobbles and hoarse from screaming, and looked back to the junction with Gor Lane. A giant in purple and gold sigmarite stood in it.

Broudiccan.

His immense shoulders were draped in a cloak bearing the anvil and storm heraldry of the Heavens Forged. His helmet plume was white. His Mask Impassive, no longer dented by the scowl that he had diligently preserved in it for over a hundred years, was pristine. Reforged. In place of the monstrous starsoul mace with which he had proven so unstoppable, and which had received more prayers of thanks from me than Sigmar ever had, he wielded a halberd. And in the other hand, a warding lantern.

‘You are Frankos’ Lord-Castellant now?’ I said.

‘Lord-Castellant Broudiccan Stonebow, of the Heavens Forged.’ His voice was resonant, as if echoed by an empty shell of armour before emerging from his mouth slit.

‘And Crow?’

The gryph-hound opened its beak and hissed at me as if I were a stranger. Coming from my boon companion of over a hundred years, that cut deeper than beak or claws.

‘I come seeking no approval from you.’

He lowered his halberd like a barrier, bidding the pursuing Liberators to stop.

They did.

‘Hamilcar never surrenders,’ I said, grinning fiercely. ‘You should know that.’

Broudiccan was quiet for a moment. His mask turned down. ‘I do. I think. I remember dying on a nameless hill for your pride.’

‘It had a name.’

‘A name you gave it. A name to embellish your legend.’ He swung his halberd, striking sparks from the cobbles and forcing me to scramble backwards. ‘You always considered yourself the greatest among us, Hamilcar Bear-Eater. Prove it now. Let us settle this as champions.’

The growing evil in me did yearn to test my skills against Broudiccan’s, but do you recall when I said I could count the Stormcasts who could best me on the fingers of my hands?

Broudiccan’s name is number four.

Self-interest won out, but it was close fought.

‘I will not.’

‘You fear being bested.’

‘I won’t fight you here, brother. Not in anger. Not like this.’

‘Brother? You mistake what we had for friendship. You were my lord and I was your second. You were an embarrassment to the reputation of the Astral Templars.’

I knew that these words he spoke were a product of the Smith’s hammer on poor Broudiccan’s soul, distorting and destroying his memories. He wept when Sigmar returned him again to my service, some years later. Wept. Even so, they struck harder than any blow from a starsoul mace or a castellan’s halberd ever could.

I was still reeling from them when someone behind me yelled.

‘Hamilcar, Sigmar, and the Seven Words. Fire!’

The air about me exploded with gunfire, lead shot and sigmarite-tipped armour-killing rounds riddling Broudiccan’s amethyst breastplate.

The giant shrugged through the fusillade and swept up his halberd to skewer me to the cobbles before finally succumbing to the punishment.

I grinned for the briefest of moments, before it dawned on me what was going to happen.

My heart stopped.

‘Gods, no.’

Thirty men in leather and glass armour and bronze halfmasks depicting the unsetting sun blocked the street behind me in ranks. Powder smoke from their discharged pistols shrouded them and the bulk of the Gorkomon at their backs. ‘Reload!’ The front rank knelt and began doing something arcane with their firearms. ‘Target the Liberators!’

My face screwed up in concentration.

I recognised the leader.

Hamuz el-Shaah. The captain from Jercho. I cursed. The one city in the Mortal Realms where my star shone even brighter than it did in the Seven Words.

‘Fire!’

Another barrage of whistling cracks and explosive bangs riddled the scattered retinue of Liberators. Covering twice the range and four times the number of targets, the salvo lacked the stopping power that had put down Broudiccan, and the Liberators recovered with surpassing skill, unhitching shields and forming a line.

Crow lashed his tail and crouched protectively over Broudiccan’s body. No lightning bolt had consumed it to ferry his soul back to Azyr. He lived.

For now.

‘First and second ranks. Draw swords.’ There was a long, drawn-out scrape as the fourteen soldiers comprising the front ranks drew Jerech quartzswords from their scabbards. ‘Third and fourth ranks. Fire!’

Another fusillade of shot split the air above me. A bullet nicked Crow’s beak. He shrilled. A Liberator went down with a pinhole in the middle of his shield and disappeared in a crash of Celestial lightning that stove in doors, cracked stone, and splintered wooden shutters.

What had I done?

Half a day in the Mortal Realms and I had somehow managed to incite the Seven Words into armed rebellion and seen an Astral Templar cast back to the Forge Eternal.

Sometimes I don’t know my own strength.

I had to get out of the Seven Words, and now, before this uprising could spread any further. Flattering though it was, I had no wish to see the Seven Words torn apart in my name. We still had the skaven for that. I looked around for ideas. Gor Lane was tempting, but it only led down to the Morkogon Gate and there would be hundreds of Heavens Forged between me and escape. The catacombs were always an option, but they weren’t unguarded either. Akturus himself would doubtlessly be there by now, and if there was one thing I did still want to avoid then it was that.

An aetar shrieked, way above, and I looked up, my heart sinking.

That was a lot of mountain.

Chapter nineteen

I had been climbing for about a quarter of an hour when the inevitable finally came.

‘Go no further, Hamilcar. You are surrounded, above and below.’

An Azyrite warmth prickled at my back, melting the scab of hoarfrost that had formed over my plate. I pressed my cheek against the rock face to look back over my shoulder, my beard gusting wild, and caught sight of the Prosecutor-Prime behind me. He was one of Akturus’ Imperishables, his black armour embellished with morbid symbols of death and eternal life. Every beat of his wings was an assertion of Azyri dominance, denying the lesser gods of earth and sky the right to dash his heavily armoured body against the rocks below. I saw no weapon in his hand, but knew that it would take but a prayer on his part to summon one from the Cosmic Storm.

‘Begone!’ I bellowed into the gale.

With my gauntlets, I probed the rock face for another handhold. I couldn’t find one, resorting once again to punching one for myself. With a grunt of effort, I dragged myself another few feet, reassigning my boots to the holds that freed up.

I scowled breathlessly at the rock.

In cruel mockery of the numbness in my fingertips and in the skin of my face, my muscles felt as though they were turning slowly and painfully molten. It was worst in my hands, particularly along the outside edges, but no muscle in my body seemed immune to the burn. My legs. My back. My stomach. Even the muscles of my lips and eyes. As if even grimacing in pain had become an effort. I looked down. I know that this is what climbers in every realm are warned not to do, but I was born a child of the mountains. I had no fear of high places.

Then I looked up.

That was arguably less wise.

Breath steamed out of my mouth in a rasp.

The summit was so far above me that I couldn’t even see it yet amongst the lesser ridges and crags. If someone had appeared to me in spirit form to tell me that it was only ten times the distance I had already scaled yet to go, then I would have taken it and kissed that spectre’s hand. The uncounted legions that had warred over the Seven Words for so many thousands of years had shared little in common beyond an acceptance that the Gorkomon was unconquerable.

I hated proving people right.

‘I will not relent,’ I hollered to the Prime over my shoulder. ‘Not to Frankos. Not to Vikaeus. And definitely not to Akturus.’

‘The Lord-Veritant comes bearing the seal of the God-King himself with orders for your capture and return to Sigmaron,’ said the Prime evenly, as though we were having this discussion over ale. ‘She impressed upon us the commandment to return you alive.’

‘Good luck with that, brother.’

‘It is for your own protection.’

‘She said that, did she?’

‘Indeed. She told us of how your spirit has been spoiled by sorcery most foul, and that you will surely deteriorate and perhaps perish if you are not soon returned to the care of the Six Smiths.’

I thought of the flashes of anger I had been experiencing since my return to Ghur. My unexplained feelings towards Vikaeus. The thawing of my memories.

I shook my head fiercely.

‘Never!’

‘She said that you might not be of your right mind.’

‘What does Vikaeus know of my mind anyway?’

There was a snap of Azyr power as a stormcall javelin exploded from the raw aether and into the Prosecutor-Prime’s gauntlet. It hummed forcefully. I glanced back. The rest of the retinue circled a short distance away, four winged warriors accompanied by an amethyst-and-gold figure infused with the unmistakeable cobalt halo of a Knight-Azyros. Another holy warrior with a damned lantern. The Prosecutor-Prime turned his head to follow my gaze, then turned slowly back. His mask was blank. He didn’t say anything. But I could tell very well that he knew exactly what I was thinking, and why, and that he was offering me this one last chance.

‘You heard what happened when I used my own lantern then?’ I said.

He nodded. ‘I happen to believe that Vikaeus is correct in this. You started a riot. Did you know that elements of the Freeguild have barricaded themselves within some of the outer wards and are refusing to recognise any higher authority unless it is you?’ His mask emitted an exasperated sigh. ‘If the skaven are anywhere close then they will attack soon, and in full force. You may have doomed the Seven Words with your actions, Hamilcar. But if you surrender to me now, talk these misguided captains down from the calamity they rush towards, then you have my oath that no harm will come upon you.’

With a grunt, I broke open another handhold and pulled myself up. It was quite probably the last I had the strength to make, but surrender just wasn’t in me. The Imperishables could catch my unconscious body when my strength gave and I fell. Not a moment before.

The Prosecutor-Prime shadowed me effortlessly.

‘It’s not that I doubt your oath, my friend,’ I wheezed. ‘I know Akturus well enough to know that he’d sooner break his own fingers than his word, and I am sure his warriors would do the same.’

‘In the heartbeat of a zephyrgayle.’

‘What I doubt, however,’ I said, my voice raising to a shout, ‘is that you have the slightest inkling of what awaits me in Sigmaron.’

‘It is Sigmar’s will.’

‘To the Great Nothing with Sigmar’s will!’

The Prosecutor hissed, taken aback. ‘Very well, then.’ The javelin crackled as he drew it back for the cast.

I turned my back and gritted my teeth against the expected pain.

A screech tore through the freezing air and I tensed, expecting to find myself pinned to the mountain by a lightning bolt, but instead a winged shadow fell across me, followed by a metallic scrape and a human scream. I looked back to see the terrifying form of an aetar eagle knight with the Prosecutor-Prime clutched in one of his talons. The Stormcast’s javelin snapped back into non-existence as he threw all his strength into fighting his way free, only to be summarily dashed against the mountainside. I felt the crunch of his impact through my fingers. I watched his wings fizzle out and held on tight to the rock face as his crumpled body plummeted by me.

The aetar beat its wings, almost ripping me off the mountain, as it shrieked a challenge. The turbulence scattered the remaining Prosecutors, but they had been drawn from the greatest heroes in the Mortal Realms, and belonged to a chamber renowned for its phlegmatism. They were already summoning javelins to hand, and fighting for height. A beam of Celestial starlight lanced from the Knight-Azyros’ beacon and across the eagle knight’s armour. It did absolutely nothing. I, however, winced at even that close a glimpse of the heavens.

The aetar snatched the Knight-Azyros up in its beak.

‘Release him, heathen bird!’ Lightning leapt from a Prosecutor’s casting arm, the stormcall javelin exploding into rainbow hues against the spell-wards knit into the eagle knight’s mail.

The aetar delivered another piercing shriek, this time mocking, even muffled as it was by the Knight-Azyros struggling to drive open his beak.

Sigmar, but the aetar were so much more impressive in the air.

‘Go higher, brother. Higher.’ The Prosecutors called out to one another as they circled the great beast, like starving dogs around a white lion. ‘Anubus. Grab the Bear-Eater and fly. We will shield you.’

Another lightning bolt scalded the eagle knight’s beak. Shrieking in rage, it raked for the Prosecutor with its talons. The Stormcast dived, but the aetar were the kings of this sky, and there was nothing nimbler or fiercer with wings. Claws the length of swords nicked the Stormcast’s harness and ripped a fistful of glowing feathers from his back. The warrior screamed as he pinwheeled towards the Seven Words, trying desperately to gain flight without half of one wing.

His brothers hesitated, torn between grabbing me, fighting the eagle knight and rescuing their comrade.

Then another devastating shriek rang out of the higher crags.

Two more proud aetar in splinted mail and bladed claws appeared in the sky above us, growing very large, very fast.

The eagle knight already in the fight tossed the Knight-Azyros contemptuously aside. His harness had been buckled in the aetar’s beak and it struggled to ignite, trailing lightning as he tried to deploy his wings.

That seemed to settle it for the Prosecutors.

Without a word to me or to each other, the three remaining warriors tucked in their wings and dropped after their falling comrades.

I laughed fiercely as I watched them become specks and then vanish.

‘I always knew that Augus had my b–’

A scaled foot the size of a door flattened me to the rock face before I had much chance to get carried away. Then it clawed me out, excavating a few hundred pounds of shattered rock along with me. Beating its wings hard, the aetar drew me from the mountain and into the air. I swung in the eagle knight’s talons, watching as the stones and debris drained through its claws and dissipated into the great gulf of nothing between me, the wind and the Seven Words. My first instinct was to fight.

I felt that to be an instinct worth suppressing on this occasion.

‘Where are you taking me?’

The eagle knight issued a deafening shriek.

‘Of course,’ I said. ‘I should have known.’

Chapter twenty

The fortress eyrie of the aetar. A soaring bastion of rustling motion and constant noise. And I was the first of my kind to see it. Or so I thought at the time.

The great eagles nested in hollows gouged out of the high walls by aetar claws, made homely with found things. Scraps of cloth. Fur. Feathers. Even bits of armour. I counted hundreds, far more than I would have expected to find given the dozen or so knights that King Augus had been so loath to loan me for the battle against the brayseer. With a hundred aetar knights, Augus could have owned this region of the Ghurlands, from the southern tracts of the Nevermarsh to the mysterious Sea of Scales beyond the mountains to the far north – had he wanted it. They chirped and cooed in their roosts. Scratched their claws. Nibbled at the rock. Ruffled their feathers. Flapped their wings in annoyance and in pleasure. Boisterous young males, identified by their smaller beaks and straighter claws, pinwheeled through the air before their roosts, coming together in collisions of heads, explosions of feathers and squawking. If anyone came away from these displays a winner, I wasn’t sure who, but the pointless bravado struck a chord with me nonetheless.

While the rookeries dotted the mountainside, they faced out onto a glorious expanse of blue emptiness. The aetar had no use for battlements or gates. The sky was their moat. The mile upon mile of unassailable rock beneath their talons was their wall. Even I, acclimated to the glories of the Mortal Realms and the infinities of Azyr, stared out in wonderment.

At the sound of a joyous shriek coming my way, I dragged my eyes from the spectacle for the arrival of a powerful aetar female. Her chest plumage and neck were armoured in blued steel and topaz, glittering in what was left of the amber sun. Wings extended to their colossal span, she descended onto an artificial perch that jutted from the rock face at an angle about twenty feet above my head.

The ‘ground’ of the aetar’s fort, I should add, was a shelf of rock about as wide across as I am tall. The eagle knight who had plucked me from the Gorkomon had at least been thoughtful enough to deposit me on one of the stretches less completely stained by moult and droppings.

The aetar stretched her wings luxuriously as she deliberately stamped clawed feet on the perch, shuffled sideways, then delivered a shriek that could have turned a man’s hair white.

‘It is good to see you too, princess.’

She bobbed her head and cawed.

‘Of course I recognised you. You’ve the war harness of a queen, and as well curved a beak as any this side of the Seventh Gate.’

Aeygar puffed out her feathers in pleasure.

While it’s fair to say that I didn’t understand one word out of her beak, I’ve always had a knack when it comes to dealing with people, whatever wild or wondrous form they come in. I could natter with a Treelord like a native, and send the spirit away happy hours later without ever uttering a true word of Sylvan. It’s not like flight to a Prosecutor, or a Lord-Veritant’s sense for corruption; there’s no gift to it. It’s about being interested in people, enough to care, and – as with everything in this life – throwing yourself at it as though you mean it.

I got the gist.

‘It was your retainers that picked me up, I suppose.’

Her beak went up and down, which I didn’t think was an aetar mannerism but rather her attempt at a nod. I was touched.

‘Thank you. My hands were starting to get a little tired.’

She cawed, amused.

‘How did you know Vikaeus was after me?’

She leapt up from her perch, flapping her wings flaccidly, landing with a razoring caw that sounded like a wooden spoon being rattled about inside of a saucepan.

‘Good eyes. Even for an aetar.’

She gave a shriek, ruffing her neck feathers again.

‘Kind of you,’ I said. ‘But the king never allowed me up here. Not even in exchange for a reciprocal visit to Highheim.’ An offer I had no means of honouring, of course, but by the time he was in Azyr I was confident that an aggrieved aetar king would have been someone else’s problem.

Aeygar’s head tilted until it was almost completely sideways. I couldn’t decipher the gesture, but I felt an unfamiliar pressure beneath my ribs, a faint memory of a time when a woman had looked at me with the same mixture of superiority and fondness.

I sighed.

Aeygar, meanwhile, had stepped off her perch and spread her wings, gliding into an oddly graceless landing on the filth-encrusted ground before me. She hopped awkwardly from foot to foot, claws scraping at the griping rock in unease. With a softly trilling warble, she lowered her head to the ground, long neck angled upwards like a ramp.

‘For… me?’

She issued the exact same warbling note and despite everything I’d just done and been through to get here, I laughed.

‘Better than being borne in your talons, I imagine.’

She shuffled and cawed, tapping the ground with her beak.

‘Apology accepted.’

I took a handful of the soft feathers at the back of her head, tugging on them to make certain that my weight wasn’t going to hurt her before swinging my leg over her shoulders. She didn’t even seem to register it. She reared up sharply, almost throwing me from her back before I could grab a second fistful of feathers. Then she was turning to face the wall of sky, wings thumping, powerful muscles shifting beneath the seat of my armour.

One step.

Two.

And then we were aloft.

I bellowed for the joy of it. There were many godly feats and supernatural acts I had performed in Sigmar’s name, but flight had never been one of them. Keeping a firm grip on Aeygar’s feathers, I leant over and looked down past her working wings. The rock shelf I had been standing on shrank as though it were being absorbed into the mountain, and I looked up again, laughing uproariously at the aquiline bewilderment that greeted this unprecedented thing – a Stormcast Eternal bestride the back of an aetar princess – from the warmth of their rookeries. I waved to them.

‘Who needs to waste decades questing across the Mortal Realms for a solargem, or risk their neck to impress a wild Dracoth with his purity? Not Hamilcar Bear-Eater – friend to all peoples of land and sky!’

The princess shrieked and it too was a cry of joy.

I think that she was enjoying the attention almost as much as I was.

With slow, powerful strokes of her wings, she bore us upwards. Past rookeries and hollows, month-old chicks clamouring to see the fabled Hamilcar Bear-Eater only to be called from the edge by frantic shrieks from their mothers. Higher. The young males I had seen from the ledge squalled about us. The presence of the princess amongst them only strengthened their ardour and intensified their displays, swallowing us both in a storm of beaks and feathers and amorous cries.

I felt I had to ask.

‘Are you not already promised, princess?’

She gave a tilt of the head that struck me as uncharacteristically coquettish for a creature that could have ripped both arms from my body.

‘Really? At your age?’

With an irate squawk, she hauled us sharply upwards, leaving the increasingly hot-tempered flock behind us. There was a hole in the ceiling of the fortress eyrie, a jagged shaft about fifty feet long.

And beyond it – the very roof of the Ghurlands.

The air was so clear you could have imagined Alarielle bathing in it. Assuming that your imagination, like mine, runs that way. I took a long, deep breath. It was thin, and so shockingly cold that it actually burned to breathe, but I was a Stormcast Eternal and mortal child of the Eternal Winterlands, so believe me when I say that I’ve known deeper colds than this in my day. It smelled of frost, and of wind that was pure from having never sullied itself with the touch of earth. I was so high now that I had actually stopped thinking about the ground as a part of this world. I looked up at the raw summit of the Gorkomon. The great peak was narrow enough here that I could view it all in one glance. It was clad in ice, luminous and amber in this exalted place, this world without shadow.

A cleft had been dug into that ice.

It resembled the aetar rookeries I’d seen below, only far, far larger. Stained glass and coloured silks littered the rocky shelves and ledges, ivory and jewels, silver and gold. As the Seven Words was a hodgepodge of architectural styles from two Ages of the realms and a hundred different races that had briefly (and unwisely) claimed it for their own, so too were the nesting materials of the royal aetar. Gemstones engraved with duardin runes sat next to bullgor ivory figurines, mountain aelf filigree and spiderfang silk sculpture. In a few years I expected that there’d be a storm gladius or a set of Prosecutor wings in amongst the royal collection.

Elite eagle guard, their beaks and feathers decorated with fearsome war paint, flew endless loops about the eyrie. Dozens more roosted under the foot of the cleft, ruffling their wing feathers like old campaigners shaking rain from their cloaks.

And, perched on a berm of rock – less a few feathers than when I saw him last, greyer about the eyes, more sinewy in pinion and claw, but no less majestic in splinted mail and royal crown – was King Augus himself.

He spread his wings in greeting, one lord of his people to another, and called.

Bringing us into one of the many petitioners’ perches that protruded from the royal eyrie, the princess dipped her head to her father. He cawed in greeting. Aeygar bobbed her head lower and, taking the hint, albeit reluctantly, I dismounted.

I patted her neck in gratitude and looked around. The perch wasn’t much, but the aetar are massive birds and it was more than enough for me to stand on. And if nothing else, I do have a head for heights.

‘Hamilcar?’

Sat at the base of the perch was a familiar winged figure.

Barbarus. Self-proclaimed King in the Sky.

The feathers stuck in the Knight-Venator’s hair looked in even wilder disarray than usual, and the paint on his dark skin had been allowed to run. Even Nubia, the indigo-feathered star-eagle perched on the scuffed sigmarite of his pauldron, looked unusually ruffled. No doubt anticipating the eventual downfall of the Seven Words, his helmet had been wedged in amongst the collage of Augus’ pickings, the reddish-brownish (I never did look into the exact name for the colour) plume of the Bear-Eaters spilling over a brass chalice decorated with jewels and what looked like a troggoth-skin rug.

He stared up at me as though he was seeing a nighthaunt.

From the look of him, they visited him often.

‘Is it really you?’ he murmured.

‘Would Sigmar forge two of these?’ I spread my hands demonstratively and grinned, but it faltered at his dishevelled state. ‘What happened to you? Why aren’t you wearing the white of the Heavens Forged?’

The Knight-Venator scratched at the claw marks on the rock between his thighs, reluctant to meet my eye. ‘Sigmar did call me to the muster, but I refused it. I refused to forsake the aetar, not after what we led them to on Kurzog’s Hill. Perhaps it was partly out of grief for you, but Augus’ loss moved me. I swore to him that he’d have vengeance, for you and for Ellias, and bring the skaven responsible back here to be eviscerated at the king’s pleasure.’ His words scratched to a whisper. ‘I became Errant-Questor.’

I didn’t quite know what to say.

‘It’s been five years, brother.’

We were both silent a while.

I cleared my throat.

‘Find anything?’

He glared, but was unable to hold it. His eyes slid off me.

‘You seem different,’ he said.

It was the least offensive thing that a Stormcast Eternal had said to me since the tree priestess, Brychen, had stabbed me in the neck. It came from a place of defeatism and self-absorption, but I was touched all the same.

Before I could think of anything to add, Augus issued a piercing shriek and thumped his wings.

Aeygar straightened in her perch, as did the attending eagle guard. I followed their example and straightened my back and shoulders. Barbarus, however, simply sat where he was, face down, Nubia fussing about him in an erstwhile attempt to render the Errant-Questor respectable.

The king slowly raised then stamped his feet, head bobbing and weaving as he hawked and cried.

I heard a tapping sound and turned to see Nubia pecking at Barbarus’ gorget.

‘He says that he had heard our kind could not stay dead,’ Barbarus translated, wearily, his gaze fixed glassily on whatever place it had exiled itself to. ‘He says that it is against nature and the laws of Ghur. He says…’ He snorted, a smile threatening to crack his haggard features. ‘He says that he will make an exception in your case as even before the Man-God remade you in his image the… the…’ He frowned over some untranslatable sequence of swaying head motions and croaking squawks, ‘the taker who stalks the sky above the sky could not lay its claws on you.’

I dipped my head, defacing that show of modesty only somewhat with an enormous grin.

‘You flatter me,’ I said.

Augus turned his shining, plate-like eyes to me. His beak opened soundlessly. The feathers at the back of his head bristled.

‘He says he thought for many risings and settings about what he would do with you when you returned.’ The aetar king emitted a hiss that caused his throat to tremble. ‘You who spoke so eloquently of kinship, you who persuaded his queen and daughter that the fight against Manguish and the brayseer was his fight.’

Aeygar cut in with a shriek and a wing-flap, but her father silenced her. His shriek was louder. His wingspan greater.

‘We are both hunters,’ I said, when they had quietened enough for me to be heard. ‘Sometimes the beast gets you.’

The king’s eyes caught the waning sunlight. A flash of amber, alien and inscrutable.

‘He says he likes you,’ said Barbarus. ‘That was what stayed him from turning his wrath on the Seven Words. That and… and my oath to him.’

I thought of the strength I’d seen gathered in the eyries below us, remembering how neatly just one of Aeygar’s eagle guard had despatched an entire Prosecutor retinue and a Knight-Azyros.

I decided that Augus and the aetar were the sort of enemies that the Seven Words could do without.

Augus shuffled along his perch.

‘He says that it didn’t matter anyway,’ said Barbarus. ‘Even with the Legion of Bloat destroyed and the Blind Herd defeated, the skaven will scour your fortress bare with no help from him. He has seen many stake their claim to the fort below.’

‘You know about the skaven?’ I asked.

For all of Akturus’ scribery and parchmentcraft, the Lord-Castellant of the Imperishables had been able to tell me precious little of the skaven’s numbers, whereabouts, or intentions.

Augus cawed.

‘He says he sees much that our own winged scouts cannot,’ Barbarus said, and frowned, properly, at the not-so-implicit criticism of his skills. ‘They range further. Their eyes are sharper. They are at home in the sky where ours will always pine for the earth.’ He snorted, animated, briefly the arrogant King in the Sky I’d known before all of this. ‘Or so he believes.’ The king hopped on the spot, launching into a blistering tirade. ‘He says the skaven are more numerous than any mud-dweller army he has tracked before. Dust on the wind. Their attack will come in days. The Seven Words will fall.’

Barbarus turned to face me directly. His eyes were ringed by dark circles that I had initially, and mistakenly, taken for kohl. ‘He is most certain.’

‘And will the aetar help?’ I said, addressing my words to the king.

He gave a throaty caw.

‘He asks why he should.’

The aetar made some grating noises and bob-gestures that Barbarus was slow to translate.

‘What?’ I said.

‘Place names and people,’ said Barbarus, giving his head a shake and forcing Nubia to hop across to the opposite pauldron with an aggrieved chirp. ‘They don’t always translate easily. The best I can come up with is “Ice-Queen” and “Tomb-Snake”.’

‘Vikaeus and Akturus,’ I said, after a moment’s thought.

‘He says that in spite of his warnings, they encroach too far on his eyries. Every day he must chase off more of their winged knights. He likes you, Hamilcar. You always respected him and what was not yours to control. Those now in charge below do not. Cannot.’ Barbarus’ expression became cloudy. ‘Sigmar seeks only to take, to remake all that he finds in the way that he sees as heavenly. As he did with you. He says he doesn’t like Vikaeus or Akturus. They are Sigmar’s things. They know only the storm.’

‘And… I don’t?’

Augus shook his head.

I pursed my lips, faintly troubled by that, but shook it off with a shrug. It really is as easy as that, if you let it be. I hadn’t deliberately attempted to scale the Gorkomon in order to petition for the aetar’s aid, but I was here now, and Augus was a powerful friend.

If a friend he was.

‘Then forget the skaven,’ I said. ‘Let Vikaeus and Akturus deal with them. I’m only interested in their leader, Ikrit.’

At my utterance of the name, Augus hissed. His eagle guard took up the sound in earnest, surrounding me with a needling hum of noise.

This time Barbarus spoke up for himself.

‘If we knew where the warlock was then I wouldn’t be here now. Augus would have taken his vengeance and I would be Knight-Venator again, wearing the storm-struck anvil of the Heavens Forged.’

I thought back on the dream that I had awoken to prior to my escape from the Forge Eternal. I had felt myself cocooned in the rancid flesh of a corrupt seed pod, a discordant Life song twisted out of harmony and muffled by the cushioning fibres of the seed. It had felt too vivid to be a dream, mad even for me – and in any case, I was almost certain that I had already been effectively awake by that point. What, then, if it had not been a dream at all? It would not be the first time that I had experienced a vision that had turned out, invariably with hindsight, to be prophetic. What if the thing that Ikrit had attempted to steal from me had been too large, too securely held, to be taken intact? What if he had been forced to resort instead to crude vandalism to take that which he had desired, leaving a broken trail of my soul essence that now connected my spirit to his… and vice versa. An unpleasant thought if ever I’d had one, and believe me, I’d had them.

‘He’s been lying low,’ I said. ‘Cocooned somehow, and recovering. I think I injured him badly in my escape from his lair.’

The dried paint daubing Barbarus’ features cracked as he slowly grinned. ‘And now he shows his tail again, and Sigmar sends you after him.’ He thumped my pauldron with some of his old vigour. ‘Yes. Good. So long as your quest does not interfere with mine, Bear-Eater.’

I should point out here that there is no formal hierarchy amongst the Knights-Questor. By our very nature we operate outside of the command echelons of the Stormhosts, so to create a whole set of new ones just for them would have been to totally miss the point. But even so, it struck me as obvious that those specifically chosen for the role by the God-King had to outrank those who had assumed the role for themselves.

Simple, cosmic order.

I decided to proceed on that basis.

‘I don’t know where Ikrit is, and neither does the God-King, but I know where he was. After the battle at Kurzog’s Hill he took me to his lair. I saw it briefly from the outside when I escaped. And so did she.’

I pointed at Aeygar.

Augus bristled and delivered a shriek that had the princess shuffling along her perch in surprise.

‘I heard you in the sky,’ I shouted, raising my voice enough to silence them both, and to bring the watching eagle knights into shrieks of contention. ‘You were searching for me, but the snow was falling too thickly for you to see me. I didn’t see you either, but I recognised your voice above me.’

The king threw his daughter an enquiring squawk. She shrieked back and the two fell into a belligerent hopping about and drumming of wing feathers that I would have recognised as an argument in any species.

‘Apparently the princess sought you without his consent,’ said Barbarus.

‘Apparently,’ I agreed.

Aeygar cocked her head thoughtfully, a gesture that Augus greeted with an ear-destroying shriek. I looked again to Barbarus.

The Errant-Questor had gathered up his helmet and was standing up.

‘She says that if she is permitted to go with you, then you can help her retrace her flight to where Ikrit’s lair might be found. He says that it’s too dangerous, and that he’s done doing Sigmar’s work for him. She then asks if he wants the skaven and their flying machines ruling over the Seven Words.’ Barbarus’ eyes sparked with new lightning as he slid his helmet back over his head and looked up to face the enraged King Augus. ‘Only it is not Sigmar’s work, is it? Not for me. It is yours. And I renew my pledge to you now, that you, and not the God-King, will have the warlock.’

I glanced across at him. ‘There’s my King in the Sky.’

Augus swung his head from side to side, gripping his perch tight in his claws as his wings beat in a fury.

Aeygar lifted off, hovering for a second before falling back to her perch with a shriek.

‘Yes,’ I shouted. ‘Let her. Ellias was her mother too.’

Augus quietened down, glaring at his daughter, then at me, then hung his head.

Barbarus nodded once. ‘He says that it was Ellias who convinced him to listen to Aeygar, and to give Sigmar one more chance. She was the wise one. He was only ever beak and claws.’

I snorted at that. ‘Me as well.’

The king of the Gorkomon looked sorrowful, the wind carrying through his feathers. He looked too tired to disagree with anything then.

As I said, I know people.

‘I can find him,’ I said. ‘Let Aeygar help me. What happens after that is out of all our hands.’

He gave me a hard glare.

Then lifted his beak into the air and shrieked.

Chapter twenty-one

Aeygar cawed at me, the short feathers of her head and neck forced back by the wind of her flight.

‘I see them.’

A force of about thirty men was strung out over the harsh, thickly wooded slope, fleetingly visible between the groping branches of the leechwoods and carniferns. Glassmarks and crystal armour glinted in the dusk light as they fought, the sound of quartzblades on rusted skaven steel like the clinking of china from up here on the aetar’s back.

‘It’s the Jerech Blue Skies,’ I yelled at her. ‘I am starting to think they are following me.’

Many Stormcast Eternals believe in things like fate, destiny, providence. Too many. Not me. I knew that some men were just dogged enough to keep on putting themselves in the right place at the right time.

I heard the crackling pop of gunfire.

With a gum-ache hum of the aetheric, Barbarus looped under the aetar’s wings and tucked in alongside me. His russety plume whipped out behind him. The star-eagle, Nubia, soared alongside, shedding starlight with every swift beat of her wings.

‘This is their battle now,’ he said. ‘Not ours. We have a quest and I would see it through.’

The Errant-Questor was probably right, but the idea of swooping to the rescue of the Freeguild on the back of an aetar princess in full armour was too good to resist. ‘For shame, Barbarus, where is your humanity?’ I pointed down with my halberd. ‘For Sigmar!’

‘Of course. For Sigmar.’

‘Sigmar!’

Aeygar issued a war-shriek of her own as we looped towards the embattled regiment.

Barbarus was first to the ground.

The princess may have had the clear beating of the Errant-Questor over open skies, but nothing drops out of the air like a knight in armour, believe me.

Aeygar and I were still some way up when his loosed arrow tore through a clanrat warrior like a lightning bolt, splitting him from shoulders to belly and crisping him from the inside out. It happened so suddenly that even the clanrat directly behind him hadn’t realised he was dead before Barbarus swept overhead. Branches snapped at the Errant-Questor’s beating harness as he ballooned his wings, allowing the winds aetheric to snatch him up and hurl him back into the sky.

‘King in the Sky!’ I shouted approvingly, as the Errant-Questor raked the milling skaven with arrows from his realmhunter’s bow.

The clanrats were still looking dumbly after Barbarus as Princess Aeygar’s shadow descended on them.

I thrust with my halberd like a lance as Aeygar’s claws slapped through the suckered leaves and barbs of the leechwood canopy, only managing to dent the back of a fleeing warrior’s helm before the aetar beat her wings and began to climb. I bellowed, barely holding on with just one hand and my thighs.

Nubia glittered across my face like an arrow and smacked into something furry out of sight.

I swore.

I didn’t doubt that I looked magnificent, but it wouldn’t count for much if I couldn’t hit anything and every Jerech on the ground was killed.

Even the star-eagle was making a better fist of this than I was.

‘We need to go lower. Blasted trees. I’ve seen a carnifern devour a deathrattle for the marrow in its bones.’ I shook my head. That’s the sort of sight that stays with you.

Aeygar gave a screech.

‘Fair enough, princess, this one will be all about Hamilcar Bear-Eater.’

I twisted to face the ground, just as a skaven in the overly complicated bronze armour of Ikrit’s engineers pointed a weapon roughly into Barbarus’ jinking path. It was a firearm of some kind, comprised of about a dozen barrels connected by belts to a drum borne across the hunched back of a skavenslave. The cackling engineer cranked the handle, hosing the sky around the Errant-Questor with warpstone bullets. Barbarus tried to pull out of the gun’s range, but one green-glowing missile punched a hole in his wing and he went cartwheeling to the mountainside.

He made a deep, sparking crater where he hit.

The Jerech cried out in alarm, while the emboldened vermin pressed their attack.

‘I’ll give them something to squeak about,’ I told Aeygar.

The aetar gave an enquiring caw.

‘Let me worry about the trees.’

I let go of her.

It might surprise you to learn that falling from a great height is every bit as exhilarating as flying. I dropped through the thrashing branches of the Gorwood, the predatory trees desperate to get a purchase on my plate, while I bellowed joyously. A few did manage to scratch my face, but not enough to stall the descent of a Stormcast Eternal in full armour, and I hit the ground with almost as much power as Barbarus had done moments before.

The impact ripped through the spongy topsoil, tremors rippling through the underlying rock and throwing clanrat warriors from their footpaws. I was back up before they were, bruised and dazed, but confident enough in my arm to whip out my halberd and nick the throat of a clanrat as he scrambled upright.

He scrabbled uselessly at the gushing wound as he keeled over.

The remaining clanrats sought to drown me in fur. I laughed as my halberd whipped out in looping circles, the height and width of them varying like the winds of Azyr so as to rip out jaws and chests and bellies as the gods willed it. One clanrat, panicked into an act of outright bravery, leapt through the storm of blades and clamped his jaws around my gorget. His claws scratched over my breastplate. His fangs worried against thrice-blessed sigmarite. I peeled him off, lifting him by the throat with my left hand. I regarded him for a moment, detached, as if I had just shaken a pebble from my boot, then, without thinking about it, brought my other hand to his scalp and tore the ratman’s head from his shoulders. His neck geysered hot blood into my face, and I laughed and bellowed with the battle joy of the Winterlands.

For a moment there, I wasn’t me.

Or rather I was a different, older me.

I was a king of battle, a God of blades, champion of the arctic steppe. Thoughts and needs that had not commanded my soul in centuries suddenly inflamed me, painting my vision red as I struck another clanrat across the jaw, shattering its teeth and breaking its neck.

‘For the God-Peak!’ I roared. ‘For the Twelve-Pointed Star! For the Sky-Hammer!’

I had no idea what these battle-cries meant or from whence they came, but they filled me with fury as I swept my halberd low across the ground, severing the legs of another three skaven warriors. Then I hurled the still-leaking head in my left hand, poleaxing the clawleader with a blow to the snout.

‘Lord Hamilcar!’

Someone was calling my name.

Blinking the berserker haze from my eyes, I looked around.

Captain Hamuz el-Shaah waved to me from the centre of a small box formation of Jerech Blue Skies. In addition to the usual mixed groupings of swordsmen and pistoliers, I saw a handful of heavier infantrymen wielding greatswords and two more that were hunched over a brass-barrelled field gun. I’d heard them call it a demi-cannon. A plainspoken name, for a daemon of brass and powder that speaks with Sigmar’s thunder. I counted twenty-five, with five more led by a heavily bearded greatsword bravely pushing towards the fizzing crater that marked the ground about fifty yards from their position. As I watched, I saw Barbarus flap up on one wing, smash a skaven to pulp with a blow from his bow stave, then stab another through the heart with a storm-gladius. The Jerech fighting towards him gave a ragged cheer.

‘Take down the standard-bearer!’ the captain shouted to me.

Other men yelled at one another, and the two human engineers pivoted their demi-cannon towards the figure that el-Shaah was alluding to.

A skaven warlock clad in a swollen incarnation of rubberised armour pushed his ‘standard’ ahead of him on a set of clattering metal wheels. Surmounted by a branch-like array of wires and spinning prongs, the device emitted a strange amber radiance that seemed to be afflicting the surrounding skaven with an unusual savagery. I was no Lord-Arcanum or mage-sacristan (Sigmar being wise that way), but even I could see that the device was drawing on the energies of the Ghurlands somehow to empower the skaven warriors.

Trust the warlocks of the Clans Skyre to make something as simple as a battle standard complicated. Never mind Chaos. If the Pantheon could impose upon their mortal children to build fewer contraptions such as these then it would go a long way towards peace in the Mortal Realms.

I heard the boom of the demi-cannon. Skaven squealed as thirty pounds of Gorwood iron smashed through them. The warlock with the standard wasn’t amongst them.

‘Never trust a made thing to do a warrior’s work,’ I said.

‘Is the Bear-Eater. Kill-slay.’

Turning from the warlock, I saw five of Ikrit’s elite shock-vermin, each one clad in bronze plates and ticking wheels, fan towards me. Powered glaives hummed in their paws, each spinning like its own small piece of the larger work.

The first stroked his blade towards me. I clubbed it aside easily, but the second was already stabbing for my hip while a third carved towards the opposite shoulder. My halberd spun, knocking the low blow aside, and I drew in my shoulder. The withdrawal bled enough force from the blow to let my bastion armour take the hit. Angry sparks erupted around the blade as my halberd came up to uppercut the rat that had gone for my hip, only to hit glaive. It pushed my blow wide. The fifth shock-vermin aimed his glaive at my exposed midriff like a handgun and, from essentially point-blank range, fired. Purple lightning blasted from the tip of the blade. My vision soured as I was swept off my feet and into a steaming pile of armour several feet back.

I gagged on the poisonous ozone aftertaste as I stumbled back up.

The shock-vermin were already spinning and twirling towards me. They reminded me of the wandering troupes of aelven wardancers that would occasionally grace the cities of Azyr. There was the same alacrity and grace, the same singleness of purpose. But where the aelves honed their spectacular abilities through centuries of practice and an inhuman understanding of their fellow dancers, these vermin acted out of a clockwork intensity, a routine plotted and set for them by another.

Still, it was effective.

My halberd moved as though it belonged to the same system, barely keeping up with the five of them. I felt the muscles in my arms begin to throb. Sweat gathered in the furrowed frown across my brow.

One of the shock-vermin squealed as a carnifern suddenly leant in, strangling the warrior in suckervines and hoisting the struggling ratman up into its foliage. I counted my blessings and fought on against the remaining four. Then the ground burst open beneath another, a writhing mass of puckered, blood-soaked roots ensnaring two more, and it started to dawn on me that something was going on. A wooden spear erupted from the chest of one of the ensnared skaven. His armour whirred, hacking his glaive through the grasping roots, only for the butt-end of a spear to smash enough cogs to kill him. The other shrieked and squealed as the bloodroots dragged him underground.

A woman clad in a loose-fitting lattice of stiff bark plates and barbed hollies stared at me from the other side of the torn ground.

‘You?’ she said.

‘You!’ I returned.

‘I thought I killed you.’

I grinned. ‘Wouldn’t be the first.’

The final two shock-vermin ran at me together. They were still quick, and fought exquisitely as a pair, but while five warp-lightning-powered skaven warriors had been about my limit, two were well within my gift.

I rammed my halberd through the first’s gut before he could react. I made to follow through on the second only for the woman, Brychen, to toss what looked like a flower stem in his muzzle. He blinked in surprise, and I was about to laugh at them both when the ratman suddenly squealed, dropping to the ground and clawing at his snout as flesh-eating flowers started sprouting from his fur.

I looked away with a grimace as he collapsed into a steaming pile of armour, flesh mush and pungent blooms.

I saw a skavenslave with an ammunition drum attached to a torn belt fleeing into the Gorwood. The engineer that had downed Barbarus was on the ground, surrounded by dead skaven and slurping roots, Nubia frenziedly clawing the ruin of his face. I heard a cheer, naturally assumed it was for me and turned towards the Blue Skies in time to see the warlock standard-bearer fall over with one of Barbarus’ arrows sticking out of his neck. He took his arcane standard down with him.

The Ghurite energies that had been emboldening the skaven’s black little hearts began to unravel.

‘I am here for Ikrit,’ Brychen hissed.

The cannon boomed out once more, followed by an ungodly shriek as Aeygar dropped low enough to shake the branches. That was enough for the skaven. They broke for the forest, leaving their dead behind like leaf litter.

‘Hamilcar!’ yelled Hamuz el-Shaah, and the cry went up among the Blue Skies. I saw Barbarus look at his bow and then at the dead around him in confusion. ‘Hamilcar has come to save us!’

Brychen arched her eyebrow at me.

I clapped my hand on her shoulder.

She brushed it off irritably.

‘Ikrit is going to regret the day he crossed the two of us,’ I said.

Chapter twenty-two

Leechwood pine is a moist and sappy wood. Though I don’t feel the cold as such, I do appreciate a good fire, and leechwood isn’t your wood for that. It’s challenging to light at all, and when it does take, the flame it gives is low and smoky and reeks of freshly spilled blood. It made the Freeguild captain appear darker skinned and more haggard of dress than he had a right to be. The crystal and glass of his wargear wavered in and out of amber and red, and the black of the sky.

‘What are you doing out here in the Gorwood, el-Shaah?’

‘You remember my name, lord?’

‘Of course.’

Hamuz looked into the struggling campfire and flushed with pleasure. ‘After your attempted scaling of the Gorkomon, we fled for the lower wards. Broudiccan let us go. More interested in you than us, and he didn’t have the numbers to chase us both.’

‘He lives?’

‘It would take more than these men here to take him down, lord.’

I grunted. Truer words…

‘I knew it’d only be a matter of time before the Lord-Veritant came looking for us. After what we did. Standing up to them like that.’ He stared into the fire. I could see that he was still buzzing from the excitement of what he had dared to do. A battle with a small skaven horde had nothing on standing against the avatars of your own god. With a shiver, he lifted his head and turned it towards the second fire.

The engineers sat there alone, tending Banu. Apparently, the naming of a cannon by a master gunner is a timeless and honoured Ironweld tradition, in much the same way that psychopaths have always named their knives. Banu, I later learned, was a Jerech word meaning Little Girl, which I think proves my point nicely. Surprisingly few bodies littered the ground between us. The Gorwood had seen to that.

Aeygar’s anxious coos trembled from the darkness nearby. I couldn’t see her, but I knew that spending a night on solid ground was not her idea of an adventure.

‘We thought we’d leave the fortress and try to find you,’ Hamuz went on, then smiled ruefully. ‘I hadn’t expected you to find us. On an aetar.’

The other men around the fire murmured their appreciation.

‘It’s all about trust,’ I said, winking at Hamuz as the gloriously moustachioed man to his left passed him a cup of something hot.

His name was Nassam, and I recognised him as the soldier who had led the charge to retrieve Barbarus after the Errant-Questor had been shot down. I’d assumed him to be some sort of lieutenant, but his role seemed to be something more akin to a manservant, similar to the armed retainers kept by some amongst the Astral Templars. When not wearing his greatsword hat, he was also a mender of clothing, a barber of some skill and the brewer of a superb cup of qahua, the latter of which Hamuz el-Shaah was enjoying now. Even I found the burnt, bitter odour strangely enticing.

The soldier on my right side passed me a leg of meat.

I sniffed it. Horse, I think. It smelled as though it had been preserved by salting, but after an hour’s roasting over a leechwood fire it was so bloody you could have convinced yourself that it had just stopped kicking. Hamuz was a veteran of the Gorwood. He had to know all the tricks. My mouth watered, well and truly taken in.

I tore off a chunk of meat.

I made a face, the shapes surrounding the campfire chuckling.

‘What in Sigmar’s name…?’

Nassam showed white teeth beneath the black depths of moustaches and beard. ‘Horse.’

I turned and spat what was left in my mouth as far from the fire as I could expel it.

We had horses in the Seven Words, of course. Where the settlers of Azyr go, they take the same pets and livestock and burden beasts that you can now find all over the Mortal Realms. The so-called ‘Gorwood Horse’ is something else. It refers to the ambulatory life-stage of the stelx plant, which, though slow and liable to seed, were preferred by the more naturalised draughtsmen on account of their flesh being one of the few things too foul-tasting even for the denizens of the Gorwood to abide. A regiment like the Blue Skies would never leave their garrisons, even if forced to do so in a hurry, without a side or two. Rubbing it over your wargear twice a day was the only sure way to keep the native wildlife from eating the metal.

I ruefully accepted the offer of a cup of black qahua, swilling the bitter-tasting brew around my mouth, then spraying it over the fire.

The flames leapt hungrily. Aeygar squawked in alarm, her feathers rustling, while the soldiers whooped and laughed, covering their eyes against the licking flames. I chuckled along with them, a pleasant fuzziness in my breast, wondering if a mortal troop had ever, or would ever, dare pull something like that on a Vandus or an Akturus.

I downed the qahua and tossed Nassam his cup back.

Probably not.

My laughter faded as I watched the greatsword struggle to catch the hot cup, the others playfully shoving him and laughing.

It was then I realised.

They felt no aversion to me.

My brother Stormcasts could sense what had been done to me, even if they could not understand how fundamentally I had been diminished or why it was that I repelled them. But not the Blue Skies. Not the mortals. I was still Hamilcar Bear-Eater to them, the saviour of Jercho, hero of the Seven Words, and they loved me as openly as any Champion of Order could hope for.

And I loved them too.

In my own way.

The fire shrivelled back down. I found myself staring as it popped and crackled. Almost like a chitter.

‘What did you say?’

Hamuz looked at Nassam, then the man to his right, and gave a tentative shrug.

I looked over my shoulder, a slow itch crawling down my spine.

The fire had bleached my night vision, but I could still see the faint amethyst halo of Barbarus, sat on the loam at the light’s edge. He was hunched over, working with fingers and knife and Nubia’s chirping guidance to repair the damage to his wings. The star-eagle looked up occasionally to glare at me, eyes twinkling indigo and red in the firelight, as though this was my fault. It was, but I wasn’t going to take that from a star-eagle. The Errant-Questor was ostensibly keeping watch, although I would put my faith in Aeygar and Brychen over the King in the Sky in that duty any day.

At the thought of the Wild Harvest priestess I rubbed absently at the thick ring of sigmarite around my neck. I didn’t know much about what she was capable of, but somehow I doubted there were too many skaven capable of getting the drop on her.

Of course, I could think of one or two.

With a sigh I turned back to the fire, as if I might find truth there.

Barbarus was just avoiding me.

I was wondering what that made me. Was a god without worshippers just a fickle power in the aether? Could an orator without an audience still be said to have a gift with words, or was he just another madman in a realm full of them with a penchant for talking to himself? I was the Bear-Eater. A force of nature. A gale from Azyr. I wasn’t a man, I was a totem. With Sigmaron itself barred to me, what was that worth? The knights of my own chamber could not abide my presence. A totem to whom? Was burnishing my legend amongst the mortal folk of the other seven Mortal Realms enough for a champion of my stature?

I thought about it for a time, then shook my head.

Even with the great outpouring of souls following the opening of the Gates of Azyr – the reverse migrations of the displaced over a hundred years – the population of Azyrheim alone was still greater than the entirety of the other seven Mortal Realms combined. I had no interest in being half a hero. I was Hamilcar Bear-Eater. All in, or nothing at all. The thought of adapting to my new condition barely even occurred to me. I would find Ikrit and see myself made whole: I would be the hero of Azyrheim again.

I glanced again at Barbarus. Afterimages from the fire swam about the Errant-Questor like phoenix feathers. Sigmar had warned me that other divinities had despatched champions of their own to capture Ikrit.

He might have mentioned that some of his own warriors were amongst them.

I frowned across the clearing.

Ikrit would face judgement in Azyr, as Sigmar had tasked me. If Barbarus, Brychen or anyone else wished it otherwise, then they’d soon learn why the name ‘Hamilcar Bear-Eater’ was interchangeable with boldness and resolve across half the known realms. Hyish and Ulgu still being largely unexplored at this time…

‘You keep looking at him.’

Without my noticing, Brychen had emerged from wherever she had wandered off to after the battle and creaked down beside me. I’d assumed that the priestess had been offended by the fire and found somewhere in the wood to sit. She was a tree-worshipper, after all. But she stared into the smoky offering with a rapacious fascination, as though there was something affirming at play in the consumption of dead wood by the flame.

The Jerech that had been sitting there shifted out of her way, suddenly interested in the murmured conversation going on to his other side.

The priestess turned to me, her eyes a luminescent green.

‘Why?’

I could have just ignored the question, and probably should have, but it wasn’t in my nature to keep quiet on a subject – particularly when the subject was myself.

‘You wouldn’t understand,’ I said.

‘The old wood does not understand why it must burn.’ She glanced in the direction of Aeygar. ‘The sheep does not understand the eagle.’

‘Good for them.’ I thought about it. ‘I suppose.’

‘We are neither wood nor sheep. I am the woodsman. I am the shepherd. And you…’ She looked at me archly. Shadows stretched down from her chin and the arms folded over her knees as she straightened, leaving her skin oddly discoloured. Like a browned leaf. ‘You are not a thing of nature at all.’

I grinned. ‘Hardly. I’m the walking extension of a god, an avatar of the Eternal Storm. There is nothing more natural than Hamilcar Bear-Eater in this wood tonight.’

‘Sigmar’s impression of what is natural, perhaps, but there is nothing “eternal” in the Gorwood. There is only predator and prey. And even that can never be constant. Infirmity. Calamity. This is what nature is, and what it brings.’ She sighed and turned back to the flame. ‘There is always something bigger, younger, fiercer. Dominance is illusory, and always temporary.’

‘You’re talking about Ikrit,’ I said.

She hissed. ‘Even after the loss of the Maiden we thought that we ruled these woods. The brayseer and his predecessors never troubled us in our own lands. Then the warlock came, killing and enslaving. He was the fire that strikes in summer. He was the predator that enters new territory and finds no rival there.’

‘Until now,’ I said.

‘Praise Sigmar!’ declared Hamuz, to much cheering and clapping from the Jerech.

Brychen smiled sweetly. Like a poisonous flower. Her teeth were black and sharpened to points.

‘You remind me of my brother,’ she said to me. ‘He thought the seasons turned around him as well.’

‘He told me something similar,’ I smiled, rubbing thoughtfully at my beard, pulling out the occasional stringy bit of stelx. ‘You haven’t told me yet what you’re doing out this far from the Nevermarsh.’

‘The skaven burned down our temples, massacred my people, murdered my brother. The Maiden teaches us hardship, but the warlock goes too far. The fields have been burned, the weeds have flourished, but now it is the reaping time.’ She clenched a fist, her wooden armour creaking. ‘I have drawn Ikrit’s roots this far, and soon I will pull him from the earth that harbours him.’

‘You as well, then?’ I said, casting another glance at Barbarus and Nubia.

So much for the solitary life of the Knight-Questor.

I leaned in closer to the priestess. ‘You weren’t sent after Ikrit by a god, were you?’

‘The Maiden doesn’t ask. She takes. And those she leaves behind grow all the taller and stronger for it.’

I could think of another good reason why the Maiden wouldn’t be asking any more favours, on account of her dying in my arms years before, but I took the priestess’ point.

‘Good,’ I mumbled. My quest was complicated enough with just Sigmar and Grungni’s Smiths involved. Once the likes of the Everqueen and the Undying King started throwing their champions into the mix then I just knew things were going to get difficult for me. This would be prescient, as it turned out, but a tale for another time. ‘Maybe, then, we can help each other.’

‘Maybe we can.’

‘I don’t suppose you’ve had any luck finding him yet.’

‘If I had then we would not be talking. There are times when it feels as though he has been swallowed by the realmsphere. His power distorts the ghurlines, like a great eagle upon a tree that cannot bear its weight. I see the realm bowing and the leaves where they fall, but of the beast itself, nothing.’ Her voice grew angry. ‘I had been hoping to shadow one of his war bands, to unearth some clue in their idle chittering and their careless spoor, but so far…’ She glanced between Hamuz and me. ‘Then someone killed them all.’

Hamuz began to chuckle before it dawned on him that the priestess might not be joking. He coughed and slurped on his qahua.

‘In perseverance we endure,’ Brychen sighed. ‘I will find another claw of the great beast to follow. There is no shortage, if you have the eyes to look.’

Aeygar issued a muted caw of agreement.

‘We were journeying to Ikrit’s lair,’ I said, frowning at the aetar’s siding with the Wild Harvest priestess.

‘You would be wasting your time,’ said Brychen. ‘I wished to retrieve my brother’s body and return him to our hearth trees, and so ventured inside myself after I had dealt with you.’ She spoke so straightforwardly, you could almost overlook the fact that she was talking about driving a spear through my neck. Almost. ‘I found no trace of him there, or of Ikrit, only a handful of skaven still lurking in the darkest burrows. I slew them all.’

‘I think he’s still there,’ I said. I thought of the vision I had had back in Sigmaron, of pulsing, liquid darkness. Cocooned. Buried. ‘I think he’s hidden somewhere, recovering his strength.’

The princess issued another quiet crow.

‘That’s right,’ I said, waving my finger at the priestess. ‘He’s not in the Gorwood. Not with the entire strength of the aetar scouring it for him.’

‘You understand her?’ Brychen asked, surprised.

‘Can’t you?’

‘Of course I can. I am just surprised that you appear to be able to.’

Ignore the bird-thing. Listen to the Gorkai.

I blinked, looking around for the source of the voice.

‘What did you say?’

‘Lord?’ said Hamuz. I happened to be facing his way.

Was I hearing things now? Was this the next stage of my deterioration until gibbering infirmity and dissolution took hold? I frowned down into the fire and resolved that I would never pass out of the realms that way. I would capture Ikrit and see myself restored, or I would fail in the most spectacular manner I could achieve.

‘Never mind.’ I glanced across at Brychen. ‘How far is the mountain from here anyway?’

‘A few days,’ said Brychen. ‘But I can move through woodland and marsh as you cannot. For your army? Weeks. Maybe more.’

‘Princess Aeygar can cover that ground more swiftly than you can,’ I said, feeling the need to defend my quest’s honour.

‘And yet she cannot bear the entirety of the Blue Skies,’ said Barbarus, turning slowly to face the campfire. Stormcast hearing is uncannily keen. ‘Nor can we leave them here to the skaven while you continue on your quest.’

In actual fact that was exactly what I’d been planning on doing, but I couldn’t very well argue for it now and let Barbarus look like the hero.

‘You’re right, of course.’ I bit my lip, as though thinking. ‘You should remain here with them. Your wings are damaged, and I suspect that we will be too heavy for Aeygar to carry both of us.’ I saw the shadowy outline of the princess’ beak open, as if to say something, and so hurriedly carried on. ‘If we leave at first light then Aeygar can have us there and back again before nightfall. You’ll not even notice we were gone, brother.’

‘If this is some ploy to claim all the glory for yourself…’ Barbarus growled.

I put my hand over my heart in a convincingly wounded ‘who, me?’

‘You can’t go alone,’ said Hamuz.

‘I’m touched by your concern, but it’s misplaced. There’s nothing in this realm that Hamilcar Bear-Eater cannot handle, but, should there be something…’ I turned towards the looming shadow of the princess. ‘Well, they will have Aeygar to deal with.’

The princess cawed, menacingly.

‘I’ve not seen the tunnels you’re talking about, lord, so with all due respect, do you think the aetar will be able to join you below? If it’s all the same with you, then I will join you.’

I should have just said no. I know that. The Freeguild captain had no place where I was planning on going, but where others took providential signs from timely storms and falling stars, I have always seen my god in the heart of his people. He was bold enough to want to come, so let him come. Who was I to deny such honest courage?

And I couldn’t say that I would not appreciate having someone to talk to on the way.

‘I will go too,’ said Brychen.

‘I thought you said it was a waste of time?’

‘And it will be. But with an aetar’s wings it will not be a waste of much time. And if I did miss something, if there is any chance at all, then it is worth that much.’

I felt a chittering in my ear and turned again towards the fire.

Nothing but shadow awaits you there, Bear-Eater. I am long scurried.

I focused on the flames until my eyes started to tremble. I kept my voice low. ‘Who are you?’

Fire flickering. A crackling laugh.

The better part of your soul.

‘Who is that?’ said Brychen.

I blinked, disoriented, and looked up, but it seemed that the priestess had been talking to Hamuz, rather than hearing the strange voice that spoke to me. In answer, the Jerech captain turned his shoulder to show off the glassmark glittering against the scarred muscle of his bicep.

‘My daughter,’ he said.

‘You have a daughter?’ I said.

‘Yes, lord.’ Hamuz brightened even as he said it. ‘She will be seventeen this winter.’

‘In Jercho?’

‘No, my lord. She was born here. I met my wife in Azyr. She is Gorkomon, in temper if not in blood.’

The men around the campfire gave knowing chuckles.

Suddenly I did not feel so at one with them as I had. Even in my life before this one I had never been blessed with children. It was not something I could share with them.

‘We’ve been in the Gorwood seventeen years?’ I said.

The Jerech chuckled, assuming I was joking.

My gaze drifted back to the fire. It was not speaking to me now. I had never, before that moment, truly considered that my actions could have… consequences. I wondered what would become of Hamuz’s family because he had chosen me over Frankos of the Heavens Forge?

What would Vikaeus and the Knights Merciless do?

Better to go back-back. Surrender yourself.

‘It’s a long time since I heard from my conscience,’ I murmured to myself. ‘But I don’t remember it speaking like a skaven.’

‘Bear-Eater?’ said Brychen.

I could tell from her concerned tone that she sensed something amiss with me, but her sense would have probed no deeper than that surface ripple. The gods alone held the power to fashion mortal souls, to shape them into forms more useful or pleasing to their designs as you or I might work leather or clay, but not even they possess the art to peer inside and know a soul. I was getting the feeling that my soul was somehow scattered between two bodies, mine and Ikrit’s, but it was still just one soul, impermeable to even the most gifted of scryers.

Ignore me, then. I do not want-need you now. But do not squeak-say you were not warned.

‘He’s there,’ I told her, staring a challenge into the heart of the fire. ‘I know it.’

Chapter twenty-three

It looked so different, I almost missed it.

Things appear different from on high than they do for those with little choice but to view it all from the ground. To recognise that is to be halfway towards understanding the apparent diffidence of the gods. Perspectives shift. Boundaries vanish. Impenetrable crags and impassable swathes of forest become flattened smudges, merging into an endless obscurity of indefinable features and the occasional nebulous shadow. What threw my eye most, however, was the indifferent passage of time. The last time that I had glimpsed the outside of Ikrit’s mountain lair it had been buried under a blizzard. To see it now, swaddled in long grasses and wild flowers, violently coloured and straining for every drop of sunlight and insectile attention, was unnerving. As if I’d closed my eyes for a moment in winter and opened them again in spring.

‘There,’ said Brychen, pointing.

The priestess was wedged in behind me, gripping my armoured thighs with hers. Her hair had been bound with thorns, but still whipped out behind her, holly leaves rustling over the barky lattice of her living plate. Directly below us, a string of great lakes shimmered against the mountain’s side like polished armour. They clung to the slope in perverse defiance of whatever native force should have had them gushing into the Nevermarsh.

‘I was just about to say that,’ I said.

Aeygar gave an amused shriek.

‘These lakes are what remain of the ice forests, where Malikcek hunted you after your escape,’ Brychen explained. ‘The warmer months are short on the mountain, and the trees wait them out in this molten form.’

‘I see no sign of skaven,’ screamed Hamuz, from the back.

The captain and his retainer, Nassam, sat further down Aeygar’s neck. Despite a few false starts in which one or both of them had almost fallen off as soon as Aeygar had spread her wings or lifted a foot, and some hair-raising episodes immediately after take-off, the two men had become reconciled to their terror over the hours it had taken us to over-fly the Nevermarsh. Nassam had even become relaxed enough to remember how abhorrent he found Brychen’s living armour and green flesh, and experimented with loosening his lock around her chest every once in a while.

‘They are gone. As I said,’ said Brychen.

‘The lair was below ground,’ I yelled back. ‘Beyond the lightning collectors that Ikrit had built over his apotheosis chamber, I don’t remember seeing anything up here.’

‘Then where are the collectors?’ said Hamuz.

I made a non-committal snort. ‘After five years in the Ghurlands, probably distributed between the bellies of every bird, mite and beast from here to Excelsis.’

‘That only proves my point,’ said Brychen. ‘The warlock has gone and the wild has reclaimed his lands.’

‘Not if the collectors had already done what he’d built them to do,’ I replied, a barely audible mutter in the wind of Aeygar’s flight.

Brychen remained quiet.

‘So what do we do, lord?’ shouted Hamuz.

‘We go in.’ Even if Ikrit was not here, and I was more certain than ever that he was, then he would have left something behind, some telltale piece of metal or arcana that to the eyes of Sigmar or Ong would tell the story of what was done to me. Or so, in my ignorance of such matters, I prayed. I patted Aeygar’s neck plumage and pointed to the silvery lake at the top of the necklace-like chain. ‘Take us down, princess. But not too close.’

The princess crowed her agreement and descended.

We landed in an explosion of pollen.

I coughed on the syrupy pungence of crushed flowers and rampant life. I blinked a few times, but my vision remained yellowed and tear-filled. Buzzing things swarmed through the ochre pall of seed pollen to breed and fight and prey on everything else. Including us. Hamuz and Nassam were already slapping at their skin, and even Aeygar looked discomforted until a smaller insectivorous bird flew too close and disappeared in a puff of amber feathers and a squawk. The princess tilted her neck back and swallowed. She was a creature of Ghur too, after all. The insects nibbled just as vociferously at Brychen, but it didn’t seem to bother her as much. The first to alight on my skin and jab its proboscis in died in a tiny snap of lightning, the stench of which seemed to ward off any others.

Brychen glared at me as though I’d just strangled a gryph pup.

‘And you claim to be a thing of nature?’

With a shrug, I dismounted, flattening the long stems beneath my boots and throwing up another cloud of disturbed wildlife and seed. The fingers of a shadow reached into the febrile miasma, almost reaching the ground, and I shuddered in spite of the cloying warmth. I looked up as a huge, pregnant cloud rolled across the sky between the sun and me. An itch crept down my spine, making me look away, back up the mountain’s slope.

There was nothing there.

Brychen leaned in to me, branched spear in hand, the single word she uttered making me tremble anew.

‘Malikcek.’

I nodded, doing my best to hide the fear I felt at confronting the skaven assassin again. Of course this was entirely out of concern for my companions. It would not do for Hamuz and Nassam to see their hero tremble. ‘Keep your wits about you and your swords to hand.’ I turned to Brychen. ‘I told you he was here.’

She didn’t argue.

‘You should have told them to run,’ she said instead.

And perhaps I should have, but that would not have been nearly so helpful to their morale.

‘The men of Jerech are fighting men,’ I said, thumping my breastplate, then pointing at Hamuz as though he personally exemplified the point I was making. ‘Don’t doubt their courage for the fight. They will fight, and maybe surprise you yet.’ I bared my teeth. ‘Malikcek too with any luck.’

‘Lord.’

Nassam had wandered a short way off, greatsword still in its sheath, as though he were strolling amidst the goats that grazed over the Seven Words, and was pointing to something far out in the lake. It glittered gold against the fierce brilliance of the liquid ice. Something about it tugged on my heart, stretching the glue that Ong and his apprentices had smeared over the ill-fitting shards of my soul.

Hamuz started towards it at once.

‘Stop!’ I shouted, the twang of genuine terror in my voice causing the captain to freeze as though he’d just put his foot in a bear-trap, thigh high reed stalks butting hungrily against the glassy skirts of his armour. He turned to me, white-faced. I remembered the prickling sense of cold as it had travelled up my arm from where I had touched the bark of one of those trees. I’d probably be an ice tree myself about now, had Brychen not killed me. ‘Don’t touch the ice.’

Hamuz carefully lifted his foot and drew it back from the lake-shore.

‘I think it’s your lantern, lord,’ said Nassam, surprisingly deadpan in the face of his captain’s near brush with death.

I peered out, my eyes adjusting slowly to the white glare of the lake.

It was indeed my warding lantern.

I almost laughed in surprise. I had dropped it during my fight with Malikcek, and had managed to lose it shortly after that when Brychen had stepped in to finish what the assassin had started. I had assumed that it had gone back to the celestine vaults, only to be discarded, spoiled, along with the rest of my wargear – with the exception of my halberd. For which I had Sigmar to thank. But there it was. My heart felt as though it was trying to pump air, an ache spreading through my chest. Was there some power in the ice trees that had held the lantern from Sigmar’s grasp? Or was it me? Had Ikrit broken me so completely that even its link to my soul had been weakened?

Brychen joined me at the lakeside.

‘Is that the weapon that burned Malikcek?’

I nodded. ‘Not just him.’

‘We need it,’ she said, simply.

I frowned over the burning shimmer of ice. ‘Too bad.’

She looked me up and down. ‘Your armour looks as though it covers almost all of you.’

I rapped knuckles on my forehead and winked to Nassam. ‘Only the bits that need protection.’

‘I think you can make it,’ she said.

‘You think?’

‘The trees sleep out the season. They will produce their pollen again only with the coming of the first snows.’ She lifted her gaze to meet mine. ‘How well do the Stormcast Eternals bear the cold?’

I gave a laugh, clapping her shoulders hard enough to splinter her armour. It regrew with a creak of stretching plant life as I subtly massaged my hand. ‘One day I’ll take you to the Eternal Winterlands of Azyr. Then I’ll ask the same question of you.’

Behind us, Aeygar shrieked and flapped her wings, stirring air into the fug of seed pollen and buzzing wildlife.

‘No,’ I told her. ‘I’ll not have you dipping your claws in there, not for me. Hamilcar Bear-Eater fights his own battles.’

She squawked again, but quieter.

I shook my head. ‘Snatching my lantern from the ice without touching it would take some skill. Nubia might have been able to do it, but if you’ll forgive me for pointing it out, you’re much bigger than a star-eagle.’

She clawed at the ground, beak lowered.

‘I know. But you can keep watch from the air. If anybody can spot Malikcek before Brychen or I, then it will be you.’ In truth, I doubted whether even the aetar princess would have been able to pierce the assassin’s peculiar form of obfuscation, but I wasn’t strictly lying. If anyone could do it, then it would certainly be her.

Aeygar bobbed her head, issued a shrill call, then with a paddling of her wings pulled herself back up into the sky.

I found myself unusually underawed by the feat. Had the air been any thicker, I think I could have walked on it.

‘Keep your head above the surface, and you should be fine,’ said Brychen.

‘Head up, mouth shut,’ I repeated. ‘I tell aspirants to the castellant temple the same thing before they face their first trials.’

‘Probably,’ she qualified.

‘Hamilcar spits in the eye of “probably”.’

Unfastening my belt, I tossed my halberd at Nassam. He claimed it with as much grace as he had my qahua cup the night before, which is to say it almost speared him through the chest and decapitated Hamuz. With exaggerated care, as though handling a live serpent that also happened to be a sacred relic, he clutched the weapon in both hands.

‘You can do it, my lord,’ said Hamuz.

‘I expect Sigmar left the lantern here for you to find,’ said Nassam, with a faith that, in other circumstances, some other Stormcast Eternal might have found stirring. The Jerech soldier had never met Sigmar (or so I assumed), but it did sound like exactly the sort of thing that the God-King would try to pull on me.

I am thinking of how he sent the Steel Souls into the Garden of Nurgle – twice.

Fixing my jaw, I waded into the lake.

‘Ghal Maraz, that’s cold!’

On the bank, Brychen looked smug. Ignoring her, I waded in deeper.

Whatever liquid the lake was made of, it didn’t move or feel like water. It clung to my armour as my boot went in, lapping up the greave as though trying to climb it before oozing back down. Ripples fanned out from my legs after a short delay, moving with a crystalline creak that sounded like a gryph-charger moving across too-thin ice.

‘Remember,’ Brychen called out to me. ‘The surface of the lake looks smooth, but the mountain beneath is not. The ice will be deeper in some places than others.’

I made no effort to keep the grimace from my face.

My thrice-blessed plate had already started to sing with the cold. With every deliberate step, I heard it splinter and creak. The frozen burn reached even my wool underlayers, and into the bone and muscle of my leg. Cold, though – bitter and unnatural as it surely was – was one thing I knew I could always bear. I felt no prickling sense of invisible tiny creatures crawling up the inside of my leg in the chill. Only a slowly rising numbness.

The feeling was familiar, almost comforting.

I remembered long hunts. Lying in wait. Buried in snow. Shivering in ice. Waiting for a storm petrel to return to her nest, and to my spear. For the mournfang herds to pass on their migratory trails.

The memories ached and creaked like the ice around me, just as thin.

I pushed myself away from them.

Now wasn’t the time.

Taking a deep breath, as if I could breathe body mass up from my legs and into my chest, I pressed on.

The way dipped. Ice lapped languidly up to my girdle plating. Cold pinched through the warming layers into my groin, my hips, questing into my belly from below. Still down. The ice slurped as high as the great bear emblazoned in gold on my pectoral plate. I tilted my chin away from the radiant cold and pushed on. A little further.

‘It’s too far out,’ yelled Hamuz, his voice reedy and faraway. ‘Come back.’

‘Never,’ I muttered.

A submerged stone, or something like it, slid under my boot as I put my foot down. My foot rolled over it and I started to pitch forwards. The mirror-perfect ice threw up a snarling reflection as I tipped towards it, back bent to hold my face above the surface for as long as possible.

‘My god! Hamilcar!’ Hamuz cried.

My other boot thudded to the lake bottom just as the ice ground as high as my gorget.

I let out a relieved breath. Had it been mere water then I would have been splashing around half-drowned by now. But the eerie semi-liquid I was wading through was as thick as treacle and colder than the bleakest outer reaches of Azyr.

Half frozen, I managed to straighten up.

The ice slimed back down my breastplate to chest height.

‘Nothing to it,’ I called, biting back on a snarl.

‘Then hurry up,’ said Brychen. If I could hold my teeth together without them chattering I would have ground them. ‘If Malikcek attacks now then I will have to face him alone.’

‘Nonsense,’ I managed to gasp, my chest wall freezing slowly rigid. ‘You have two of the finest warriors in Sigmar’s Freeguild there with you.’

‘And Aeygar,’ said Nassam.

‘And Aeygar,’ I acknowledged.

‘Nearly there then, lord,’ said Hamuz, reluctantly. ‘But take it slowly. Ignore her.’

‘Hamilcar heeds all advice,’ I stuttered, splashing and crunching my way towards where my lantern lay on the ice. ‘And ignores only that which he disagrees with.’ It was not far from me now, encased in the not-quite-liquid, a faint light bleeding through the crystal packing. I bared my teeth, remembering how the lantern had been unshuttered, burning Malikcek and me both, when I’d dropped it. The light did seem to have been somewhat diminished by five years of unceasing operation. Freeze-thaw damage to the glass, I supposed. It would take a few million times the five years it had been lost here in the ice to dim the light of Azyr.

Either way, I was grateful.

It was probably the only reason I wasn’t already screaming in agony.

With ice up to the rim of my gorget, I probed for the lake bottom with my toecaps. Nothing. Head tilted back, I strained my fingers for the lantern’s golden loop handle.

I clenched my chattering teeth and growled as my fingertips began to sizzle.

‘Just… a little… further.’

I made a grab for the loop handle, only for the compression wave from the movement of my own hand to push it back, just out of reach.

‘Nearly, lord,’ Nassam called out.

‘Nothing’s… ever… simple.’

As I tried to figure out how I was going to reach the damned thing, I felt the ice around my hand beginning to contract. It was the heat of my own smouldering gauntlet. It was tricking the living ice into thinking that the sun was shining on it, making it retreat further into its winter stores of chill. The turgid play of currents sucked on my arm. I fought it back up, but I saw my lantern start to sink.

‘Sigmar, damn it.’

Letting my breath out in a frozen roar, I kicked off from the bottom and lunged for the lantern. My wave caused it to wobble, the movement throwing out dulled lances of Azyr light that papered over chilblains and scrapes even as it seared my soul. I bit my knocking teeth together as I grabbed it in both hands and pulled it in to my chest.

‘Haha!’ I roared, quickly shuttering it as I treaded ‘water’. ‘Hamilcar Bear-Eater always triumphs!’ I hoisted the lantern up high, splashing my face with droplet-shards, which probably wasn’t the greatest idea in the realmsphere, and shouted, ‘Hamilcar!’ Hamuz and Nassam whooped from the lake-shore and clapped each other’s backs as my armoured body sank, my feet kicking out for something to stand on.

And kept on sinking.

‘Bloody God-King,’ I burbled, as the ice lapped over my head.

Chapter twenty-four

Brychen creaked softly as she padded barefoot down the dank, sloping tunnel into the skaven lair. I glared at her knotted back, not trusting myself to contribute anything worthier than a chatter of teeth or a rattle of half-frozen bastion plate.

After my carelessness had seen me dunked under the ice, I had managed to strike for shallower floes before my arms had numbed completely. I remember getting my toes on the bottom, but after that I’m not sure; a vague recollection of buffeting wings and entangling vines. However it had been done, it could have been done better. The cold clung to me still, encasing me like some kind of hoary mollusc in a shell of blistering chill. Even the heat from the torches that Hamuz and Nassam bore barely nibbled at its surface. I was shivering so hard that I barely noticed the subtle vibrations running through the rocky floor. My hand trembled towards the wall. There it was again. Faint, but there. Like rock pulling against rock.

‘My lord, you’re frozen through,’ said Hamuz. ‘Why haven’t you used your lantern to warm yourself? I’ve seen it restore far worse.’

‘I am saving its power,’ I lied, for it had been burning continuously for five years. Ignorant of the workings of Azyr, the Jerech captain accepted that explanation.

‘Never thought I’d miss the aetar,’ grunted Nassam.

The passage widened into a familiar cavern. The circle of torchlight expanded like an inflated bladder until it could go no further, thinning and straining as it pushed against the outer dark. Those shadows that it couldn’t reach stretched and grew massive, growing horns and claws to scrape at the tenuous skein of light as we passed beneath them. The Blind Herd’s camp. It was still here. The detritus of beast-hide yurts littered the uneven ground as far as the torches could reach, and presumably further still. Toppled beastpoles lay over skinning boards and scotched fireplaces. Hoofmarks preserved in hardened ash. A crouched figure, hooded and black, watching. The occasional glint of a femur or rib.

My heart stopped.

I looked back.

There was no figure crouched there.

‘What is it?’ whispered Hamuz.

‘Nothing,’ I said.

‘Now,’ Brychen added, ominously.

‘I wish Aeygar were here,’ Nassam muttered, holding his torch higher.

‘Courage, my friend. Hamilcar goes into this dark place beside you.’

I took the torch from the Jerech’s hand. He relinquished it gladly, instead drawing his greatsword with a sigh of creamy white quartz on rough Gorwood leather. I held the torch up, my greater stature digging another foot or so of illumination out of the black. I blinked, breaking the skin of ice that had built up over my lashes as I looked around. The position of Sigendil, the High Star – the ever-present beacon, fixed above the cosmic order of the aetheric cloud – was starting to blur in my awareness. I had felt that sense of being out of place before, but only in Ikrit’s private burrows. Not out here.

‘Do you see something, lord?’ asked Nassam.

‘The last time I came this way I was half-dead, disoriented by memories that Ikrit’s sorceries had broken loose. It doesn’t feel much better now.’

‘I know what you mean, lord.’ Hamuz shivered, and not with cold. ‘Where did everyone go?’

Realising belatedly that I had spoken aloud, I drew my attention back from the distant Celestial. ‘The entire place was falling down around my ears when I left. I thought the whole lair was going to collapse.’

‘A lot of it did,’ said Brychen.

‘Not all of it,’ said Hamuz. ‘So why didn’t they come back?’

I frowned, then shrugged. I was trying to work out the surest path to Ikrit’s apotheosis chamber and the answers I sought.

‘We should split up,’ said Hamuz, apparently regretting it as soon as he did.

‘What is the matter?’ The chittering voice echoed from the bowl of the cavern ahead of us. ‘Do you fear the shadow?’ From the crumpled yurts to my left. ‘Or he that bids them?’ The passage behind us.

Hamuz’s pistol darted from point to point. Nassam turned on the spot, the hilt of his quartz greatsword in both hands, the blade lying across his shoulders.

The echoes snickered, overlapping with and building off one another until we were surrounded by their chittering mirth, like beasts in a gladiatorum pit.

Brychen’s crooked spear hummed as she spun it. ‘The predator that dares not pounce has little to say on fear.’

‘Where is Ikrit?’ I shouted.

The shadows tittered. ‘Did you not learn-hear, Bear-Eater? He is away-gone. Long-scurried.’ The voice came from the ceiling now, and I held my torch up towards it, banishing the shadows from the claw-dug rock. Inky threads fled along gouged tracks and furrows towards the walls, away from the torchlight. ‘We were equal before, priestess of the Savage Maiden. But here-now?’ The walls chittered with quiet laughter. ‘Think not-not. Not without tree-things in which to hide-skulk.’

‘You overlook the Lord Hamilcar, vermin!’ shouted Hamuz, his voice echoing.

My grin was forced, but nobody seemed to notice in the dark.

‘I live lots-many years, but I forget nothing. My soul belongs to Malerion’s cage. Nothing escapes its shadow.’

The darkness at the edge of the torchlight suddenly swirled into humanoid form, Malikcek bursting from its diaphanous cowl like a newborn with a dripping knife. The Jerech captain screamed in surprise, pushing his torch into the path of the blade. An explosion of sparks showered the assassin. The assassin tittered, bursting into formless wisps of shadow as Nassam’s greatsword swept through him, and scattering before the injured sputtering of Hamuz’s torch. Nassam’s sword banged on hard rock. He cursed as it leapt out of his hand and clattered away.

‘Stay where you are,’ I yelled at him, walking quickly to the edge of the light and picking up the lost sword.

Holding it easily by the wide blade, I handed it back.

‘Go away-back. Do not squeak-say you were not warned.’

‘Hamuz. Nassam. Keep between Brychen and me. Watch each other’s backs.’

‘What if he’s right?’ Hamuz hissed. ‘What if the warlock isn’t here?’

‘Then why is he still here?’

‘And why does he wish for us to leave?’ added Brychen.

‘Unless…’ Hamuz trailed off as he thought. ‘Unless that’s what he means for you to think, and he’s trying to trap you here or trick you.’

I gave him a nonchalant shrug, which I certainly didn’t feel but which I knew would be reassuring. ‘That all sounds a bit too complicated for me, my friend.’

‘You should listen to the man-thing. Ikrit’s interest has moved on. Now you die-die.’

A flurry of throwing stars descended on us from all directions. Most were flung at me and ricocheted off my bastion plate, but the attack was sufficiently indiscriminate to send Hamuz and Nassam scrambling for whatever cover they could find amongst the scraps of hide and armour. Brychen issued a long, sonorous vowel sound, her voice deepening as her body stretched and hardened, shaping into a sweeping canopy above the two Jerech men. Metal stars thudded into her bark and stuck. The growth spurt lasted only a moment before it ran in reverse. The wild priestess frowned down at the twisted metal sticking out of her armour.

‘I wouldn’t try to pull them out,’ I said. ‘They’re probably poisoned.’

Her lips twitched. ‘Probably.’

A clang of steel pulled my attention from her.

Malikcek drove Nassam towards the edge of the torchlight in a blur of shadowed limbs and blackened steel. The greatsword was a soldier of great skill and tremendous pride, but the assassin had him grossly outmatched. I threw my halberd with a roar, only to see Malikcek evaporate with a shriek of laughter, and my storm-forged blade smash through the side-wall of a beast-cart.

‘I will wear you down. Claim you one by one. I am darkness. I am death. The light cannot flee from shadow forever.’

‘Use your lantern,’ said Brychen.

‘Not yet.’

‘If not now, then when?’ shouted Hamuz.

There was a whisper of silk moving through shadow as I bent to pick up my halberd and I spun, halberd spinning with me like the spoke of a wheel, knocking aside the knife that Malikcek had intended for the spot between my shoulder blades. Then I spun again, and repeated the same trick on the second knife that had been driven towards my groin. I threw a punch. The assassin melted around my fist. Darkness streamed over and around my arm to reform on the outside of my punch.

The assassin’s kick landed in my stomach with the force of a whole herd of warhorses.

I staggered back, one hand over my cracked plate.

A thunderous bang almost deafened me. Hamuz. I watched in disbelief as the Jerech’s bullet passed straight through Malikcek’s ear and out the other, before ripping through the flapping wall of a yurt. Hamuz wailed in horror as the assassin rounded on him with a snarl.

‘Sigmarite-tipped rounds!’ I bellowed, gripping my halberd short, like a sickle, and hacking it across the assassin’s midriff. He bent under it, then somehow flipped his body, wriggled back to front and whipped out with a tail knife that punched through my knee-plate and put me down on one knee. I grunted, the muscles in my leg spasming as storm-infused sinew repelled Chaos-bred poison. ‘Nothing less will stop him.’ I turned my halberd so that I held it like a spearman facing a wild dog, and stabbed it through the skaven assassin.

He reappeared behind me.

‘The first time was fun-good, Bear-Eater. Now it is almost boring.’

‘To live is to suffer and die, shadow-touched,’ came Brychen’s snarl.

The priestess’ hand suddenly ignited. Molten amber energy blazed through the leafy bark of her gauntlet fingers, her whole body shaking with its fury. ‘Feel the kiss of the sun.’ Malikcek shrieked, evaporating before my eyes as the priestess thrust her blazing hand towards him and irradiated him in amber. This was not the cleansing white light of Azyr. It was a wild, consuming energy, one that I was able to look on only for another second before the light surge forced my eyes away.

But it burned some of the chill from my armour, which was nice.

Brychen sagged to the floor. The light, untamed and ever hungry, continued to spill from her splayed palm and across the ground before she was able to seal the gates again. Nassam ran to her side.

‘Use… your lantern,’ she growled.

An ungodly howl of pain and rage shook the cavern. The shadows whipped and roiled, like a god-serpent of black scales and monstrous size that had attempted to swallow a mortal creature and been stung by it.

‘Run?’ I suggested.

‘You are wise, my lord,’ Hamuz cried.

‘Which way?’ Brychen hissed, leaning heavily on Nassam’s shoulder.

‘Follow me.’

I hurtled off in the remembered direction of the passage that would take us deeper into the skaven lair. Hamuz sprinted unquestioningly after me. I leapt over a rockfall where the tunnel mouth had partially collapsed, felt a momentary dizziness as I landed, as though the realmsphere were a plate that tilted and pivoted under my weight, before haring on. There was a hiss and a rush of shadow, the hum of quartz and a stab-flash of amber light telling me that Brychen and Nassam were busy holding the assassin at bay.

‘Where now?’ said Hamuz. His eyes were wide and gaping, the proximity of his torch narrowing his pupils to pinpricks.

‘This way.’

Without giving myself time to think, or the others time to doubt, I plunged into a branching passage. Then another. Then another. Zig-zagging my way ever deeper into the crumbling labyrinth of tunnels and slumbering rock.

I had a vague notion of the route in my head, but the lair itself seemed to be playing tricks on me. Tunnels and scratch-posts that looked familiar would lead to dead ends and cave-ins, as if the maze had restructured itself in my absence to twist me back onto paths of its own intention. Stringy-looking rats squeaked and scampered from my torchlight. Hamuz splattered one with a precious sigmarite-tipped round, which spoke highly of the Jerech’s marksmanship, if not his nerve. Brychen screamed and rammed her spear into the wall as Malikcek seeped out of the rock between. Around a blind corner, I came to a passage that I would have sworn led to Ikrit’s apotheosis chamber, only to find myself thumping against a blank wall. The passage was gone. Uncurling my fingers, I placed my palm against the stone and shuddered. The light of Sigendil had dipped almost below my horizon. I couldn’t say why or how, but I got the feeling that the chambers I was trying to reach were not there anymore.

Then the shadows behind us furled into a hissing, verminous shape, and we were running again.

A mile or more of tortuously winding tunnels brought us to the lip of an enormous bowl of a cavern. A wooden bridge had once spanned it, but it had broken and now hung against the two sides of the abyss. I remembered this place well. With a snarl of frustration, I went to the ledge and looked down. Twisted machines held in upright sarcophagi of warped iron lay silent in their own, darkly glittering filth. Movement from the other side of the chasm caught my eye and I looked up.

Malikcek waved to me and bowed before dispersing into the shadow.

‘I hate that rat,’ I growled.

‘Hate the ghyrlion, not its claws,’ said Brychen.

We took another way.

We wormed through a collapsed passageway on our bellies, Brychen last, me staring into the darkness for what felt like an age, with such high-strung alertness that I began to see assassins in every bulge of rock and chewed-on corpse. I think that he chose not to attack me then on purpose, amused by my fear. We ran through chambers that reeked of meat and spoil, airless pockets where the fear stench had been allowed to fester and left the four of us retching and gagging.

‘He’s not here,’ said Hamuz, covering his mouth with his hand as I shouldered open a mould-framed wooden doorway. ‘Nobody’s here.’ Then he walked into a stench that finally had him on his knees and vomiting over the blood-stained floor.

I grimaced. It looked like something between a charnel house and an abattoir. Sides of meat, including a number of human-looking limbs and torsos, hung from the ceiling on hooks over a system of clogged and rusted drains. Organs had been stuffed into drawers and cupboards. Bloody cutting implements and cookware was jumbled up on top of stoves and surfaces. It rattled softly together with a quiet vibration that nobody else seemed to be aware of but me.

Their attention was on other things.

Brychen prodded one of the hanging torsos with the butt of her spear. It swayed, creaking on its hook, butting against the one behind. They were pale and bloodless, but the skin was recognisably green.

‘This is what became of my people,’ she murmured. ‘The Wild Harvest. The Gorkai. First the vengeance of Ghur’thu, and the loss of the Maiden. And now this.’

‘I doubt your brother is here,’ I said, partly because I needed her mind on the assassin rather than her loss, but also because it was true. I thought of the crushed and twisted thing that Malikcek’s poison had left of Barrach.

Some things even a ratman would know better than to put in their mouth.

‘It does not matter,’ she said, lowering her spear. ‘When the jepard tears the throat out of the ghurzelle, or the fire consumes a forest and roasts all the life it harbours alive, it is no different to this.’ She turned to the Jerech and me, dead-eyed. ‘This is how we all end.’

Inspiring stuff, I think you’ll agree.

‘Let’s move on,’ I said. ‘Before he finds us again.’

I kicked in the door at the far end of the chamber. It had already rotted half away, what was left hanging off its hinges, but smashing it down seemed expedient and infinitely more satisfying at the time.

Nassam came next with Brychen under one arm, Hamuz following quickly, walking backwards, firelight and pistol both trained shakily on the passage behind us.

‘Her light fades fast-quick…’

‘Don’t let him taunt you,’ I called back, before the Jerech captain could waste another shot. ‘Remember who stands here beside you.’ I thumped my weapon haft against my halberd and roared, ‘Hamilcar does!’

‘Leave her to me. Maybe you get out-out alive.’

‘The warlock’s not here, lord,’ said Hamuz, a quaver in his voice. ‘We should get out of here.’

‘Not without her,’ I said.

As heroic as that came across, it was partly practical. I had been so intent on locating Ikrit’s apotheosis chamber – or better yet, Ikrit himself – that I’d been paying only a passing regard to our route.

I had been hoping that Brychen was paying attention.

‘We’re getting close to something,’ I said.

And we were. I could feel it. Sigendil had dipped out of view entirely, leaving me chilled and alone, but the nauseating sensation of the realmsphere tipping and turning beneath me had gone with it. Wherever the new makeup of the lair had been funnelling us, we were close to it, I was sure.

‘It looks like the apprentice workshops in the Ironweld armoury,’ said Nassam.

I nodded, though I’d avoided the place like it was a plague house.

Scraps of parchment lay everywhere, as though torn from the crooked metal cabinets and discarded drawers in some haste. The covers of books with their pages torn out. Bits of metal. Tools. Wires. Coloured glass.

‘Someone ransacked this place in a hurry,’ observed Hamuz.

‘Clearing out,’ agreed Nassam.

‘Going where, I wonder?’ I said.

Brychen looked thoughtful. ‘There have not always been skaven in the Nevermarsh. One day there were none and the next… it was as though the rains came.’

‘So they move on,’ I grunted. That was going to make my life harder. ‘I suppose that makes sense, the powers lined up in pursuit of Ikrit’s undead tail.’

‘How long ago was this?’ Nassam asked the priestess.

‘Nine seasons.’

‘A year and a half,’ Hamuz murmured. ‘No way they could have dug all these tunnels in a year and a half.’

I had no idea if it was possible or not, so I shrugged. ‘Deviant skaven sorcery. This would be the least impossible thing that I’ve seen it do.’ I gestured towards another passageway. ‘Over here. I think I know where we are.’

And to my immense satisfaction, I discovered that I wasn’t lying.

Ikrit’s burrows.

Leaving the others to catch up, I hurried towards the big circular door at the end of the undamaged tunnel. I stared at it for what was, in hindsight, an inordinately long time.

‘What is it, lord?’ said Hamuz.

‘This door was open before.’

‘What of it?’ asked Nassam.

‘Someone’s been here.’

‘One of Ikrit’s minions?’ said Brychen. ‘We have seen none now, but I despatched dozens when I came here the first time.’

I shook my head. ‘Not in their master’s own burrow. You haven’t seen him, but trust me. Even with the lair falling down around their ears they wouldn’t have dared shelter in there.’

‘Malikcek then,’ said Hamuz.

‘Not big on doors,’ I said. ‘You may have noticed.’

The Jerech captain glanced nervously back down the passageway. ‘You might be right.’

‘So… someone else has been in there?’ said Nassam, catching on.

‘Someone’s still in there,’ I said, a grin coming slowly. ‘It can only be opened from the inside.’

‘Well, let’s get what we came for.’ Hamuz pointed his pistol at the fiendishly complicated setup of rods and wheels and chains that constituted the lock. ‘Then get back out.’

‘No.’

Putting one hand over the Jerech’s wrist, guiding his aim down to the ground, Brychen placed the other against the door. At first, nothing much happened. Then there was a creak. Hamuz jumped back with a start as a strip of brass plating buckled outwards and a green shoot forced its way underneath it. My first thought was that the priestess was going to goad the dead wood to new life, ripping out the artifice of the warlock’s doorway, but where that idea came from, or how being presented with a tree rather than a door would have been preferable, I have no idea.

Before I had a chance to answer that question, the priestess was gone, sucked into the wood of the door through that sapling growth.

We all took a step back.

‘Gods… damn,’ muttered Nassam, signing the hammer.

There was a click, and the door hinged open. Brychen stood on the other side, leaning even more wearily on her spear than she already had been.

‘I’m glad she’s on our side,’ Hamuz whispered to me.

I clapped him on the shoulder and ushered him in. Having experienced Brychen from both sides, I wholeheartedly concurred. I went in last. My vision swam and my knees weakened the moment I crossed the threshold. At first I thought that my constitution had finally been defeated and Malikcek’s poison had won out, but it wasn’t that. The weakness was spiritual, not physical. The High Star was gone, its blurry radiance consigned below the strange horizon of this room. I touched the door frame, but the telltale tremors and aetheric vibrations of the Realm of Beasts were no more.

I hadn’t crossed a door. I’d gone through an Arcgate into some kind of dead zone between realms.

Or so it felt at the time.

‘Are you well, lord?’ said Hamuz.

‘Fine. Shut the door and lock it.’

‘Are you sure? It seems to be the only way in or–’

‘Are you wanting to go somewhere? Lock it.’

‘Lord.’

The Jerech captain set about his orders.

‘And you.’ I pointed at Brychen, spotting the ripped Magrittan chaise that Malikcek had dumped me in when I’d first attended upon his master in his lair. ‘Sit. Recover your strength.’

‘There can be no recovery for me here,’ she said. ‘Cut off from the currents of the Ghurlands as we are.’

I blinked at her. ‘You felt it too? Why didn’t you say something?’

‘I assumed you knew.’

I rolled my eyes.

‘What’s she talking about, lord?’ said Hamuz, just finishing up with the door.

‘Nothing to worry about,’ I said. ‘We’re here now. Let’s find the warlock.’

‘He is not here,’ Brychen observed, with annoying dispassion, and even more annoying accuracy.

I looked around. The burrow did indeed appear to be devoid of any obvious signs of life, but it wasn’t lacking in clutter. Everything that had been missing from the workshop-warrens and study-holes in the surrounding tunnels seemed to have been crammed in here. Blocks of browned and nibbled papers had been stacked up, tied with rattails or string, or just flung in wherever. There were half-finished devices. Complicated-looking firearms with no stock, strings and wiring spilling out the sides. A plethora of iterations around the theme of powered digging and cutting tools. What looked like a crude facsimile of my lantern in amberglass, warpstone and bronze. I smashed it with the butt of my halberd and some satisfaction. Shaped crystals and assorted gems sat in drawers, loose on the floor, alongside claw-scratch sketches, odd bits of machinery and rubber bands.

I rubbed at my head. It was starting to hurt. It was possible that being severed from Azyr was having a more profound effect on me than I’d imagined, but given how the realm’s focused energies burned me now, its eclipse should have been the opposite of painful. Being cut off from the Mortal Realms more generally then?

Perhaps.

Or maybe the man I was slowly remembering how to be didn’t respond too well to adversity.

‘Maybe it’s not Ikrit as we know him that we’re looking for. I hurt him the last time we parted. He has been recovering somehow, regenerating, using the powers he has stolen to regather his strength.’ I went on to explain, without going into the grisly details, of the vision I had experienced in the Forge Eternal, of being cocooned in a seed pod, feeling my ancient body mend.

‘A seed pod?’ said Brychen.

‘What are you, my Heraldor?’

‘The Wild Harvest used such magic to revitalise our warriors when they tire and rejuvenate our leaders when they age.’

‘Used?’ said Nassam.

‘It was a gift from the Maiden. Like the tide, withdrawn.’

‘Ikrit stole it from her,’ I said. ‘That and other things.’

She glared at me, and for a moment I thought she was going to strike me. ‘It would be large,’ she said at last. ‘Not like those of the Gorwood sylvaneth. We are flesh and blood and cannot be cut and re-sown as they are. It would be larger even than the skaven himself. It could not be hidden here.’

‘My lord.’ Hamuz was rifling through some of the loose papers. He picked up a clutch of them and held them up against the light of his torch. ‘I can’t read the language, but there are pictures here. Designs for…’ he struggled for a moment, ‘things.’ He flipped a piece of paper to show me what looked like the skeleton of one of the flying machines that had undone the aetar at Kurzog’s Hill. ‘Maybe there’s something here that can shed some light on what was done to your soul.’

‘You heard about that?’ I said.

He nodded.

‘And you followed me anyway?’

‘Hamilcar, Sigmar, Seven Words,’ he said, repeating the triptych that I’d heard him shout out before bringing down Broudiccan on my behalf.

‘In that order,’ said Nassam.

I felt a fuzziness in my chest, pushing out the stinging throb in my temples.

Hamuz tossed me a book.

‘What am I supposed to do with this?’

‘Have a look.’

I held the object in my palm as though it might shed its carapace and sprout wings.

‘How would you know that Ikrit had gained such gifts of regeneration?’ asked Brychen.

I ignored the question with a snarl of discomfort.

‘Look at these,’ Nassam called over from the bookshelf bolted to the rock wall. He proceeded to pull various tomes down, holding them together as a stack and examining the spines. ‘These are in Azyri, I think.’ He turned to me.

I stared at him, dumbly, the other book still sitting in my palm, stubbornly refusing to move or transform. Hassam waved another sheaf of papers at me.

‘Come on, lord. Let’s find anything that might be of value and get out of here.’

‘Why were you so certain that Ikrit would be here?’ Brychen went on.

‘Arrrgh!’

In a sudden, senseless rage, I ripped the book in half and threw the torn halves aside.

‘The nights I spent, night after unending night, huddled in the snow, lying in wait for mournfang or thundertusk and huskwolfen. Do you think we read? When we recalled the brothers and sisters, daughters and sons, fathers and mothers lost to war and winter, do you imagine we did it with these?’ I kicked over a table and sent papers flying. Hamuz stumbled back, his hands raised placatingly. ‘We saw by the stars, and by the unlight of Dharroth. Nothing grows in the Eternal Winterlands. Nothing that will burn. I was a grown man when I saw the sun for the first time.’ Feelings poured out of me. Rage. Shame. Guilt. I had no idea where they were coming from, but I couldn’t make them stop. I closed on Hamuz until I felt Brychen’s spear against my breastplate. I turned to her with a feral grin, uncaring. ‘And what did we do? We fought until we couldn’t stand, we drank until we couldn’t stand, we let the women abuse us until we couldn’t stand. Because that is how the Winterlands tribes have always seen in the Day.’

‘I’m sorry, my lord,’ said Hamuz, mortally terrified, in spite of Brychen’s spear. ‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry.’

I leaned in towards him, the spear-point digging in in a way no wood should have been able to mistreat sigmarite. ‘I. Can’t. Read.’

A slow hand-clap snapped me out of it before I or Brychen could do anything more lasting. It made an odd, muted clicking sound, as if the hands were gloved.

Or furred.

‘Ikrit squeak-say that this would happen. You are becoming less-less the perfect thing that your god tried to make you. More that of meat and bone which he took-snatch from the ice.’ Malikcek was sprawled comfortably over the chaise that I had bidden Brychen to sit in. Something in my face made him snicker in amusement. The indescribable bout of rage had left me as suddenly as it had come about, but anger doesn’t leave you just like that. It’s like oil. It blackens what it touches.

‘What does Ikrit know of it?’

‘What becomes of you becomes of him, only… opposite.’

I grappled with my belt, Hamuz and Nassam backing fearfully away from me, before finally unhitching my warding lantern. Malikcek regarded it in apparent surprise.

‘Your hell-light. I thought it lost.’

‘It was. To the ice lakes outside.’

The assassin clapped his paws together in front of his snout and sniggered in delight. ‘Teheheheh. Such beautiful irony. That which even now he invades the Seven Words to claim, he could have just took-found outside his own lair.’

I held up my lantern. ‘He wants this?’

‘You feel-know how it mends your soul, even as it burn-burn your body, yes-yes? Ikrit wants a hell-light for his own.’ He licked his lips. ‘He was most wrathful when he found you had taken it in your escape. He kill-flayed three engineers with Death magic from inside his flesh cocoon.’

Brychen shot me a look. I ignored her.

Malikcek bared his fangs at me. It could have been smile or snarl, I didn’t know.

‘But he not squeak-ask for me to take-steal your light from you. He squeak-ask for me to make sure you found his burrow.’

‘Hah! You lured me nowhere, shadow–’

‘Enjoy your oblivion, Bear-Eater.’

With that, he sank back into the shadows of the chair cushions and left me brandishing a lantern over an empty chaise.

‘Malikcek!’ I yelled. ‘Malikcek!’

I got no answer, and I had the sense that the assassin was gone for good this time.

And that I probably wanted to be going the same way, fast.

‘Nassam, get that door open.’

The greatsword hesitated a moment, looking at me fearfully, before hurrying to the door. He grabbed the wheel-lock mechanism, but recoiled with a cry before he could turn it as though he had just been burnt. An amber flood, muddied with polluting streams of Chaotic energies, shone from the very matter of the door. Substance dissolved into pure magic, and the door – and the entire wall – twisted into a puddle of discoloured fire that I was in no hurry to command anyone to try to open again.

I knew now why I had felt that the passages and chambers beyond the various collapses hadn’t been there anymore. They hadn’t. They’d sunk through the aetheric plane of the realm and gone to an entirely other place.

And we were about to join them.

‘Find another way out,’ I yelled, as the walls began to swirl and run, a bubble of non-existence closing in around us.

‘There’s none,’ screamed Hamuz.

‘Take my hand.’ Hamuz and Nassam didn’t hesitate, gripping my gauntlets tightly. Brychen frowned, then reluctantly held up her hands for the two Jerech to take.

‘This is your fault,’ she said.

‘We stand together. We fall together. We stand again by the God-King’s grace.’

The ground beneath us tilted, stretched, sliding towards an event horizon a billion billion miles below our feet. The rest of the lair and the Ghurite-Chaotic strands that it now existed as streamed in towards that amber-haloed maw, a smear of suns and moons and broken stars laddering all the way towards the High Star and its companion cosmos, an infinity and an eternity away.

‘Lean on me, brothers and sisters.’

I roared, fighting the cosmic drag on the three mortals with all my storm-forged might, but my voice was already being drawn out, disappearing into the abyss.

My legs started to stretch, my feet little more than dots in the Celestial nothing.

‘Hamilcar… stands! Hamilcar… lives!’

Chapter twenty-five

‘What think you of your conquest, my king?’

Vikaelia stood before me in spousal furs, hands on hips. Her body was clad in a bodice of finely stitched leathers and hides, the individual squares of leather crawling with the warrior motifs of her tribe. A pair of black bear paws cupped her breasts, the claws sharpened to lie against pale skin. A zephyr feather skirt glittered and dazzled down to her ankles. Her arms, hardened by axe and spear and sling, were strapped into vambraces of soft minkgor leather. The outfit left her shoulders bare. The sight of even that much uncovered skin was enough to arouse a fever in me.

Her lips parted, powdered with goldspar, inflamed by too much ale and no little pride.

‘You stay your final blow,’ she said, her voice slurring slightly. ‘Does your courage fail you at the last?’ She stepped back.

She was a queen. My queen.

Sigmar, I wanted her.

And Hamul of the White Spear Tribe got what he wanted.

I barked like an animal, unsettling the hounds curled up around the ember coral in the corners as I rose to tackle her. She yelped in surprise as I lifted her off the ground, the muscles in my shoulders bunching as I locked my hands together behind her back.

‘Hamul has nothing if not courage.’

We fell together into the bedding furs. Even with a dozen layers of fur between us the ground was hard, but I was accustomed to ice and naked rock and so was she. Light and glitter from her zephyrarch skirt settled on us like a dusting of snow. I laughed as she scratched her nails down my chest, and grabbed at her wrist.

The grave chill of her touch seared the passion from me, and I pulled my hand away to stare at her arm.

The hard muscles had somehow atrophied to become sinewy and thin, clad no longer in minkgor but in a stiff matt of white fur. I looked up, and into the scintillating witch-glare of a demi-god’s gaze.

The warlock recoiled from me at about the same moment that I recoiled from him.

‘Hssss,’ said Ikrit.

‘Aaaargh!’ I countered.

I woke up with a scream and the taste of warpstone breath in my mouth, rubbing my hands vigorously up and down my forearms as if to rid them of every trace of fur. Slowly becoming aware of someone standing over me, I threw out a heel to kick them off. But it wasn’t a dream anymore, and it wasn’t Ikrit. It wasn’t Vikaeus, or Vikaelia, anymore either, more’s the pity.

It was Brychen.

The priestess brushed off my wayward boot and thwacked me on the head with her spear.

‘Aaagh.’

Rubbing at my head, I backslid into a sudden recollection of lying in a bed with Ikrit on top of me. My throat clenched as if preparing to throw up. ‘Sweet Sigendil.’ The warlock had been unarmoured, very much a living, breathing, warm-blooded rat with the exception of his eyes. They had burned like dying stars. ‘Sweet Sigendil. We’re appearing in each other’s dreams now? Well, I hope you enjoyed that one, you–’

Brychen raised her spear again.

I held up a hand.

‘Wait!’

‘Are you back with us?’ said Brychen.

‘I think so.’

‘It sounded as though you were wrestling a tigress.’

‘Something… like that.’

I looked up at a familiar rock ceiling. Familiar that is except for the powerful sense of vertigo that was doing my stomach few favours. I could see that it was still and yet I could tell that it was spinning. I could feel the solid ground beneath my back and yet I knew that in reality I was falling. I tried closing my eyes, but the sense of tumbling through the aetheric cloud was even worse without the illusion of solid rock around me.

‘Did I save us all?’

‘See for yourself,’ said Brychen, more grimly than I had ever heard her speak.

With a grimace, I sat up.

I looked around.

I allowed myself a moment.

‘Well. That wasn’t what I was expecting.’

We were still in Ikrit’s burrow. Or at least a chamber that was identical in every detail to it. Every piece of parchment and stray bolt was exactly where I remembered it being. Even the two halves of the book I had torn apart lay where I’d tossed them. Hamuz el-Shaah and Nassam had made something like a pair of chairs out of the stacked papers and had collapsed into them, clutching the arms and staring at the ceiling as though on the ride of their lives. Hamuz was sporting a livid black eye and a bloody lip, his left hand draped across the arm of his paper throne in a way that suggested a break or at least a sprain. Nassam’s magnificent moustache looked a little askew and his armour scuffed, but, a spot of dizziness aside, the Jerech greatsword appeared otherwise hale and whole.

‘L-lord,’ Nassam slurred.

Hamuz’s gaze rolled towards me. I smiled reassuringly, but he recoiled as though shown a glimpse of fang. Fear and love warred over his face, and I recognised the look that mortal men and women showed to the Stormcast Eternals all over the Mortal Realms. Except for me. No one ever wanted the mortals’ fear, but I had never even desired their respect, which was probably why they had always given it so whole-heartedly. I just wanted them to love me enough to forget their fear of death, to fight beside me in Sigmar’s name.

Only now he had seen something of that which my brother Stormcasts had sensed.

I was a broken hero.

Part of me wanted to apologise for my loss of temper but, as with so many of the traits that lifted a man above the dogs in his cave, the skill of doing so just wasn’t in me.

‘I think that the mortal man I once was… wasn’t a very good man.’ I sighed. I looked at the floor as if the words I sought might be there amongst the scattered pages, taunting me with my inability to know them. ‘Why me?’ My voice had become a hiss. It was unused to articulating these kinds of thoughts. ‘Why did the God-King choose to raise up someone like me?’

Hamuz attempted to say something, his head lolling back into his seat.

I took it as encouragement.

‘You are right, my friend. And you too, Nassam. Thank you, both.’ I offered a hand, which the Jerech captain regarded woozily. ‘Sigmar wanted a warrior and that was what I gave him. The rest was in his power to reshape, and he did. He made me better than the man he found. Fair enough, a lot better. And though Ikrit would strive to see that great work undone, I make you this promise now that I’ll always strive to be the best man I remember being rather than the worst. And with you men here to help me, how can I fail?’

‘Ungh.’

Nassam slipped off his seat and flopped onto his side.

I frowned at him, then at Hamuz, glancing sideways at Brychen.

‘Do they seem a little off to you?’

‘It is this place,’ said Brychen, and I detected a hitch of tension in her voice that I hadn’t before, as if she was concentrating very hard on one small thing and even talking to me was a distraction she could do without.

‘I wonder where that is,’ I said.

‘The realm roots,’ she whispered.

She stared up at the ceiling with plates for eyes as if it were a circling aetar.

It felt like one.

‘The realm…’ And then I understood what she meant. A Stormcast Eternal always knew where he was in the realm, and I had been here before.

It wasn’t in the realms.

‘I’ve felt the formless magic of this half-realm before. Once. When I fought against the Varanguard of the Everchosen and their daemonic allies at Beast’s Maw. The Arcway Fortress of Gorgonsarr.’

‘Gorgonsarr,’ breathed Hamuz, eyes rolling. ‘Lord-Celestant… Kaedus Fulgurine… led that assault.’

‘Why do you think we lost?’ I frowned as I looked around. ‘We’re in the Allpoints.’

‘Sigmar…’ the Jerech moaned.

‘But this sense of tumbling, falling, this is new. It was not like that when I stepped through the Maw. It’s as if a piece of Ghur has been shorn away and cast into the aetheric cloud.’ I turned to Brychen. ‘Why aren’t you feeling it too?’

‘Am I not?’ She giggled, before she could control herself. ‘Our place within the realm roots is unsettled. We are still burrowing through the void. The ghurlines grow thin but I can feel them still. If I concentrate. They are a point of focus for me. I…’ She smothered another high-pitched laugh. Whatever she was feeling had pushed her to the edge of madness. ‘I think that Ikrit meant for us to be cast adrift in the realm roots, but we have not yet travelled far.’

The voicing of Ikrit’s name made me shiver.

I pushed the image of him bestride me far away.

‘Do you mean to say that this entire burrow is travelling through the Allpoints?’ I said. No one replied so I nodded in answer to my own question. ‘Of course. That would explain how Ikrit has managed to keep ahead of the Horned Rat and every other god he’s irked over the centuries. You thought he was nomadic, priestess, but he never really goes anywhere. When he’s ready to move he just unmoors his entire burrow to cast back into the Allpoints. Whatever damage I caused in my escape, it must have unintentionally begun the process.’

‘So… all of these flayed trees?’ Brychen toed aside a piece of parchment from the general ground litter.

‘Must be what Ikrit couldn’t bear to leave behind,’ I said. I didn’t want to add that Ikrit had lured me into yet another trap, so I didn’t, but that didn’t do much to alter the fact that he clearly had. ‘He’s probably ransacking the Seven Words about now,’ I sighed. ‘Looking for Akturus’ lantern.’

‘Which would suggest that he would want a way back.’

I snapped my fingers. ‘Yes! You said that you can still feel the energies of Ghur nearby. These… ghurlines?’

‘I can, but I told you that they are weak and becoming weaker. I will need to be able to concentrate if I am to find a path back to the Gorwood.’

‘Just try to avoid the Varanspire.’

‘You do understand that the realm roots run through the entirety of the Mortal Realms, and beyond.’

‘I was making a joke,’ I said, trying – successfully, I think – to cover for the fact that I had not been.

‘Varan… spire?’ murmured Hamuz.

‘The fortress of the Three-Eyed King,’ I told him. ‘It’s supposed to be in there, somewhere, though I know of no one who’s ever seen it and returned.’

Hamuz grinned like a lunatic, then passed out.

I looked at him. Then at Nassam, splayed out on the floor. Brychen, staring at the door, lips peeling, unpeeling, fighting to keep her eyes from crossing.

‘This is going to be harder than I’d imagined,’ I muttered.

Isn’t it always?

Chapter twenty-six

Within the bounds of Ikrit’s chambers, all was much as it had been when the lair had still been tethered to the Ghurlands. Beyond his door, the insanity of unreality reigned. Passages flexed towards some immaterial end-point, their walls smooth to the touch, but otherwise indistinct, as though the matter to make them had yet to be fully mined from the aether. Pinpoints of light that weren’t true stars, waypoints in the lunatic substrata of the Allpoints perhaps, streaked as we plunged deeper through the plane of the realmsphere, smearing the half-made walls a virulent green. Energy and motion vibrated the walls, the ground underfoot. We were accelerating, spinning out of control, beyond Sigendil’s light and un-anchored from the Mortal Realms. It was becoming too much even for my awesome constitution to bear.

‘Which way to the Gorwood?’ I roared.

Our descent was soundless, the Allpoints a void, but in my soul it screamed and it was over that imagined cry that I strained to be heard.

‘Do not talk to me,’ said Brychen, voice high with strain. ‘Just follow.’

Staggering, as though her legs were of variable and changing lengths, the priestess veered towards a flapping maw in the substance of the wall. It took me a moment to recognise it as the fork to another passage. I blinked. The maelstrom of energy was overwhelming, but my eyes were starting to adapt to it. Either that or the lair itself was starting to impose some kind of stability on the raw flux of the aether. If I looked hard enough and concentrated, I could even see through the wall in front of me, visualising instead the whole labyrinth of tunnels and caverns, boring outwards through the Chaos until my eyes crossed. I blinked and tried again, but it was like holding a finger in front of your nose and forcing yourself to see double.

All I could see was wall.

Hamuz murmured desperate nothings in my ear, struggling limply where he lay across my pauldron.

‘It’s alright, my friend.’ I gave him a reassuring pat on the back, but he didn’t seem to notice it, which was hardly surprising.

Nassam, on the other hand, stumbled along behind us under his own power. The Jerech greatsword actually seemed to be coping a little better out here than he had been in Ikrit’s chambers. I assumed it had something to do with at least now being able to see the madness he was feeling. Whatever the reason for it, I was grateful. I had broad enough shoulders to carry both men, but I preferred keeping one hand free for my halberd and a spare blade at my back. Somehow I doubted that Brychen was going to be much use if we ran into anything that objected to our presence, which experience told me we would, eventually.

The priestess shuddered and sank into the upright support of her spear.

‘Bounteous destruction!’ she wailed. ‘It is failing.’

‘What is?’

‘My sight. My breath. I can feel the ghurlines stretching thin. The lair falls deeper into the foundations of the realm, leaving the sphere entirely.’

‘Do you have any idea where it’s taking us?’

‘No, I…’ She ground her forehead to the wood of her spear and groaned. ‘There is a destination. That I can say. But where? I am a bird on her first migration. I feel my course though I cannot know it. I am Ghur. It is all I can recognise.’

It was reassuring to know that if Brychen failed to guide us back to the Gorwood then we would eventually wash up somewhere in the Mortal Realms, but kicking back and waiting to face Ikrit at a time and place of his convenience was hardly my plan of choice. And besides, being inside this place as it had detached from Ghur had been traumatic enough. Being in it when it crash-landed gods knew where was something I was keen to avoid.

‘I believe in you,’ I said, imbuing those words with all the strength of confidence I could muster. ‘Take a moment.’

‘We don’t have a moment,’ she snapped. ‘The trail weakens by the second.’

‘Well then, try concentrating.’

‘I am concentrating!’

‘Lord?’

‘Not now, Nassam.’ I crouched down beside Brychen and spoke softly. ‘It’s like holding a wild, monstrous beast by the leash. It’s difficult to imagine that you could lose it and ever have it under control again.’

‘Yes,’ Brychen hissed, staring.

‘But it’s too savage. Too bright. This is prey that can’t hide, that won’t hide. Hear its roar. Feel the ground tremble.’

‘Lord?’ Nassam tugged on the bearskin draped over my armour.

‘Shhh.’

‘I feel it.’ Brychen drew her head from her spear and turned towards me, her eyes so de-thorned, so round, that just meeting her gaze felt like an abuse of her vulnerability. ‘Can you feel it too?’

‘Not here, no. But I am a Stormcast Eternal, I have felt it before.’

‘Thank you.’

‘You did it yourself,’ I said, confident that we both knew otherwise.

‘Lord.’

‘What is it, Nassam?’

‘I can see through the walls, lord.’

I sighed. ‘Just blink a few times. It’ll pass.’

‘I think I see something coming towards us.’

‘What? Where?’

‘Skaven. Over that way.’

The Jerech lifted a hand to point a shaking finger. I stared at the solid (ish) patch of wall in question, but forcing yourself to relax at sword point seldom works, and is far more likely to achieve the opposite of what you were aiming for. Nassam, however, was proving to be the most reliably nonchalant mortal I’d ever encountered which, for a man who consumed as much qahua as he did, was quite the gift. After a few seconds’ determined squinting I did see something. A silhouette, like a night skyline glimpsed for a split-second beneath a lightning flash. Ten or eleven elongated snouts. Long implements that might have been pikes or firearms. Admittedly, they could have been lamplighters or extra-long-handled paintbrushes for all I knew. There was no depth, no texture to the impression, the hunched figures superimposed over one another like the blast shadow of some kind of mutant spawn.

Then I lost it.

I rubbed my aching eyes.

‘What should we–?’ Nassam began before I shushed him.

Skaven eyesight, I knew from experience, was so poor they probably couldn’t make out the tail waving about in front of their snouts. Even if they could peer through the tunnel walls, as we could, I doubted very much that they would have been able to pick anything as insignificant as a Stormcast Eternal and three mortal humans from the roiling mayhem of the Allpoints. Provided we stayed quiet, then unless the skaven got behind us and managed to pick up our scent, they would probably scurry on by us, no harm done. It wasn’t that fighting a dozen skaven of unknown armament and intention with just one arm and while dizzy troubled me unduly, but Brychen looked one small upset from complete mental disintegration.

And I didn’t think much of my chances of getting out of this place without her.

I put a finger over my lips.

Nassam nodded, understanding.

‘I have lost the trace of them, most understanding of overseers.’ The nervous chitter carried through the spongy barrier between us.

‘Then find-find it again.Warlock-Master Krittak smelled an intruder in these tunnels, and I will not scurry home empty-pawed.’

‘I am trying, most patient of potentates.’

‘What do you think is down here?’ A third squeak.

‘A daemon-thing from the Eightpoints,’ said the authoritative voice. ‘Until Krittak and his tinker-rats close-finish the walls they will find-burrow a way through.’

‘Daemon-thing?’

Nassam shifted position to better free his sword. ‘Are they talking about u–?’

I waved him urgently to stay quiet.

‘A small daemon-thing. If it was scary-big then Pekreek would not have lost-lost.’

‘I still look-feel for most understanding of masters.’

‘We cannot stay here,’ hissed Brychen. ‘With every moment, the great beast moves further from us.’

I held my hand up, waiting – aware, through a discombobulated assortment of senses that was not exactly sight, not exactly sound, of the skaven shuffling away from us. I exhaled and let my hand drop.

‘Alright.’ I tapped Brychen on the shoulder. ‘Go. Quietly.’

She nodded and tiptoed forwards.

‘Wait-wait!’

I squeezed Brychen’s shoulder. She stopped with a stifled groan. Nassam drew up against the tunnel wall, looking to get his sword out from between his legs. The half-formed ground sponged and quivered underfoot.

Suddenly, it dawned on me just how the skaven had been tracking us.

‘Nassam. Stop moving.’

‘That way.’ I was aware of a long, tubular apparatus like a broom being swung across the floor of a separate passage towards ours. ‘That way, master. Go-go!’

Before I even had the chance to shout a warning, a dozen tin-pot skaven warriors wielding a motley collection of spears, man-catchers and what looked like spring-loaded nets came spilling around the flex of the passage behind us. Typical skaven, they seemed preternaturally at home in the insane environment they had chosen to lair in, sprinting sure-footedly and with little obvious fear as Nassam and I struggled to stand upright and just about managed to avoid decapitating one another as we readied our weapons.

‘Stand behind me,’ I bellowed, turning to place the solid width of one Hamilcar Bear-Eater between the delirious Captain el-Shaah and the onrushing skaven.

‘Yes, lord.’ Nassam dropped back.

‘That is no daemon-thing,’ squeaked one superior thinker.

‘And there is four of it,’ added another, not to be outdone.

‘Dread whiskers of the Great Horned Rat. It is the Bear-Eater!’

That was more like it.

Some rabid breed of courage drove them on just the same, the first two frothing at the mouth, squealing in a frenzy of racial hatred and terror as they stabbed at me with spear and man-catcher. I welcomed the former into my breastplate, presenting myself as a human shield for the still-fumbling Nassam. The weapon delivered some kind of pathetic lightning charge that splashed against my armour even as the blade snapped. The man-catcher closed over my shin, snap-releases firing a ring of steel splints into my greaves. The slavers’ implement didn’t have a prayer to any god of breaking sigmarite, of course, and my sense that my attacker hadn’t really thought things through was confirmed a moment later when I pulled my leg back and dragged the ratman squealing along the ground towards me.

‘I can wait no longer!’ Brychen cried, breaking suddenly for the passage behind me.

‘Go with her, Nassam.’

‘Yes, lord.’

‘The Bear-Eater shall hold the vermin here. I–’

I glanced over my shoulder, but the Jerech was already stumbling after the departing priestess. I frowned, faintly annoyed at having my inspirational cry cut short. With a snarl, I kicked off the skaven that was still holding furiously to his man-catcher, then punched into the pack with my halberd. What I lacked in orientation I more than made up for in stature, and with the haft held diagonally I could cover most of the passage. The spear-rat ducked under the high end, but the skaven leaping over Man-catcher got a broken kneecap and a rendezvous with the floor as just reward for his keenness. Hamuz mumbled something as he was jostled against my breastplate.

‘Look-smell how the others run-flee,’ came the clawleader’s snarl. The skaven leader held the traditional position of high rank at the very back of the pack, urging his warriors on with what looked like an Ironweld blunderbuss, only ten times worse. The green fumes dribbling from the barrel seemed to be working the clawleader up into a hyperbolic state. ‘Kill-kill the storm-thing. It is alone. Kill-kill!’ He clapped the heavy gun-barrel into his palm, squeaked something that I hoped for his comrades’ sakes was Queekish for ‘get down’, and fired.

There was no solid projectile that I saw. It was as though the clawleader had just triggered the cantrip for a spell-trap to turn the air between us into a screaming, murderously glowing blizzard of shrapnel.

I hate guns. I always have, and always will. It is something I have borne with me from my mortal life, I think. In the Eternal Winterlands, a man killed and was killed in turn by the strength and reach of his own arm. Give a mortal a gun and he can hit near as hard as a Stormcast Eternal, but it is more than power that forges one of Sigmar’s chosen. It is wrong. It is unearned strength. It is unnatural, foul-smelling, and arcane. The limit of a warrior’s fury should be the throw of his spear. I have barely reconciled myself to bows.

I roared back as warpstone dust and scrap metal cut through the packed skaven bodies. It rattled against my armour like daemon hail and tore the skin from my face. I staggered back, hand belatedly rising to shield my eyes, and heard a cry from Hamuz.

The Jerech had been hit.

The clawleader tittered, drunk on warpstone vapours, already stuffing another bag full of sharp objects down the fat barrel of his gun.

‘The storm-thing bleeds. Kill-kill. Kill-kill now.’

He looked expectantly over his warriors, but unless this lair was currently hurtling towards Shyish, none of them looked as though they would be springing up any time soon.

The clawleader gulped.

He was scampering back down the tunnel before I’d even lowered my hand from my eyes.

I was tempted to give chase. I am a hunter, a wild beast at heart, and it ran against my nature to let a foe escape. There was also a chance that he would lead me right back to his brothers and the way out, but my odds of keeping pace with a fleeing skaven in this place were about as good as finding my way back without Brychen. Reluctantly, I turned around, giving Hamuz a gentle nudge as I started after the priestess.

‘Hamuz?’ Another shake. ‘El-Shaah?’

‘Still here. My lord.’

I grinned with relief. On top of the broken hand that the Jerech captain had taken falling out of the Ghurlands, he could now add a buckshot grazing to his unlikely collection of injuries. The freckling of hits to his upper thigh and forehead looked superficial to me, but there was a poisonous glitter to the wounds that didn’t look good. My smile fractured. I knew without needing to consult the knowledge of wiser heads that the captain wasn’t going to make it. The ghurite herbalists, spirit healers and warrior priests of the Freeguild talked as good a medicament as I did a campaign, but this was of a level beyond the usual flesh-eating and blood-ravaging complications of doing battle in the Realm of Beasts. This was warpstone poisoning. Even a warrior of the purity of Akturus or Vikaeus would have struggled to cleanse this wound.

‘We’re really in… the Allpoints,’ he mumbled. He was staring at the floor. The waypoints struck by beneath us like shooting stars, all falling in a line. ‘I meant to take something back… for my… daughter.’

‘Your…’ My expression wavered between a forced laugh and a full grimace. ‘What?’

‘I… brought her a… soulblight tooth from… Shyish, and… a snowflake from… Azyr. So she knows… I’m… thinking of her. She…’ He gritted his teeth against a violent shudder. ‘She’ll never believe I was… here… otherwise.’

‘I knew it,’ I said.

‘Knew what?’

‘That you were disappointed that we weren’t really going to the Varanspire.’

The captain’s chuckles faded to shallow breaths. ‘You should… leave me.’

‘You think that Hamilcar Bear-Eater, Champion of the Gods, cannot carry you?

‘Of course… not.’

‘Then don’t suggest it again.’

‘Hamilcar. Sigmar. Seven Words.’ The Jerech’s words grew quieter as he slipped back into unconsciousness. I shook him gently against the shoulder where he lay, but this time he didn’t rouse.

‘Fight, my friend. This is one battle I can’t win for you.’

I may not have been able to trace the Ghur energies as Brychen could, but I was a trapper and a hunter; I could see the depressions that Brychen and Nassam had left in the amorphous ‘rock’ and follow them. Sounds came back to me. Hushed voices. Stumbling feet. They didn’t rebound back to me in the manner of an echo, but rather trembled out of the walls like ripples through a pond. Every so often, I even trained my eyes to catch a glimpse of them. Two figures, greyed out and blurred together by several feet of intervening rock, leaning into one another like a three-legged gor, and running.

After what I presumed to be a few hundred feet, but could not be sure as the passage had a nasty habit of flexing and stretching at random, Hamuz and I came to a large half-finished cavern. The walls rippled and bulged like the skin of an under-inflated bladder. Skaven clambered over ramshackle timber scaffolds to chip away at them, others remaining below to slap at them with nothing more esoteric than paint rollers. Where their instruments passed, the walls of the cavern became marginally more opaque. They were making this place real, mining solid rock from the aether stuff of the Allpoints.

In amongst the labourers, overseeing the work, were large, black-furred skaven encased in armoured suits veined with warpstone.

They put me in mind of the lightning golems that mined the hollow core of the Mallus for sigmarite on the God-King’s behalf.

I had never ventured into the remains of the World-That-Was of course (not at that time, anyway) for it was forbidden to all but Grungni and Sigmar himself, and I had the horrible feeling that this was the vision I would hold every time I thought of it thereafter.

The skaven seemed to be in a state of some disarray, and I noticed that one armoured miner was spraying green sparks from the cracked joints of his wrist. Almost as if his arm had just got in the way of a Jerech quartz greatsword. I couldn’t help but admire Nassam’s composure. The ratman squeaked in fright at the sight of me and managed to avoid making the same mistake by getting well out of the way.

Ignoring him completely, I belted past, after Brychen and my way out, down the tunnel that he’d been hunched in front of.

The place was a warren, a howling madness of coiling trails and endlessly snaking paths that seemed to lead nowhere but always, nearly, somewhere. I’d been harbouring the hope that it would start to show some similarity to the old Nevermarsh lair, but I should have known better. That’s not how skaven minds work. Dig first, plan later. Even if Ikrit had wanted everything to be exactly so, I doubted even the Horned Rat himself had the power to make his minions do so, not without getting down here and doing the work himself. And neither Ikrit nor his horned god seemed like the dirtied hands type.

Without slowing down, I allowed myself a moment to close my eyes and get my bearings, to set aside the sense of acceleration. Brychen was right. We were tearing free of the realmsphere.

The reminder that I was speeding through an infinite cosmos and not, in fact, in a confined underground space, actually came as something of a relief.

Feeling surer about things, I took a deep breath and blundered on.

My first indication that I was actually getting somewhere came in a flash of amber and gnashing teeth. I felt a low growl, as low as the fire in the earth beneath the permafrost, rumble through my marrow – the challenge of one alpha beast sensing the return of another. Ghur. It knew me, and the part of me that was still of Azyr responded in kind.

My second indication was the bullet in my rondel plate.

The warpstone shell punched into the circular disc covering my armpit and threw me back against the wall of the tunnel almost as soon as I’d charged out of it and into another cavern. A second blew a hole out of the rock between my legs. A third and a fourth missed by more appreciable distances, but close enough still to cover me in an acrid haze of debris. Coughing, I stumbled across to the opposite wall, Hamuz still unconscious across my shoulder, while a fifth shot smacked into the wall where my chest had been. I looked back at the crack in the wall and grinned ruefully. The sound of ringing sigmarite had numbed my ears, but I could hear combat up ahead. Steel on glass. Wood on steel. Inhuman squeals. I couldn’t see any of it, of course, but I was taking that as a positive sign that my attackers couldn’t see me anymore either. The fingers around my halberd jangled from the shot to my armpit, but I ignored it, charging through the green fugue and back into the cavern.

I blinked, disoriented as much by the grotesquery that milled about in front of me as the warpstone poison in my eyes. Banners hung like tithes of flesh from walls that were so thin as to be practically non-existent. Stars screamed past, coloured with the reds, yellows and bilious browns of Ikrit’s colours. And not just Ikrit’s. As well as cogwork shock-vermin, engineer-piloted warsuits, chittering clan warriors kitted out with warpfire throwers, ratling cannons and poison wind launchers, the chamber heaved with heavily armoured bestigors of the Blind Herd and a score of swollen knights in the putrid iconography of the Legion of Bloat. I’ll admit, I hadn’t given a second thought to the remnants of Manguish’s forces since defeating their champion at Kurzog’s Hill, but the long-suffering adherents to Nurgle’s creed were nothing if not apathetic in the face of life’s blows.

The sounds of fighting were still coming from somewhere, but the chamber’s disorder was so great that I didn’t even know where to start.

I looked instead to where that unclean alliance of Ruin seemed to be heading.

It was a portal. It looked and smelled like the Arcway gate I had described at Beast’s Maw, although I assumed it to be an artificial and temporary one, veined with warp-lightning and surrounded by a steel ring that was suspended from the ceiling by rusted hawsers. Something about it tasted familiar. As if it were my power that had blasted this hole between realms.

The only way towards it was by a single flight of metal steps, currently groaning under the stupefying weight of Ikrit’s blightkings. Slavering and snarling, it stained the horrific warriors under its maws with amber light before devouring them wholesale. Trying to look through the portal to what lay on the other side was like looking through an orange-coloured pool in the rain. To either side of the portal apparatus, tiered gantries had been set up, bristling with skaven jezzails and ratling gunners who would occasionally pummel the liquid surface of the portal with fire, presumably with the intention of convincing whatever was on the other side to keep their heads down.

Only about half a dozen or so seemed more intent on me.

Brychen and Nassam had to be in there somewhere.

I was good, but I wasn’t quite this good.

Unshipping my lantern, I held it at arm’s length. ‘Look at me!’ I yelled, easily shouting over the mixed braying of a few thousand skaven, beastmen and plague knights. ‘Turn and be awed when Hamilcar Bear-Eater speaks to you.’ A few hideously malformed heads turned my way and I inched open the lantern’s shutter, delivering a blast of Azyr light that, even directed away, seared my eyes and burnt a scream out of me.

The blubbering squeals of gors and skaven made me feel marginally better.

When my vision cleared I saw that I had burnt a swathe through the Ruinous horde. Up on the gantry, the jezzails that had been aiming at me had all dropped their guns in favour of pawing at their bleeding eyes. I grinned at them for a moment. I’d never seriously doubted it, but it was good to be reminded that I still had it.

‘Over here, lord.’

Nassam stood at the outer rim of an expanding wedge of scorched bodies, sword glittering amber, but looking otherwise immaculate except for a few specks of blood in his magnificent beard. Brychen, on the other hand, apparently much recovered for the snarling proximity of the Ghurlands, had hurled herself onto a bestigor twice her size with an icon of Tzeentch stapled through its nose and was disembowelling it with obvious relish.

‘No time for that,’ I yelled at her.

‘The summer fades!’ Brychen shrieked over the beastman’s terrible lowing, spraying the surrounding transparency with bloody entrails. ‘The days shorten. The bowers turn red. And now comes the reaping time!’

‘Brychen. What in the–?’

I covered my mouth as something cancerous and black, and yet unmistakeably stomach-like, was skewered on the priestess’ spear, ripped out, and flung towards me. It sailed over my shoulder and burst on the ground with a wet splat. I made a face. Even I had limits. Getting as far as Nassam, I pushed the Jerech towards her, then turned to smash a blightking across the face with my lantern. Hamuz’s limbs flapped. The pox knight’s helmet snapped around with a wheeze of lanced sores. Then he hacked up yellow pus, sounding suspiciously as though he were laughing at me as it dribbled through his grille. I backed off after the greatsword.

Sigmar, but they were hard-wearing.

Brychen emitted an ululating shriek from behind me. I looked over my shoulder as she launched herself at the Skyre clan warsuit at the top of the portal steps. It raised an arm. Her spear clanged against the riveted metal. It raised the other, a pulse of green lightning stiffening trailing whip-claws into six-foot long blades, and swiped at her head. She knocked it over her head on the butt of her spear, then let the weapon fall from her hands. The warsuit’s engineer-pilot squealed in delight. Brychen’s fists burst into roaring flame. The engineer stopped squealing as Brychen tore open the machine’s chest armour and roasted the contents of the pilot’s cradle.

‘My lord.’

Nassam greeted me at the bottom step with a nod. I assumed it was for me, but then I realised he was gesturing towards el-Shaah, on my shoulder. I gave the captain a shake.

He wasn’t breathing.

‘No,’ I snarled.

I’d lost men before, I’d lost them by the tens of thousands, but Hamuz and Nassam were the first two I’d ever known well enough to really lose.

I was surprised by how angry it made me.

‘Hamuz is dead, lord,’ said Nassam, matter-of-factly.

‘Hamilcar does not answer to Death.’

I pounded up the metal steps, Nassam falling behind me, just as the skaven gun teams sorted themselves out and started firing on us. I ran past Brychen, the priestess swiping a bark-encrusted hand to swat aside a bullet and, giving a furious yell, flung myself head first into the portal.

Chapter twenty-seven

You are probably expecting a corridor of rushing stars, a roar of cosmic noise – if so, then prepare to be as underwhelmed as I was at stepping through Ikrit’s portal. There was a ripple across the surface of the portal that I barely even felt, and then before I’d so much as realised that I’d gone anywhere I was stepping out into pitch darkness, looking for a step that was unexpectedly not actively spinning away from my boot, and fell flat on my face, Hamuz on top of me. I took in a deep breath of rock. Ghur. I would have recognised it anywhere.

I would probably have kissed that rock were it not for the battle currently being fought over it.

As battles went, this one didn’t present a lot to look at, a rutting blackness of antlered heads and armoured, animal shapes, illuminated by the occasional spark of blade on blade. A brilliant flash of lightning pushed back the darkness for an instant, replacing it with something more blinding, but not before giving me a glimpse of a shattered wall of Liberator shields, the gaps in their formation plugged by desperate Judicators, fighting off the Skyre clans’ elite with storm gladius and crossbow stocks.

Wincing at the throbbing ache behind my eyes, I started to push myself up, just as Brychen and Nassam fell out of the portal behind me. A single warpstone bullet split the rippling skein from which we’d come and struck Brychen in the back. Her armour cracked and she cried out, arms going up as she crashed to the floor. Nassam dropped immediately to her side, but she waved him off, already getting up. Looking over her shoulder she scowled at the split bark.

‘Warpstone bullet,’ she snarled.

‘Stopped by wooden armour?’ said Nassam, amazed.

‘Says the man wearing glass.’

‘It’s crystal.’ The Jerech self-consciously brushed dust from his immaculate harness. It glittered sporadically in the lights of Azyr battle. ‘And a bit of leather.’

I set Hamuz neatly on the ground by the portal. I’d seen him back to his home realm. That felt like something. Not much, perhaps, but more than most got in exchange for the sacrifices they gladly gave. For a moment we remained like that, staring at each other, as if waiting for one of us to say something.

‘I’ll make sure your daughter gets a piece of the Allpoints, captain,’ I murmured. ‘She’ll have a horn off the Everchosen’s crown.’

‘We should leave him,’ said Brychen.

‘I am leaving him.’

‘You look like you are taking root.’

‘Get moving,’ I snapped at her. ‘There’s an army behind us.’

‘There’s an army in front of us,’ Nassam chipped in helpfully.

Brychen frowned over the sporadically flash-lit cavern. ‘Underground again. Is it too much to ask for a taste of open sky?’

‘It’s still up there,’ I said.

Clenching her fists, the priestess opened her mouth and groaned. The sound came from the bark of her vambrace rather than her mouth, however, and in a rupturing creak of emergent life her hand suddenly sprouted another spear.

‘Nice,’ I said, and meant it.

‘The snake in the forest litter we will be, then. The lightning bolt that strikes the solitary tree.’ She raised her spear in the air, the wooden point bursting into a molten amber that bathed the battlefield in its savage glow. ‘Destruction comes for you,’ she shrieked, bounding towards the embattled skaven. ‘With poison and fire, and hatred in her veins.’

Twirling my halberd, I strode after her.

I wasn’t going to let a mortal priestess take all the glory. Not with Akturus’ Imperishables right there.

‘Hamilcar returns to the Ghurlands!’ I hacked down a bleating bestigor just as Brychen flung herself onto a clanrat warrior’s back and ripped out his spine. She sent a lance of amber through the heart of another, leapt forwards and impaled a bullgor through the mouth with her dripping spear. I kept pace with long strides, hacking and yelling, finishing off the fuming bullgor for her with a hewing stroke of my halberd. She glared at me as I shouldered past. ‘Brothers and sisters of the Storm Eternal, stand fast. This battle is won.’ I hammered my halberd into the cogwork shoulder of a shock-vermin as it sought, wisely, to spin out of my way. ‘Because Hamilcar Bear-Eater joins it.’ A bestigor lowed and swung at me with a cleaver. I broke its shin with a sharp kick, then did the same to its jaw as it dropped neatly into the rising uppercut from my warding lantern. ‘Rejoice, and let the heavens hear your praises.’

‘Sigmar,’ I heard one of the Imperishables breathe. ‘He has come back.’

I thought that I recognised the voice of the Judicator who had first welcomed me to the Seven Words. His tone was, if anything, even more awe-struck than it had been then.

‘Yes, brothers,’ I shouted, before adding simply. ‘Yes.’

‘More on the way, lord,’ said Nassam, safeguarding my back by swinging at whatever came close to it with a giant glass sword.

‘Let them come!’ I thundered. ‘Let them all come. Let Ikrit know that here is where Hamilcar stands.’ I looped my halberd overhead, messily decapitating one bestigor and cracking the antlers of another behind me with the ferrule. ‘I am coming for you, warlock!’ I bellowed with every kill I made and every forwards step I took. ‘The God-King’s judgement comes for you on storm-forged sigmarite!’

‘Step!’ someone yelled, which seemed an incongruous sort of thing to be shouting in the middle of a fight. There was a resounding bang from somewhere. ‘Step!’ And another. The bestigor I had been reaching for obligingly rammed itself onto my blade. It lowed furiously. ‘Step!’ The clot of fur and flesh ahead of me gave way before a wall of black cartouche shields. Too tightly packed even to raise their arms, skaven and beastmen died as warblades stabbed out from behind the shield wall.

I lowered my halberd.

The battle was over. This was the bit that came after, the slitting of throats and the spearing of chests; some of those in need of finishing off just happened to be upright and holding weapons.

‘Loose!’

A flurry of boltstorm bolts thrummed over the shield wall. Everything within six feet of me suddenly dropped, a quarrel crackling from some part of their anatomy. One of the Judicators aimed his crossbow at Brychen, his stormsight clearly less than convinced by the green-skinned priestess with the amber-tipped spear and the bloody face.

‘She’s human,’ I barked, my voice hoarse from shouting. ‘And a ward of the Bear-Eater.’

‘I am most certainly not,’ she hissed.

‘Ignore her!’

‘Breach!’

The shield wall parted down the middle. The Liberators to my right took a step to the right, while those to the left went left. I ushered Nassam through and glared pointedly at Brychen until the priestess lowered her spear and stalked after him. I turned, backing up as the Arcway disgorged a fresh wave of beastmen and skaven, the occasional volley of gunfire cracking off the walls, the ceiling or a Sigmarite Shield. The shield wall crashed back together behind me, and I left the Imperishables to do what the Imperishables were renowned for doing.

Standing still.

‘You must have some nerve, Hamilcar.’ A Judicator-Prime walked towards me, identified by an ornate headdress that resembled a pair of golden serpents spilling down the sides of his helmet.

‘I do, brother. And then some. But don’t toast my victory just yet, for we have seen what lies on the other side of the portal and the warlock is holding his best until last.’

‘Toast your victory?’ The masked warrior sounded incredulous.

‘I said “don’t”.’

‘If not for you then we would have had Freeguild to call upon. Instead they are fortified in their barracks, or they were the last time we received a runner from the Seven Words.’

Brychen looked at me. ‘What did you do?’

I ignored her. ‘Is the Seven Words under attack too?’

‘Not that I have heard, but that means little now.’ The Judicator-Prime glared passingly over Brychen and Nassam, somehow finding something to disapprove of in the immaculately turned-out Jerech soldier, before looking me up and down. ‘My name is Kuphus, and you should know that Lord-Castellant Ironheel has issued commandments for your capture.’

Nassam moved in front of me. ‘Over my stilled heart.’ His scowl eased, and he dipped his head to the towering Judicator-Prime. ‘Lord.’

‘On the order of the God-King,’ Kuphus added.

‘It’s alright, Nassam,’ I said. ‘I wanted to find Akturus anyway.’

‘You did?’ asked Kuphus.

I shrugged.

Kuphus looked uncertain. ‘Well… the Lord-Castellant stands guard over the Seventh Gate. A large force of skaven and their foul allies broached the catacombs before my brotherhood were able to locate the entry portal and block the passages.’

I sympathised.

The catacombs had always been the Seven Words’ weak point. Or should I say weakest point? Had it not been for the Azyr Gate, and the archaeological mystery of their construction and continued expansion, then the whole network of passages would have been collapsed years ago. The Imperishables had been tasked wholly to their defence. That they had outnumbered my Bear-Eaters by eight to one tells you all you need to know about the catacombs’ vulnerability, and their importance to the God-King.

But only one of us got to sit in a throne.

‘The Lord-Castellant despatched conclaves to guard the main exits to the fortress,’ Kuphus went on. ‘But he remained in person to hold the Gate.’

That made sense.

Hold the Seventh Gate and you hold the hope of reinforcement from Azyr. Lose it, and the Paladins of Sigmaron would have absolutely no hesitation in slamming that gate shut and throwing away the proverbial key before risking any grand scale incursion into Azyrheim. It sounds too harsh to be believable, but believe me I have seen whole nations, hundreds of thousands of souls, forsaken for less. Much as Sigmar himself had once been driven to abandon the entirety of the Mortal Realms. Without the Realmgate, the Seven Words wouldn’t stand for a month – even without a skaven horde at the gates. It simply couldn’t feed and provision itself.

It was obvious that a zero-sum tactician like Akturus would hold it in person.

And if someone like me could deduce that, then so could Ikrit.

Bringing the warlock to battle before the portal to the Eternal City had a pleasing practicality to it. It would save me the bother of having to drag him too far. I smiled, distantly, imagining the approving roar of the free folk of Azyrheim as I paraded the captive warlock through the Sigmarabulum on our way to the Celestial Stair.

‘Bear-Eater,’ Brychen snapped.

‘I’m just getting my breath back,’ I said, irritably.

‘Hmmmm.’

‘I will send a warrior to escort you,’ said Kuphus.

‘That won’t be necessary,’ I protested. But not too hard. I don’t know what I would have done had the Judicator-Prime rescinded his demand.

‘I insist,’ said Kuphus, firmly.

Chapter twenty-eight

I had no idea of the way to the Seventh Gate, of course, but as Kuphus had obligingly insisted on an escort I was only too happy to defer to Aphis’ guidance. The Judicator walked with his crossbow leading. A heavy weapon of black sigmarite, golden serpents coiled up the faux wooden finish and a bolt fizzled in the track, lighting the passage ahead of us as well as any torch. Moisture and metallic mineral crystals glittered from the walls. After about half an hour of determined walking, I opened my mouth to strike up a conversation, only for the Judicator to whisk up a hand for quiet. Taking the fizzling crossbow one-handed, he pressed back against the wall. Nassam did the same, Brychen virtually sinking into the rock.

I planted my halberd in the middle of the corridor and set my hand on my hip.

‘What is it?’ I said, making no particular effort to be quiet. ‘I can’t hear anything.’

‘That is what troubles me,’ Aphis whispered. ‘The Seventh Gate is supposed to be under attack.’ The Judicator nodded down the passage. The light thinned out there, the walls struggling to hold their crystalline shine. ‘The gate chamber is just around this corner.’

I frowned into the gloom.

Akturus was the nastiest fighter I’ve ever known. Even for a warrior as exceptional as I, watching the Ironheel fight was an education in weak spots, pressure points and the darker arts of comparative anatomies.

‘It could be that the assault on the Realmgate has already been broken.’

It didn’t seem very likely, even to me.

I knew what Akturus was up against, and I doubted even Akturus’ near-supernatural ability to hit below the belt would avail him against the master warlock.

‘We should send back to Kuphus for reinforcement,’ Aphis murmured.

‘And tell him what?’ I said. ‘That there isn’t any fighting?’

‘I…’ The Judicator struggled over his answer to that.

‘Come on.’

I started down the tunnel. Brychen detached from the wall to flow after me, Nassam affording the Judicator an apologetic shrug before following. After a few seconds, the sputtering bob of Kuphus’ light followed, so either his crossbow was coming after us or the Judicator had taken up the rear.

Rounding the corner that Aphis had warned of, I ducked under the lintel of a duardin-cut archway and into the gate chamber.

The crackling glow of the Judicator’s boltstorm bolt expanded to fill the space, pushing into the thick shadows. Stout buttressing columns loomed out of the blackness. The capitals shone grimly, ancestor faces carved in the duardin style, the peeling remnant of lead and tin and golden paints clinging to the effigies like hair on mummified skin. The Seventh Gate glowered over the ancient glory, a thunderstorm within a ring of stone. It could have been my eyes adapting to the darkness, but the light from Aphis’ crossbow noticeably waxed in the deluge from Azyr.

There was a pair of torches on the floor, but they seemed to have been abandoned, extinguished. The tiles where they lay were scorched black.

‘Where is everyone?’ Aphis murmured.

My thoughts exactly.

‘Look at this.’ Brychen pointed to a black mark on the ceiling, immediately above one of the dropped torches.

‘A battle was fought here,’ I said.

‘Here?’ said Nassam.

‘We lost,’ I said.

I pointed to the scorch mark on the ceiling.

If you have ever wondered how a lightning bolt carrying the soul of a Stormcast Eternal is able to pass through solid rock on its way to the celestine vaults then know that you are not alone – I am happy enough just knowing that it does.

‘Akturus was here with a Thunderhead Brotherhood of over fifty Imperishables,’ Aphis hissed. He swept the surrounding columns with his uncertain light. ‘What in this realm or any other could account for such a force without leaving even one survivor, or evidence of their own dead?’

‘Ikrit,’ I muttered.

The warlock’s power had been colossal, and that had simply been my impression from being in his presence. The thought of him in unleashed battle was terrifying, I will admit. A gnawing sensation took up in my gut. The feeling was such an unfamiliar one that I initially dismissed it as a hunger pang. It had been a full day, and no little excitement, since my last meal with Aeygar and Barbarus and the rest of the Blue Skies. It was only after it spent the next few moments knotting itself into my bowels that I began to recognise it. Fear. The novelty of the sensation made it almost pleasurable. Like the ache in your muscles after a hard-won battle. What would be more glorious, more affirming, than achieving a feat that even I wasn’t convinced I could do? Through my triumph would Sigmar again be ascendant. With custody of the warlock, Nagash and Malerion and every other wayward power in the Pantheon would return as petitioners to the God-King’s court, and it would be me, Knight-Questor Hamilcar Bear-Eater, that would have brought them there.

‘Lord, over here,’ said Nassam, interrupting my daydream.

A flight of mineral-encrusted granite steps wound up to the Seventh Gate, turning a half circle so that the portal’s thunderous glare was directed towards the chamber’s wall rather than the entrance. The Jerech was crouched down by the bottom step. The shadows there were unnaturally deep, beneath the turned face of Azyr. Aphis swung his crossbow light towards it, excavating something metallic and black from the darkness. The golden fang of an asp glittered.

‘Akturus!’ Aphis cried.

‘He’s alive,’ said Nassam.

‘He would be,’ I said. ‘Ikrit wanted the lantern.’ I swore. ‘We’re too late.’

‘Then we should kill him now,’ said Brychen. ‘Before the warlock can use his light.’

‘I will murder you before you can even make the attempt,’ said Aphis, rounding on the priestess and bringing up his crossbow.

Brychen’s eyes narrowed to pinpricks in the light beam. ‘I gave the Bear-Eater the same mercy.’

‘She did,’ I grunted.

I didn’t exactly enjoy talking about it.

‘The lantern’s still here,’ said Nassam.

‘Wait, what?’ I said.

The Jerech looked up, pulling on the black sigmarite lantern that was, indeed, still hooked to Akturus Ironheel’s belt.

‘What in Sigendil’s light is going on here? Why would Ikrit leave it behind?’

‘Maybe you frightened him off, lord,’ Nassam suggested.

I looked at him, incredulous. ‘Really?’

The Jerech, however, seemed entirely straight-faced.

I appreciated the vote of confidence.

‘Or perhaps Akturus Ironheel injured the warlock,’ said Aphis. ‘Enough to drive him from the fight. He could have lost consciousness some time afterwards.’

‘Step away from him, Nassam,’ Brychen said, staring up into the ceiling vaults with inhumanly dark eyes. ‘Something smells rancid here.’

A titter of quiet laughter echoed back from the stone ceiling.

Aphis’ crossbow jerked up.

‘Your instincts are good-good, tree-thing. You make dangerous prey.’ I felt a wind brush through my hair, and when the voice returned, it was from behind me. Aphis’ crossbow lurched back around. ‘But not so good that she cannot sense-smell a trap before her foot is inside it.’

Brychen glanced my way and arched an eyebrow as if to mime, ‘Again?’

I scowled. ‘Malikcek.’

‘Did you think-think you had smelled the last of me?’ There was another titter and a breath of movement, the sense of something flowing from wall to wall. ‘No-no. Our game has been too enjoyable by far.’

‘This is no game,’ Brychen hissed.

There was a slow creak, as of timbers settling after a hard storm, and the priestess’ entire upper body began to glow. Amber light streamed through the latticework of her armour, and Malikcek slunk into the leafy shadows cast by her trappings with a snicker.

‘Games, yes-yes. There can be no winning for me. No losing. What is left then but how I play-play the game?’

‘He’s mad,’ Nassam murmured.

I agreed, but didn’t answer.

The assassin’s sanity was no doubt in a secure box somewhere in Ulgu.

‘Ikrit thought he could trap-hold you in his lair, Bear-Eater. Cut you open at his leisure. But I knew better. You are too good. Like me. Dead and returned. You live for the game.’

‘I have heard enough,’ said Aphis. I could see the dark eyes behind his mask roving in search of a target. As one of Sigmar’s Justicars, his senses would have been as sharp as mine, if not sharper. He saw nothing. ‘What happened to Akturus’ Thunderhead Brotherhood?’

The darkness chittered in mockery.

‘Squeak-ask instead what happened to my warriors? Or do you think so high of me, that I could overcome so lots-many of Sigmar’s finest without help?’

A swirl of movement deformed the brilliance of the Seventh Gate.

At first I thought it was something coming through, a figure clad in the black of the Anvils of the Heldenhammer, but the figure was too small, hunched over, more malicious than any Stormcast Eternal by far.

‘A thousand of Ikrit’s most expendable vermin I sent-hurried through the portal-gate to Azyr-place. The minions of the Man-God will kill-slay them very soon.’ Malikcek cackled. ‘And when it is finished-done, what then?’

‘They’ll seal the Realmgate,’ I breathed, aghast.

‘Vermin,’ Aphis spat, then pointed his crossbow and fired.

Malikcek parted before the crackling quarrel like fog before a bolt of lightning.

His laughter, when it came again, echoed from every darkened corner at once. Every vault and column. Every lingering shadow. Every graven image joined him in his mirth.

‘Go, Aphis,’ I said, the Judicator stubbornly reloading. ‘Through the Realmgate to Azyr. Whatever happens, you can’t allow the wardens of Azyrheim to close the Seventh Gate.’

‘You cannot expect me to leave my Lord-Castellant here with you.’

‘Akturus would give the same order were he conscious, and you know it. I think you know that I can’t go. And Kuphus would have shot Brychen first and asked questions later, so what do you think the Paladins of Azyr will do?’

‘What about him?’ said Aphis.

Nassam looked up.

‘A mortal?’ I said. ‘With a thousand skaven warriors between him and the Stormcast Eternals?’

Aphis scowled in indecision.

‘Tick-tock. Tick-tock.’ The edges of the chamber cackled mercilessly. ‘How long will a thousand clanrats last against a fortress filled with Sigmar’s best-best, I wonder?’

‘I am going,’ the Judicator shouted back, shouldering his crossbow. ‘I am going.’

‘Nassam,’ I said. ‘Go with him.’

‘Yes, lord.’

There was no argument: this, in a nutshell, is why I’ve always preferred leading mortal soldiers over Stormcast Eternals.

The Realmgate spasmed as first Aphis and then Nassam stepped through. Lightning bolt discharges of Azyr blue cut away the shadows to reveal the creature shrouded amongst the rafters like a gargoyle. As soon as the two warriors passed, however, it was gone. The darkness closed back in, almost physically pushing Brychen and me together until we stood back to back. I gripped my halberd two-handed. I heard Brychen’s living spear hum as she spun it.

‘Just we three,’ Malikcek hissed from hiding. ‘As it was on the mountain. Do you remember? Long-long ago it feels now. This time there will be no interruption. This time we will know-see which of us is best.’

I scowled into the darkness.

And I thought I liked to talk myself up before a fight.

‘Come on then, Malikcek. Show me what you’ve got and I’ll tell you if it’s enough to finally end the Bear-Eater.’

‘You will regret-rue your courage.’

The assassin burst out of the darkness in front of me.

My first instinct was to recoil, but I suppressed it. All of my will, my anger at the injuries to my pride that this skaven had inflicted, went into ignoring his knives and instead thrusting my halberd through his heart. The assassin evaporated before my blade with a snicker. As I’d known he would. I stepped in, spinning even as he reappeared behind me, reversing my grip and stabbing back with the haft. Malikcek squealed in fury and exploded into a tornado of black cloud, the occasional glimmer of steel or skaven feature taunting my blade. I hacked at it, but my halberd passed through. The assassin tittered as the shadow storm blew itself out. I roared. From behind me, there came a thunk and a splitting of wood as Malikcek’s knife sank into Brychen’s spear. She pushed him off, the assassin dissolving and streaming back into the shadows before I could turn around.

‘Hehehehe,’ he squealed, launching himself out of nothing, inches from my face.

‘Do we outnumber him?’ I bellowed, hacking, slashing, scissoring blades driving me back so hard that I couldn’t even think of returning an attack of my own. ‘Or is it the other way around?’ I saw an opening and scythed my halberd through the cackling mirage of an assassin.

The blessed sigmarite of my halberd couldn’t cut him. The breathing wood of Brychen’s spear passed straight through.

‘He bleeds like any creature of this realm,’ Brychen hissed, already winded. ‘I have seen you hurt him.’

‘I am the Bear-Eater,’ I yelled, watching the shadows as they fled from me before reforming in the lee of one of the giant duardin columns. ‘There is but one true immortal here!’ Taking my halberd two-handed like a quarter-staff, I charged at the assassin with a roar. Malikcek blocked with both knives held overhead, then kicked me in the knee with sigmarite-breaking force. I dropped onto the knee and he spun, smashing a footpaw through the side of my face that had me spitting blood and seeing stars. I must have blacked out for a split-second because the next thing I knew I was face down on the flagstones.

‘Squeak-say it. Malikcek is best.’

‘The greatest beast in the wood does not need to display its fangs,’ said Brychen. I looked up from the floor. Malikcek turned his black, partially transparent snout. The priestess extended her open palm towards us. ‘Every other creature will already fear its might.’ With the furious buzz of a vespis swarm, the twittering of a flock of flesh-eating birds and the roar of a ghyrlion, amber-hued light lanced from her fingertips.

Malikcek flailed, shadows boiling off the rat-shape within, and tripped over my prone form. He burst into the dark, dissolving back safely beyond the cone of the priestess’ light, striking his blades together as though sharpening a knife for carving.

‘This game is over-done. Malikcek wins.’

‘The game is a cycle,’ Brychen corrected. ‘There are no winners.’

She turned her palm up to the ceiling and as she did so the two wooden torches that I had seen lying on the ground (and frankly, forgotten about in all the excitement) burst into flame. The assassin squealed at the sudden light to either side of him and covered his eyes. Seeing his distraction, I drew my feet beneath me and charged. Even half blind and robbed of his shadows, the Deathmaster was a more gifted killer than I’d allowed for. He struck the inside of my halberd with his left-hand knife and tried to force the blow wide. He was twice as strong as any skaven assassin had a right to be. But I was a Stormcast Eternal. I was stronger.

I pushed through the attempted parry and drove my blade into the flesh and blood of his shoulder.

‘You have faced the Bear-Eater and you have lost!’

The assassin’s shriek of pain rose to become a rush of air, his body billowing up towards the ceiling.

It became a shriek again.

Black eyes glinted evilly from a black hood.

‘Only with your tree-thing witch to aid you.’

‘We are not ghurzelle displaying our horns.’ Brychen straightened with an obvious effort. ‘We are hyenae ripping apart a freak of nature.’

The priestess might have been impervious to the assassin’s taunts, but I felt my pride nettled.

‘I have this from here,’ I told her.

‘He is still dangerous.’

‘This is the fight for which I was forged. Stand back, priestess, and watch what the pinnacle of Sigmar’s creation can do.’

‘He is toying with you.’

Malikcek chittered as he drew himself into the darkness, his verminous form expanding to envelop the entirety of the ceiling.

‘She is not wrong, Bear-Eater. Cat and mouse is the game we play. You are not the cat.’

With a hiss of inrushing air, the assassin imploded.

I started back instinctively. It almost certainly saved my life. Malikcek exploded into my face with knife, teeth and whip-tail, all awhir with a rabid energy. The injury to his shoulder and the consequent loss of a blade in no way diminished the ferocity of his attacks. He didn’t seem to tire. He didn’t even seem to breathe insofar as I could tell. Everything that I had left to give went into matching him, blow for blow, and it still wasn’t nearly enough. Step by step, parry by bone-jarring parry, he forced me back.

‘You are the mad-fool, here. Not I.’

‘How so?’

‘You need-want to ask? Who is Malikcek? He is nothing. He is not master here.’

‘Ikrit? What of him?’

Malikcek cackled as he eroded my guard and slammed me against the wall. ‘There are two lords-castellant in the Seven Words. And the other is not Hamilcar Bear-Eater.’

I stared through Malikcek’s shadowy muzzle and into nothing. My own stupidity was suddenly so glaring it stole everything else’s light.

Broudiccan.

Ikrit was in the Seven Words, and I’d let him trick me. Again.

He was going after Broudiccan.

I didn’t even notice as Malikcek palmed aside my halberd and hammered an elbow into my breastplate. Fractures splintered through the sigmarite, a matching set of fissures spidering into the dressed stone behind me as my backplate and head smacked into it. The breath rushed out of me, and I wheezed down the wall to the floor.

I never even saw the deathblow coming.

Luckily, it wasn’t coming for me.

Dawn came from the direction of the Realmgate. The white-hot brilliance of Azyr’s billion suns scoured the gate chamber clean, shadows withering to bright light before the cosmic power of the Celestial. With tears running down my face and soaking my beard, I rolled over and scrambled blindly for shelter. My fingers touched the base of a column and I dragged myself behind it.

‘My brother Hamilcar is not alone in neglecting the presence of a Lord-Castellant,’ came Akturus’ dust-dry voice.

I gasped aloud, a strange mingling of exquisite pain and relief, and looked back around the column, only to recoil from the white wall of light and pain.

‘Now for the jugular,’ said Brychen, untouched by that storm of light.

Leaves rustled through the aether, and then a second light reared up like an amber bear to challenge the Azyri newcomer for its kill. Shielding my eyes, I forced myself to look back out. The light burned, but it was no longer as terrible as I had feared. I thought back to what Malikcek had said to me, back in Ikrit’s burrow, about how the Azyr light of a warding lantern might mend our damaged souls. Could he have been right? How faithful a restoration could it produce with half the pieces still lost to another’s body? Perhaps that would be good enough for Ikrit, but not for me.

Malikcek writhed in agony, suspended in mid-air like a black moth between two plates of coloured glass, one amber and one blue. The assassin steamed, growing ever more distinct as the opposing lights burned the shadow from his flesh.

The silhouette of a man wobbled towards the captive assassin.

My eyes trembled. I refused to let them blink.

‘Allow me, lord,’ said Nassam.

‘Glorious Highheim,’ I called back. ‘What are you doing here? I sent you through the Seventh Gate.’

‘You did, lord. But you didn’t tell me not to come back.’

I laughed, as the Jerech hacked his greatsword down.

Chapter twenty-nine

The skaven were, as you’ll remember, abroad in the High Gorwood in force well before the opening of Ikrit’s Arcway beneath the Seven Words, and I emerged from the catacombs to find the fortress under siege from above as well as from below. The old fort had weathered the two-pronged assault about as well as I would have expected.

Skaven rampaged through the twisting lanes in packs of a hundred or more. They kicked in doors, pried slates from roofs, dragged women, children, and men screaming into the streets, butchered the livestock that grazed on the grassy outcroppings with equal malice and no apparent distinction.

From the vicinity of the keep, thunder still rumbled. The growls of Dracoth. The reports of storm-infused lightning hammers and volleystorm crossbows.

Paladins of the Knights Merciless, godlike and aloof in shining white armour, scattered any muster of strength with repeated charges of their Fulminators and Tempestors. If the cries of those in the wards praying for deliverance penetrated their helmets’ icy veneer, then they betrayed no sign of caring.

Fighting spilled through the rest of the city.

From the Ironweld compound, gunfire crackled. The fortress manse of the conclave representative stood fast yet, as did a number of temples to the more redoubtable divinities of the Gorkomon (Sigmar and Gorkamorka, primarily) and at least half of the five Freeguild garrisons. Outposts of resistance in a sea of slaughter.

Everything else was screams and burning.

The fiercest fighting was centred around the main gatehouse.

As I watched, a great wheeled engine thundered down the Bear Road, repeated blasts of lightning from its fork-like projectors shredding the buildings to either side, before ripping itself apart, a seething ball of rapidly disintegrating skaven engineering rolling through the unmanned Freeguild stockades towards the Morkogon gate. The Heraldors’ horns sounded an incessant call to arms. The tattered banners of the Heavens Forged and of Lord-Celestant Frankos himself flew there, jewels of amethyst and curls of gold glinting still under the deluge of rust and rot and verminous fur. A ramshackle fleet of paddle-driven airships circled the embattled fortifications, skaven gunners scampering the weather decks to pour fire over the Astral Templars. The killing was as indiscriminate as it was deadly, but the masters of the skaven ruinfleet clearly considered a few hundred slaughtered clanrats to be fair exchange for one Azyr-bound stab of lightning.

The storm energies of a Stormcast warrior chamber aroused fully to war was an awesome spectacle, even to one such as I. Thick clouds and sudden downpours broke from blue skies. Mighty winds hammered the airships, disrupting their formations, forcing the overseers of the rowing decks to crack their whips lest their craft be dashed against the rocks of the Gorkomon.

A clarion voice rang out from the bastion wall.

‘Die, unclean vermin. Burn on a pyre of your own scabrous bones!’

Lightning speared the sky in half, carving through the hull of an airship and blitzing east to west along an overrun section of rampart. Skaven squealed, going up in tiny little flares of igniting fur. There was a creak, as of roasted bones, and a large part of the wall collapsed. ‘How dare you, heathen rats. Your ungodly souls are unworthy of the stones of this Free City. Your cairn shall be storm cloud and wind alone. The stench of burnt flesh shall be your sole remembrance.’ Another crack ripped the sky asunder, this time calling forth a volley of lightning that bombarded the entire length of curtain wall, reducing it to rubble despite the clear absence of so much as a clanrat within fifty feet.

I groaned, feeling my high spirits deflate.

Lord-Relictor Xeros Stormcloud still had that effect.

‘Was it asking too much of Sigmar for him to stay dead?’ I muttered. ‘Not for all eternity. Just a decade or two. If anyone has flaws in their spirit to warrant another pass through the soul-mills then it’s the Stormcloud.’

‘Ikrit has yet to show his own claws,’ said Brychen.

The priestess stood on the causeway steps beside me, inhaling deeply of the fresh air that gusted endlessly towards this high point from the seven corners of the aetheric cloud. The hollies clambering over her armour lattice fluttered violently against it.

‘What makes you say that?’ said Nassam.

‘Because the wall is still there,’ said Brychen.

‘Most of it anyway,’ I added. ‘No thanks to the Stormcloud.’

‘I see,’ said Nassam.

The Jerech looked at me guiltily, as if he felt the burn to my face and the cracks in my armour were partly his fault. None of it was anything that the lifting of a divine geas and six months in the Aetherdomes of the Sigmarabulum having my whims catered to by aelven maidens wouldn’t remedy.

But outwardly, I chose to suffer like a hero.

‘That’s where we’ll find him, though,’ I said.

‘Why is that, lord?’

‘Because that’s where Xeros is, and if Broudiccan learned just one thing from me in a hundred years as my second-in-command then it would have been to keep that maniac close.’

‘If that is where the prey is, then that is where we must go too.’ Brychen was already gliding down the steps.

I grunted to Nassam to go after her.

The square at the bottom of the stair was like a charnel pit, a mass grave for the enemy’s anonymous dead. But these bodies had belonged to no one’s enemy. Dropping to one knee, I swept blood-matted hair from a woman’s face. The pale, fish-eyed gaze of a corpse stared sightlessly back up.

Azyrite settler and Ghurite native, everyone in the Seven Words had understood the precariousness of their existence. Their walls were porous. The land was hostile. But they had known all that. Or had they? The more I thought about it, the more I wondered whether anyone would have chosen to build a life and raise a family from the harsh rock of the Gorkomon if they had really believed any of that.

Had they not simply believed that the Bear-Eater would protect them from it all?

A low growl rose from my throat.

‘They are dead,’ said Brychen. ‘They belong to the worms and the insects now.’

Anger filled me. Not the righteous wrath of a warrior of Heaven, but the unthinking fury of a man who had known life, and felt loss. Had I been the sort of man who thought about such things, then I might have wondered if this was the reason that Sigmar allowed his Stormcast Eternals to be denied such memories.

A crash sounded from one of the adjoining streets.

To me, it was the sound of something snapping inside my mind.

My head pulled around, like a dog catching the scent of prey, and, with a bark of anger, I broke towards it.

The narrow street was littered with wooden debris and gore. Upended carts. Butchered dray beasts. All the little things of frontier life, all strewn over the rough set grey cobbles. The sound that had drawn me had come from a weathered stone building, a pack of skaven fifteen-strong armed with heavy-bladed cutlasses and hatchets furiously hacking into the wooden shutters that blocked the windows. Every splintering blow brought squeals of delight from the ratmen’s foam-slicked jaws and screams of terror from those hidden inside.

The nearest clanrat turned, whiskers atwitch as I strode towards him, opening his mouth to squeak a warning only to issue a breathless mew of pain and horror as my halberd split his belly and splattered out of his back. His silent mouthing became a witless shriek as I hoisted him up into the air. Skaven blood trickled through the runic engravings of the haft to pool under my thumb. Another warrior rounded on me. I kicked him in the chest. Ribs snapped and he broke hard against the shutter, achieving with his own shoulder blade what he’d been trying to do with his sword.

The rest squeaked in alarm.

I must have been quite the avenging spectacle. Clad in amethyst and gold. Blood-drenched. Hair wild. Bedecked in emblems of savagery, and with one of their own shrieking as his entrails slowly unwound down the shaft of my weapon.

Dull eyes widened. Ears flattened against scraggy heads.

‘This is the Free City of Hamilcar Bear-Eater!’ I bellowed. ‘Those who dwell within do so under my protection. Those who would threaten them are mine to butcher and defile as I see fit. Behold me, vermin, and then behold yourselves. Nothing but a slow death and a spike awaits you here!’

With a squeal of terror, the skaven to the rear of the pack spun and fled. The rest followed in brisk order, scrambling over the wall that surrounded the little yard and tearing up the street after their leader.

I bellowed after them, shaking my still-squealing banner.

‘Tell your brethren – the Bear-Eater does not surrender the Seven Words!’

Planting the butt of my halberd on the ground, leaving the skaven up there to bleed out, which he was making excellent progress on, I heard the sound of a locking bar being lifted and a door being opened.

‘Lord Hamilcar?’

A thickly bearded Ghurite man peered through the crack between door and frame, fear in his eyes, but wonder in his tone. As soon as my eyes crossed his, he turned back to address those still inside. ‘It’s Hamilcar. Lord Hamilcar has come back.’ I heard the word ‘Hamilcar’ being passed around as the door was pushed wide. The Ghurite stepped out. An old leather jack strained on its ties around a robust frame, an heirloom matchlock pointing up at the sky. He had old Freeguild tattooed all over him, possibly even literally, but as you know, I never did learn to read. More men and women, at least a score and a half of them, poked out after him, all armed with pickaxes, hunting bows or stonecutting hammers. Even the children.

I glanced over my shoulders as further doors and shutters were cast out, more people stepping out into the street.

‘Hamilcar is back.’

‘The Bear-Eater will rout the vermin, you’ll see.’

‘We’re saved.’

I even saw a few current Freeguild uniforms amongst them.

I couldn’t blame them for abandoning their garrisons to defend their families. Kuphus or Akturus might have, but not I. They were only human, and I remembered what that felt like. I wondered if we were really so different. Was I not guilty of the exact same offence by being here instead of chasing after Ikrit as Sigmar’s geas demanded of me?

‘We have to go,’ Brychen hissed, behind me, as if aware of my thoughts. ‘If we do not then Ikrit will capture your friend, Broudiccan.’

Raising a clenched fist in salute, I grinned maniacally for the hundred or so men and women that had gathered to see me.

‘Men and women of the Seven Words!’ I yelled, only to have my words answered by a roar of relief and defiance that brought my burnt skin out in goose bumps. I opened my hand as if for quiet, but I didn’t call for it or wait for it. I didn’t want quiet. I wanted their anger. ‘Seven Words!’ I screamed. Another bloody cheer, louder this time than the first. I shouted over them. ‘I will fight for you, but even I cannot hold our city alone. That is right. Our city. Yours and mine. Fight for your homes. Fight for your lives. Fight here, now, and Hamilcar Bear-Eater will fight with you!’

The mortals thrust old and improvised weapons in the air and gave a tumultuous cheer. ‘Hamilcar!’

I took an enormous breath.

The realmsphere stood still.

‘HAMILCAR!’

The strength of their return ovation was empowering, as if belief alone could render sigmarite impregnable. There was a part of me, even back then, that was wise enough to realise that for every ten stupid things I’d ever convinced myself were excellent ideas, nine would have been birthed on the heady crest of a wave like that.

‘We’ll fight!’ I yelled. ‘And we’ll win! For Sigmar and the God-King!’

‘For Hamilcar Bear-Eater!’

‘This house of stone is a distraction,’ Brychen hissed. ‘No different to Malikcek.’

‘These are Sigmar’s people,’ I said, speaking loudly enough for everyone to hear.

‘Sigmar has cast his people freely across the Mortal Realms. If we do not end Ikrit here, do you think these will be the last to suffer?’

I frowned.

It wasn’t that they were Sigmar’s people as much as that they were my people.

‘He slaughtered my people too,’ Brychen went on. ‘He murdered my brother, polluted our sacred grounds, stole the gifts of my goddess. This does not end for me until I have fed his dead body back to the earth.’

‘I will not abandon my people.’

‘Then this is where our two winds blow apart.’

‘Don’t be so drama–’

I turned to face her but, much to my chagrin, the priestess had simply left. Nassam, at least, was still there, his massive quartz greatsword held in two hands and resting against one shoulder. I narrowed my eyes. I couldn’t shake the feeling that he must have combed his moustaches during his brief sprint from the square. Shaking my head, I turned back to the crowd.

I reasoned that as long as I was the one seen saving the Seven Words then it really didn’t matter if Brychen got in there first. I still had Sigmar to satisfy, of course, but one problem at a time – that was the Bear-Eater approach to war.

‘Go then,’ I shouted after her. ‘I will join you by the pyre of skaven dead that I will raise over the Morkogon gate when my city is saved.’ A boisterous cheer went up at that, and I saluted them with my halberd. The skaven warrior had long since ceased struggling. I knew that I was getting a little carried away, but none of my many great victories had been achieved by doing what sensible heads would have done in my place. Would Gardus have charged headlong into the stronghold of Uxor Untamed with just fifty warriors at his back? No, he would not. Would Vandus have had the foresight or the common touch to get himself euphoric on fungus beer, accidentally start a war with the Skarabrak lodge, only to then wake the next morning with a sore head and fifty thousand moonclan berserkers ecstatically avowed to Sigmar’s cause?

No and no and no again.

Only Hamilcar.

‘When every last skaven in the Seven Words is dead!’ I yelled.

‘When they’re dead!’

‘Hamilcar is back!’

‘What now then, lord?’ said Nassam, as though we’d just arrived in an unfamiliar city and he was uncertain whether ale or lodgings should take precedence.

‘The Seven Words are home to five thousand soldiers and almost thirty thousand civilians,’ I told him. ‘We rally them all. We arm them. And then we drive the skaven from our walls.’

A voice interrupted me.

‘That is not a plan, Hamilcar Bear-Eater,’ called Vikaeus, freezing my heart stiff. ‘It is a prayer.’

Chapter thirty

The exuberance of the crowd fell cold, dead. Magnificently barded in white plate and silver, Cryax walked with cold-blooded malevolence down the narrow street. The muscular roll of the Dracoth’s shoulders caused his rider to sway. Vikaeus herself inspired every bit as much terror as her Celestial mount, if not more so. Her white armour shone, hard and untouchable as a glacier, and faintly luminous as though a light had been encased within. A plume of the same colour and a frost-blue cloak tore in the wind. She was a crack in the ice. A portent of doom from the heavens. She stared with cold judgement through the slits in her mask as the two Concussors riding as her escort reined in behind her. I felt the warmth drawn right out of my bones. I tried to think of something biting to say to her, something bold and witty to fire the people’s passions to my side, but my tongue was tied.

‘This plan of yours rests on blind faith and self-confidence,’ she said, and harder words have never been carved in ice and rammed through a Stormcast Eternal’s chest. ‘It hardly requires a prophet of Sigmar to foresee as much of you.’

I was too occupied by staring to notice her dismount. I only realised she was walking towards me on foot when I heard the creak of the little yard’s gate, the Lord-Veritant pushing it open on the glittering ferrule of her abjuration staff.

My heart pounded. As if it had never done anything so pure and unforced in all its long years in my hard, storm-forged chest. It was fists on an ice wall. Broken knuckles and torn nails. Suddenly the Eternal Storm and Sigmar’s great war of liberation seemed trivial, trifling concerns, matters of no consequence to beings with hearts free to think and choose, and most of all to feel. My heart and mind must have gone through several rounds of this between themselves before I managed to moisten my tongue sufficiently to make a word.

‘Vikaelia.’

‘That is not my name,’ she said, simply.

‘It was. Once.’

I couldn’t make out the Lord-Veritant’s expression through her mask. I had no doubt that she would have been puzzled by mine.

‘How would you know such a thing?’

‘I…’

In an act of astounding rarity, speaking volumes for my state of disarray, I thought before I answered.

It came to me then, in sudden, abject clarity, exactly what Vikaelia had been to me in life. She had been my queen. I had coveted her, I had taken her, and I had loved her fiercely. Everything I had felt for her before, I felt again then. It was heat and noise. Emotion without consequence. Plunging without course or anchor into the unformed insanity of the Eightpoints was as nothing compared to what I felt then. It was a rush, bubbling and messy, an indiscriminate mess of feelings that knew only what they wanted and couldn’t conceive of a future in which they might care who got hurt in the taking. All of this I ached to tell her, but before the words came to me, I found that I could not.

Because though a part of Hamul might have been reborn in me, she was no longer Vikaelia. She was the property of no one, not even Sigmar, for the God-King demanded only the respect of his warriors, not the fealty that a weak lord demands of his vassals.

She would remember none of it.

As delirious as my earlier revelation had been, this one was the kick in the liver that, in my experience, inevitably followed any feeling that intoxicating.

It felt like the greatest evil ever committed against the good order of the God-King, that a man could carry such love beyond death only to find it not only unrequited, but forgotten.

Vikaeus made to grab me.

I backed off, swatting aside her gleaming white gauntlet.

I’m not sure what I was afraid would happen if I let her touch me. That I would petrify in a block of ice, perhaps? Or, less spectacularly – but far more likely, and all the more terrifying for that – that I might just surrender.

Nassam stepped in front of me. Vikaeus looked down on him as though he were a blemish on her boot.

‘The ire of the God-King is not towards you, Jerech. But it can be.’

‘Lord?’ he asked.

‘It’s alright.’

He surprised me by looking relieved. ‘Lady,’ he said, bowing to the Lord-Veritant, and then withdrew.

‘So you are capable of being reasonable,’ said Vikaeus, the mortal already dismissed from her thoughts. ‘The lords-sacristan did indeed speak truthfully. You have been changed.’

‘Would you believe me if I told you that I was a Knight-Questor, here on a mission of divine significance from Sigmar himself?’

‘Akturus wove me the same tale. He should have known better from the last time you tricked him.’

‘This is different.’

‘Because Sigmar sent you?’

‘Yes!’ I shouted, smacking my hands together. Retreating into the old habits helped obscure the fact that my hands were shaking.

Vikaeus took another step towards me.

‘And yet it was Sigmar who sent me to bring you back. Explain that.’

‘He had to, because you see, Ong, the first of the Six Smiths–’

‘I do not need you to spin me a tale, Hamilcar. I need you to surrender your weapon and come with me.’

‘Now?’

‘Yes. Now.’

I laughed, incredulous. ‘The skaven are going to destroy this city. Sigmar’s city, Sigmar’s people.’ I spoke louder, warming to my theme and the growing grumbles of the men and women watching our exchange. ‘What kind of Lord-Veritant would allow such a thing on her watch?’

Vikaeus looked coldly around her. ‘If Sigmar wished this city saved he could have sent another. He sent me. You will return with me through the Seventh Gate, Lord-Castellant Hamilcar Bear-Eater, and back to the Forge Eternal where the Relictor and Sacrosanct temples of your brothers have commanded your soul be incarcerated.’

A spontaneous cry of ‘No!’ went up from the people around us.

A snarl from the Dracoths silenced them, but Vikaeus looked up again, as if conscious for the first time that she was in the middle of a powder keg. ‘He is a danger to himself and all he touches,’ she announced, absolute in the authority of her words, but with all the rhetorical nous of a bloodletter of Khorne.

‘He’s the Bear-Eater!’ I roared, pumping my fist in the air, and bringing an outraged cheer from the mob.

‘It is for his own wellbeing as much as all of yours,’ Vikaeus responded, calmly.

‘What is your wellbeing worth to you in a skaven slave pit, or worse, a cook pot? Am I dangerous? Hah! I say let the skaven be the judge of that!’

‘The God-King commands otherwise.’

Now I may not have had Vikaeus’ vaunted – and to my mind, grossly oversold – gift for prophecy, but I had a good sense for when a crowd was about to turn. After everything that had happened to me during my last escape from the Seven Words, I wasn’t about to underestimate how beloved I was by the people of the Gorkomon again. I didn’t doubt that the citizens of the Seven Words would attack if Vikaeus tried to take me by force.

Dracoths or no Dracoths.

And then things really would turn ugly.

‘You’ll have to kill a lot of people to get at me,’ I warned her.

‘The Hamilcar I know would never shield himself with the blood of those he claims to protect.’

Vikaeus advanced on me. I continued backing away until my back hit the hovel’s door.

‘They are the men and women who should be defending this place,’ I said.

‘Given that it was your misguided rebellion that broke the Freeguild in the first place, I find your concern of dubious sincerity now.’

‘That was never my intention,’ I said, feeling for the door handle behind me. ‘If you want someone to blame for that, you should help me look for Broudiccan.’

Vikaeus tutted in disappointment. ‘Are you trying to shift blame?’

‘Is it working?’

She stepped in closer. Near enough for my skin to shrink from the cold emanating from her reforged skin. ‘No one ever speaks the truth to a Lord-Veritant. Not at first.’

‘I was afraid of that. I’ll have to try something else, then.’

‘You have nothing left to try, Hamilcar.’

‘You really are the worst prophet, Vikaelia,’ I said, as I ripped the door from its frame and hit her with it.

Chapter thirty-one

Those things I told you earlier, about how you’ve never seen a Stormcast Eternal at full tilt? Forget it all – you don’t know what haste is until you’ve run through a sacked city with three Knights Merciless on Dracoths behind you.

I ran into the side of a building at a full sprint. It looked like an alehouse, but I paid it no mind. Grabbing hold of the projecting eave, I pulled myself up, my feet scrambling on the wall, and rolled onto the sloped roof. Quickly onto my feet, I drew enough acceleration from somewhere to leap the small rear yard and the narrow ravine it backed onto, landing onto cobbles in a clattering roll that carried me immediately back into a sprint.

The alehouse collapsed behind me.

Cryax bellowed and pounded through the back wall. I glanced over my shoulder. Vikaeus’ icy halo burned through the pall of crushed mortar and dust and stung my eyes. The following Concussors smashed what was left of the alehouse to rubble as Cryax bunched the gargantuan muscles of his haunches.

I’d wager you’ve never seen a Dracoth jump.

It’s not a sight for the faint-hearted.

Even from where I was, halfway down the street, I felt the ground shake and heard the shutters in the windows around me rattle. I found an extra push of speed.

‘Hamilcar is here!’ I screamed, one of the shutters ahead of me nudging warily open on the barrel of a longrifle. ‘The battle is not yet over!’

I sprinted past.

While I knew most of the alehouses in the Seven Words (and indeed, most of the Free Cities of the Mortal Realms), I’d been in too great a hurry to notice which one I’d just passed, or which street I was on now. The Seven Words was a honeycomb of narrow, ill-kept little lanes like this one, switchbacking their way around the Gorkomon’s inhospitable crags. It was hardly suited to the trio of enraged Dracoth knights and I knew it.

If Vikaeus had ever ventured beyond the keep then she would have known it too.

Skidding around a razor-sharp bend, I veered past the eviscerated remains of a Gorwood horse still lashed to a cart, my armour scraping the wall, bouncing and rattling off downhill.

I heard the Dracoths bellow behind me, the scrabble of foot-long claws on cobbles, then the crash of a Celestial war-beast bursting side-on through the stone wall of a house. The beast roared in outrage as the roof cascaded over its armoured head. I heard the muffled clang of a Concussor pitching from the saddle.

I grinned, glancing over my shoulder as Vikaeus and the last Concussor slowed through the turn before urging their monstrous mounts on after me. I had already doubled my lead on them. I knew where I was going. They couldn’t catch me now. I even felt confident enough to slow down at the sight of a group of armed Freeguilders holding their little patch of drystone wall.

‘You need more than a Dracoth to beat Hamilcar Bear-Eater in a race to the fight,’ I bellowed as I flashed past.

The ground shook as Cryax built back speed.

Too late now.

Like every street in the outer wards, this one wound its involuntary little way around the rough terrain to feed into the main traffic of the Bear Road. Exactly where I wanted to be.

I burst out of the lane and onto the wide, ruined concourse of the Seven Words’ one genuine road. I quickly looked both ways. The devastation that had been wrought by the skaven’s wheel machine was plain to see. It had ploughed through Freeguild stockades and Frankos’ diligently erected chokepoints like a stampede of wild beasts, leaving behind wooden debris and a warping haze of charge. And into the destruction had come the skaven, as surely as rotten meat produced flies. Judging from the earthy hummocks of spoil poking up through shattered cobblestones, they had come from beneath. The Seven Words had more holes in it than one of my alibis for failing to attend early morning drills, and I could hardly fault Akturus for letting a few slip his notice. In any case, shock-vermin were still shimmying down ropes dangling from the keels of low-hovering airships while several thousand more had gone for the expedient route of simply smashing open the main gate. The surrounding swathe of road was awash with armoured skaven warriors and verminous beasts, bludgeoning through a stubborn, but ever-diminishing line of Heavens Forged.

I tried to pick out Broudiccan, Xeros or Frankos from the mayhem, but I didn’t have the time for a proper look.

Swinging its huge arms, as if needing that initial boost to get the massed musculature of its upper body moving, one of the skaven war-beasts rounded on me and roared. Its head was that of a rat, hunched into gigantic shoulders, albeit enlarged to twice the size of a man’s. Its gargantuan build was that of an ogor. The skaven beastmakers call them rat-ogors, the famed ingenuity of their race inexplicably deserting them at the end. I had encountered several of the mutated rat-beasts before, but this one was the first to have been encased in cogwork battle armour, warpfire dribbling from nozzles appended to each fist.

Trust Ikrit to make a foul thing a hundred times worse.

Red eyes glittering with madness and childish hate, the rat-ogor lumped its balled fist at me. I ducked under the blow, and spun behind the beast, still working off speed as I backpedalled away from it.

I found myself perfectly positioned to watch as Cryax and Vikaeus emerged from the alley.

Anything less massive than a rat-ogor on the receiving end of a Dracoth would have been trampled, no questions asked, but the skaven war-beast was simply barged backwards – towards me. Claws and the ill-fitting armour plates nailed to its calves gouged sparks out of the cobblestones as it slowed down. Wrapping its arms around Cryax’s neck, it delivered a high-pitched mangling of squeak and roar. The Dracoth drowned it out with its own bellow. Lightning bolts sprayed from the Celestial beast’s open jaws and flayed the meat from the rat-ogor’s head. Incredibly, even with half its face dribbling towards its groin, the rat-ogor didn’t let go. Vikaeus swept up her sword, the bound energies of the merciless storm flickering along its length and haloing the Lord-Veritant in divine fury. She hacked through the rat-ogor’s clutching arm in a single blow.

The following Concussor did the rest.

Still running blind, the second Dracoth blundered into Cryax’s hindquarters, shoving him forwards, through the squealing rat-ogor, and finally throwing the pain-addled beast to the ground. A second rat-ogor waded towards the pair like an armoured ape, green light bleeding from the sutured ruin of its eyes. The Paladin swung his lightning hammer, shattering thick metal plates and knocking the rat-beast off its stride. The Dracoth smashed it to the ground with a swipe of its head, then proceeded to disembowel it with frenzied motions of its claws.

Cryax crunched over the body of his rat-ogor, his ice-rimed eyes intent on me.

The currents of battle drove a pack of clanrat warriors squealing into the space between us. Cryax snatched a clanrat up in his jaws, bit the screaming ratman in half, and flung the pieces over his shoulders. Vikaeus levelled her sword towards me, her staff held high. She blazed like a star-goddess, a divine creature of vengeance.

‘You cannot flee Sigmar’s judgement, Hamilcar.’

‘Come here and get me, Vikaelia!’

Even as I yelled it, a drover-engineer in spiked armour (designed, I expect, to make the wearer less appetising to his charges) snapped a charge-rod into the backs of a pair of half-machine rat-ogors until they gave in and lumbered towards the Lord-Veritant.

‘Hamilcar!’ she screamed at me before she and Cryax disappeared under a sheet of warpfire from one of the rat-ogor’s fist weapons.

I spun away.

I was sure that she’d be fine.

Then I saw something that stopped me short.

‘Broudiccan.’

The Lord-Castellant held his ground at the centre of a ragged crescent of Heavens Forged Paladins. Thunderaxes and stormstrike glaives took a fearsome tithe of the endless hordes being flung at them, matched only by the castellant’s halberd of the huge warrior himself. The Imperishables’ approach to warfare might have been as alien to me as Lord-Ordinator Ramhos’ approach to castle-building, all squares and lines and structural members, but the Astral Templars still did it the old-fashioned way. The way that Hamul of the White Spear would have recognised it. The Heavens Forged were no different. Every warrior before me was the hero of his own saga, turning his or her god-like vigour and unbound strength to their own glory with only half a nod towards ‘victory’ or the survival of their brothers and sisters. If it appeared to the uninitiated as if the Paladins were tearing every sinew in the defence of their Lord-Castellant then it was only because someone – and this had Frankos of the Heavens Forged drawn all over it – had had the presence of mind to put them next to him before the fighting had begun.

The ground before the Decimators and Protectors was heaped high with skaven dead, a corpse moat ten feet wide and five deep that would have been impressive were it not also grim testament to how far the skaven’s rabid ferocity and sheer numbers had driven the Paladins back.

As I watched, I saw a Decimator dazzled by the glaive-routines of a shock-vermin cog-pack a dozen strong before finally going down. Another fell to a sniper’s bullet. I snarled upwards as the lightning bolts bearing the two warriors back to Azyr blew the circling airships aside.

Broudiccan bellowed for more from his Paladins. More strength. More courage.

He was good, but he was no Hamilcar Bear-Eater.

I started towards them, only to feel my legs waver at the first step. The encroachment of an all-too-familiar evil had made them freeze. I wouldn’t go so far as to call it dread. Not exactly. Not unless pushed. But unease washed through me like the icy breath of a frost-drake. My guts knotted, tugging on my insides, as if to pull away from me and towards some titanic outward force.

I looked in that direction.

The battle fell away from me. Scales fell from my eyes.

I gripped my halberd as though it was the last implement of pure sigmarite in the Mortal Realms.

Ikrit had joined the battle.

Chapter thirty-two

Encased in armour of gold and bronze and iron rust, the master warlock stood a head taller than even his largest warriors. The air cooked where he strode, engulfing all but him alone in a haze of raw heat and brutalised power. The cobblestones beneath his tread cracked and steamed, as though bearing the weight of a being many times his physical size. Whether it was the broken glass trail that linked our damaged souls or some divine gift of his, the warlock sensed my presence as I had sensed his and turned. Frenzied clan warriors scurried on between us, oblivious to the witching glare of his lensed eyes that passed over them. Death leapt from his eyes to mine, and it was only by the turbulent energies of the storm in my veins that I was able to resist the explicit command of his gaze to cease living.

Ikrit’s jaws parted in what might have been a snarl. Diamond-edged teeth flared with a faint corona of trapped Azyrite light, and the sight of that pure energy on his decaying lips purged my muscles well and truly of any lingering paralysis.

I gripped my halberd until my knuckles whitened.

‘I’m going to–’

The outraged bellow of a Dracoth cut me off just as I was about to get started.

I looked over my shoulder to see Cryax and Vikaeus hacking and trampling their way through the skaven horde. The other Concussor was still caught some way behind, but closing the gap determinedly.

‘I know-smell this one from our dream,’ said Ikrit.

‘My dream.’

‘You like-like her smell.’

‘I don’t need to hear that from you.’

‘I know-see what you need. We are connected now. Let me help-help.’

The warlock raised his giant metal claw, curling in the stiffly jointed digits until only one remained, pointing at me. The skaven around him suddenly flopped to the ground, grasping at their throats and gasping. Then they shrivelled, their flesh ageing a thousand years as if their perishing were fuel for the dark purple and green flames that enveloped the warlock. An amethyst bolt lanced from Ikrit’s paw. The skaven in its path fell by the score, slain instantly, their souls banished from their bodies and drawn in to empower the sorcerous bolt still further. I reached instinctively for my warding lantern, a little burnt flesh be damned! But I was too slow.

It lanced over my head.

I spun around with a cry, and a blast strong enough to have brought down the wall of a stormkeep hit Cryax in the chest. His sigmarite peytral, that’s the chest-plate to you and me, cracked. I heard ribs break. Flayed skaven souls broke from the amethyst firestorm in a screaming torrent, ripping away frost-white scales and armour plates as the mighty Dracoth was tossed to the ground like an emptied aleskin. Lord-Veritant Vikaeus was hurled from the saddle. She rolled along the ground, arms flailing, losing her staff, but by accident or sheer indomitability of will managing to keep hold of her sword.

I lost her to the melee.

‘Vikaelia!’

Part of me wanted to run to her. A powerful and still growing part. But the better part, that which I had promised Hamuz el-Shaah would always remain dominant, held true.

I turned to Ikrit.

‘Sigmar has reforged me as Knight-Questor. He has charged me with your banishment to Sigmaron, and I will see it done.’

I had expected a sneer, a cackle, a disappointed shake of that mechanical muzzle, but the warlock appeared to take my threat entirely at face value. ‘I will go-scurry to Azyr-place, storm-thing. One day. When I am strong enough. Too strong for your God-King to stop me take-stealing it from him.’

‘What could you want with Azyr?’

‘There is a throne in the mountain-place you call Highheim. It will be mine.’

Ikrit ran at me.

Clad in rusted plate, he didn’t look as if he should be able to move anywhere like that fast, but the air seemed to be complicit, drawing aside as if giving him a free run while the ground itself propelled him forward.

Without waiting for him to make the distance, I threw myself at him with a roar.

My halberd crashed down onto the shoulder joint of his armour. It was like striking a shard of the Mallus, thinner than my finger, denser than worlds. The shock of hitting it threw back my arm. Sparks of energy with at least six different colours crawled over my halberd blade. At the same time Ikrit grabbed the device on my breastplate. I must have been twice his height, yet he lifted me off the ground like a broken toy. I backhanded him across the jaw, snapping his head back, then brought my elbow hammering down into the joint of the arm that held me. It collapsed under the blow and released me. I backed quickly away. My halberd continued to bleed a rainbow as I spun it warningly between us.

Ikrit cocked his head.

The ground beneath me trembled.

I looked down, just as the cobbles beneath my feet broke open, green shoots ripping free of the earth beneath. They whipped for me, one of them finding an ankle and dragging it down. Had I simply been caught while standing then that would have been bad enough, but it snared me as I had been pedalling back from the warlock and sent me crashing down onto my back. More creepers erupted from the broken ground, lashing around my arms, legs, waist and neck before I had a chance to rise.

‘Do not fight-struggle, Hamilcar. You should know-learn by now. Things become painful when you struggle-fight.’ Lightning surged through the creeping vines. I howled in pain and the warlock chittered, watching me writhe, before dismissing the spell with a twitch of his whiskers. ‘Give-give the lantern.’

‘Come and take it, Ikrit. Or are you afraid I’ll bite?’

‘I like-like you, Hamilcar. You remind me of… life. I do not want-wish to hurt you again.’

I made a dismissive snort. ‘You think that hurt?’

The warlock’s armoured jaws clanked silently open and shut, which I was taking for laughter, or at least the physical manifestation of the idea of laughter. ‘I was a living rat once. I lived in a place other to this. A gone place. All over that world I travelled, seeking knowledge, power. I found-learned immortality of a sort.’ With the lighter gauntlet of his left paw, he indicated to his undead, armour-plated frame. ‘But not like this. True immortality. The power to die and come again. That you gift-gave to me.’ His eyes flashed with the madness of power. ‘And to remember. Many things I had forgotten. One day… One day I hope-want to remember my real name.’

He crouched over me with a squeal of joints and set his heavy claw over the lantern where it was hooked to my waist.

‘I knew that Sigmar would resist me. I knew it would do damage and was prepared. Yes-yes. I knew. That is why I made certain-sure to take a Lord-Castellant. For the lantern-light.’ He looked down, snarling. ‘But Malikcek let you escape-flee.’

‘If it makes you feel better, he’s dead now. I killed him.’

Alright, it had been Nassam that had killed him, but Ikrit didn’t need to know that, did he?

‘That you are here now squeak-told me that already. He was good-good at what he did for me, but a god must outgrow even his mightiest servants.’

‘I have been in the presence of a god or two lately. You don’t walk on the same plane.’

‘You hope-hope to goad me? Anger withered from this flesh a hundred lifetimes ago.’

He pulled the lantern hard, twisting the loop handle out of shape and snapping my belt. It came away in his oversized claw.

‘It’ll hurt,’ I warned.

‘The dead do not know-feel pain. Not as you understand it.’

‘It’ll probably kill you too.’

‘I am already dead. I have been dead-dead for thousands of years.’ He pulled his gaze from the lantern to look down on me. ‘There are those in your own Pantheon who would stop-think before facing me alone. What madness possessed you? To think that you could best-slay me?’

With a growl of effort, I lifted my head from the ground. The vines that held me dug into my flesh, groaning as they thickened to counter me.

‘I’m about to tell you something that you can never share.’

Ikrit leaned in. His voice was husky and low. ‘Never-never.’

‘I am Hamilcar Bear-Eater. I always win because I am never alone.’

The warlock looked puzzled for a moment, then sneered. ‘Vikaelia? Bringing her and her warriors with you was a smart-clever trick. But the Veritant-Lord is as fearsome to me as you are. They are nothing. Two more warriors will be swallowed-killed by the numbers of my great-great horde.’

‘Two warriors? I assumed warlock engineers could count if nothing else. Look again.’

With my head fixed to the ground, I glanced aside with my eyes.

From the shattered buildings to either side of us, bowmen and handgunners of a rejuvenated Freeguild poured fire onto the Bear Road. I recognised some amongst them from the men and women I had seen on my flight through the Seven Words, and heard my name being shouted like a rallying cry. From every side street, back alley and gutted shop front, leather-armoured soldiers and lightly armed civilians pushed into the flanks of the skaven horde. I thought I caught the glitter of Nassam’s quartzsword amongst them, but there were too many of them to be certain.

‘Mortals,’ said Ikrit, in the same tone with which one might dismiss ‘insects’.

With a quip of my eyebrows, I gestured behind me.

The warlock hissed in displeasure.

‘No,’ Ikrit hissed.

‘Yes,’ I grinned.

It was Akturus Ironheel.

I couldn’t see him, but I could hear the rhythmic, almost mechanical tread of his Liberator shield walls closing off the road behind me. A few flashes from the Lord-Castellant’s warding lantern had patched him up nicely, and thanks to my efforts in the catacombs, the Imperishables had had a few warriors to spare. I heard the terrified squeals of skaven warriors falling between the relentless advance of the Imperishables and the weapons of the Freeguild and Heavens Forged.

‘I still command-rule in the air,’ Ikrit snarled. ‘My airships will–’

He was cut off by a terrific shriek and an explosion high in the sky, as an armoured body half again as massive as a Stardrake tore through the hull of one of the Skyre clan airships. Bits of wood and flailing bodies rained over the battlefield as the eagle knight chomped on the larger airborne pieces, scattering the debris with an almighty beat of its wings. Ikrit stared up in horror.

‘No-no.’

I chuckled harshly. One benefit of being lashed to the ground was having a fine view of what was happening in the sky.

‘I always knew that Augus liked me.’

Ikrit turned from the battle for the air and glared down at me. ‘You think me beaten? You think I want-need my army. I will make-build a new army.’ He held up my lantern. ‘I need-want only this.’ He stood with a squeal and turned to walk away, only to stop abruptly when a viperish green shoot broke through the road beneath his footpaw to wind about his shin. He looked down at it, then back at me. ‘This is your doing as well?’

Breaking free of the earth behind the warlock like a particularly vigorous weed, Brychen drove her spear between his shoulder blades.

‘No,’ said the wild priestess. ‘It is mine.’

It snapped in two. The warlock staggered towards me, chittering annoyance, as the priestess cast aside the broken halves to sprout another with a thicker haft.

‘This power is not yours to command,’ she said, radiating anger like coloured light from a flower. The verdant growth that covered me pulsed and shrank back into the earth. Buds swelled and burst, throwing a sickly floral scent over us all as exploratory shoots lashed around Ikrit’s iron claw, dragging it towards the ground and binding my lantern tightly in its palm. ‘It is time for it to be returned to the soil.’

Ikrit looked over his shoulder at the priestess, his expression blank. ‘I am dead-dead. Many times over I have been given-fed to the black earth. Rarely does my buried form lie still. Death always conquers Life. In the end.’ Ribbons of entropic energies coursed the vines that held his gauntlet pinned. They withered, turned yellow, then black. The embrittled stalk husks fell off him like dust from a coat of armour as he turned. ‘Always.’

The look he gave Brychen was a thunderclap that hurled the priestess back into the melee on a comet tail of splintered armour and blood.

I didn’t watch her go.

I didn’t wait to see her land.

As I had instinctively known during my brief, albeit unwitting, altercation with Sigmar in the Forge Eternal, there was no way I was going to defeat Ikrit with strength alone.

Sucker-punch and surprise would be my weapons here.

I threw myself at the warlock while he was still facing the other way. My halberd carved a searing arc towards the wrist joint of his gauntlet. A black wind billowed about Ikrit’s body and carried him out of my reach. The halberd whistled past his midriff. He hissed his displeasure. I reversed my grip, roared, the muscles across my upper body bulging as I struck back with the butt. The sigmarite ferrule countered the weight of the entire foot-long blade. It could crush conventional plate and shatter immortal bone. Ikrit didn’t give it the chance. A whoosh of warpflame from his gauntlet flicked me contemptuously aside.

The ichorous green jet was severed almost as soon as it had been unleashed, warpflame dribbling from the nozzle to hiss off the cobbles.

It had been a playful shove, a jepard batting a doomed animal between its paws.

Surprise had not served me nearly as well as I might have hoped.

‘Fool-fool,’ Ikrit hissed. ‘After all you have seen you still challenge me.’

At the warlock’s gesture the ground between us shuddered and fell away. The road tore itself in half, noxious fumes gasping from the rent in the earth, swallowing clanrats and Freeguilders alike. ‘I need-want no army!’ the warlock squealed, shrill with power. ‘The very earth of the realm answers my summons-call.’ A nimbus of multi-hued energies encompassed him as he extended a gauntlet. ‘I am the Ur-Rat, the Rat-That-Was. You will kneel-die!’

A streak of oily lightning leapt from the warlock’s outstretched paw.

I dived to the ground. The blast careened over my head and obliterated a war-wagon that had been lying on its axle behind me. It died in splinters and flame. Bits of shrapnel rattled off my backplate as I crawled away from the pyre. Another energy blast blew a crater out of the ground. I found my knees, rising messily into a sprint as the third blast carved open a company of Freeguilder polearms and hit the rat-ogor that had been bludgeoning its way through them, reducing them all to ash and jelly and a foul taste in the back of my mouth.

‘Run-flee, Bear-Eater. I know-see what you crave over all else. I know-know how to make you hurt.’ The warlock cackled. ‘Let them see you run.’

Fire engulfed both his gauntlets, white hot and searing. His arms trembled as he drew them back, the flames shrinking into the metal until they glowed, then thrust his paws towards me.

A sun ignited on the Bear Road, and warriors of all ilks burned.

Skaven used their last breath before they were blown to ash to squeal. Men and women disappeared like tallow sticks in a flame. Lightning bolts tore free from the maelstrom, warriors of the Heavens Forged and the Imperishables, their thrice-blessed no proof against the monstrous fireball. It spanned the full width of the road, two-score feet across. Stone ran from the frontages of the buildings like fat from a roast. Scaffolds, awnings, and windows simply ceased to be. Lead tiles glowed like coals. Running out of the blast even as it was erupting, I avoided the worst, but then I think that that had always been Ikrit’s intention. Heat raced ahead of the explosion and threw me to my face. I skidded over the ruined cobbles on my breastplate before running out of push.

I threw my head back like a drunk who could not comprehend how he had come to be on the floor. I could barely see. Blood matted my hair to my face. I could smell it.

‘Vikaelia!’ I roared.

Broudiccan had been somewhere close by too, but it wasn’t his face that filled my mind then, nor goaded my strength to fury. I rose with a groan of sigmarite heated to murderous temperatures, the burnt muscles in the back of my neck stretching painfully as I turned my head towards Ikrit.

He was walking towards me, but, borne on a gryph-charger of complicit storm winds, he came as a thunderbolt of corroded bronzes and Azyrite blues.

I beat my halberd back across his path like a scythe. There was no finesse to it. I targeted no weak point in the armour nor gleaned vulnerability in his form. There was only the burning need to reap. My halberd hacked into a skein of Ulgu shadow, slowing the blade noticeably before it clanged against his armour. My fury became incandescent. Divine. I was a mountain man, and the boiling point came for me well before it would have taken another. Everything this rat had done, everything he had taken from me. I no longer cared if I lived or died. Life in the Winterlands was brutal and brief, and death unmourned. Let my soul burn, let it set the Heavens ablaze this one final time as it returned to the Cosmic Storm. I didn’t care, so long as I could hurt this rat in my passing.

Howling like a wounded ghurlion, I threw myself at my aggressor.

The warlock squeaked in surprise as my arms wrapped around him and locked behind his back. He shrieked. I sank my teeth into his snout. Cold blood oozed into my mouth. For a moment I relived the vision of my first, mortal death at the hands of the ogor frostlord and his giant bear, and was pleased. There was a circularity to it that appealed to my vanity, that fate would accord me such a thoughtful gesture for my passing. Spitting out a whisker, I smashed my head into Ikrit’s. It was like head-butting a statue. Pain rang outward from my forehead. I felt Ikrit’s jaws snapping for my throat. We grappled. My fingers went through the eye slit of his helm and mushed something glutinous and rotten. My other hand found the warding lantern in his claw.

With an outraged squeal, Ikrit caught the hand by the wrist and twisted. Pain exploded into the forefront of my mind, bringing me screaming back to my senses.

Bone spurs scraped over the inside of my vambrace as Ikrit dangled me by my limp hand. I screamed. He screamed back at me. Then he spun me once around and hurled me through the wall of a roadside inn.

Still cooling from the wrath of Ikrit’s fireball, the wall disintegrated as soon as I hit it. It collapsed onto me, followed by the ceiling, then the roof. I coughed, snarled, bellowed in pain and pointless fury as the building sought to bury me alive under rock that fell apart into cinders as soon as it came loose. I shook my face and my hand as if to dig my way out of the grave of cinders, glimpsing clear sky overhead as the last of the structure gave way. The blue thickened and turned green even as I flapped at the flames. Ectoplasmic muscle swelled across the open sky like angry clouds, thick-veined and bristling with Ghurite strength. A colossal in-breath snuffed out the flames around me as the Foot of Gork came crashing down, demolishing what little was left of the inn and smashing me into the rubble.

The gigantic foot broke into a virulent green fog as soon as it made impact with the ground.

I lay in the midst of it, gasping and broken, staring up at blue skies once again. My breath hitched as I struggled to fill my lungs. I had broken at least one rib and had collapsed a lung, by the frantic wheezing of my breath.

Ikrit stepped off the road and into the flattened inn.

The residual smog parted before him. I saw now why he did not need an army. An army was almost an encumbrance to a being like him, useful only insofar as he could not be everywhere at once.

One-handed, I drove the butt of my halberd into the ground and made myself meet death like a warrior. My armour protested the movement, rubble sliding off its curves. Anyone but me would have been dead already, but Sigmar had made my bastion armour thick and warded where it mattered. He had known that my next death could be my last, and had done all in his power to ensure that it never came to be. He did not want me dead. He wanted me triumphant.

Not nearly as much as I did.

The warlock’s surprise at seeing me alive was bettered only by that at seeing me upright. The sight of his snout still black and oozing gave me the strength to pull the last few inches of my spine straight.

‘What does it take-need to put you down?’

‘More than you can throw,’ I wheezed. I spat blood, then looked down at my broken hand. The claws of my fingers were still gripping the warding lantern that I had wrenched from his grip. ‘You haven’t got the strength in you to finish Hamilcar Bear-Eater. Chosen of Sigmar. Knight-Questor! Champion of the Gods!’

Gritting my teeth, I slid back the lantern’s shutter and hurled it like a Kharadron grudgesettler bomb with the pin removed.

Strobing starlight flashed across the smouldering rubble as the lantern spun, end over end, a weaponised pulsar encased in sigmarite, amethyst and gold. Where light slashed Ikrit’s armour, black steam rose, and he stumbled back from me with a hiss of pain. A stone from the inn’s foundation wall protruded from the ground behind him, and he went backwards over it in a billow of sparks.

He thrashed about, driving up fresh cinders as he struggled to right himself, only to shriek all the louder as he discovered a halberd piercing the palm of his gauntlet, driving into the rock, and pinning his paw to the ground.

Ikrit swung with his other gauntlet. Not for me but for my halberd. I knocked his paw aside on the outside of my knee, and then, my chest an agony, trod down hard on his elbow. Dropping my knee into his stomach plating, I punched him across the jaw. And again. And again. Losing myself to the fury. ‘I told you.’ His helmet buckled. ‘It would.’ A bloody smear on his diamond teeth. ‘Hurt.’ My blood. Thoughtlessly, I hit him with my broken hand. With a dying fish gasp of pain, I rolled off him. Using just my feet, I pushed myself back, my head flopping finally to the ground as the madness that had loaned me its strength departed me with its due.

I lay there for a time, struggling to breathe, listening to the sounds of battle return.

Of course, they had never left. Even so, I found it hard to credit that anyone else out there was still fighting. A hero had just fought a god into the ground. The realms should have taken a breath. They should have held back and taken heed. Instead, skaven and Freeguilder grunted and yelled like savages in the mud. The thunder of Stormcast and Ironweld weaponry warred with the piercing war-cries of the aetar.

I lifted my head just enough to look over at Ikrit. The warlock was slumped and beaten, his right arm half-melted by the fluids leaking from his own gauntlet, and speared to the ground. He looked even worse than I felt.

‘You’re mine,’ I managed to say. The breath coming in was agony. The voice going out was a rasp.

‘You cannot even… stand-stand.’

‘I’ll drag you to the Seventh Gate with my teeth if I have to.’

‘Try it… Bear-Eater. I do not need my… arm… to destroy you.’

‘Surrender! Show me how to restore my soul, and I will appeal to Sigmar to be merciful with yours. Tell me, and I will have him consign you to oblivion before the Smiths can lay their tools upon you.’

By way of answer, Ikrit turned his face to the sky and screamed.

He screamed with the vehemence of a beaten god. At first I thought it the venting of the indignity of defeat, but then I heard the familiar rifling of feathers, the whistle of air through an open beak. I saw the shadow that darkened the ground where Ikrit and I looked up. My heart forced pain wider through my chest.

With a blistering shriek, King Augus announced his intentions.

His plumage bristled with the fury of the seven winds. His mail coat and spiked crown caught Azyr lightning and warpfire, and were vengeful.

‘No!’ I screamed.

A furious beating of wings forced me back into the ground, as Augus lifted his enormous bulk off the crushed warlock, all the while keeping one enormous talon possessively over his body. Then the victorious king of the aetar closed his beak over the helmet and wrenched Ikrit’s head from his shoulders.

Chapter thirty-three

King Augus tossed the helmeted corpse head aside and turned to me with a look of aquiline satisfaction.

‘No!’ I cried again.

The word caused me so much pain that at first I didn’t recognise it as mine. It was a bladed imprecation that someone had pushed into my chest to the crosspiece and twisted. But it was just the broken end of my rib pushing into my lung. A trifling hurt, in comparison. On hands and knees, drawing my halberd through the rubble as if it were a paddle, I crawled towards Ikrit’s headless body, the co-vessel for my storm-forged soul. Ignoring Augus’ increasingly irate caws, I took Ikrit by the shoulder and shook him.

I don’t know what I was expecting.

‘No, no, no.’ I glared hotly at the aetar. ‘No!’

Augus lowered his head towards me and delivered an ear-destroying shriek.

‘You think I’ll let that insult pass?’ With the strength in my arms I pushed against my halberd to position my body upright until I was, on my knees, almost level with Augus’ breast. Pain flared in mine. The aetar swirled in my vision like cream poured into qahua. ‘You stole prey from the Bear-Eater. Do you think me so far gone that I won’t pluck every feather from your body before I spit you on my spear?’

As bluster went, this was a desperate attempt. Even hugging myself to my halberd like a tent around a pole, I swayed on my knees. I didn’t care. With Ikrit destroyed, his soul blasted into whatever aether awaited the souls of pariahs to the skaven race, the Smiths would never be able to undo what he had done.

What he had done to me.

I would never again be whole.

Augus was a proud king, but not so humane that he would not rip the head from a wounded foe, as I had just learned to my eternal cost. At least it would be quick. It would be bloody and honest. Better that than the slow dissolution of the soul that awaited me now.

‘Come on, Augus, why do you hesitate? Are you afraid?’

The aetar bristled, baring his gnarled and blood-stained beak.

A nearby voice interrupted. ‘Peace, Augus. Can you not see he is out of his wits?’

Lord-Veritant Vikaeus of the Creed crunched onto the rubble-strewn ground. Her sword was bloody, her plate battered. Her staff shone with a cold light that stung tears from my eyes. It was as though my body acted out of its own self-interest, for on top of everything else it had endured it knew that the sight of her, unblurred, would have broken me then. A pair of Concussors walked behind her, both as well-blooded as the Lord-Veritant herself. One was on foot. The other struggled through the wreckage on a rancorous, ice-blue Dracoth. Augus swivelled his head to glare at them, beating his wings threateningly to warn the Knights Merciless from his prize.

I, however, spread my arms and bowed my head, as though offering my neck as a gift.

‘The sun rises. The rule of the Day Queen comes,’ I said, speaking with bitterness the words that I could recall her once speaking to me when we had been mortal.

She looked at me quizzically. Her eyes unfocused, just for a moment. ‘What did you say?’

‘I am usurped,’ I said, continuing. ‘Come, take what is yours.’

Shaking off whatever moment had taken her, she gestured to the Concussors. ‘Seize him.’ Augus delivered a terrific screech as the warrior on foot passed close. He backed off, warily, hands raised. Vikaeus turned her staff towards the aetar. ‘I have no interest in your verminous prize, Augus. I am here for Hamilcar alone.’

Augus shuffled back, cawing, dragging the warlock with him, leaving a smear of hissing green oil on the rubble behind it.

‘Wait,’ said the mounted Concussor who had held back by the Bear Road. ‘What is happening to the warlock?’

Ikrit’s body was starting to dissolve, his armour buckling as green bubbles foamed from the seams.

‘Sigendil’s light,’ I swore, as the corpse began to buck and twitch under Augus’ foot.

‘Stay back, Lord-Veritant,’ said the other, drawing Vikaeus towards him by the elbow.

Vikaeus turned to address me. ‘Is this more foolery of yours, Hamilcar?’

I didn’t answer.

I was as captivated as they were.

A bang sounded from behind us, like popping corn, and we all jumped. Augus took to the air, alarmed. Vikaeus turned instinctively towards the Bear Road, the Concussors closing around her with lightning hammers raised. The battle for the Seven Words had been won, thanks to me, but it was far from over, and the Paladins were right to fear a skaven bullet aimed at their Lord-Veritant. This time, however, it was something less prosaic, but no less trying on the heart. It was Ikrit’s head, jumping about in the rubble where Augus had discarded it. The flesh, bone and metal seemed to be dissolving into a volatile mix of sickly gases and energy, leapfrogging the pulverised foundation slabs every time a belch of the former was released.

Vikaeus pushed aside her warrior’s lightning hammer for a clearer look.

‘What witchcraft is this?’

Augus settled onto an adjoining rooftop and shrieked down on us all.

Ikrit’s remains disintegrated into lightning, flares of poisonous green energy originating from his head and his body before crackling together above our heads. It was like an implosion, but of light rather than sound or energy, drawing it in and turning the realm around me dark. Combined into a single bolt, the lightning cut its chaotic path across the sky. I squinted, trying to follow its arcing course to whatever star marked its destination. I had a fair idea where it was going. A certain dark burrow with a Magrittan chaise and a strewn pile of ancient parchments, hurtling through the Allpoints towards realms unknown.

It didn’t help me very much, but even so I found myself smiling.

Ikrit had done it. He had done it. This was news of the darkest sort for Sigmar and the integrity of the Stormhosts, and the grimmest of tidings for the grand alliance of Order in general, but I smiled like a boy who had been given a sweet to assuage his hurts.

‘It’s not over,’ I said.

‘How…?’ murmured Vikaeus. She stared up, transfixed, troubled to the ice-cold cavity of her chest. ‘Where has he gone? Surely not the soul-mills of the Forge Eternal?’

‘I mean to find out, Vikaelia,’ I said.

‘What? No. Enough of this.’

Stepping between her warriors, Vikaeus brought the butt of her staff crashing to the ground. The leaves of ice that enclosed the abjuration lantern at its crown fell aside and heavenly light blazed forth. It spilled over the two Concussors and the Dracoth, brought a pained squawk from Augus, and would have rendered me immediately chastened and helpless had something gigantic not cast its wing shadow over me at just that moment.

Princess Aeygar Ayr Augus announced herself with an ebullient screech, spreading her wings to shield me from the Lord-Veritant’s light as she scooped me effortlessly from the ground in one talon. She had timed her descent with the grace of a born hunter, and a single beat of her wings was enough to convey her back into the sky without ever setting a claw on the ground. I made a noise that fell somewhere between a cry of delight and a scream as the ground fell away from me, my broken ribs grinding into me in the aetar’s grip, and the Lord-Veritant’s abjuration grew increasingly distant and dim. Before I had a chance to adjust to the change in scenery, I found myself hanging in the midst of the battle for the skies of the Seven Words. Aetar knights swooped and soared, slowing only to savage what remained of the Skyre clan ruinfleet.

‘Forgive my tardiness, lord.’

Nassam sat high on the princess’ neck, his dark beard and moustaches flying in the seven winds. His Jerech greatsword was sheathed across his back, the better to cling onto Aeygar’s plumage.

Princess Aeygar gave a concerned squawk.

‘I’ve suffered worse than this and walked away to tell the tale.’

She beat her wings, eyes sparkling. The feathers of her neck ruffled against her blued armour, a bass cooing coming from deep in her throat.

‘I don’t know what to say. If you’re sure you don’t mind having me for company for a while.’ Freeing one arm from Aeygar’s talons, I pointed weakly towards the now-distant speck of light that marked Ikrit’s passage.

‘Follow that lightning.’

With a joyful shriek, the aetar dipped her wings, and turned away from the Gorkomon.

‘So there you have it. You will probably have guessed that we’re some way from the end of this story. But look here… We have talked the fire down to its embers. It is morning and it is time to show the enemy our steel. Live out the day and perhaps I will seek you out again to finish the tale.

‘For Hamilcar. For Sigmar. And for the Free City.’

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I’m not normally one for writing dedications. I feel awkward sharing what I’m really thinking without having characters or a narrator to filter it before it reaches another human being. This novel is different. It’s my first as a full-time author, requiring me to suck it up and dredge up a few words of recognition and thanks, which is frankly the least that those who have helped make this possible deserve.

Thanks then to Guy Haley, Gav Thorpe, and Josh Reynolds for their sage counsel on making the leap and finally giving up my day job. To my girlfriend, Philippa, for not walking out when I suggested it. Thanks to Guy (again) and Justin Hill for the continuing support of the unofficial North Yorkshire freelance support group. One day we’ll actually have that get-together.

To Laurie Goulding, for buying that inauspicious story about two clanrats walking into a bar back in 2011. To Graeme Lyon and Lindsey Priestley for taking me on, through the End Times and Beast Arises and beyond.To Nick Kyme for too much to go into really, but in the context of these pages for being the one to convince me that a minor character from The Beasts of Cartha was a character people would want more of.

To Kate Hamer, who edited the Hamilcar short stories and who edited this novel and who came to love the big man as much as he loves himself (or as close as any mere mortal can get). To Toby Longworth, whose portrayal of Ciaphas Cain did so much to inform the voice of Hamilcar in this book.

And finally, of course, thanks to everyone who ever gave me a word of advice or encouragement, wrote a review or bought a book.

Especially that last one.

It’s you that made this book possible.

About the Author

David Guymer wrote the Primarchs novel Ferrus Manus: Gorgon of Medusa, and for Warhammer 40,000 The Eye of Medusa, The Voice of Mars and the two The Beast Arises novels Echoes of the Long War and The Last Son of Dorn. For Warhammer Age of Sigmar he wrote the novel Hamilcar: Champion of the Gods, the audio dramas The Beasts of Cartha, Fist of Mork, Fist of Gork, Great Red and Only the Faithful. He is also the author of the Gotrek & Felix novels Slayer, Kinslayer and City of the Damned and the Gotrek audio drama Realmslayer. He is a freelance writer and occasional scientist based in the East Riding, and was a finalist in the 2014 David Gemmell Awards for his novel Headtaker.

Content

HAMILCAR
Champion of the Gods
(David Guymer)

Chapter one

Chapter two

Chapter three

Chapter four

Chapter five

Chapter six

Chapter seven

Chapter eight

Chapter nine

Chapter ten

Chapter eleven

Chapter twelve

Chapter thirteen

Chapter fourteen

Chapter fifteen

Chapter sixteen

Chapter seventeen

Chapter eighteen

Chapter nineteen

Chapter twenty

Chapter twenty-one

Chapter twenty-two

Chapter twenty-three

Chapter twenty-four

Chapter twenty-five

Chapter twenty-six

Chapter twenty-seven

Chapter twenty-eight

Chapter twenty-nine

Chapter thirty

Chapter thirty-one

Chapter thirty-two

Chapter thirty-three

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

About the Author