Gods' Gift - David Guymer

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  Gods’ Gift – David Guymer

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  Gods’ Gift

  David Guymer

  I held out my hand, palm down, fingers spread, hovering over the animal print caked into the dried mud of the mountain side. The heel of my palm was about level with the matching point of the imprint. The tips of my gauntleted fingers came nowhere even close to the clipped indents left by the passing beast’s claws. I frowned.

  ‘Are you familiar with the monster, Lord-Castellant?’

  The old woodcutter, Fage, crouched across from me on the other side of the print, a long, long way away. His eyes possessed the faint shimmer of the Azyr-born, but his insect-bitten skin and sour odour were those of a naturalised Ghurite. He wore a wax coat fastened up tight with wooden toggles and string, and a pair of trousers of similar material but mismatched colour. A hat fashioned from the skin of a furred creature was pulled down over his greying head, flaps covering his ears. White fog curled about his lips, for though we were half a day’s march from the Seven Words and the great peak of the Gorkoman, the air still had teeth.

  He looked at me, waiting to be told that ‘By Sigmar, yes, I know well this beast,’ and that it was nothing I had not slain a thousand of before. I had no wish to lie, particularly, but a reputation for semi-divine infallibility was the foundation of all that I had raised here.

  ‘I cannot be certain,’ I said, after a reasonable pause.

  Broudiccan snorted. The hugely armoured Decimator loomed silently amongst the wiry leechwood pines a few dozen paces up-slope.

  He knows me too well.

  The trees of the High Gorwood were short, ten or eleven feet tall, clad in reddish bark with long, waspish branches swaying only partially in tune with the wind. A little deeper in, the shadows of several similarly outfitted Astral Templars of the Bear-Eaters jigged and wavered in the light of a fire. The clatter of a rough camp being set rang about the carnivorous trees. The warriors were in high spirits. One of the vanguard-hunters was already beating a slow rhythm into an improvised drum. Another, the raptor – Illyrius, judging by the quality of his singing voice – was opening the Saga of the Barrel Kings. The saga was a favourite of the Bear-Eaters due to their small (though not the way Illyrius sang it) role in the death of the god-beast Mammothas in its final verse.

  In the Age of Myth, Sigmar had tasked his brother-god, Gorkamorka, with the purge of monsters from the mortal realms. With the dawning of the Age of Sigmar, that task had been bestowed upon the Astral Templars.

  To the Bear-Eaters, a beast-hunt through the Gorwood felt almost like a reward.

  ‘We will know more when the light returns,’ I told the woodsman, ignoring my lieutenant’s weighted silence.

  Fage peered out into the thickening darkness. Dusk fell suddenly over the Gorkoman, and the colour was fast draining from the landscape. The clicks and chirps of creatures were fading in the transition from day to night. The burden of life in the Realm of Beasts was more or less equivalent, regardless of your side of the dawn. The woodsman fiddled anxiously with the hatchet that dangled from his undercoat on a leather thong.

  ‘There is nothing to fear in the Gorwood,’ I said, baring my teeth. ‘Hamilcar Bear-Eater is with you now.’

  The woodcutter pulled himself together and nodded, reassured.

  As well he should be.

  For I am a savage vision, awe-inspiring if I might say, at least to human eyes. My hair is dark and wild. My skin is marked with etchings of my own application. Others have oft-times questioned why I would deface Sigmar’s great work with my own. I have no answer for them except that I wished to do so and did. My armour is the colour of amethyst, the very spirit and hue of death, strung with dead animals and scrawled with tribal glyphs whose shape I recall but whose meaning I can no longer comprehend.

  I am, if we are to speak in understatements, no Vandus Hammerhand.

  Leaving his axe where it hung, Fage planted his hands to his thighs and stood with an audible creak. I chose to remain crouching, lest the mortal startle.

  ‘This beast took twenty of my people,’ he said, shaking his head sadly. ‘The rest of the camp fled.’ He looked at the print as if vowing to commit it to memory. ‘I’m the only one that made it to the Seven Words.’

  ‘It is a long journey,’ I said, rising slowly with a rattle of heavy sigmarite and hanging mail. I stand over him like a mountain. ‘You may find that others have made it upon our return.’

  It was also a terrain crawling with beastmen, skaven and worse, but this, I judged, the woodcutter did not wish to hear.

  A sudden rustle in the litterfall had the man reaching for his axe, but it was only Crow. My faithful gryph-hound had been scouting further downslope and burst from the trees, chewing my gauntlet in greeting, then dropping his ice-blue beak to sniff at the print in the mud. I did not know what, if anything, he expected to find, for the print was days old at least. Frankly, we were fortunate to have even that much to go on, for the ground of the Gorkoman is hard, its topsoil thin and its climate sufficiently disagreeable to turn an exposed patch of earth to slurry in short order.

  ‘Sigmar blesses us,’ I said aloud, scratching the downy feathers behind Crow’s eyes. The gryph-hound clacked its beak in annoyance, then surrendered to my touch, emitting a throbbing growl as he pushed his head into my gauntlet. His bright blue eyes glittered in the twilight, tilted sideways, but still studying the trees with more caution than I could profess.

  Broudiccan crossed his arms.

  ‘The camp is made,’ he said. The Decimator Prime was a man of grim and silent stature. I have never seen a man so capable with a starsoul mace be so reticent to speak of his deeds. If a few of his acts had been misattributed to my heroism, then I would not be surprised. ‘We should rest,’ he went on, the nature of the quest clearly rendering him uncommonly loquacious. ‘Continue tomorrow.’

  Fage looked at me, startled. ‘You sleep?’

  I startled him just a little further with a roaring laugh. ‘Only when my foes are uninspiring.’

  I do not dream. Sometimes I think it another mortal impurity beaten out of me on the Anvil of Apotheosis, but I know others who speak of their dreams and it is true that I used to dream. It was not so very long ago that I would close my eyes in dread of reprising my dying moments under the claws of the Abyssal, Ashigorath, another night. Though I must remind myself that it has been a hundred years since the Realmgate Wars raged over Ghur. There were times when I feared myself mad, but perhaps that, too, was a symptom of my second Reforging, for the nightmares became less frequent as the decades passed. Now, I do not dream.

  That was I how I knew this dream was not mine.

  A giant tree stood above me, a deciduous giant that had no earthly place amongst the carniferns and leechwood pines of the High Gorwood. It was night, a vastly swollen moon framing the great oak’s bower. The stars were unfamiliar ones, as if positioned as an afterthought by one who had never given them much consideration. I, on the other hand, am a creature of Azyr, and they were the first things I noticed out of place. The night chorus, too, was gone. Silence circled me and the great tree like an unseen threat, and though I felt no wind on my skin, the oak leant over me and rustled.

  In a groan of bark and a murmur of leaves, it spoke.

  ‘Help me.’

  With an angry crunch, the tree reared up onto its roots, tearing great clumps of earth away from the ground as if it meant to rise away. I reached over my shoulder, but whoever’s mind con
jured this dream had not seen fit to furnish me with a weapon. My warding lantern was similarly absent.

  ‘He stole my life.’

  ‘Where are you?’ I roared over the shaking branches.

  ‘I am dying. You will be next.’

  There was a ripping sound, a splitting of hard bark, sap splattered from the wound like human blood. I flung a hand in front of my eyes as the sap turned to searing amber and burned the dream from my sight.

  I woke up waving my hands furiously, Ghur’s bright sun a stabbing pressure on my eyes. I grunted, still only half awake, prising Crow’s beak from my vambrace.

  ‘I was having the most pleasant dream,’ I said, stretching ruefully, hoping to brazen the episode out.

  Unfortunately, there were those amongst my Vanguard Chamber who had been with me since Jercho and the Sea of Bones, and even those who had not would have heard the stories. They watched me arm myself as if I might pick up my halberd upside down or try to fit my warding lantern over my head.

  Fage, naturally, was oblivious. The masks the Stormcast wore to battle made it almost impossible for one who knew them less well than I to judge their mood. The woodcutter had apparently woken early and hovered about the outskirts of the camp, coat fastened, axe in hand, and clearly eager to find what was left of his group.

  I forced the man to eat something while I splashed the soil with watered wine, a libation to Sigmar and the local deities of the hunt, and set the anxious woodsman loose.

  Fage hared off into the trees, the pair of vanguard-hunters I had ordered to keep an eye on him striding purposefully after him.

  Only Fage knew exactly where we were heading. The Seven Words was still a ruin of her former (and I am being generous here) glory. No one, least of all me, had paid overly close attention to where the woodcutters and quarrymen that poured through the Azyr Gate disappeared to upon their arrival. I knew there was every chance that Fage could find the monster that had taken his fellows without my warriors’ help, but with any luck the sharp-eyed vanguard-hunters would spot the beast before it spotted him.

  The remaining hunters fanned out into the trees, raptors with longstrike and hurricane crossbows advancing more carefully behind them.

  The Astral Templars were no less keen than their mortal guide to be about the hunt.

  I walked over to Broudiccan. The Decimator nodded to me as he pulled on his battered helmet and tested the draw of his heavy-headed mace from its shoulder sleeve. It was all the welcome I was going to get, but my dream was weighing on my thoughts and I needed to discuss it with someone.

  ‘What do you know of the Gorwood?’ I asked him, measuring my stride to his. He shrugged. ‘I know that Uxor Untamed held the Seven Words for several years before I took it from him.’

  ‘You and Lord-Castellant Akturus.’

  I waved off the correction. ‘Is that why we still call it the Gorwood, I wonder? Has it always been the haunt of beastmen and their kind?’

  Another shrug.

  Broudiccan’s imagination was as stilted as his words, but to me the staggering variety of the eight mortal realms has always been a source of wonderment. The mark of the gods was not always as obvious as the Mountains of Maraz or Gouge Canyon, but wherever you chose to look, that was what you saw there. Every peak and defile, every endemic tree and native creature had been shaped, deliberately or otherwise, by the divinities that had once moved amongst them – and in many lands still did.

  ‘Do I recall Barbarus speaking of a cult of tree worshippers?’

  ‘A dead cult,’ Broudiccan shrugged. ‘I saw some of the ruins they left behind. They were gone long before the Untamed took their country.’

  I pondered on the Decimator’s words as we continued after Fage and the Vanguards.

  Ghur was a wild place, ever changing, and little of it had been effectively explored. This was true even of such bastions as Excelsis and Shu’ghol, fortresses of enlightenment that Sigmar knew better than to send the likes of me, but compared to their toothless savagery the Gorkoman was an ancient and untamed wilderness.

  Anything could be lurking on the slopes of the High Gorwood.

  The leechwood pines thickened as I pushed downhill, sharp-edged branches striking against my armour, the occasional twig drawing blood from my face. The Vanguard had dropped out of view, even Crow loping off after them, agitated by something or other. He left Broudiccan and me alone.

  ‘I dreamt last night,’ I said.

  ‘I know.’ Clearly, the Decimator had no wish to discuss it further.

  ‘It was a prophetic dream.’

  Broudiccan’s grim mask turned towards me.

  ‘You do not believe me?’

  ‘Prophecy is not your gift.’

  The Decimator’s understatement threatened to bring a laugh out of me, but I suppressed it. ‘If you doubt me because of the incident with the seraphon…’

  Broudiccan sighed. ‘The stars were all in their proper place when I looked at them.’

  ‘They had shifted once again by the time you had dragged yourself to my throne room,’ I barked. ‘The slann was signalling me for help. Just as the oak is now.’

  ‘The… oak?’

  I gave him a feral grin. ‘Tell me it would not be the strangest thing you have seen in the mortal realms.’

  Broudiccan did not answer that. ‘But why do these portents speak only to you?’

  I frowned.

  I could see that the Decimator would take some persuading. My reputation amongst the Freeguild regiments of the Ghurlands was a legend of valour, courage and shining charisma. My reputation amongst my immortal brethren was for recklessness, grandstanding and personal bravado. The Bear-Eaters wore my legend like a token of blessing on their armour, but that did not mean they would follow me into the Crystal Labyrinth on the strength of my say-so.

  ‘Tell me where the oak guides you and we will go there. But if it does not guide you…’ Broudiccan shrugged again. I was getting a little sick of seeing it. ‘We still have a monster to hunt.’

  I threw him a reluctant nod of agreement, just as Crow’s shriek and the wail of something bestial rang through the trees. My first thought was that the gryph-hound had found something more appetising than jerked lizard for our repast, then an arrow thudded into the tree beside me.

  ‘Beastmen!’ I yelled at the top of my formidable voice as gangly ungors clad in crimson bark and animal skins poured out from the trees. Arrows hissed towards me. Most were caught up in the hanging nets of predatory branches, but a dozen or so clattered off mine and Broudiccan’s armour.

  The Decimator wordlessly freed his starsoul mace and ran to meet the beastman charge. I spun my halberd overhead, lopping off an ungor’s head as it ran towards me, then caught the haft two-handed to bring it down as though I were an axeman splitting wood. The blade struck the ungor’s arm from its body. The animal bleated in shock and panic as leechwood pines leaned in on all sides to haul the struggling creature into their branches.

  I tried to ignore the horrific slurping noises from the trees as the beastman’s death throes subsided, thinking again of those cuts to my face that I had foolishly dismissed as insignificant grazes.

  A star blast from Broudiccan’s mace proved a welcome distraction, pulverising a beastman. The shockwave threw two more off their hooves and into the clutches of the thrashing leechwoods.

  Just as I made to join the Decimator, Crow bounded into the carnage.

  The gryph-hound scrabbled to a halt on the rough ground, silver beak and claws all bloody, only to stare at me judgementally before turning and running back the way he had come. Huffing air out through my pursed lips, I left Broudiccan and chased after the gryph-hound. The Decimator Prime could take care of himself.

  Branches lashed at my face as I pounded after Crow. The trees were aroused now, responding to the taste of spilled blood in the
air and the vibrations of the hunt. The wood around me shivered in expectation.

  A larger beastman gor galloped into my path. A longstrike bolt fizzled in its gut. I ran it down without slowing, and the goat-headed monstrosity thumped off my breastplate. Something purple winked from behind a tree. I stumbled to a halt, arms out like a break sail. Illyrius. The raptor pointed his hurricane crossbow at the creature and swore in a language dead even to me. A withering volley of charged bolts whittled down the pack of gors that had been massing behind me for a charge. When I had regained my composure, I saluted the raptor with my halberd and looked around for Crow.

  I did not need to look too hard.

  Simply following the sound of bones being cracked and organs torn open, I found the gryph-hound, up to his neck in a large gor’s stomach.

  A vanguard-hunter ran across me before I had a chance to move. Firing off thunderous blasts of his boltstorm pistol from the hip, he headed towards Fage.

  The woodsman was fending off a pair of ungors with the speed and strength of uncompromising terror. The opportunistic runts had naturally been drawn to the human while the two vanguard-hunters I had left with him were engaged with five of their burlier cousins. Each of the giant bestigors boasted the size and brawn of a Stormcast Eternal, if not the blessed raiment and the skill. Broudiccan barrelled into the melee with his customary silent rage, and I left him to it, confident that the woodcutter would live to tell the tale.

  Hooves pounded on the hard ground behind me. Closing fast.

  Timing it to perfection, I looped my halberd up and back and saw the blade sink into the muscular but unprotected torso of a stampeding centigor. The beast’s speed and my own strength came together to devastating effect, my halberd passing clean through the centigor’s chest and bringing its equine lower quarters crashing to the ground at my feet in a spray of mulch and grit. I confess to being unsure as to the ultimate fate of its upper body.

  Twirling my halberd through a sequence of lazy circles, I scanned the area for more enemies, only to find them all fully engaged in dying or fleeing. The fizz and snap of hurricane and longstrike bolts pursued the latter, a bestial squawk or two and a shaking of ravenous trees attesting to the raptors’ lack of mercy and their aim.