‘What’s happening here?’ I bellowed.
Someone stupidly threw a punch at me. I parried it on my wrist, turned it across me, opening up the unwise pugilist’s belly into which I obligingly planted a fist of my own. The man folded over before flying backwards into the scrum like a cannon ball.
‘Castle Lord!’ one of the guards cried out over the distant rumble of artillery, fending off three men with his spear held horizontal, an elbow in his face. ‘Help us!’
‘No!’ From the hubbub of voices in the crowd.
‘Feed Angujakkak!’
‘Feed the Grey King!’
‘It has been long enough…’
‘It is time to strike back…’
There was more, but something in my mind between ears and brain snapped at the words ‘strike back’.
The maorai might have been perfectly content to let the bloodreavers carry on breaking their knuckles on their faces, but I wasn’t. I’m a simple man, you see. A man should kill, and get killed, according to the strength and reach of his arm. A strong man could throw a spear further, but that strength was earned. As far as I was concerned, Blackjaw sought to cheat me of my hard-earned advantage. He had resorted to ‘mathematics’ and other unholy wizardries to make parity with a chosen of Sigmar.
It was unnatural, and I refused to stand for it. I wanted to strike back, and if the Nemesians were sitting on a way for me to do that, then by Sigmar I wanted to know about it.
I turned to the guard who had called out to me. Something thunderous in my expression made him blanch. He took a step back, his foot splashing into water where the platform’s tilt had caused the lake to spill onto the promenade.
‘What are they talking about?’
‘I… don’t understand, Castle Lord.’
He actually seemed to be serious, which only annoyed me further. ‘The Grey King?’
‘It is sacred.’
‘So is lightning. I still throw it at my enemies.’
As if to affirm my point, a small tendril of Azyrite energy snapped from my clenched knuckles. I like to consider myself a man of the common folk, and generally do a better job of keeping the overt signs of my essential divinity in check. That it escaped me then only serves to demonstrate the kind of pressure I was under. The guardsman nearest to me lowered his spear with a cry, and while his comrades stared at me in astonishment one of the rioters succeeded in pushing through the cordon to make a break for the water.
‘Feed the King!’ she yelled, and hurled herself bodily into the lake. The splash of her landing broke my hold over the guards. They spun around as one.
‘Sigmar,’ one of them cursed.
‘Get her out of there.’
‘I’m not going in after her.’
‘Khunas, quickly. Fetch a net.’
While the guardsmen argued and one of them, Khunas presumably, ran off towards one of the gaily painted promenade-side buildings, the swimmer splashed towards the middle of the lake. For someone born on the ocean, her technique was appalling. I probably could have done it better in full armour, and I’d lived my entire mortal life on a mountain. I hadn’t seen running water until after my Reforging on the Anvil of the Apotheosis. It was quite the marvel, let me tell you. This woman, though, moved through the water as though through a fight – rolling around, hitting it with balled fists, slapping at it with her feet.
I noticed then that the entire promenade had fallen quiet. Citizens and guardsmen that had previously been trying to shove one another into the lake or onto their backsides stood shoulder to shoulder, just watching, completely ignoring the thunderous rumble of Blackjaw’s barrage.
I felt the intensity of their attention pull on mine.
The swimmer groped clumsily towards the middle. ‘Feed,’ she gasped, between dunkings, repeating the mantra even as she coughed up sea water. ‘Swim free. Fee–’
I like to think myself largely unshockable, I have seen enough in my day, but the suddenness of what came next drew a gasp out of me.
A huge grey tentacle burst from the water and whipped about, drenching the swimmer under a torrent of salty rain, drowning her fevered prayers. The water around her seethed, as though the ocean were being drained from under her, and a truly gargantuan body broke its surface. To this day, I don’t know what it was that I saw. I have seen lurkinarth and kharybdiss, leviadon and murkraken, and none have come anywhere close either in scale or in the foulness of their appearance. The best that I can describe it is as some nightmarish cross-breeding of mega-squid and trench-dwelling troggoth, ridged with armour and folded with fat, pit-black eyes sunk deep into a central body surrounded by a nest of tentacles. Seawater streamed from albino scales. Its body was partially transparent. I could see the burrowing purple lines of veins, organs of unholy scale throbbing against the other side of its pearlescent skin.
The swimmer, I belatedly realised, had not stopped shouting: she had simply become mute under the waterfalls cascading from the monster’s tentacles.
A suckered tendril wrapped around the woman and dragged her from the water. It looked as though each tentacle was in it for themselves as several converged to try to pry the woman away from the first as she was drawn inexorably towards the monster’s head. A mouth split the jellied mass in half. Row upon row of primitive white teeth glistened, and I grimaced as the tentacle unrolled to propel the woman inside.
‘Feed. Swim fre–’
The mouth slammed shut.
To my horror I discovered that I could still see the woman through the monster’s translucent scales. Like a chewing ruminant, it worked its teeth. Blood burst against the walls of the creature’s mouth cavity, bones grinding, before draining away into the body of the monster as it swallowed.
I don’t know why it never occurred to me to draw my halberd and dive in after that woman. I was a Lord-Castellant, after all, and had been spoiling for any kind of a fight mere moments before, and yet my courage deserted me then. I think it was the stillness of the crowd that had made me a part of it, the reverential aspect to their observance. No one screamed in terror from the promenade the way they should have. And then, like a fish that had bobbed its mouth above water to capture a fly, the monster sank, body first, then head, leaving a handful of whipping tentacles that disappeared without a ripple. An artillery strike to a nearby pontoon made the surface water tremble, the fire reflecting in broken orange and red, and then the beast was gone.
‘What on Sigendil’s radiant glow was that?’ I said.
‘I don’t follow,’ said one of the guardsmen, as though I had just asked him to explain to me the meta-cosmology of Ulgu and its relationship with Hyish.
I looked at him, incredulous.
He shuffled back. ‘I don’t understand.’
‘There is a monster under your city that could accidentally swallow a Stardrake in its sleep,’ I explained, deliberately. ‘These people seem to think that it can help you against Blackjaw, and I’m inclined to agree with them.’
‘No, Castle Lord.’
‘No, what?’
‘It’s forbidden.’
I glared at the guardsman, and then, because it wasn’t as if this idiot was ever going to go to Azyr and find me out for a liar, said, ‘There can be no secrets from those touched by the heavens.’
‘Secrets, Castle Lord?’ He shook his head vigorously. The others joined in. ‘I don’t understand.’
I swear that if I heard that one more time, then people were going to start dying. Fortunately for their skin – and my honour – it didn’t come to that.
‘Castle Lord Hamilcar,’ came a voice from behind me. ‘What is going on here?’
‘I wish I knew.’
I turned as a heavy-set older figure shuffled onto the promontory, escorted by a pair of pontoon guards that looked about as threatening as one of those little blue daemons of Tze
entch. He was clad in a slightly finer variation of the whale fat and seagull feather ensemble sported by all the Nemesians I had encountered thus far. Fishbone pins secured his collar and his sleeves, and a complicated necklace-cum-dreamcatcher rested against his broad chest. I knew him. His name was Nanook, elder chief of the Killiniq Pontoon, one of the council of fifteen that governed this place.
Now, ordinarily, I have precious little time or patience for temporal authority. I prefer to seize command myself where I can, or work further down the chain and act as though higher authority were not there if I cannot. The elder chiefs of Nemisuvik, however, took their duties commendably casually. Their ceremonial meeting place was a hut right there in the Katuunak pontoon, but they tended to convene wherever was warmest and driest, and happened to be offering food.
As the siege had drawn on however, I had seen them more often standing vigil on the gabion-walls with the maorai than sitting on a blanket humming to the ocean for guidance. I had been greatly impressed by them, truth be told, and naturally they had been impressed by me.
I jabbed my thumb over my shoulder. ‘I just saw a monster that would give a Dracoth nightmares eat a woman. You didn’t think to mention it when I arrived?’
With a reluctant sigh, Nanook gestured back with his head. ‘Come with me, Castle Lord.’
With that, the elder chief turned and shuffled off with his guards. With an impatient frown, I went after him. While I wanted to press him on the monster right away, I had a finely honed sense for an old man being bloody mysterious, and held my silence.
In any case, he didn’t take me far.
Our destination was a modest timber-framed building, waterproofed in stretched grey hide that looked as though it had been flayed from the allopex at about the same time that Dracothion was plucking Sigmar from the ruins of Mallus. Smoke puffed from the gill-windows, but it was of the ‘there’s something on the hearth’ kind rather than the ‘your house has been hit by a burning skull’ kind, so I stood by as Nanook pushed in the flap and entered.
As was customary in Nemesian dwellings, regardless of size, there was a single room. Furnishings were sparse, limited to blubbery skins on the floor and some twinkly things dangling from the ceiling, turning idly in the smoke from the hearthpot. For a people who made their homes in the coldest, wettest place in the Mortal Realms, they overcompensated enormously when it came to their homes.
Even I swooned slightly.
Two old mortals were already bent around the stewing hearthpot, but because no gathering of the elder chiefs would be complete without some humming and muttering, a third observed the ritual formalities from a mat in the corner. The first two supped contentedly at bowls of fish broth, as if the bloodreavers of Khorne were not knocking their city down around their heads. It made me want to shake someone. Instead, I took the bowl that was offered me, as Nanook took that offered him.
The Nemesians set great store in perseverance, and in generosity, and Hamilcar Bear-Eater never turns down free food.
Nanook sipped gingerly, while I took my bowl of broth in a single outsized hand to down it in one slug, fishy lumps and all. Wiping my mouth on the back of my gauntlet, I tossed the bowl back to the elder who had passed it to me. He caught it deftly, belying his years, for I swear that the Nemesians do not age like other men. The Stormwilds batter them until they are dried out, preserving them like some kind of brown cheese until they consent to up and die. His name was Pak, of the Taloyak Pontoon. The other seated beside the hearthpot was Hitta. Unless my ears deceived me, the woman muttering in the corner was Jissipa.
‘Is anyone going to tell me what I just saw?’ I said, as Pak and Nanook took seats by the hearthpot. ‘I am a Lord-Castellant of the Astral Templars, and I would know every inch of the fortress I am tasked to defend.’ The better to argue for conducting the fight outside of it, usually. As far as I’m concerned walls are good for nothing but impeding a real man’s swing. Of course, that had never been an option in Nemisuvik, so in truth I had not pressed my responsibilities in that regard too closely.
The gathered chiefs looked at Nanook.
‘He saw Angujakkak,’ he explained.
‘The Grey King surfaced?’ said Hitta. Her voice was like an old rope, crusty with salt and smoke.
The others’ eyes brightened momentarily, and not with the fire.
‘He has not lain yet,’ said Nanook. ‘There was a fight on the promenade. A crowd rushed the guards to entreat the King. One woman made it.’
The elders muttered into their soup. I couldn’t tell if it was a prayer for the deceased woman, or just elderly harrumphing.
‘People,’ said Pak, with the same tone of voice that you might say idiots. ‘They can be stupid as slugfish.’
‘They are desperate,’ said Nanook.
‘No excuse,’ said Hitta.
I snapped my fingers, releasing a tiny spark of Azyr into the drowsily lit hut. ‘I’m waiting.’
‘Forgive us, Castle Lord,’ said Nanook. ‘We never have visitors. It is not something we know how to explain, because it never needs to be said. Angujakkak pulled the first men here, so our legends tell us, to where the currents of the Stormwilds shelter and provide. You have seen that we have no boats of our own.’
I had noticed.
Had I spotted one then I would have been on it and paddling towards Blackjaw’s flagship quicker than you could recite the names of the Six Smiths. After the first few days of my stay I had actually tried to build one. Nemisuvik possessed no shortage of materials, or things that float, but it turns out that boatbuilding is harder than it looks.
‘The beast looks hearty for a thousand years or more,’ I said.
The elder chiefs shook their heads.
‘No, Castle Lord,’ said Nanook. ‘He is the fourth. Every few hundred years, the King will grow large enough to break the nets that hold him.’
‘You mean it will get bigger?’
Nanook shrugged. ‘When he breaks the nets he will be big enough, and then leave.’
‘But not before laying the egg,’ said Pak.
‘And a new cycle begins,’ Hitta finished.
‘Well, he’s more than big enough to smash a hole in Blackjaw’s fleet.’ I shook my head. ‘Any bigger and he’d be entering into Godbeast territory.’
Godbeasts, or Zodiacal Monsters, depending on the pretentiousness of the scholar you’re speaking to, are monstrous constellations of the Mortal Realms. Think of them like realmstone, the way that celestium, gravesand or warpstone soaks up the properties of their respective realms. Still with me? Good. Godbeasts are the same. Vulcatrix who slew Grimnir, Drakatoa who trapped Gorkamorka for hundreds of years, and of course the great Dracothion himself – all of these are Zodiacal Godbeasts, mighty enough to defy gods, and many of them even sat in the Highheim with Sigmar’s divine pantheon in the good old days. I didn’t know for certain if Nemisuvik’s Grey King was quite in that class, but it was close enough for me.
‘He and his ancestors have been our guardians for two thousand years,’ said Nanook. ‘He protects us from the predators of the Stormwilds even as he draws them to defend our walls, but he is still a wild monster, Castle Lord. He will not be bidden by us, or by you.’
‘You didn’t see him on the promenade,’ I said. ‘Trapped, surrounded by armed men and women. A wild beast would have run amok. Trust me, Nanook. I’m an Astral Templar, and I know beasts. It should have been a slaughter. The monster has bonded to you somehow, to this city. I can smell it.’
The old man frowned, thoughtfully. ‘Still, it cannot be.’
‘There has been no laying,’ said Hitta, leaning closer to underlight her wizened, fat-smeared features. ‘If Angujakkak leaves without first laying, then it will be the doom of Nemisuvik.’
I pointed angrily. At what, I don’t recall, but since we were surrounded it probably doesn’t matter. ‘The bl
oodreavers are going to be the doom of Nemisuvik!’
‘Perhaps,’ said Nanook, equanimously.
I let my head sink into my hands and growled under my breath. Perseverance and bloody equanimity. I wish I knew how they did it. Could they not be furious or frustrated like me, terrified like an ordinary human being?
‘The woman who dived into the lake,’ I said, drawing my fingers down my face and looking up. ‘What was she hoping to achieve?’
‘I do not know,’ said Nanook.
‘I know how well I play the part, but don’t mistake me for a genuine fool. And don’t think I can’t spot another fraud quicker than a Judicator can glean the taint of Chaos.’
The elders exchanged glances.
Nanook sighed and set down his soup, his appetite apparently gone. ‘To goad him on blood, Castle Lord. To make him hunger, enough that he will break his nets and swim in search of meat amongst the bloodreavers.’
‘That sounds like a fine plan,’ I declared. ‘A classic. Just the way they teach it at the castellan temples in Sigmaron. The only drawback I see to it is that it’s taken you over a month to bring it to me.’ The elder chiefs shrank from the thunder in my voice. The feathers in their attire prickled as the air in the hut became charged. I eyed the steaming hearthpot. ‘Let’s feed the Grey King.’
‘No,’ said Nanook, mildly, but firmly.
‘Try and stop me, old man.’ I regretted the words as soon as they left my mouth, but I was angry. The long, cold fear had made me so. I saw a way out of this purgatory and it made me go in with both feet. I never had been one to think of consequences. ‘I’ll jump in with the monster myself if I have to.’
The elder chiefs looked at each other, astonished, never once considering that I was an immortal barbarian who would far rather be eaten by a hell-squid in pursuit of victory than endure another day under Blackjaw’s siege ships.
Gods & Mortals Page 2