by Warhammer
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. ‘T
he 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.’