by Warhammer
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 h
is 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 har
d. 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.