by Warhammer
‘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 Like the tide, withdrawn.’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 o
f 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?’