Hamilcar- Champion of the Gods - David Guymer

by Warhammer

  ‘I knew it,’ I said.

  ‘Knew what?’

  ‘That you were disappointed that we weren’t really going to the Varanspire.’

  The captain’s chuckles faded to shallow breaths. ‘You should… leave me.’

  ‘You think that Hamilcar Bear-Eater, Champion of the Gods, cannot carry you?

  ‘Of course… not.’

  ‘Then don’t suggest it again.’

  ‘Hamilcar. Sigmar. Seven Words.’ The Jerech’s words grew quieter as he slipped back into unconsciousness. I shook him gently against the shoulder where he lay, but this time he didn’t rouse.

  ‘Fight, my friend. This is one battle I can’t win for you.’

  I may not have been able to trace the Ghur energies as Brychen could, but I was a trapper and a hunter; I could see the depressions that Brychen and Nassam had left in the amorphous ‘rock’ and follow them. Sounds came back to me. Hushed voices. Stumbling feet. They didn’t rebound back to me in the manner of an echo, but rather trembled out of the walls like ripples through a pond. Every so often, I even trained my eyes to catch a glimpse of them. Two figures, greyed out and blurred together by several feet of intervening rock, leaning into one another like a three-legged gor, and running.

  After what I presumed to be a few hundred feet, but could not be sure as the passage had a nasty habit of flexing and stretching at random, Hamuz and I came to a large half-finished cavern. The walls rippled and bulged like the skin of an under-inflated bladder. Skaven clambered over ramshackle timber scaffolds to chip away at them, others remaining below to slap at them with nothing more esoteric than paint rollers. Where their instruments passed, the walls of the cavern became marginally more opaque. They were making this place real, mining solid rock from the aether stuff of the Allpoints.

  In amongst the labourers, overseeing the work, were large, black-furred skaven encased in armoured suits veined with warpstone.

  They put me in mind of the lightning golems that mined the hollow core of the Mallus for sigmarite on the God-King’s behalf.

  I had never ventured into the remains of the World-That-Was of course (not at that time, anyway) for it was forbidden to all but Grungni and Sigmar himself, and I had the horrible feeling that this was the vision I would hold every time I thought of it thereafter.

  The skaven seemed to be in a state of some disarray, and I noticed that one armoured miner was spraying green sparks from the cracked joints of his wrist. Almost as if his arm had just got in the way of a Jerech quartz greatsword. I couldn’t help but admire Nassam’s composure. The ratman squeaked in fright at the sight of me and managed to avoid making the same mistake by getting well out of the way.

  Ignoring him completely, I belted past, after Brychen and my way out, down the tunnel that he’d been hunched in front of.

  The place was a warren, a howling madness of coiling trails and endlessly snaking paths that seemed to lead nowhere but always, nearly, somewhere. I’d been harbouring the hope that it would start to show some similarity to the old Nevermarsh lair, but I should have known better. That’s not how skaven minds work. Dig first, plan later. Even if Ikrit had wanted every­thing to be exactly so, I doubted even the Horned Rat himself had the power to make his minions do so, not without getting down here and doing the work himself. And neither Ikrit nor his horned god seemed like the dirtied hands type.

  Without slowing down, I allowed myself a moment to close my eyes and get my bearings, to set aside the sense of acceleration. Brychen was right. We were tearing free of the realmsphere.

  The reminder that I was speeding through an infinite cosmos and not, in fact, in a confined underground space, actually came as something of a relief.

  Feeling surer about things, I took a deep breath and blundered on.

  My first indication that I was actually getting somewhere came in a flash of amber and gnashing teeth. I felt a low growl, as low as the fire in the earth beneath the permafrost, rumble through my marrow – the challenge of one alpha beast sensing the return of another. Ghur. It knew me, and the part of me that was still of Azyr responded in kind.

  My second indication was the bullet in my rondel plate.

  The warpstone shell punched into the circular disc covering my armpit and threw me back against the wall of the tunnel almost as soon as I’d charged out of it and into another cavern. A second blew a hole out of the rock between my legs. A third and a fourth missed by more appreciable distances, but close enough still to cover me in an acrid haze of debris. Coughing, I stumbled across to the opposite wall, Hamuz still unconscious across my shoulder, while a fifth shot smacked into the wall where my chest had been. I looked back at the crack in the wall and grinned ruefully. The sound of ringing sigmarite had numbed my ears, but I could hear combat up ahead. Steel on glass. Wood on steel. Inhuman squeals. I couldn’t see any of it, of course, but I was taking that as a positive sign that my attackers couldn’t see me anymore either. The fingers around my halberd jangled from the shot to my armpit, but I ignored it, charging through the green fugue and back into the cavern.

  I blinked, disoriented as much by the grotesquery that milled about in front of me as the warpstone poison in my eyes. Banners hung like tithes of flesh from walls that were so thin as to be practically non-existent. Stars screamed past, coloured with the reds, yellows and bilious browns of Ikrit’s colours. And not just Ikrit’s. As well as cogwork shock-vermin, engineer-piloted warsuits, chittering clan warriors kitted out with warpfire throwers, ratling cannons and poison wind launchers, the chamber heaved with heavily armoured bestigors of the Blind Herd and a score of swollen knights in the putrid iconography of the Legion of Bloat. I’ll admit, I hadn’t given a second thought to the remnants of Manguish’s forces since defeating their champion at Kurzog’s Hill, but the long-suffering adherents to Nurgle’s creed were nothing if not apathetic in the face of life’s blows.

  The sounds of fighting were still coming from somewhere, but the chamber’s disorder was so great that I didn’t even know where to start.

  I looked instead to where that unclean alliance of Ruin seemed to be heading.

  It was a portal. It looked and smelled like the Arcway gate I had described at Beast’s Maw, although I assumed it to be an artificial and temporary one, veined with warp-lightning and surrounded by a steel ring that was suspended from the ceiling by rusted hawsers. Something about it tasted familiar. As if it were my power that had blasted this hole between realms.

  The only way towards it was by a single flight of metal steps, currently groaning under the stupefying weight of Ikrit’s blightkings. Slavering and snarling, it stained the horrific warriors under its maws with amber light before devouring them wholesale. Trying to look through the portal to what lay on the other side was like looking through an orange-coloured pool in the rain. To either side of the portal apparatus, tiered gantries had been set up, bristling with skaven jezzails and ratling gunners who would occasionally pummel the liquid surface of the portal with fire, presumably with the intention of convincing whatever was on the other side to keep their heads down.

  Only about half a dozen or so seemed more intent on me.

  Brychen and Nassam had to be in there somewhere.

  I was good, but I wasn’t quite this good.

  Unshipping my lantern, I held it at arm’s length. ‘Look at me!’ I yelled, easily shouting over the mixed braying of a few thousand skaven, beastmen and plague knights. ‘Turn and be awed when Hamilcar Bear-Eater speaks to you.’ A few hideously malformed heads turned my way and I inched open the lantern’s shutter, delivering a blast of Azyr light that, even directed away, seared my eyes and burnt a scream out of me.

  The blubbering squeals of gors and skaven made me feel marginally better.

  When my vision cleared I saw that I had burnt a swathe through the Ruinous horde. Up on the gantry, the jezzails that had been aiming at me had all drop
ped their guns in favour of pawing at their bleeding eyes. I grinned at them for a moment. I’d never seriously doubted it, but it was good to be reminded that I still had it.

  ‘Over here, lord.’

  Nassam stood at the outer rim of an expanding wedge of scorched bodies, sword glittering amber, but looking otherwise immaculate except for a few specks of blood in his magnificent beard. Brychen, on the other hand, apparently much recovered for the snarling proximity of the Ghurlands, had hurled herself onto a bestigor twice her size with an icon of Tzeentch stapled through its nose and was disembowelling it with obvious relish.

  ‘No time for that,’ I yelled at her.

  ‘The summer fades!’ Brychen shrieked over the beastman’s terrible lowing, spraying the surrounding transparency with bloody entrails. ‘The days shorten. The bowers turn red. And now comes the reaping time!’

  ‘Brychen. What in the–?’

  I covered my mouth as something cancerous and black, and yet unmistakeably stomach-like, was skewered on the priestess’ spear, ripped out, and flung towards me. It sailed over my shoulder and burst on the ground with a wet splat. I made a face. Even I had limits. Getting as far as Nassam, I pushed the Jerech towards her, then turned to smash a blightking across the face with my lantern. Hamuz’s limbs flapped. The pox knight’s helmet snapped around with a wheeze of lanced sores. Then he hacked up yellow pus, sounding suspiciously as though he were laughing at me as it dribbled through his grille. I backed off after the greatsword.

  Sigmar, but they were hard-wearing.

  Brychen emitted an ululating shriek from behind me. I looked over my shoulder as she launched herself at the Skyre clan warsuit at the top of the portal steps. It raised an arm. Her spear clanged against the riveted metal. It raised the other, a pulse of green lightning stiffening trailing whip-claws into six-foot long blades, and swiped at her head. She knocked it over her head on the butt of her spear, then let the weapon fall from her hands. The warsuit’s engineer-pilot squealed in delight. Brychen’s fists burst into roaring flame. The engineer stopped squealing as Brychen tore open the machine’s chest armour and roasted the contents of the pilot’s cradle.

  ‘My lord.’

  Nassam greeted me at the bottom step with a nod. I assumed it was for me, but then I realised he was gesturing towards el-Shaah, on my shoulder. I gave the captain a shake.

  He wasn’t breathing.

  ‘No,’ I snarled.

  I’d lost men before, I’d lost them by the tens of thousands, but Hamuz and Nassam were the first two I’d ever known well enough to really lose.

  I was surprised by how angry it made me.

  ‘Hamuz is dead, lord,’ said Nassam, matter-of-factly.

  ‘Hamilcar does not answer to Death.’

  I pounded up the metal steps, Nassam falling behind me, just as the skaven gun teams sorted themselves out and started firing on us. I ran past Brychen, the priestess swiping a bark-encrusted hand to swat aside a bullet and, giving a furious yell, flung myself head first into the portal.

  Chapter twenty-seven

  You are probably expecting a corridor of rushing stars, a roar of cosmic noise – if so, then prepare to be as underwhelmed as I was at stepping through Ikrit’s portal. There was a ripple across the surface of the portal that I barely even felt, and then before I’d so much as realised that I’d gone anywhere I was stepping out into pitch darkness, looking for a step that was unexpectedly not actively spinning away from my boot, and fell flat on my face, Hamuz on top of me. I took in a deep breath of rock. Ghur. I would have recognised it anywhere.

  I would probably have kissed that rock were it not for the battle currently being fought over it.

  As battles went, this one didn’t present a lot to look at, a rutting blackness of antlered heads and armoured, animal shapes, illuminated by the occasional spark of blade on blade. A brilliant flash of lightning pushed back the darkness for an instant, replacing it with something more blinding, but not before giving me a glimpse of a shattered wall of Liberator shields, the gaps in their formation plugged by desperate Judicators, fighting off the Skyre clans’ elite with storm gladius and crossbow stocks.

  Wincing at the throbbing ache behind my eyes, I started to push myself up, just as Brychen and Nassam fell out of the portal behind me. A single warpstone bullet split the rippling skein from which we’d come and struck Brychen in the back. Her armour cracked and she cried out, arms going up as she crashed to the floor. Nassam dropped immediately to her side, but she waved him off, already getting up. Looking over her shoulder she scowled at the split bark.

  ‘Warpstone bullet,’ she snarled.

  ‘Stopped by wooden armour?’ said Nassam, amazed.

  ‘Says the man wearing glass.’

  ‘It’s crystal.’ The Jerech self-consciously brushed dust from his immaculate harness. It glittered sporadically in the lights of Azyr battle. ‘And a bit of leather.’

  I set Hamuz neatly on the ground by the portal. I’d seen him back to his home realm. That felt like something. Not much, perhaps, but more than most got in exchange for the sacrifices they gladly gave. For a moment we remained like that, staring at each other, as if waiting for one of us to say something.

  ‘I’ll make sure your daughter gets a piece of the Allpoints, captain,’ I murmured. ‘She’ll have a horn off the Everchosen’s crown.’

  ‘We should leave him,’ said Brychen.

  ‘I am leaving him.’

  ‘You look like you are taking root.’

  ‘Get moving,’ I snapped at her. ‘There’s an army behind us.’

  ‘There’s an army in front of us,’ Nassam chipped in helpfully.

  Brychen frowned over the sporadically flash-lit cavern. ‘Underground again. Is it too much to ask for a taste of open sky?’

  ‘It’s still up there,’ I said.

  Clenching her fists, the priestess opened her mouth and groaned. The sound came from the bark of her vambrace rather than her mouth, however, and in a rupturing creak of emergent life her hand suddenly sprouted another spear.

  ‘Nice,’ I said, and meant it.

  ‘The snake in the forest litter we will be, then. The lightning bolt that strikes the solitary tree.’ She raised her spear in the air, the wooden point bursting into a molten amber that bathed the battlefield in its savage glow. ‘Destruction comes for you,’ she shrieked, bounding towards the embattled skaven. ‘With poison and fire, and hatred in her veins.’

  Twirling my halberd, I strode after her.

  I wasn’t going to let a mortal priestess take all the glory. Not with Akturus’ Imperishables right there.

  ‘Hamilcar returns to the Ghurlands!’ I hacked down a bleating bestigor just as Brychen flung herself onto a clanrat warrior’s back and ripped out his spine. She sent a lance of amber through the heart of another, leapt forwards and impaled a bullgor through the mouth with her dripping spear. I kept pace with long strides, hacking and yelling, finishing off the fuming bullgor for her with a hewing stroke of my halberd. She glared at me as I shouldered past. ‘Brothers and sisters of the Storm Eternal, stand fast. This battle is won.’ I hammered my halberd into the cogwork shoulder of a shock-vermin as it sought, wisely, to spin out of my way. ‘Because Hamilcar Bear-Eater joins it.’ A bestigor lowed and swung at me with a cleaver. I broke its shin with a sharp kick, then did the same to its jaw as it dropped neatly into the rising uppercut from my warding lantern. ‘Rejoice, and let the heavens hear your praises.’

  ‘Sigmar,’ I heard one of the Imperishables breathe. ‘He has come back.’

  I thought that I recognised the voice of the Judicator who had first welcomed me to the Seven Words. His tone was, if anything, even more awe-struck than it had been then.

  ‘Yes, brothers,’ I shouted, before adding simply. ‘Yes.’

  ‘More on the way, lord,’ said Nassam, safeguarding my b
ack by swinging at whatever came close to it with a giant glass sword.

  ‘Let them come!’ I thundered. ‘Let them all come. Let Ikrit know that here is where Hamilcar stands.’ I looped my halberd overhead, messily decapitating one bestigor and cracking the antlers of another behind me with the ferrule. ‘I am coming for you, warlock!’ I bellowed with every kill I made and every forwards step I took. ‘The God-King’s judgement comes for you on storm-forged sigmarite!’

  ‘Step!’ someone yelled, which seemed an incongruous sort of thing to be shouting in the middle of a fight. There was a resounding bang from somewhere. ‘Step!’ And another. The bestigor I had been reaching for obligingly rammed itself onto my blade. It lowed furiously. ‘Step!’ The clot of fur and flesh ahead of me gave way before a wall of black cartouche shields. Too tightly packed even to raise their arms, skaven and beastmen died as warblades stabbed out from behind the shield wall.

  I lowered my halberd.

  The battle was over. This was the bit that came after, the slitting of throats and the spearing of chests; some of those in need of finishing off just happened to be upright and holding weapons.

  ‘Loose!’

  A flurry of boltstorm bolts thrummed over the shield wall. Every­thing within six feet of me suddenly dropped, a quarrel crackling from some part of their anatomy. One of the Judicators aimed his crossbow at Brychen, his stormsight clearly less than convinced by the green-skinned priestess with the amber-tipped spear and the bloody face.

  ‘She’s human,’ I barked, my voice hoarse from shouting. ‘And a ward of the Bear-Eater.’

  ‘I am most certainly not,’ she hissed.

  ‘Ignore her!’

  ‘Breach!’

  The shield wall parted down the middle. The Liberators to my right took a step to the right, while those to the left went left. I ushered Nassam through and glared pointedly at Brychen until the priestess lowered her spear and stalked after him. I turned, backing up as the Arcway disgorged a fresh wave of beastmen and skaven, the occasional volley of gunfire cracking off the walls, the ceiling or a Sigmarite Shield. The shield wall crashed back together behind me, and I left the Imperishables to do what the Imperishables were renowned for doing.