‘Across this plain lies the Manticore Dreadhold,’ said Thostos, his voice a granite rumble. ‘We must make haste. The next stage of Sigmar’s plan cannot proceed until we secure it and hold it.’
Mykos watched the Lord-Celestant. Thostos showed no interest in the grand spectacle of the plains, nor did he make any attempt to bolster his warriors’ spirits after their struggle through the warrens. His hands were clenched at his sides, and he stared listlessly at the distant horizon as the Celestial Vindicators formed up behind him. The fervour and the anger were long gone, and in their place was stillness, but not calm. His armour and battle-mask obscured any expression, but Mykos could feel the tension in him even at this distance. He was coiled like a spring, ready to snap at the slightest opportunity.
‘Goldfeather,’ Mykos shouted, dragging his mind back to more immediate matters. The Prosecutor-Prime dropped neatly off the rock where he had been perching, and glided down to where the Argellonites were still ranking up.
‘My Lord?’ he asked.
‘Take your swiftest men and survey the foothills and the immediate area. I want no more surprises. Anything suspicious, anything at all, and you report back to me. This land has already sent many broken brothers back to Azyr, and I do not intend to take its dangers lightly. Go.’
The Prosecutor-Prime nodded and went to gather his fellow heralds. The rest of the Argellonites and the Bladestorm had begun to filter down the winding stair, though it was so narrow that only two could walk side by side. It would take several hours to reach the foothills and redress once more into proper fighting ranks. That worried Mykos. Of the Stormcasts’ manifold virtues, stealth was not one; they were exposed here, and the skaven had amply proven the potential of a swift surprise attack.
As the Argellonites began to file down the twisting steps, Eldroc came to Mykos’ side. His armour was freshly repaired, and the hint of a limp that had marked him in the warrens had disappeared. Once again he was an image of strength and implacable fortitude. Of all the Bladestorm’s warriors, Eldroc had been the most forthcoming, and Mykos was grateful for it. He liked the man’s simple honesty and level-headedness.
‘You seem troubled, my friend,’ Eldroc said.
‘It is nothing, Lord-Castellant. Merely concern that we found battle so soon. I had hoped to arrive at our destination without issue.’
‘How fine that would be,’ Eldroc chuckled. ‘In these times that would be a rare blessing, in any corner of the realms.’
He rested his halberd on his shoulder and leaned upon the haft. They were silent a moment, listening to the tramp of boots and the howling of the wind as it whipped its way through the mountain pass.
‘He can be difficult, I know,’ the Lord-Castellant said, quietly.
Mykos said nothing. It was clear that Eldroc was choosing his words carefully, and he gave the man time to gather his thoughts. It was no easy thing for a Stormcast to question a fellow warrior, let alone his leader. Absolute loyalty and brotherhood was as much a part of them as their armour, as their weapons and their fearlessness.
‘I have spoken to many of our reforged brothers,’ Eldroc sighed, ‘and the change is more marked in Thostos than in any of them. He used to be such a thoughtful man. I think that was why he was chosen to lead. We are a wrathful host, and we need such men to temper us.’
Eldroc turned to Mykos. There was a pleading edge to his voice, and Mykos realised that the Lord-Castellant had likely never spoken to another soul regarding his concerns.
‘Give him time, my lord,’ Eldroc said.
Prosecutor-Prime Evios Goldfeather enjoyed the spiteful power of the winds of the Roaring Plains as they buffeted him mercilessly. It was pleasant enough to glide in the tranquil air of the Singing Gardens, or even over the celestial valleys of Erianos, but if there was one thing Goldfeather valued, it was a challenge. The wind here had no sense to it; a zephyr would drift west, allowing him to glide on its gentle arc, then a wall of force would slam him back the other direction, blasting him so hard that he dropped several yards, and spinning him so fast that he could barely control his descent.
At first it was unsettling, but he quickly found himself relishing the unforgiving nature of the place. There was a pattern to be found in the midst of the madness. He caught a rising gust and let it lift him, felt it sway and weaken, and sought a westerly gale that filled his radiant wings with air, letting it take him on a wide arc over the churning grass of the Roaring Plains. His fellow Prosecutors followed in his wake, though he noted with no surprise, and no small amount of satisfaction, that they were finding the turbulent winds far trickier to deal with. Galeth and Harion had already been blown off course, despite the power of their Azyrite wings. He would have to speak to them later; he demanded a certain level of excellence from his men, after all.
He returned his gaze to the plains. It was an astonishing sight, the Prosecutor-Prime had to concede. The great grass seas stretched for miles in every direction, punctuated by jagged, twisting spears of rock and wind-scoured mesa clusters that broke through the earth’s surface, clutching at the sky. In all that space one might expect a measure of stillness, but that was not the case; everywhere Goldfeather looked, there was motion. Around the base of the rocky protrusions the grass grew longer, grasping at the escaping formations, wrapping around them in choking vine clusters. The wind shifted and pulled at these vines, tightening them like a hangman’s noose. As the shifting clouds passed overhead and darkened the plain for a moment, Goldfeather thought he saw one great claw of rock lurch, dragged down towards the earth by a thick belt of thorns that encircled it. Then sunlight speared though the clouds once more and it was still. Just a trick of the light, he supposed.
He was distracted by a low, rumbling noise that built into a roar. In the distance, the earth itself split. Dirt was kicked up as a great gouge tore across the plain, as if something monstrous was attempting to wrench itself free. No sooner had the earth ceased its writhing movement than a second rent appeared, following the path of the first. There was a tremor, signified by a series of great cracks that rippled across the ground, and then an uneasy quiet.
Soaring higher, Goldfeather saw more terrible wonders. A carpet of flesh roiled across the plain far to the Stormcasts’ left, a shifting mass of stampeding beasts so thickly packed together that he could not see the ground beneath them. They were flat-headed, quadruped grazing beasts, with mighty horns that wrapped backwards around their skulls. There were thousands… hundreds of thousands of them.
The Prosecutor-Prime dropped closer and saw another flock of creatures, scaled and lizard-like, but with brightly coloured feathers across their wings and hindquarters. Each was bigger than a man, almost the same size as a Stormcast, and as Evios watched they rolled and dived into the stampede, nipping at the flanks of the beasts and trying to drive them into one another. As he watched, one of the larger avians succeeded in tripping an unfortunate creature; there was a horrific avalanche of hooves and screaming flesh, and a great chunk of the onrushing tide collapsed in on itself. Nothing could survive such carnage and Evios watched, impressed despite himself at the winged creatures’ ingenuity, as a mountain of crushed beasts piled up, ground to pieces under the sheer weight of the onrushing mass. They would eat well once the stampede had passed on.
One of the avian creatures noticed his presence and began to shriek, and Goldfeather decided it was time to move on. He signalled his retinue, and as one they peeled away from the massacre.
He dropped again and found another gust of wind, and let it sweep him back to the south, towards the Stormcast position. The Prosecutor-Prime had almost satisfied himself that he had a clear reading on the region when he caught something out of the corner of his eye. Heading in a lateral direction towards the foothills that the Stormcasts were heading to, he saw a number of specks. He signalled his men to follow and soared towards the movement.
As he swept closer,
he saw that a large mob of creatures was pursuing a smaller, scattered band across the plain. The pursuers numbered a couple of hundred, perhaps, and their size, lumbering gait and bulky, crudely grafted armour marked them out as orruks.
Prosecutor Omeris finally caught up with him. ‘They head towards our brothers,’ he said, straining to be heard above the howl of the wind. ‘We should head back to inform the Lord-Celestants.’
‘Orruks,’ spat Goldfeather. ‘Low-minded filth, the lot of them.’
‘They almost have their prey,’ said Omeris.
‘Hardly surprising,’ Goldfeather replied. ‘The cursed brutes can run for hours when their blood is up.’
His gaze fell upon the fleeing band. They were scrawny and battered, and they wore ragged scraps of leather not much more refined than that of the primitive savages chasing them, but there was no mistaking it.
They were human.
The Stormcasts wound their way through the bluffs, alert at every howl, every creak of earth. Eldroc marched at the head of the column, a few paces behind Thostos. He watched his lord stride onwards, heedless of the noises around them. Eldroc, and all of his brothers in the Celestial Vindicators, had seen their families and friends slaughtered by the vile hordes of Chaos. As the blades finally came for them too, they had bellowed their defiance to the skies, and prayed to mighty Sigmar for the chance to wreak their vengeance upon the hated minions of the Dark Gods. This oath had been offered willingly, and any price had been a price worth paying.
And yet, looking at what had become of his Lord-Celestant, Eldroc was filled with doubt. The man was hollow, an unfeeling shell filled with nothing but an insatiable need to exact his vengeance. Gone was the thoughtful, righteous man that Eldroc had battled and trained with for so many years leading up to the great venture into the realms. They had talked together once, sharing dreams of a new era of hope and glory for the scions of Sigmar, both knowing that they would never get to experience that peace for themselves. They had accepted that truth gladly, but it was one thing to welcome an inevitable, honourable death, and another to die eternally, each fresh Reforging bringing a symphony of agonies, further draining and weakening the soul.
And what else did the Stormcasts risk, every time they went to war for the God-King? The truth only Sigmar knew. Each warrior came back altered in his own way. There was a Liberator in the Bladestorm who returned unable to remember any of his former friends, but able, with perfect clarity, to recall hundreds of ancient sonnets in some archaic language that could barely be deciphered. Others remembered only fragments of their former lives, as though they were seeing them through the eyes of another person.
Eldroc himself had felt the agony of Reforging. Yet somehow he had emerged without the traumas that his friends and brothers had suffered. His memories had faded, yes, like a rich tapestry left in the blazing sun, but deep down he knew himself; he remembered the man he had been and what he fought for.
There was guilt, too, when he looked upon the haunted visage of his Lord-Celestant, the broken shell that Thostos had become. Why had he not suffered as brutally as his friend? This terrified him more than any malady or sickness of the mind. A gnawing thought echoed inside Eldroc’s head: he had not yet discovered just what he had sacrificed – when he did, would it make what Thostos had gone through seem minor?
Absolute loyalty and devotion to his God-King ran through Eldroc like a rich vein through unyielding stone, but still he could not set aside his misgivings. Nor could he sleep at night.
The beating of wings stirred him from his dark thoughts. The Argellonites’ Prosecutor-Prime had returned, arriving some way ahead of his fellow scouts. He dropped nimbly from the sky, landing before Lord-Celestant Argellon with ease.
‘My lord,’ he said, his voice tight and urgent. ‘A mob of orruks is heading towards us, pursuing a band of mortals.’
Mykos visibly tensed. ‘Have they fallen? Do they bear the mark of the Dark Gods?’
The Prosecutor-Prime considered this a moment, and shrugged. ‘They are savage-looking, wrapped in animal skins like primitive brutes,’ he replied, and Eldroc could hear the disdain in his words, ‘but I saw none of the wretched symbols or marks of Chaos. I cannot say for certain, though I do know they will not make it much further before they tire and the orruks run them down.’
‘How many orruks?’ said Thostos, and Goldfeather gave a start at the Lord-Celestant’s sudden presence.
‘Roughly two hundred,’ he replied.
Mykos exchanged a look with Thostos. ‘We do not need a fight with the orruks,’ he said. ‘Our mission will be difficult enough already without their interference. Yet these mortals may be able to provide us with valuable information regarding this region. We should show our strength.’
The Bladestorm stared at Mykos for a long time, then gave an almost imperceptible nod and turned to survey their current position. They were coming to the mouth of the foothills, and the terrain was sloping down to meet the plains. It was still rough ground, jagged, heat-baked and dry, but it formed a natural defensive position against an infantry assault. The embankments that channelled them were roughly the height of two Stormcasts, and the ground between was narrow enough for two-score warriors to hold the line without threat of being outflanked. Some thousand yards or so ahead, the rocky earth sloped down one final time, and beyond that Thostos could see a glimpse of open ground.
‘Retributor-Prime Hyphon,’ he shouted, ‘summon your warriors. Lord-Celestant Argellon, we will take a hundred men and make haste for the ridge ahead of our main force.’
Liberators dashed to the summit of the ridge, forming into lines and smashing their colossal shields down into the dirt to form an impenetrable ring of steel. Behind them the Judicators judged their range and held their bows taut and ready as the orruks rumbled closer. It was easy to hear them now, hooting and hollering their bestial war cries as they drove themselves ever harder, desperate to catch the fleeing mortals.
Staggering with the half-drunk sway of exhausted prey, the beleaguered humans spotted the formation of Stormcasts and stopped still. Several dropped to their knees, exhausted.
‘Move your idle backsides,’ roared Goldfeather, hovering above the ragged band. He scanned the group to indentify the leader and settled on a wiry female who was down on one knee, a curved blade in her hand. She seemed to be the one the others looked to.
He swooped down to meet her. ‘Get your people behind those shields, or we’ll leave you to the greenskins,’ he said.
The mortals’ nervous eyes flicked towards the woman, who stared up at the Prosecutor-Prime with a familiarity and lack of fear that made him feel surprisingly uncomfortable. He was used to little more than servile deference from mortals. Finally, she nodded, put two calloused fingers between her lips and gave a sharp whistle, clearly deciding that a slim chance of survival was better than the certainty of death. Summoning up one last reserve of energy, the mortals dragged themselves forwards, scrambling up the shallow incline towards the Stormcasts’ shield wall, which opened to let them through. As they passed, the Celestial Vindicators slid back into position expertly.
‘They’re a ragged lot,’ said Knight-Heraldor Axilon as the humans passed. Mykos could hardly disagree.
They were wiry and weathered, with a leanness to their frame that suggested many nights had gone by without a decent meal. Ritual scars and red-ink tattoos covered their sun-browned skin; they wore little armour besides thin hide shirts and breeches, and leather wrappings on their feet and hands. The tall, raven-haired warrior who led them in had her hair bound up on one side with leather scraps and shaved clean on the other. As her party staggered past, her eyes locked with those of the Lord-Celestant. They were cold, grey and hard – a hunter’s eyes, a wolf’s eyes. She showed no fear, and no surprise or awe that he could discern. These are killers, Mykos thought. He signalled Liberator-Prime Julon, who nodded and began to secu
re the mortals, stripping any weapons they carried and examining them for any overt signs of corruption.
The orruks howled, denied of their prey, and thundered forwards into a wide, loose semicircle some twenty yards ahead of the Stormcasts. They grunted and snarled, spat and snorted, but for now they seemed curious enough not to hurl themselves into the Stormcast line. Shoving his fellows out of his way, a hulking specimen stomped forward, lazily scratching his thick neck, a wicked-looking greataxe held loosely at his side. Several burly warriors followed him, each bearing a smeared, red claw mark upon their black-iron breastplates.
‘What now?’ asked Goldfeather, gently dropping to the ground beside his Lord-Celestant, a stormcall javelin held at the ready in one gauntleted fist.
‘Now we parlay,’ said Mykos grimly, looking to his fellow Lord-Celestant, who was gazing at the orruks dispassionately. Thostos said nothing, though his weapons were drawn and held in steady hands. ‘Humanity has known a common purpose with the orruks before. Perhaps we can avoid a skirmish that will gain us nothing.’
He signalled to Axilon, and the Knight-Heraldor nodded and selected five broad-shouldered and eager Retributors. If this did come to blows, he wanted the orruks down and dying as soon as possible. Together, the retinue stepped out from the shield wall.
Mykos held Mercutia, and the wondrous grandblade caught the sun, sending a ripple of light over his armour. He motioned his men to halt and strode forwards, sword raised high. The orruks watched, their ape-like brows furrowed. With elaborate slowness, the Lord-Celestant made a show of lowering the weapon, sliding it securely into the scabbard at his thigh.
The orruks looked to their leader, inching forwards slowly. He held out a meaty palm to stop them, and raised his own weapon. Tongue protruding in mock concentration, he lifted the greataxe and slotted its haft through an imaginary scabbard. His warriors guffawed idiotically. He smirked, and barked something indecipherable at his warriors. Eight came forward, while the others loomed menacingly in the background.
Bladestorm Page 3
