Gods' Gift - David Guymer

by Warhammer

  If not their actual woodcraft in spotting the ambush in the first place.

  I found Broudiccan in the aftermath doing as all good second-in-command’s should in such situations, remonstrating bitterly with the two hunters I had left with Fage. The mortal looked rattled, but none the worse for a scratch or two that would give him a story to tell when he returned to the Seven Words.

  I dismissed the three warriors and crouched by the shaken woodsman. His eyes rolled towards me, and for a second I was afraid he might bolt.

  The last thing I wanted was to have to send Crow to bring him back.

  ‘I presume you have not been troubled by beastmen before now?’ I said, as kindly as I could muster.

  He shook his head. ‘The best lumber comes from further down the mountain, nearer the Nevermarsh. Our palisade was high enough to keep the… the beasts at bay. And we paid natives to ensure the woods were clear before we set out to cutting.’

  ‘Natives?’ I asked. I could not say why that struck a chord with me, except perhaps that Fage had never bothered to mention them before now.

  He swallowed and nodded. ‘Good people. Primitive. But good people. Whatever they could take off the beastmen was the only payment they would accept. All they asked was for us not to damage their sacred trees.’

  ‘And did you?’

  The man blanched. ‘Cut a sacred tree? In the Gorwood?’

  A twitch of movement caught my eye, and I reached instinctively for my warding lantern, but it was only a bestigor, suspended between the branches of a pair of trees and jerking as the blood was sucked out of it. It seemed to make the woodsman’s point neatly, and he did not elaborate further.

  ‘Could the monster that murdered your comrades have been some slave beast of the brayherds?’ I asked.

  ‘A jabberslythe?’ suggested Broudiccan.

  ‘A razorgor?’ offered Illyrius.

  Fage shook his head, angry. ‘I don’t know. How would I know?’

  ‘It is all right,’ I said. ‘I do not think it is either of those things.’

  I had seen both before and far worse in the armies of Chaos, and none could account for the track we had found the night before. An idea formed in my mind and I pursed my lips, ready to give credence to the possibility that I just might be infallible after all.

  ‘Show me where the better trees are.’

  The sun sank behind the mountain. Ghur’s sun is a wild and untamed thing, prone to rise and set wherever, and whenever, it will. Its abandon I can respect, though it does make timekeeping a challenge. I estimated that it had been eight or nine hours (by the Azyrite measure) since the ambush in the Gorwood when Fage pointed me towards a swathe of large and imposing trees.

  For all their rude stature, there was something funereal about the scene. The woodcutters’ hard work had coppiced into the boundaries to leave a verge of jagged stumps between those bigger, rounder trees and the bloodthirsty homunculi of the Gorwood. They looked like grave markers – the sort that you can find in the Freeguilder cemeteries of Azyrheim, if the Knights of Usirian will let you pass, which is seldom a given.

  It all reminded me of my dream.

  I perused the treeline, the idea I had been playing with since my last conversation with the woodsman taking on a kind of shape. I pointed to a tree at random. Being no expert, one looked about as good as another to me.

  ‘Cut it down,’ I said.

  Fage looked at me as if such wild nonsense had never been heard within shouting distance of a lumber camp.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Humour me.’

  The woodsman glanced at the other Stormcast for support, but to a warrior they were masked and grim and he found no contradictory argument there. ‘All right.’ He made his way, half-skipping over the stump-riddled slope towards the tree I had indicated.

  Fage unhitched his axe, eyed up the trunk, measuring the blow, then hacked into the wood. Bark flew off as he teased the axe-blade out of the trunk. I wondered if the groan that passed through the verdant copse was genuinely one of discontent or purely in my imagination.

  Finally, the axe came out. The gash it had inflicted on the wood was pitifully shallow.

  Felling a tree was clearly harder than it looked.

  ‘Is that all?’ I said

  Fage lowered his axe, his pride stung. ‘It’d take a score of men, paired up and working in shifts, to bring something like this down.’

  I crack my knuckles. ‘Step aside.’ I walked towards the wounded tree, letting the haft of my halberd slip through my grip until I held it near the butt. The long curve of its axe-like blade glinted in the last of the sun.

  This time I definitely heard something.

  A groan, as if ancient timbers were being drawn into a stressed and unpalatable new position. The foliage rustled briefly, then moved, a wave of restless leaves heading slowly in our direction. Fage hurried back to the line of Vanguards who calmly raised their weapons to the trees.

  The front rank of trees gave way, and I took an involuntary step back.

  I saw then why I had such difficulty identifying the spoor we had discovered in the High Gorwood, why there had been only a single print, and how it had been made in such unlikely ground.

  The creature towered over us all. It was huge, lignified, armoured in thick plates of reddish bark and encrusted with orange lichens. Buzzing clouds of insects emerged from bore holes in its bark and swarmed around its aggressively branched crown. Its eyes were myopic pools of amber, buried within toughened whorls. They seemed to have difficulty focusing on something as small and active as me, and the monster peered down with short-sighted loathing.

  I have never been to Ghyran.

  I am familiar enough with the warlike forest spirits that inhabit the Jade Kingdoms to bluff it, if challenged, for they exist too in the wilder places of Azyr. They are different, of course, as the Everqueen and the God-King are different; reclusive, patient, less prone to spring rages and content, by and large, to sleep through the cycles of the Heavens.

  This was a Ghurite Treelord.

  It was a beast.

  I lowered my halberd, lifting my open hand to show I meant it no harm.

  ‘You came to me in my dream. Tell me, how may Hamilcar Bear-Eater hel–’

  The treelord snatched me up without breaking stride, blasting the wind from my lungs and tossing my halberd to the ground. Broudiccan shouted something that I could not hear for the wind whistling in my ears, presumably ‘loose!’ for soon thereafter the air burned to the rapid fire of hurricane crossbows. The smell of wood smoke reached me, but the treelord took another lurching step and smacked a vanguard-hunter into the bole of a tree with a swipe of its hand. The Stormcast dissolved into a bolt of lightning that hammered the dead warrior back to the Heavens. The tree smouldered in its wake and the beast gave a rumble of steady outrage, its grip on me tightening until sigmarite creaked and ribs bowed.

  My vision burst into colours, stars blistering the foreground of what was otherwise a blur of bloody bark and hissing swarms. The treelord’s hand had swallowed my lower body up to the waist. Its grip pushed my warding lantern up against my breastplate, but its gnarly index finger was clamped over the shutter and I could not open it.

  Bracing my hands against the treelord’s finger, I tried to force it far enough down to free the lantern.

  I am a beast of a man, a giant even amongst my fellow Stormcast. I am the Champion of Cartha, the Eater of Bears. I slew the Ironjaw war chief, the Great Red, in an unarmed combat that lasted a day and a night. My strength is a thing of fireside tales and legend, yet I could not for the life of me move that finger.

  I was not even wholly convinced that it noticed the attempt at all.

  Lightning-flecked quarrels and boltstorm fire thundered and cracked. Somewhere in that awkward streak of greenish ground and amber sky, I saw C
row tearing bark from the treelord’s shins, trying to climb. The treelord ignored him utterly. Another streak of lightning bolted skywards.

  I am not afraid to die.

  I have done it before and I will doubtless have to do so again, but if my warriors were to be spared the torment of the soul forges that day, I was going to have to fell the treelord myself.

  The constant spinning motion of the treelord waving me about in its fist was starting to have an unpleasant effect even on my constitution. I gritted my teeth against the rising bile, then spat with inch-perfect precision in the monster’s lidless eye.

  I felt the anger run through the treelord’s gnarled bulk as it turned its age-dulled eyes from my warriors to me.

  I would have gasped in pain, but the monster’s grip was crushing my diaphragm and all I could do was mouth silent profanities as it drew me in. I could feel my bones being ground, my feet, legs and stomach being compacted like a nut in a vice. Something metal clattered hollowly on hard wood. I almost cried in elation as I looked down to see that the treelord’s tightening grip had forced my warding lantern wholly out of its clutches.

  Frankly, I had no idea if the restorative power of Sigmar would harm or hinder the Ghurite, but it was all I had. My fingers felt as if they were clad in sponge rather than sigmarite. My arms had become bendy and gained a joint, but somehow I got my hands over the lantern’s mechanism and drew the shutter.

  The light of Sigendil and every bright star over Azyrheim emptied from my lantern and into the treelord’s half-blind eye.

  It gave a slow but emphatic roar of pain.

  I had hoped that it would drop me, but, of course, it had to hurl me with every chip and whorl of its awesome strength as if I had just burst into flames.

  I crashed through a tangle of leechwood pines, their branches willowing over my heavy armour and savaging my face. By some sweet irony, the treelord had thrown me too hard for the branches to get a purchase on me, only slowing me down as I battered my way through and thumped heavily to the ground.

  Groaning, astonished that my legs could still stand my weight, I stumbled up and around, and swayed to face the treelord.

  Its legs had been stripped of bark. One was on fire. Its body sprouted quarrels like virile new growths and the eye I had burned was leaking a milky white sap. It gave a tortured groan and collapsed.

  It dropped straight down, falling onto what I will call its knees, though they did not bend so much as bow, then split like hollow bones. Its shoulders sagged, and then it was still, the creak of settling wood overlain with the grating disquiet of the insects that had called it home. My relief was such that the sight of Fage swatting at a furious swarm of fat-bellied wasps with the flat of his hatchet almost made me chuckle.

  The sudden shudder of tearing bark knocked my good humour flat, throwing me straight back into the final moments of my dream the previous night.

  Acting on a premonition, I flung up a hand as the treelord’s great trunk tore up the middle and a searing beam of amber flashed across us.

  It faded quickly, leaving only a tingling warmth upon my skin, and I lowered my hand to see the bark that had clad the belly of the treelord had given way to reveal a cocoon of some kind within the dripping sap. Held in a foetal curl within its protective juices was a sylvaneth unlike any I had seen before. Her bark was brittle, and where new growth showed, it was yellow and unhealthy. The entire inside of the tree smelled rotten.

  The tree spirit looked up at me like a blind crone on her death bed.

  I went to her.

  ‘It was you,’ I said, gruff, but gentle. ‘It was you that sought to reach me in my dream.’ The sylvaneth turned to the sound of my voice without any suggestion of recognition or, indeed, sanity. ‘Why did you attack us? Or the woodsman’s people?’

  ‘I am dying,’ she rasped, her voice like wind through reeds.

  I understood. The Jade lines ran strong here, strong enough to support these great trees. ‘You fled here to heal.’

  ‘Ghur’thu heard my call,’ she said, presumably referring to the treelord I had unfortunately just slain. It must have killed Fage’s woodsmen and driven off the native tree worshippers too, which must have come as a nasty shock to their beliefs.

  ‘It does not look as though you are healing,’ I said.

  ‘He stole my life.’

  I shot a questioning glance at Fage, who shrugged. ‘Not yet, he hasn’t.’

  ‘He stole my life.’

  Her use of the word “stole” struck me as awkward, and I was almost certain that I was misinterpreting her meaning somehow. There was no time to interrogate her further than that, however. She was dying.

  ‘You will be next,’ she hissed.

  That gave me pause. A vision of myself held in a cage of warp lightning and screaming filled my thoughts, and I cursed the Lord-Veritant of the Knights Merciless who put it there.

  ‘What… makes you say that?’

  ‘Because he told me.’

  ‘He?’

  She opened the mottled bark of her mouth to answer as a feeble shudder passed through her body. She relaxed into the soft wall of her cocoon with a sigh, and said no more.

  For a time, no one sullied the grove with words.

  I lowered my eyes and placed my hand upon her body. I felt a light tingling through the metal of my gauntlets. I did not know what had been done to her.

  But I would find out.

  About the Author

  David Guymer is the author of the Iron Hands novel Eye of Medusa and Echoes of the Long War for The Beast Arises series. For Warhammer, he is best-known for his Gotrek & Felix novels Slayer, Kinslayer and City of the Damned, along with the novella Thorgrim. He is also responsible for a plethora of short stories set in the worlds of Warhammer and Warhammer 40,000. David is a freelance writer based in the East Riding of Yorkshire, and was a finalist in the 2014 David Gemmell Legend Awards for his skaven novel Headtaker.

  When Hamilcar Bear-Eater, self-styled greatest of all Sigmar’s heroes, must defend the critical Seven Words, he does so in typically bombastic style.

  A Black Library Publication

  Published in Great Britain in 2017 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

  Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.

  Cover illustration by John Michelbach.

  Gods’ Gift © Copyright Games Workshop Limited 2017. Gods’ Gift, GW, Games Workshop, Black Library, Warhammer, Warhammer Age of Sigmar, Stormcast Eternals, and all associated logos, illustrations, images, names, creatures, races, vehicles, locations, weapons, characters, and the distinctive likenesses thereof, are either ® or TM, and/or © Games Workshop Limited, variably registered around the world.

  All Rights Reserved.

  A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN: 978-1-78572-847-1

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

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