Gods & Mortals

by Various Authors

  Dull things in their glorious plate, the Solar Guard moved in.

  There was a reluctance to their step, but they came anyway, a reminder of why Hamilcar had always despised biddable warriors, served up in gold.

  Whatever orders they had been given it was clear they had been told to execute them quietly, for without a cry or an oath they drew back their pole arms and charged. Hamilcar was not about to oblige them their desire for silence.

  Say one thing for Hamilcar Bear-Eater: he was loud.

  With a bellow that caused the panelling on the gates behind him to rattle and the imprisoned moon dragon of Jercho to shift in its chains, he backhanded an incoming pole arm from his chest, then drove his elbow into its wielder’s helmet with force enough to crack the man’s skull against his spine. Thracius shattered another’s breastplate with a punch that threw him into the wall. The Liberator-Prime beat on his breastplate and roared. Disappointment had made him wrathful, and Hamilcar was almost glad that he did not have a weapon. With an inchoate beast-sound Thracius dragged a knight from his comrades by the point of his pole arm, then dashed him against the ceiling.

  Even unarmed, the Stormcasts were proving more than the elite warriors of Jercho had been prepared for.

  With the courage of one who bore no share of danger, the Ray exhorted her faltering soldiers to press that attack. ‘They are unarmed. Bring down one, just one, and the sun will shine forever on you all.’ Her blade wove a dazzling pattern of sunsteel and diamond. It was a struggle just to look at her. Crow drew onto his haunches to leap for her, only for Hamilcar to throw his arm down across him like a barrier.

  ‘Down.’

  The woman laughed coldly. ‘As the sun forever shines, so is Sigmar prideful.’

  ‘I am not Sigmar. Though the resemblance is marked.’

  The thrall leapt forwards. Hamilcar unclipped his warding lantern just as the woman came within reach. The heavy sigmarite shutters struck her a mighty blow across the jaw, and she hit the floor like a pouch of gemstones. Hamilcar walked towards her recumbent form, rubbing his eyes, as Broudiccan and Thracius saw to the last of the Solar Guards.

  ‘Could Mannfred have worked his claws so deep so soon?’ asked Broudiccan. The giant Decimator was on one knee, looking over his shoulder as he sat an unconscious knight against the wall.

  ‘Mannfred would have known better. He would have sent more men.’ Blinking quickly, he turned to the downed woman. ‘Tell me why–’

  Before he could finish, a knife appeared in the woman’s hand. Hamilcar drew back, but then, eyes glassed by distance, she ran the knife across her own throat. A red line appeared, and the glaze in her eyes cleared as the controlling spirit chose that moment to forsake her body. Its parting gift was a few moments of horrified incomprehension as the woman spluttered and gagged and clawed at Hamilcar’s boot as if he had the power to save her. And then she was still.

  Hamilcar clicked his tongue.

  He had died one time too many to be moved by barbarity now.

  ‘Whatever the reason, the sun-king wants us dead.’

  ‘Agreed,’ said Thracius.

  Broudiccan spat on the ground as he rose. ‘And they say that Chaos never reached here.’

  ‘Chaos doesn’t always march with an army,’ said Hamilcar. ‘You can travel the seven realms to the farthest winterland and still find that Chaos got there first.’

  ‘Then we remove its stain from our boot heel,’ said Broudiccan, grimly.

  ‘Agreed,’ said Thracius.

  Hamilcar and his brothers looked up to see Crow pacing restively before the electrum panelling of a heavy wooden door. The gryph-hound stared at Hamilcar, intelligence and aggression in his eyes. Hamilcar grinned.

  Retrieving his halberd, Hamilcar kicked the doors in. They smashed outwards and splintered against the walls of a corridor. Immediately, he recoiled. It was a blistering desert of pastel stone and points of gold without colour or finish, such was the unnatural intensity of light that blazed through its enormous windows. Despite the pain in his eyes, Hamilcar marvelled. No army could storm the sun-king’s citadel and prevail. No agent or saboteur could make it this far and navigate any further undiscovered.

  ‘Some ambassadors we turned out to be,’ said Thracius, sorrowfully.

  ‘Ambassadors.’ Hamilcar gave a snort. ‘Describe me thus again and I’ll rinse your mouth with sand.’

  Broudiccan adjusted the sit of his dented helm and regarded them both sourly.

  ‘The sun-king seeks to thwart our great task and now he will pay for his crime. Such is the rule of Hamilcar!’ Hamilcar turned to his men, lifting his voice, and holding his halberd high. ‘We will bleed him, brothers. And give his kingdom to Sigmar!’

  ‘To Sigmar!’ they bellowed in return.

  ‘Hamilcar!’ he roared back at them, until the names were interchangeable.

  His heart beat faster than the continuing medley of the sun-king’s horns and gongs as Crow tore off down the corridor. Hamilcar powered after him, the ground-eating stride of a demigod, his warriors close behind. Joraad could be anywhere, but he would know exactly what was loose in his citadel. Through a door and the corridor became another, great open space, its windows washing it with molten gold. Hamilcar staggered, another blow to eyes that were still raw. There was a gargling cry from ahead, short-lived, then a slam of gryph-hound against metal, against stone wall. Hamilcar stepped over the savaged Solar Guard and into a staircase. It was marginally darker inside, luminous rather than blinding.

  The Astral Templars clattered down the stairs.

  Hamilcar broke open another door.

  It was some kind of receiving hall. A large wooden table was arrayed with nuts, dates and cured meats, presented as artworks on golden platters. Sunlight fell through slanted windows like taffeta ribbons, along with a natural breeze. A marble statue of womanly splendour poured water into a font from a horn of plenty. The cool chuckle of running water was a delight, so unexpected that Hamilcar almost charged right through the door and into the table.

  The spread teetered on its platters.

  His stomach stirred in sudden interest.

  The Sea of Bones had been a journey to tax even the limitless constitution of the Stormcast Eternals and he had taken little but water and salted sankrit since. With an act of will that impressed even himself he ignored the growls of his stomach to focus on those of Crow, and the pound of armoured footsteps approaching from beyond the other door, across from the far end of the table.

  ‘Judicators, left and right.’

  With exaggerated cutting gestures of his hand he directed the Judicators to either side of the long table, then leapt onto it two-footed. The elaborate vittle sculptures descended to the floor with a crash. He kicked aside a pyramid of dates that had somehow remained standing and twirled his halberd. The Judicators’ boltstorm crossbows sparked and whined as bolts of Azyrite energy materialised in their tracks, fizzing against aetheric strings that were suddenly taut.

  ‘Loose on my order,’ Hamilcar bellowed, for there was no warrior who could not be improved by heeding the example of Hamilcar. ‘I claim the city of Jercho for Sigmar. The fewer of its people I have to kill, the greater will be his prize.’

  With a crashing of gold-barred timbers, a phalanx of leather and bronze-clad common soldiery fell through the far door. ‘Hold!’ roared Hamilcar, and the mortal legionaries checked back in disarray at the monstrous visage he must have presented.

  Pushing and cussing, a slightly bent old man draped in black silks with light silver vambraces and coif forced his way up from the rear ranks. ‘Is this the same legion that crushed the sankrit at Heliopalis, first through the breach at Anatoly? If I didn’t know better, then I–’ The newcomer hesitated as he saw Hamilcar up on the dining table. Without tearing his eyes away, he too gestured his men to stand down. With clear relief, they did so. �
�Lord-Castellant,’ he said.

  Hamilcar might have laughed. He hadn’t even been as pleased to see the man when he’d first stumbled into him, blind with thirst, lost and half-mad from a sun that never set.

  ‘Sarmiel! Praise whoever you like for you!’

  The Jerchese general did not return Hamilcar’s welcome. ‘There were reports of fighting in the gatehouse.’

  A shrug. ‘That was us.’

  ‘I vouched for you before the sun-king himself. Do you know what that means? A dozen Solar Guard are dead!’

  ‘At least twice as many still live. Is that the work of invaders?’

  Sarmiel hesitated at that, Hamilcar saw. He already doubted the truth of his reports or he would have come in fighting and to hell with explanations.

  That was all the opening Hamilcar needed.

  He had mastered his rhetoric in debate with the God-King himself, the Sigmarabulum crowded to its rafters by the admiring folk of Azyr, there to witness a bout between champions. They were a dozen spear-lengths apart, Hamilcar and the mortal man, but he lowered his halberd and extended a hand in friendship.

  ‘You remember the day we met. You remember what you said to me? I know you do because you had to tell me again after you had given me water and I became sensible.’

  A nod. ‘That to have crossed the Sea of Bones you could only have been sent by Sigmar.’

  ‘You had me at your mercy. Now I have you at mine.’

  His halberd tinked as its blade touched the flagstones.

  Sarmiel appeared to sag in surrender. No sooner had he done so, however, than the stoop he had been carrying seemed to evaporate off him. He sheathed his sword with a shake of the head. ‘I doubt I could stop you anyway. Not with this lot.’ A glare at his men.

  ‘I didn’t want to be the one to say it.’ Hamilcar grinned.

  ‘I knew something was amiss when el Ranoon removed me from your honour guard. No. Before then. Since he moved his court to the Moon Palace.’

  ‘Moon Palace?’

  ‘It is where the first sun-king imprisoned the night.’

  Hamilcar and Broudiccan shared a look.

  ‘Take us there.’

  Hamilcar did not even realise he had been asleep.

  He gasped, fighting with nothing, arms bulging as he fought to drive the… something from his breastplate. There was a pain in his heart. Black iron cracked his ribs like the shell of a nut and dug for the soft beating pulp within. With a roar he lashed out, his halberd having somehow found its way into his hand, and clove at the Abyssal’s neck. The splitting of stone and the crack as it hit the ground broke the dream logic, and he blinked the bloody image of his murderer, Ashigorath, back into nightmare.

  In its place came the prattling of a fountain, the click and chirrup of insects, the rustle of leaves. Moonlit petals crept over the ledges of windows that faced in from no part of the fortress that Hamilcar could remember seeing. He held his chest and drew a deep breath. The air was jasmine-scented, as cool as dead iron. He looked back to the steel-barred portal that el Talame’s key had seen them past.

  ‘Here is where the night is bound,’ said the old general. ‘And everything that goes with it.’

  ‘Fitting,’ Hamilcar grunted.

  Broudiccan and the others said nothing. Hamilcar knew no fear. They knew better than to doubt it.

  The fountain he had heard was a few score yards from the portal, in a column of moonlight that the trees seemed to have twisted themselves to avoid. He walked to the basin. Kneeling, he splashed cool water into his face. As the ripples cleared, he saw himself looking into a face that he almost recognised: the tawny beard, scuffed by serried lines of scars, the thorny branch tattoo that swirled around his eye.

  The eye, however, he avoided looking into too deeply.

  Say one thing for Hamilcar Bear-Eater: he wasn’t perfect. He dashed the reflection with his gauntlet.

  Memories of death and Reforging had never before troubled him while he had been awake. Was he awake in this place? He wondered, briefly, if el Talame ever slept and if he did, if he dreamed.

  Crow whined up at him as he rubbed his breastplate.

  Sigmar, would the dreams never leave him?

  He turned to el Talame. ‘The sun-king. Point me at him.’

  The general pointed through a crumbling stone arch. He was afraid to be here, but he marshalled it well, achieving as much as Hamilcar with far less in his making. Determined to be the champion of a god that warriors would kneel to, he shrugged the ache aside, then rose, flicking dream water from his fingers, and ducked under the arch.

  The fact that they moved through the heart of the citadel of Jercho, or some timeless, dreamscaped version of it, was artfully masked by weeping orchids and clambering vines. Night birds twittered in backwards verse and things both ageless and unseen scampered amongst the branches. Blossoms drifted on the air as they need never fall.

  Broudiccan tramped after him, grim, solid.

  ‘Do you think this place would resist a Chaos invasion if it came?’ Hamilcar asked him, surprised at how the garden’s solemnity made him whisper.

  ‘No. If an army can breach the Sea of Bones then Jercho and her sisters will fall.’

  They passed onto a bridge over a gurgling stream, causing the wood to creak under the weight of their armour.

  ‘It needn’t be an army,’ said Hamilcar. ‘Mannfred can build an army. I saw it myself in Cartha–’

  ‘–hold!’

  Broudiccan caught his shoulder and the column of Astral Templars and Jercho legionaries clattered to a halt.

  The space beyond the bridge was littered with small stone benches and statues that had been subjected to centuries of weathering and then shrouded in creepers. The moonlight that filtered through the ornamental trees gleamed where it touched bare stone and cut sharply across reflective pools and small bowls of water. A young man with the entitled impatience of a nobleman rested with one arm against a statue, as though awaiting an audience. He was lightly armoured in a fitted leather lorica with gold accoutrements and a silk cloak swept over one shoulder. A fine pair of steel swords with jewelled hilts were scabbarded at his belt, and rested against the statue beside him was a long spear with a jade-coloured pennant tied around the base of the blade. Seeing Hamilcar at the same time as Hamilcar saw him, he swept up his spear and sauntered towards them.

  Broudiccan didn’t wait for any sign of malice.

  Striding towards the noble he planted his boot heel through the man’s chest, strength that had been beaten into him on the God-King’s anvil, lifting the mortal from his feet and smashing him back against the statue. The youth dropped in a clatter of lorica scales into a reflective pool, broken, Hamilcar would have thought, but then he vaulted agilely to his feet. He hissed, bleeding from his mouth. His spear began to hum as he spun it.

  And something that no man should possess glittered in the moonlight.

  Fangs.

  ‘By the gods, that’s Gilgazed,’ el Talame stuttered, agog, pointing with his tulwar, ‘el Ranoon’s eldest son.’

  Snake-quick, the vampire struck Broudiccan like a spear thrown at a wall. The Decimator’s enormous axe whirled as fast as the vampire’s spear could match. Blade struck blade, haft against haft; claps of thunder shook invisible birds from their roosts amongst the trees as storm-fused barbarian battled undying fiend.

  Hamilcar turned from his brother’s fight, the splash of water warning of the arrival of others from downstream. The vampire’s speed made him little more than a blur, a sweeping depression in the surface of the water that raced towards Hamilcar at the foot of the bridge.

  The vampire’s blade came at him like the lance head of a galloping knight, hard enough and fast enough in that first dramatic instant of arrival to have speared through dragon scale had Hamilcar not had the wherewithal to duck. It sli
ced across him. Using his momentum to turn, Hamilcar backhanded the rising butt of his halberd across the vampire’s jaw. The knight’s face snapped back and spun away. Hamilcar forced the rest of the vampire’s body to follow. A boot to the back bent the vampire over the bridge’s handrail. Hamilcar lent in, drew his gladius, and rammed the stabbing blade through the vampire’s spine. The fiend’s legs turned to jelly, and Hamilcar’s boot held him where he was. Boot transferred to knee and then he leant in to bite down on the vampire’s ear. His teeth tore through cartilage, his mouth filled sluggishly with brackish warm blood, and then he put his full strength through his knee.

  The handrail broke with a splintering crack and the howling vampire dropped the short way to the water. Hamilcar spat his bloody ear after him and roared.

  He was Hamilcar of the Astral Templars. Eater of Bears. Sigmar would look upon him and then turn to his own two hands to marvel at the titan they had wrought.

  The vampire writhed in the shallow water, and the slower men in clanking golden plate that had been hurrying to the bridge from the same direction looked up in surprise. Hamilcar grinned at them. ‘Hamilcaaar!’ He leapt, two-footed, and flattened the two men into the rocky streambed where the first still scrabbled madly to claw his way out. These were not vampires; they were mortal.

  They never stood a chance.

  ‘Slaughter the infidels!’ cried a voice, cultured, but too steeped in the intonations of the Jerchese to be anything but a native. ‘By order of the sun-king!’

  With a roar, four-score Solar Guards surged up the paths that converged on the little bridge and its island folly. A boltstorm bolt blasted a knight to scraps of liquid gold and cast the two behind into the trees with the aftershock. Prosecutors took wing. While Hamilcar and Broudiccan had fought, Thracius and el Talame had organised their men and they moved to oppose their attackers now. Armed and ready, Hamilcar would have counted on his dozen alone against five times the number of mortal warriors that assaulted them now, but for every ten heavy knights there was a sneering nobleman with an exotic blade and fangs.