Gods & Mortals

by Various Authors

  I am, if we are to speak in understatements, no Vandus Hammerhand.

  Leaving his axe where it hung, Fage planted his hands to his thighs and stood with an audible creak. I chose to remain crouching, lest the mortal startle.

  ‘This beast took twenty of my people,’ he said, shaking his head sadly. ‘The rest of the camp fled.’ He looked at the print as if vowing to commit it to memory. ‘I’m the only one that made it to the Seven Words.’

  ‘It is a long journey,’ I said, rising slowly with a rattle of heavy sigmarite and hanging mail. I stand over him like a mountain. ‘You may find that others have made it upon our return.’

  It was also a terrain crawling with beastmen, skaven and worse, but this, I judged, the woodcutter did not wish to hear.

  A sudden rustle in the litterfall had the man reaching for his axe, but it was only Crow. My faithful gryph-hound had been scouting further downslope and burst from the trees, chewing my gauntlet in greeting, then dropping his ice-blue beak to sniff at the print in the mud. I did not know what, if anything, he expected to find, for the print was days old at least. Frankly, we were fortunate to have even that much to go on, for the ground of the Gorkoman is hard, its topsoil thin and its climate sufficiently disagreeable to turn an exposed patch of earth to slurry in short order.

  ‘Sigmar blesses us,’ I said aloud, scratching the downy feathers behind Crow’s eyes. The gryph-hound clacked his beak in annoyance, then surrendered to my touch, emitting a throbbing growl as he pushed his head into my gauntlet. His bright blue eyes glittered in the twilight, tilted sideways, but still studying the trees with more caution than I could profess.

  Broudiccan crossed his arms.

  ‘The camp is made,’ he said. The Decimator-Prime was a man of grim and silent stature. I have never seen a warrior so capable with a starsoul mace be so reticent to speak of his deeds. If a few of his acts had been misattributed to my heroism, then I would not be surprised. ‘We should rest,’ he went on, the nature of the quest clearly rendering him uncommonly loquacious. ‘Continue tomorrow.’

  Fage looked at me, startled. ‘You sleep?’

  I startled him just a little further with a roaring laugh. ‘Only when my foes are uninspiring.’

  I do not dream. Sometimes I think it another mortal impurity beaten out of me on the Anvil of Apotheosis, but I know others who speak of their dreams and it is true that I used to dream. It was not so very long ago that I would close my eyes in dread of reprising my dying moments under the claws of the Abyssal Ashigorath another night. Though I must remind myself that it has been a hundred years since the Realmgate Wars raged over Ghur. There were times when I feared myself mad, but perhaps that, too, was a symptom of my second Reforging, for the nightmares became less frequent as the decades passed. Now, I do not dream.

  That was how I knew this dream was not mine.

  A giant tree stood above me, a deciduous monster that had no earthly place amongst the carniferns and leechwood pines of the High Gorwood. It was night, a vastly swollen moon framing the great oak’s bower. The stars were unfamiliar ones, as if positioned as an afterthought by one who had never given them much consideration. I, on the other hand, am a creature of Azyr, and they were the first things I noticed out of place. The night chorus, too, was gone. Silence circled me and the great tree like an unseen threat, and though I felt no wind on my skin, the oak leant over me and rustled.

  In a groan of bark and a murmur of leaves, it spoke.

  ‘Help me.’

  With an angry crunch, the tree reared up onto its roots, tearing great clumps of earth away from the ground as if it meant to rise away. I reached over my shoulder, but whoever’s mind conjured this dream had not seen fit to furnish me with a weapon. My warding lantern was similarly absent.

  ‘He stole my life.’

  ‘Where are you?’ I roared over the shaking branches.

  ‘I am dying. You will be next.’

  There was a ripping sound, a splitting of hard bark, sap splattered from the wound like human blood. I flung a hand in front of my eyes as the sap turned to searing amber and burned the dream from my sight.

  I woke up waving my hands furiously, Ghur’s bright sun a stabbing pressure on my eyes. I grunted, still only half awake, prising Crow’s beak from my vambrace.

  ‘I was having the most pleasant dream,’ I said, stretching ruefully, hoping to brazen the episode out.

  Unfortunately, there were those amongst my Vanguard chamber who had been with me since Jercho and the Sea of Bones, and even those who had not would have heard the stories. They watched me arm myself as if I might pick up my halberd upside down or try to fit my warding lantern over my head.

  Fage, naturally, was oblivious. The masks the Stormcast wore to battle made it almost impossible for one who knew them less well than I to judge their mood. The woodcutter had apparently woken early and hovered about the outskirts of the camp, coat fastened, axe in hand, and clearly eager to find what was left of his group.

  I forced the man to eat something while I splashed the soil with watered wine, a libation to Sigmar and the local deities of the hunt, and set the anxious woodsman loose.

  Fage hared off into the trees, the pair of Vanguard-Hunters I had ordered to keep an eye on him striding purposefully after him.

  Only Fage knew exactly where we were heading. The Seven Words was still a ruin of her former (and I am being generous here) glory. No one, least of all me, had paid overly close attention to where the woodcutters and quarrymen that poured through the Azyr Gate disappeared to upon their arrival. I knew there was every chance that Fage could find the monster that had taken his fellows without my warriors’ help, but with any luck the sharp-eyed Vanguard-Hunters would spot the beast before it spotted him.

  The remaining hunters fanned out into the trees, Raptors with longstrike and hurricane crossbows advancing more carefully behind them.

  The Astral Templars were no less keen than their mortal guide to be about the hunt.

  I walked over to Broudiccan. The Decimator nodded to me as he pulled on his battered helmet and tested the draw of his heavy-headed mace from its shoulder sleeve. It was all the welcome I was going to get, but my dream was weighing on my thoughts and I needed to discuss it with someone.

  ‘What do you know of the Gorwood?’ I asked him, measuring my stride to his. He shrugged. ‘I know that Uxor Untamed held the Seven Words for several years before I took it from him.’

  ‘You and Lord-Castellant Akturus.’

  I waved off the correction. ‘Is that why we still call it the Gorwood, I wonder? Has it always been the haunt of beastmen and their kind?’

  Another shrug.

  Broudiccan’s imagination was as stilted as his words, but to me the staggering variety of the eight Mortal Realms has always been a source of wonderment. The mark of the gods was not always as obvious as the Mountains of Maraz or Gouge Canyon, but wherever you chose to look, that was what you saw there. Every peak and defile, every endemic tree and native creature had been shaped, deliberately or otherwise, by the divinities that had once moved amongst them – and in many lands still did.

  ‘Do I recall Barbarus speaking of a cult of tree worshippers?’

  ‘A dead cult.’ Broudiccan shrugged. ‘I saw some of the ruins they left behind. They were gone long before the Untamed took their country.’

  I pondered on the Decimator’s words as we continued after Fage and the Vanguards.

  Ghur was a wild place, ever changing, and little of it had been effectively explored. This was true even of such bastions as Excelsis and Shu’ghol, fortresses of enlightenment to which Sigmar knew better than to send the likes of me, but compared to their toothless savagery the Gorkoman was an ancient and untamed wilderness.

  Anything could be lurking on the slopes of the High Gorwood.

  The leechwood pines thickened as I pushed
downhill, sharp-edged branches striking against my armour, the occasional twig drawing blood from my face. The Vanguard had dropped out of view, even Crow loping off after them, agitated by something or other. He left Broudiccan and me alone.

  ‘I dreamt last night,’ I said.

  ‘I know.’ Clearly, the Decimator had no wish to discuss it further.

  ‘It was a prophetic dream.’

  Broudiccan’s grim mask turned towards me.

  ‘You do not believe me?’

  ‘Prophecy is not your gift.’

  The Decimator’s understatement threatened to bring a laugh out of me, but I suppressed it. ‘If you doubt me because of the incident with the seraphon…’

  Broudiccan sighed. ‘The stars were all in their proper place when I looked at them.’

  ‘They had shifted once again by the time you had dragged yourself to my throne room,’ I barked. ‘The slann was signalling me for help. Just as the oak is now.’

  ‘The… oak?’

  I gave him a feral grin. ‘Tell me it would not be the strangest thing you have seen in the Mortal Realms.’

  Broudiccan did not answer that. ‘But why do these portents speak only to you?’

  I frowned.

  I could see that the Decimator would take some persuading. My reputation amongst the Freeguild regiments of the Ghurlands was a legend of valour, courage and shining charisma. My reputation amongst my immortal brethren was for recklessness, grandstanding and personal bravado. The Bear-Eaters wore my legend like a token of blessing on their armour, but that did not mean they would follow me into the Crystal Labyrinth on the strength of my say-so.

  ‘Tell me where the oak guides you and we will go there. But if it does not guide you…’ Broudiccan shrugged again. I was getting a little sick of seeing it. ‘We still have a monster to hunt.’

  I threw him a reluctant nod of agreement, just as Crow’s shriek and the wail of something bestial rang through the trees. My first thought was that the gryph-hound had found something more appetising than jerked lizard for our repast, then an arrow thudded into the tree beside me.

  ‘Beastmen!’ I yelled at the top of my formidable voice as gangly ungors clad in crimson bark and animal skins poured out from the trees. Arrows hissed towards me. Most were caught up in the hanging nets of predatory branches, but a dozen or so clattered off my and Broudiccan’s armour.

  The Decimator wordlessly freed his starsoul mace and ran to meet the beastman charge. I spun my halberd overhead, lopping off an ungor’s head as it ran towards me, then caught the haft two-handed to bring it down as though I were an axeman splitting wood. The blade struck the ungor’s arm from its body. The animal bleated in shock and panic as leechwood pines leaned in on all sides to haul the struggling creature into their branches.

  I tried to ignore the horrific slurping noises from the trees as the beastman’s death throes subsided, thinking again of those cuts to my face that I had foolishly dismissed as insignificant grazes.

  A star blast from Broudiccan’s mace proved a welcome distraction, pulverising a beastman. The shock wave threw two more off their hooves and into the clutches of the thrashing leechwoods.

  Just as I made to join the Decimator, Crow bounded into the carnage.

  The gryph-hound scrabbled to a halt on the rough ground, silver beak and claws all bloody, only to stare at me judgementally before turning and running back the way he had come. Huffing air out through my pursed lips, I left Broudiccan and chased after the gryph-hound. The Decimator-Prime could take care of himself.

  Branches lashed at my face as I pounded after Crow. The trees were aroused now, responding to the taste of spilled blood in the air and the vibrations of the hunt. The wood around me shivered in expectation.

  A larger beastman gor galloped into my path. A longstrike bolt fizzled in its gut. I ran it down without slowing, and the goat-headed monstrosity thumped off my breastplate. Something purple winked from behind a tree. I stumbled to a halt, arms out like a break sail. Illyrius. The Raptor pointed his hurricane crossbow at the creature and swore in a language dead even to me. A withering volley of charged bolts whittled down the pack of gors that had been massing behind me for a charge. When I had regained my composure, I saluted the Raptor with my halberd and looked around for Crow.

  I did not need to look too hard.

  Simply following the sound of bones being cracked and organs torn open, I found the gryph-hound, up to his neck in a large gor’s stomach.

  A Vanguard-Hunter ran across me before I had a chance to move. Firing off thunderous blasts of his boltstorm pistol from the hip, he headed towards Fage.

  The woodsman was fending off a pair of ungors with the speed and strength of uncompromising terror. The opportunistic runts had naturally been drawn to the human while the two Vanguard-Hunters I had left with him were engaged with five of their burlier cousins. Each of the giant bestigors boasted the size and brawn of a Stormcast Eternal, if not the blessed raiment and the skill. Broudiccan barrelled into the melee with his customary silent rage, and I left him to it, confident that the woodcutter would live to tell the tale.

  Hooves pounded on the hard ground behind me. Closing fast.

  Timing it to perfection, I looped my halberd up and back and saw the blade sink into the muscular but unprotected torso of a ­stampeding centigor. The beast’s speed and my own strength came together to devastating effect, my halberd passing clean through the centigor’s chest and bringing its equine lower quarters crashing to the ground at my feet in a spray of mulch and grit. I confess to being unsure as to the ultimate fate of its upper body.

  Twirling my halberd through a sequence of lazy circles, I scanned the area for more enemies, only to find them all fully engaged in dying or fleeing. The fizz and snap of hurricane and longstrike bolts pursued the latter, a bestial squawk or two and a shaking of ravenous trees attesting to the Raptors’ lack of mercy and their aim.

  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 Stormcasts 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.