by Warhammer
And the reminder of Broudiccan only made me feel worse.
I couldn’t avoid thinking back to my own reforging.
A warrior’s death is never going to be a joyful experience, but my last one was about as unpleasant as a soldier of Sigmar can hope for. My body ripped apart by the Dread Abyssal Ashigaroth, my soul halfway down its throat before the pull of the Mallus dragged me from its gorge. Broudiccan’s end had been a peck on the cheek by comparison, but no matter the means of return, a soul’s experience on the Anvil soon renders the pain of its delivery insignificant.
Imagine that you are steel. Hot and impure. You are material, and to the Smith that is all you are. You are not a man to him. You are something to be worked, something functional yet wondrous to be remade. With every blow of his hammer you feel yourself broken, elements both precious and half-remembered coming off you in hissing sparks of mortality. Then you are turned and you are broken again. And again. And again. You are doused in steam, heated in fire, returned to the Anvil and the ministrations of the Smith once more. It can last for days or for decades. Time matters not on the Anvil. Vandus Hammerhand is said to have emerged from the Forge Eternal mere heartbeats after his entry, which is just one more reason why Sigmar’s golden boy and I will never see eye to eye. For the rest of us mere immortals it is a trial of endurance and pain, and it is the trial that makes us in the end. And when the Smith holds up his finished work to the light of the Broken World, most of us are less than what we were before, as anything that has been broken and remade must be. We are not perfect. Even Sigmar is not perfect. Grungni, as sure as Tzeentch has eyes, isn’t perfect and neither are his Six Smiths. But we are good enough to sheathe anew in sigmarite and send back to war.
Because war is like snow.
Even if you can’t see it, it’s falling on someone, somewhere.
A traumatic death and a lengthy reforging had left me damaged in more ways than I think I understood at the time. Nightmares of both had plagued me for years, and had only just begun to subside before Sigmar returned me to the Ghurlands, to capture the Seven Words alongside Akturus Ironheel’s Imperishables. It was one of the few subjects that I never talked about, but there are no secrets within a warrior chamber on campaign. They all knew. Broudiccan certainly knew.
Thinking of my steadfast second-in-command going through the same experience made my stomach knot. We have all gone through it once, of course, but the best of us need never do so again. This would be Broudiccan’s first return to the Anvil, and that he went in my stead left me feeling hollow.
Do you hear that sound, my friends? It is the Bell of Lamentation tolling for poor, sorry Hamilcar.
I sat there in my self-recriminations and silence for hours or minutes. As it was upon the Anvil, so too did time matter little in sunless solitary confinement. I had no way of knowing how long I wallowed like that before the sound of a key turning in a lock jolted me out of my misery.
I stood up quickly as a fantastically obese clanrat strutted past my cell. He was blind in both eyes, missing an ear and several teeth, and the right side of his face was a mess of milky white scar tissue that only enhanced his good looks. Despite being in the heart of his own lair, he wore an iron hauberk. Though if I’d been through what he apparently had, I think I’d wear one too. A fat ring of keys clinked from a leather belt that was almost white with the strain of closing around his belly. Given the well-known skaven proclivity for consuming one’s rivals, I assumed that this one had to be near to the top of his particular hill.
He sniffed at me and grinned, baring his teeth and chittering something to the two thugs that followed him in, which I somehow doubted would be complimentary.
They were big, broad across their shoulders, thick ropes of muscle rubbing together under their mangy brown fur. They were mostly naked but for fur and a bit of loincloth, their bodies covered instead in brands that reminded me of street gang tattoos or the tribal runes that I had idly painted into my own flesh. Theirs were crude and angular things, the horned cross of their repellent god drawn in various pigments and sizes. Unlike theirs, I did not know what mine were supposed to represent. Perhaps they depicted gods too.
I could, however, recognise low-lifes when I saw them.
Call it a gift.
While Milk Scar watched me, his heavies dragged another prisoner, one arm apiece, to the cell across from mine. I felt my chest swell. I’d been consciously captive for less than a day, or so I guessed, and I was already overwhelmingly grateful for the gift of another furless being. In size and proportion, he was clearly human. Judging by the scars on his flesh and the size of his bones, he had probably been a well-built one too until incarceration had worked its curse on his muscles. His skin, though, was a mossy shade of green, and his hair was the colour of autumn leaf fall. He appeared to be unconscious. If not for the fact that the skaven were bothering to lock him up and hadn’t already eaten him I would have thought him dead.
Squeaking at his henchrats, Milk Scar locked the cell door, then hauled himself around to go back the way he’d just come.
Something in me snapped at the thought of being left alone in the dark so soon.
I drove my arm through the bars and grabbed for the keyring hanging from Milk Scar’s expanse of waist. He didn’t so much as flinch, which was unexpected as the skaven aren’t exactly well known for their cool under duress. It occurred to me then that, blind as he was, he must have known exactly where to stand so as to be well out of reach should anyone take exception to their confinement. He turned his pearly eyes to me and snickered, air whistling through the gaps in his smirk. He chittered something I didn’t understand to one of his henchrats who then smacked me on the wrist with a wooden cudgel.
I made a barking noise, surprise and anger, and grabbed for the skaven’s club, but he knew his business and it was already out of my reach.
‘Bad dog,’ said Milk Scar in passable Azyri. ‘I do not like-take disobedience.’
‘My name is Hamilcar Bear-Eater, vermin.’
‘I know-smell who you are.’
‘And who are you? I would know the name of my captor.’ I pressed my face back to the bars and bared my teeth. ‘Before I eat him.’
The clanrat leered at me, tongue lolling over the side of his mouth. ‘Fool-fool. I am not your captor.’
I thumped the bars in frustration, the ratman tittering as he strolled off. ‘I will find a way out of here! I will walk out wearing your skin for boots and gloves and with your skull to sup from when I grow weary of slaughtering your kin. You hear me, rat? Answer me!’ His wheezy laughter faded as the dungeon door clanked shut behind him, leaving me again in semi-darkness.
When I had calmed down enough, I sat back down. I frowned through the bars. I frowned at the ceiling. I turned to frown at the other cell across the way.
‘Friend,’ I called over. Nothing. ‘Talk to me, brother.’
He was out cold, only the shallow rasp of his breaths to answer my welcome.
I sighed.
I wondered if his being imprisoned here where I could see him was a deliberate ploy on the part of my captors. That he had been badly abused, and over a significant length of time, was obvious. Was this the psychological equivalent of a torturer displaying the paraphernalia of his craft? Did they expect me to spend my hours of solitude henceforth consumed by the terror of what awaited me at its end? If so, then they sorely underestimated the fortitude of the Stormcast Eternals.
I may not have exactly edified myself with my response to captivity, but if there is one thing that unites all Stormcast Eternals it is our capacity to endure, and familiarity with, pain.
I looked forward to their attempt.
If only to give me someone to talk to.
The hours stretched by. I tested the bars one by one. I shook them, pulled them, threw myself against them. None of them budged. I tried scratching at the walls.
Somehow I came to the conclusion that if a skaven could burrow through it, then so could Hamilcar Bear-Eater, but I lacked their claws, and I surrendered a fingernail long before the rock was ready to yield. Frustrated and bloody-fingered, I was the very model of a caged beast. My thoughts drifted from sullen defiance to my brothers, the Bear-Eaters.
‘They will come,’ I muttered to myself, quietly, so as not to disturb Zephacleas.
I had named my echo Zephacleas. It seems strange now, looking back, but it felt natural at the time.
Frankos had been far from me and the main thrust of the skaven attack when I’d fallen, along with the bulk of the Freeguild. The Knight-Heraldor had always been blessed with a cooler head than I would have known what to do with, and I was confident, as only I could be, that he would have been smart enough to get off Kurzog’s Hill before being overrun. Barbarus too. I hadn’t seen the King in the Sky after the aetar had abandoned us, and I could only hope that he had gone with them. And Xeros… Sigmar, I never thought I’d wish the Stormcloud well, but if the Lord-Relictor lived then there was no place in creation that the skaven could harbour me and hope to remain hidden from his stormsight.
I turned my gaze inwards.
Introspection had never suited me and I was about a century out of practice, but a Stormcast Eternal could always tell where he was. Every realm has a magical resonance that responds in its own peculiar way to the spark of Azyr we all bear within us. And the light of Sigendil shines upon us always, calling us to war just as it had in my mortal days. I was almost certain I was still in Ghur. I could sense the same savage gyres in the aether that my soul had felt as kindred when they had first met in the Free City of Cartha, but there was a scratching, chittering white noise running through it that gnawed at my confidence in that judgment.
‘Be alive, Stormcloud.’ I sat in silence for an interminable spell longer. ‘But pray Sigmar, don’t bring Akturus with you.’
The sound of the dungeon door being reopened startled me from my reverie.
How long had it been? Long enough to have become a moot consideration.
I was up and at the bars before Milk Scar had made the short swagger to my cell.
He looked pleased with himself. Never a promising sign in such a transparent sadist. In addition to his two thugs, who looked shifty and had their weapons out, he had brought two more clanrat guards with lowered spears to back them up. A heavy set of solid bar manacles fell from his paws and onto the floor beside him with a clunk. One of the spear-rats scurried closer to pole them through the bars and into my cell.
‘On-on,’ said Milk Scar. ‘Fast-quick.’
‘Why?’
‘We walk-scurry.’ The ratman bared his teeth at me, and clipped the ear of his spear-rat who obligingly prodded at the manacles until they butted against the outside of my foot. ‘To learn name of your captor.’
Chapter six
I put on the manacles. I stepped forward on command and let the nervous-looking spear-rat insert a locking bar through each wrist while the other attached another set around my ankles. These, at least, were linked by a short length of rusty chain rather than being a solid lump of iron, allowing me to move a little, even if it did force me to shuffle about like a monk of the Listening Order. The thought of beating the two ratmen to death with their locking bars did occur, but I am not nearly the unthinking animal that I like to be portrayed as. That they feared me enough to be so cautious was flattering, but I knew that killing a couple of clanrat guards was not going to get me out of that cell. And I did want to get out of that cell. I was curious to know who was mad enough to think that they could cage the Bear-Eater, and why.
After that, I allowed (though I was definitely stretching the definition of ‘allowed’ by this point) them to feed a metal rod through steel eyes in both sets of fetters and lock them together. By the time Milk Scar was satisfied enough to unlock the door I was trussed like a Sigmarzeit hog for roasting.
I still fancied my chances in a fight if it came to it, but fleeing a skaven warren in that state was hardly going to be the most glorious escapade of my life.
I was content to wait for my moment. For now.
The spear-rats both shuffled behind me as I stepped out of the cell and into the passage. One of Milk Scar’s henchrats approached with a hood, a look in his eyes that suggested he was wondering how to overcome the clear foot of disparity between his uppermost reach and the top of my head with dignity.
‘No-no,’ said Milk Scar, to his henchrat’s poorly disguised relief. ‘Our… friends want-wish to see him.’ His struggles over the word ‘friend’ suggested to me that Queekish had no proper translation for it.
Then one of the spear-rats prodded me in the back and we were moving.
Exploring the interior of a skaven lair was one of those rare experiences that I’d often found time to imagine but had yet to indulge. Like hunting vulcharc through the Crystal Labyrinth of Tzeentch, scratching my name onto the black stones of the Shrine of Elixia in the famous Hanging Vale of Anvrok, or conquering the Tattered Peaks of Ulgu where, I’ve heard, you can see older stars than any in Azyr. Naturally, then, I went in with certain expectations, all of which were grossly surpassed by the reality.
As soon as the door was opened, I gagged on the stench of rat. If my gaoler had soaked a cloth in piss and ordure, allowed it to marinate with wet fur and fouled meat, and then stuffed the finished article in my mouth the pungence could not have been more overpowering. It was almost enough for me to turn around and beg for the hood. The effect of the odour was worsened by the fact that my sense of smell, along with an equally disturbed one of touch, was almost all I had to go on. The same awful green half-light that had permeated the dungeons coated everything here as well, enough to see by, but only just; no colour there but green and the many shades of it towards black. The clanrat right in front of me was less defined than a shadow.
Even the main tunnels were narrow.
The skaven scurried on all fours and it was tight even for them. No consideration was spared for the eight-foot-tall Stormcast Eternal with fetters binding ankles and wrists, and the skaven behind me took every moment of struggle as fair excuse to prod me in the back with their spears.
‘Try that again and I will break your arms,’ I snarled.
They simply tittered and prodded harder. As if the passages were not cramped enough with just the six of us, we had to contend with a constant flood of skaven coming in the opposite direction, as well as plenty more trying to overtake us from behind. A thoroughfare through skaven eyes, or to be more accurate, skaven whiskers, seemed to be a survival contest of biting and clawing and bullying of the fittest. I’d taken more than a few claw marks, and a few more sly spear jabs I might add, before we’d even lost sight of the dungeons.
Very occasionally the passage widened, but if I was expecting any respite from the deranged horrors of skavendom then I was to be disappointed.
The tunnel seemed to have been dug with just enough deliberation to wind around a succession of larger natural caverns, widening as it did so – in this instance, into a vertiginous shelf of flat-ish rock overlooking the chaotic sprawl of verminous industry below. Scaffolding clambered up the walls, wreathed in the impenetrable toxic smog of the hell-foundries and machinery in its depths. The rickety platforms that had been built onto the very top of the scaffolds put me in mind of dead fish floating on a poisoned lake, and I’d seen more than a few of those in my time battling the Rotbringers of Ghur.
There are many horrors that I’ve borne witness to in my life, but the sound and vibrations of those skaven machines, ravening and consuming with neither animus nor soul, made me shudder.
Milk Scar moved unerringly through it all in spite of his blindness. He would scurry along, inches from a thousand-foot drop, whiskers atwitch at some change in pressure or humidity that I couldn’t detect. Then he would count out his steps before ha
lting at a bustling intersection, sniffing both ways, then dashing headlong into a seething torrent of vermin – as if it were somehow preferable to the seething torrent of vermin that had been there two seconds beforehand. When he counted, I counted, doing my best to recall our route, memorising the rhythm of the landmarks, such as they were. A side-passage from which the unappetising stench of roasted flesh emerged. Another that went up, skaven scrambling over each other for claw-holds, the chittering and screaming of skaven barter echoing down. We went through a sprawling warren of hide yurts that I took to be the skaven equivalent of an embassy quarter. Beastmen brayed and jeered as I was led through, shaking their horns in a riotous display. I bared my teeth gamely and tried to clench my fists and flex my muscles. My fetters wouldn’t let me raise my hands above my waist, but I was pleased to see that the effort offended them enormously.
A scratch post, little more than a wooden stake that had been hammered into the ground and covered in claw-scratch writing, pointed off in a bewildering array of directions. Every indecipherable notch corresponded to a branching tunnel. The acrid stench of skaven scent markings pooled there at the confluence. I retched, rattling my fetters as I tried to cover my mouth. I clenched my jaw, trying to breathe through my gritted teeth, but I could still taste it.
The place was a maze, a labyrinth, a hundred thousand skaven or more fighting across it day and night, and I’d not glimpsed so much as a hint of a way out.
If I was to have any hope of getting out of there, then the one advantage I could rely on would be the cowardice of the individual skaven and the sheer anarchy of their society. If I tried to fight my way out now then as many would try to run away as try and stop me, and a hundred times as many again would be reliably oblivious to the fact that I was ever there.
