by Warhammer
That still left me with a task, but I would gladly leap across that river when I was good and ready.
After about half an hour of scuffling and scraping, I had a respite of sorts when Milk Scar stopped scrabbling along with such easy haste and began probing out the path ahead with his tail. I assumed that we had to be venturing into newer delvings, or perhaps into an area that he did not know so implicitly. The passages all looked alike to me, I confess, though I did start to notice something different in myself. The sense I had of the Ghurlands began to recede, replaced by the sense of something gummy and vile, chewing on me from within. Even the light of far Sigendil became briefly occulted, as if some miasma had passed between us. Even on my brief incursion into Shadespire, I had not felt so distant from my maker.
Once again, I found myself in the implausible scenario of fervently praying for Xeros Stormcloud’s wellbeing.
‘Here-here.’
Milk Scar gestured to a door that had been set into the wall of the passage. It shouldn’t have been all that sensational, but it was, and I only understand why it was when I realised that I hadn’t seen a single one since we’d left my cell. The skaven exist cheek by jowl, after all, and clearly placed a low premium on individual space. The door was covered in brass wheels and rods, all of them lit a metallic green, but there was no handle or latch that I could see. I wondered for a second if I might have been mistaken about it being a door at all, but then Milk Scar scuttled up to it and knocked. There was no answer, but as the gaoler withdrew his paw the wheels covering the door began to spin, bars sliding through tracks, and of its own inanimate will the door lurched outwards.
The sight of it made my skin crawl, and I turned to Milk Scar.
‘What are you waiting for?’ I said.
‘I not go-scurry in there.’ His spear-rats gave me a jab for good measure.
Rattling my fetters as I made to lift my hands in surrender, I shuffled inside alone.
Though the pervasive illumination persisted, it was somehow darker inside, as though this burrow was the source of all that was black and it was thicker here as a consequence. Numerous low-slung tables cluttered the floor, spilling over with bits of metal, springs and gnawed wires. Tools that no five-fingered, two-handed, or right-minded man would have any use for lay everywhere, discarded, half-made. The walls were clad in shelving, none of it level, an eclectic collection of rusty machinery and ancient tomes. Spidery text crawled down the books’ spines, and averse as I am to lettering of any hand or kind, these works had me looking quickly away.
Across from the door was a chaise. It was Azyrite quality, the makers mark glittering dully on one wooden foot. One of the many fine things that the skaven had looted from the Seven Words in their last unsuccessful raid, I suspected. I certainly doubted that there could be too many cordwainers of the Magrittan school on this side of the Nevermarsh. The fine cordovan leather was shredded, the seat sagging. At first I thought it unoccupied, but then I saw the two sinister red eyes that floated in the darker shadow above its cushions, the jagged chasm of a grin.
I started towards it without thinking.
The chains looping through my leg irons pulled taut. I yanked instinctively on my handcuffs to break my fall, only managing to rattle the connecting bar, and struck my head on the corner of the closest table. I groaned, more with embarrassment than with pain, as screws and washers and ball bearings all clattered over the floor, and over me, though the wetness spreading from my temple was reminder enough that even the Stormcast Eternals are not so mighty that they needn’t fear their own stupidity.
The shadow-rat tittered, like a cold breeze brushing across my gravestone.
‘Leave him, Malikcek,’ said another voice, nearby. ‘Leave us.’
‘That’s right, leave us, before I–’ I wriggled in a rattle of rods and chains and looked up, but the chaise was already empty. I blinked. The depression that the shadowy creature had left in the cushions slowly crinkled out. ‘What? How did he…?’
‘The gods have been harsh-cruel to poor Malikcek.’
Shrugging off the gash to my forehead, I tensed the muscles of my abdomen to draw myself upright and turned towards the sound of the voice.
The creature hunched amongst the cluttered arcana was skaven in size and form, but encased entirely in metal. Coppery whiskers protruded from a muzzle lined with diamond-edged teeth. White hairs tufted through gaps in the ironwork where plates had been misaligned or fitted together poorly. Even the master warlocks of the Clans Skyre, it seemed, were not immune to the freneticism and failure of detail that marred the products of their demented, but undoubted, genius. Even when it came to their own forms.
‘And as you know-see for yourself, Malikcek is cruel-harsh to the gods in kind.’
The warlock pointed at me, then gestured to the chaise.
His hand was an articulated iron claw, bolted onto the shell of his arm, and studded with crystals, lenses, and odd designs. Out of curiosity more than genuine obedience I manoeuvred myself towards the chaise and dropped into it. The warlock made no effort to assist me. Nor did he sit himself. He didn’t stir at all, just watched me struggle to perform his bidding, his eyes like captured ice within the dark confines of a metal helm. It took no special gift on my part to sense the power behind that gaze. I’ve fought many mighty beings in my time. Mortarchs. Daemons. All of them paled in comparison to what I felt standing before me in that warren, and though I’ve stood against or alongside greater powers in the years since and not been cowed, only once before had I experienced its like.
When I’d clasped the hand of Sigmar and been thrown to Ghur for the very first time. Where the power of the God-King was uplifting, golden light from horizon to horizon and the glory of the stars themselves, what I felt in the warlock’s presence was something smothering and dark. It was a patchwork of rust and shadow, scraps of power sewn together with a ratman’s infinitely imaginative spite.
It occurred to me that I, and the Seven Words, were in far greater danger than I had realised.
‘Why am I here?’ I asked.
‘Because I wished it. Because you are valuable to me.’ He tittered. It was a dry, retching sound, like a blade in need of oiling that wouldn’t come free of its sheath. ‘Because take-luring you was easy.’
I shook my head, trying to understand. ‘Kurzog said that it was about me. To capture me? Why?’
The warlock said nothing. His eye-glow was unblinking and his mask expressionless.
‘Who are you?’ I demanded.
He cocked his head. It was a skaven mannerism I was familiar with, but performed with a stiffness of movement more reminiscent of the newly animated flesh of a zombie or the bark of a slumbering treekin than a ratman. ‘In Blight City they call-squeak the Rat That Was, the Ur-Rat. To the Shadow Lords of Decay in the Realm of Ruin I am Outcast. In Phoenicium I am Life-Taker and Gnawing Winter. In the Fractal Fortress of the Legion of Fate I–’
I interrupted him with a chuckle.
‘They have a few good names for me there too.’
I had been expecting him to bristle. It is what most verminous maniacs would have done in his place, but he did not. He just studied me, as though I were a moving part in some mechanism of his and had just started running backwards.
‘What does your mother call you?’ I said.
‘Mother…?’ The warlock pondered the question, then performed another creaking laugh. ‘Ikrit is my name. Was. As good as any. Quicker to say than most.’
‘Why am I here?’ I said again.
Ikrit didn’t answer.
He clanked towards me, unclawing his huge mechanical hand one stiff-jointed digit at a time until his palm was open to me. I tried to draw myself out of reach – and you would too, under the circumstances – but my movements were hampered by my restraints, and by the back of the chaise. He laid his claw upon my chest. A frisson o
f power surged from the cold metal and into my skin. It was the wild vigour of Ghur. The steady life-pulse of Ghyran. The iron grip of Chamon. The enduring stasis of Shyish. More. Powers from realms I had never trodden and peoples I had never encountered, all somehow welded together and fused by skaven sorcery into that cold mechanical shell.
I understood then what I had felt from him before, and for the first time in my many lives, I think I felt afraid.
‘The lightning-god and his duardin slaves take-steal from all of Pantheon, and mix-meld to make something unique in the realms. And powerful.’ He tittered, excited, as he looked at me, his eye glow flickering. ‘First step is hardest, I know. Innovation not easy. But after that? What has been made once can be copied. What has been copied once can be made again. The lightning-god has a secret. I want-want.’
‘Why me?’
The warlock shushed me with a metal finger upon my lips. I growled and tried to shake my head, but for a skaven-sized creature Ikrit was obscenely strong. He pinned me down with one finger and bent in as if to sniff me in the manner of his race, but his ironclad snout emitted no mortal breath that I could hear, or feel against my face.
‘I ask-squeak the questions now.’
Chapter seven
Day and night didn’t exist in the warren, but the skaven had their own uncanny sense of routine. Sunrise came for me on the point of a spear in my ribs or in my back, depending on where my captors had left me to pass out the night before. There would be a squeak from the gloaming dark and then my two favourite rats in the eight realms would exchange spears for buckets. The first would contain a grisly slop that, the first time it had been spooned out and onto the floor of my cell, I wasn’t sure whether it was intended as a meal or a cellmate. I’d fought Chaos spawn with fewer tubes, eyeballs, and fingernails than one spoonful of what I reluctantly decided was breakfast.
For several days I refused to cooperate, and not just because I was waiting for my breakfast to make the first move.
For all our differences, you and I, we are more alike than not. I am a man still, albeit one who has passed through the Cairns of Tempering, and I would starve as well as any man would. I considered it. Death is never something to be welcomed, but when it ceases to be the end of all things… well, then certain unpalatable options become open to consideration. The only thing that made me hold my nose and eat was the knowledge that starvation would be a slow death, and Milk Scar undoubtedly had ways of forcing sustenance upon me were I to refuse indefinitely.
My brothers in the Hallowed Knights would have seen that as a capitulation, but that’s Hallowed Knights for you, bear them no mind. I prefer to see it as finding victories where you see them.
After all of that was dealt with, I would be taken to Ikrit.
We would always start with questions.
‘The Anvil of Apotheosis, how does it work-work?’
‘It is duardinium, mined from the heart of a still-living star by Grungni’s pick and kept alight by the prayers of ten thousand skink priests.’
‘How is the work-labour shared between the Smith-God and his servants?’
‘The Six Smiths are all just aspects of Grungni. If you look close enough you can see the differences in the character of the Stormhosts and the sigmarite they wear.’
‘The reforging – how does it hurt-feel?’
‘Like showering under starlight. Sigmar is a just and loving god.’
If you were to delve deep enough into the Well of Eternity, the font of all knowledge that resides at the heart of the Impossible Fortress, then you would surely find Hamilcar Bear-Eater shouting nonsense from the bottom.
With each day that this went on my lies became progressively more stretched and extravagant, until I was earnestly explaining how Sigmar had traded the mortal memories of the Stormcasts to Malerion in exchange for the secret of immortality and how every item of sigmarite was hand-nurtured from a single Dracothion scale. It is just not within me to keep quiet when invited to speak, and feeding my captor the most outrageous falsehoods I could imagine was an act of defiance. It was what got me through each day.
Ikrit, however, was unfazed by any lie. He would take his time to consider every answer, no matter how ludicrous, and then simply ask another question.
One time, I found him tinkering with my warding lantern.
The warlock had the ornate device held between a set of browned metal clamps, measuring, poking, poring over every groove and embellishment in the casing with a lensed instrument, which resembled a crystal butterfly that had been turned inside out. The lantern was glorious despite its confinement, and my chest swelled for the sight of it, the timely reminder that the same might also yet be said of me. My armour and my weapons are extensions of my soul. My warding lantern is an extension of Azyr as well, a sigmarite outpost of the Mortal Realms where I and the Celestial overlap, and I felt a glow simply from being near to it again.
‘How does it work?’ Ikrit would ask, as though speaking through his array of lenses to the lantern itself rather than to me. ‘Does energy come from within or is it sent-drawn from Azyr? Or from you? How does it chose-choose between those it heals and those it burns?’
I answered those questions in the same way as I had the others.
And regardless of how it began, how I chose to defy him, it would end with torture.
I call it that because I can’t think of any other word to describe it, but as soon as the implements were drawn and I was suitably restrained he would ask no further questions.
With tiny knives, he would cut into my veins and bleed me, filling vials that he would then subject to harsh lights and Chaotic energies. One day he neglected to question me at all, so excited was he by some new frolic he had in mind for us both. Between thumb and foreclaw of his gauntlet, he showed me what looked like a fleck of iron dust, explaining, so enthused was he, that it was a miniscule automaton of his own creation. Then he forced a vial full of the tiny constructs into my mouth and clamped my nose shut with his claws. Even a Stormcast Eternal cannot hold his breath forever. For days afterwards, I was laid low with hacking coughs and fevered dreams with the sense of things crawling beneath my skin. It was a period in which Ikrit seemed almost animated by what, in his words, his machines ‘told him’ about my body’s innermost workings. He would burn me, freeze me, hook me up via thickets of cables to spinning, ball-armed devices and jolt me with sorcerously generated power.
He wanted to trap the storm and measure it, to see where the man ended and the scaffolding of the gods began.
The worst days though were when he went into my thoughts, and with claws of Light and of Shadow dug deep into my memories.
I saw Ramus of the Shadowed Soul, the look in his mortis helm as I charged through the Bone Sea Gate to save his life. My old friend and comrade, Brakka, lost to the soul-mills for a hundred years and still counting, frowning at a beast spoor in the snow. Vikaeus, the Lord-Veritant, standing in the blustery great hall of the Seven Words in armour of ivory and azure and frowning up at me on my throne. Then Vikaeus again, same frown, but different. Her long hair was free, unbound, dusted with goldspar, a gown of sablewool and zephyrarch feathers arousing feelings in me that I was not sure one of the God-King’s blessed Eternals should be permitted to hold. The memory wasn’t one of mine, I was sure of it, but it tapped a wellspring of emotion that left me gasping.
And what I saw, Ikrit plundered.
‘You do not remember your life before,’ he said, withdrawing his gauntlet from my forehead so as to glare into my eyes. ‘There are times I think-wonder if it is the gods’ spite. They cannot stop me now, so they take-cheat from what was. Fool-fool. Superstitious, I am. Yes-yes. They do not have that power. Mortal flesh as ours is not built-made to be as we have become. That is all.’ Then he closed his gauntlet over my brow again, and I ground my teeth in readiness of more pain. ‘I thank you, Stormcast. I understand n
ow.’
It was unusual for my captor to speak at all at these times, never mind so candidly about himself, but after the day’s trials I had not the energy or the wit to ply him for any more.
I would find out what he had in mind for me soon enough, of course, and pine for such simple torments as these.
Now that Ikrit had himself a newer plaything in me, my green-skinned friend in the cell across from mine slowly recovered his strength.
His name was Barrach.
‘How are you faring this morning, friend?’ I mumbled as I slipped free of unconsciousness for another day of the same.
That too had become part and parcel of my daily routine, and I measured the passage of time by Barrach’s progression from monosyllabic grunts to actual words, generally inviting me to shut my mouth and die.
‘Stronger,’ he grunted, balling up his fists, his voice like wind-blown leaves scuttling across the empty passage.
It did not seem to occur to him that he was recovering from his mistreatment in order to suffer more mistreatment once Ikrit grew bored of me. He was a warrior, and if nothing else, I could say that I knew warriors. We are simple souls, pleased by simple things, and he revelled only in his recovering strength.
‘You look it,’ I said, though in truth it was difficult to see much of anything in the dark. He sounded it. ‘How long have you been awake?’
The darkness shrugged. ‘A while. You were having a bad dream.’
In tried and tested fashion, I laughed it off. I doubted that Barrach could have seen my expression from over there, but mossy skin and autumnal hair generally went hand-in-glove with a variety of uncanny talents, so I thought it better to go overboard.
‘Nightmares dream of Hamilcar,’ I added.
