by Warhammer
‘Hamilcar, Sigmar, and the Seven Words. Fire!’
The air about me exploded with gunfire, lead shot and sigmarite-tipped armour-killing rounds riddling Broudiccan’s amethyst breastplate.
The giant shrugged through the fusillade and swept up his halberd to skewer me to the cobbles before finally succumbing to the punishment.
I grinned for the briefest of moments, before it dawned on me what was going to happen.
My heart stopped.
‘Gods, no.’
Thirty men in leather and glass armour and bronze halfmasks depicting the unsetting sun blocked the street behind me in ranks. Powder smoke from their discharged pistols shrouded them and the bulk of the Gorkomon at their backs. ‘Reload!’ The front rank knelt and began doing something arcane with their firearms. ‘Target the Liberators!’
My face screwed up in concentration.
I recognised the leader.
Hamuz el-Shaah. The captain from Jercho. I cursed. The one city in the Mortal Realms where my star shone even brighter than it did in the Seven Words.
‘Fire!’
Another barrage of whistling cracks and explosive bangs riddled the scattered retinue of Liberators. Covering twice the range and four times the number of targets, the salvo lacked the stopping power that had put down Broudiccan, and the Liberators recovered with surpassing skill, unhitching shields and forming a line.
Crow lashed his tail and crouched protectively over Broudiccan’s body. No lightning bolt had consumed it to ferry his soul back to Azyr. He lived.
For now.
‘First and second ranks. Draw swords.’ There was a long, drawn-out scrape as the fourteen soldiers comprising the front ranks drew Jerech quartzswords from their scabbards. ‘Third and fourth ranks. Fire!’
Another fusillade of shot split the air above me. A bullet nicked Crow’s beak. He shrilled. A Liberator went down with a pinhole in the middle of his shield and disappeared in a crash of Celestial lightning that stove in doors, cracked stone, and splintered wooden shutters.
What had I done?
Half a day in the Mortal Realms and I had somehow managed to incite the Seven Words into armed rebellion and seen an Astral Templar cast back to the Forge Eternal.
Sometimes I don’t know my own strength.
I had to get out of the Seven Words, and now, before this uprising could spread any further. Flattering though it was, I had no wish to see the Seven Words torn apart in my name. We still had the skaven for that. I looked around for ideas. Gor Lane was tempting, but it only led down to the Morkogon Gate and there would be hundreds of Heavens Forged between me and escape. The catacombs were always an option, but they weren’t unguarded either. Akturus himself would doubtlessly be there by now, and if there was one thing I did still want to avoid then it was that.
An aetar shrieked, way above, and I looked up, my heart sinking.
That was a lot of mountain.
Chapter nineteen
I had been climbing for about a quarter of an hour when the inevitable finally came.
‘Go no further, Hamilcar. You are surrounded, above and below.’
An Azyrite warmth prickled at my back, melting the scab of hoarfrost that had formed over my plate. I pressed my cheek against the rock face to look back over my shoulder, my beard gusting wild, and caught sight of the Prosecutor-Prime behind me. He was one of Akturus’ Imperishables, his black armour embellished with morbid symbols of death and eternal life. Every beat of his wings was an assertion of Azyri dominance, denying the lesser gods of earth and sky the right to dash his heavily armoured body against the rocks below. I saw no weapon in his hand, but knew that it would take but a prayer on his part to summon one from the Cosmic Storm.
‘Begone!’ I bellowed into the gale.
With my gauntlets, I probed the rock face for another handhold. I couldn’t find one, resorting once again to punching one for myself. With a grunt of effort, I dragged myself another few feet, reassigning my boots to the holds that freed up.
I scowled breathlessly at the rock.
In cruel mockery of the numbness in my fingertips and in the skin of my face, my muscles felt as though they were turning slowly and painfully molten. It was worst in my hands, particularly along the outside edges, but no muscle in my body seemed immune to the burn. My legs. My back. My stomach. Even the muscles of my lips and eyes. As if even grimacing in pain had become an effort. I looked down. I know that this is what climbers in every realm are warned not to do, but I was born a child of the mountains. I had no fear of high places.
Then I looked up.
That was arguably less wise.
Breath steamed out of my mouth in a rasp.
The summit was so far above me that I couldn’t even see it yet amongst the lesser ridges and crags. If someone had appeared to me in spirit form to tell me that it was only ten times the distance I had already scaled yet to go, then I would have taken it and kissed that spectre’s hand. The uncounted legions that had warred over the Seven Words for so many thousands of years had shared little in common beyond an acceptance that the Gorkomon was unconquerable.
I hated proving people right.
‘I will not relent,’ I hollered to the Prime over my shoulder. ‘Not to Frankos. Not to Vikaeus. And definitely not to Akturus.’
‘The Lord-Veritant comes bearing the seal of the God-King himself with orders for your capture and return to Sigmaron,’ said the Prime evenly, as though we were having this discussion over ale. ‘She impressed upon us the commandment to return you alive.’
‘Good luck with that, brother.’
‘It is for your own protection.’
‘She said that, did she?’
‘Indeed. She told us of how your spirit has been spoiled by sorcery most foul, and that you will surely deteriorate and perhaps perish if you are not soon returned to the care of the Six Smiths.’
I thought of the flashes of anger I had been experiencing since my return to Ghur. My unexplained feelings towards Vikaeus. The thawing of my memories.
I shook my head fiercely.
‘Never!’
‘She said that you might not be of your right mind.’
‘What does Vikaeus know of my mind anyway?’
There was a snap of Azyr power as a stormcall javelin exploded from the raw aether and into the Prosecutor-Prime’s gauntlet. It hummed forcefully. I glanced back. The rest of the retinue circled a short distance away, four winged warriors accompanied by an amethyst-and-gold figure infused with the unmistakeable cobalt halo of a Knight-Azyros. Another holy warrior with a damned lantern. The Prosecutor-Prime turned his head to follow my gaze, then turned slowly back. His mask was blank. He didn’t say anything. But I could tell very well that he knew exactly what I was thinking, and why, and that he was offering me this one last chance.
‘You heard what happened when I used my own lantern then?’ I said.
He nodded. ‘I happen to believe that Vikaeus is correct in this. You started a riot. Did you know that elements of the Freeguild have barricaded themselves within some of the outer wards and are refusing to recognise any higher authority unless it is you?’ His mask emitted an exasperated sigh. ‘If the skaven are anywhere close then they will attack soon, and in full force. You may have doomed the Seven Words with your actions, Hamilcar. But if you surrender to me now, talk these misguided captains down from the calamity they rush towards, then you have my oath that no harm will come upon you.’
With a grunt, I broke open another handhold and pulled myself up. It was quite probably the last I had the strength to make, but surrender just wasn’t in me. The Imperishables could catch my unconscious body when my strength gave and I fell. Not a moment before.
The Prosecutor-Prime shadowed me effortlessly.
‘It’s not that I doubt your oath, my friend,’ I wheezed. ‘I know
Akturus well enough to know that he’d sooner break his own fingers than his word, and I am sure his warriors would do the same.’
‘In the heartbeat of a zephyrgayle.’
‘What I doubt, however,’ I said, my voice raising to a shout, ‘is that you have the slightest inkling of what awaits me in Sigmaron.’
‘It is Sigmar’s will.’
‘To the Great Nothing with Sigmar’s will!’
The Prosecutor hissed, taken aback. ‘Very well, then.’ The javelin crackled as he drew it back for the cast.
I turned my back and gritted my teeth against the expected pain.
A screech tore through the freezing air and I tensed, expecting to find myself pinned to the mountain by a lightning bolt, but instead a winged shadow fell across me, followed by a metallic scrape and a human scream. I looked back to see the terrifying form of an aetar eagle knight with the Prosecutor-Prime clutched in one of his talons. The Stormcast’s javelin snapped back into non-existence as he threw all his strength into fighting his way free, only to be summarily dashed against the mountainside. I felt the crunch of his impact through my fingers. I watched his wings fizzle out and held on tight to the rock face as his crumpled body plummeted by me.
The aetar beat its wings, almost ripping me off the mountain, as it shrieked a challenge. The turbulence scattered the remaining Prosecutors, but they had been drawn from the greatest heroes in the Mortal Realms, and belonged to a chamber renowned for its phlegmatism. They were already summoning javelins to hand, and fighting for height. A beam of Celestial starlight lanced from the Knight-Azyros’ beacon and across the eagle knight’s armour. It did absolutely nothing. I, however, winced at even that close a glimpse of the heavens.
The aetar snatched the Knight-Azyros up in its beak.
‘Release him, heathen bird!’ Lightning leapt from a Prosecutor’s casting arm, the stormcall javelin exploding into rainbow hues against the spell-wards knit into the eagle knight’s mail.
The aetar delivered another piercing shriek, this time mocking, even muffled as it was by the Knight-Azyros struggling to drive open his beak.
Sigmar, but the aetar were so much more impressive in the air.
‘Go higher, brother. Higher.’ The Prosecutors called out to one another as they circled the great beast, like starving dogs around a white lion. ‘Anubus. Grab the Bear-Eater and fly. We will shield you.’
Another lightning bolt scalded the eagle knight’s beak. Shrieking in rage, it raked for the Prosecutor with its talons. The Stormcast dived, but the aetar were the kings of this sky, and there was nothing nimbler or fiercer with wings. Claws the length of swords nicked the Stormcast’s harness and ripped a fistful of glowing feathers from his back. The warrior screamed as he pinwheeled towards the Seven Words, trying desperately to gain flight without half of one wing.
His brothers hesitated, torn between grabbing me, fighting the eagle knight and rescuing their comrade.
Then another devastating shriek rang out of the higher crags.
Two more proud aetar in splinted mail and bladed claws appeared in the sky above us, growing very large, very fast.
The eagle knight already in the fight tossed the Knight-Azyros contemptuously aside. His harness had been buckled in the aetar’s beak and it struggled to ignite, trailing lightning as he tried to deploy his wings.
That seemed to settle it for the Prosecutors.
Without a word to me or to each other, the three remaining warriors tucked in their wings and dropped after their falling comrades.
I laughed fiercely as I watched them become specks and then vanish.
‘I always knew that Augus had my b–’
A scaled foot the size of a door flattened me to the rock face before I had much chance to get carried away. Then it clawed me out, excavating a few hundred pounds of shattered rock along with me. Beating its wings hard, the aetar drew me from the mountain and into the air. I swung in the eagle knight’s talons, watching as the stones and debris drained through its claws and dissipated into the great gulf of nothing between me, the wind and the Seven Words. My first instinct was to fight.
I felt that to be an instinct worth suppressing on this occasion.
‘Where are you taking me?’
The eagle knight issued a deafening shriek.
‘Of course,’ I said. ‘I should have known.’
Chapter twenty
The fortress eyrie of the aetar. A soaring bastion of rustling motion and constant noise. And I was the first of my kind to see it. Or so I thought at the time.
The great eagles nested in hollows gouged out of the high walls by aetar claws, made homely with found things. Scraps of cloth. Fur. Feathers. Even bits of armour. I counted hundreds, far more than I would have expected to find given the dozen or so knights that King Augus had been so loath to loan me for the battle against the brayseer. With a hundred aetar knights, Augus could have owned this region of the Ghurlands, from the southern tracts of the Nevermarsh to the mysterious Sea of Scales beyond the mountains to the far north – had he wanted it. They chirped and cooed in their roosts. Scratched their claws. Nibbled at the rock. Ruffled their feathers. Flapped their wings in annoyance and in pleasure. Boisterous young males, identified by their smaller beaks and straighter claws, pinwheeled through the air before their roosts, coming together in collisions of heads, explosions of feathers and squawking. If anyone came away from these displays a winner, I wasn’t sure who, but the pointless bravado struck a chord with me nonetheless.
While the rookeries dotted the mountainside, they faced out onto a glorious expanse of blue emptiness. The aetar had no use for battlements or gates. The sky was their moat. The mile upon mile of unassailable rock beneath their talons was their wall. Even I, acclimated to the glories of the Mortal Realms and the infinities of Azyr, stared out in wonderment.
At the sound of a joyous shriek coming my way, I dragged my eyes from the spectacle for the arrival of a powerful aetar female. Her chest plumage and neck were armoured in blued steel and topaz, glittering in what was left of the amber sun. Wings extended to their colossal span, she descended onto an artificial perch that jutted from the rock face at an angle about twenty feet above my head.
The ‘ground’ of the aetar’s fort, I should add, was a shelf of rock about as wide across as I am tall. The eagle knight who had plucked me from the Gorkomon had at least been thoughtful enough to deposit me on one of the stretches less completely stained by moult and droppings.
The aetar stretched her wings luxuriously as she deliberately stamped clawed feet on the perch, shuffled sideways, then delivered a shriek that could have turned a man’s hair white.
‘It is good to see you too, princess.’
She bobbed her head and cawed.
‘Of course I recognised you. You’ve the war harness of a queen, and as well curved a beak as any this side of the Seventh Gate.’
Aeygar puffed out her feathers in pleasure.
While it’s fair to say that I didn’t understand one word out of her beak, I’ve always had a knack when it comes to dealing with people, whatever wild or wondrous form they come in. I could natter with a Treelord like a native, and send the spirit away happy hours later without ever uttering a true word of Sylvan. It’s not like flight to a Prosecutor, or a Lord-Veritant’s sense for corruption; there’s no gift to it. It’s about being interested in people, enough to care, and – as with everything in this life – throwing yourself at it as though you mean it.
I got the gist.
‘It was your retainers that picked me up, I suppose.’
Her beak went up and down, which I didn’t think was an aetar mannerism but rather her attempt at a nod. I was touched.
‘Thank you. My hands were starting to get a little tired.’
She cawed, amused.
‘How did you know Vikaeus was after me?’
She leapt up from her perch, flapping her wings flaccidly, landing with a razoring caw that sounded like a wooden spoon being rattled about inside of a saucepan.
‘Good eyes. Even for an aetar.’
She gave a shriek, ruffing her neck feathers again.
‘Kind of you,’ I said. ‘But the king never allowed me up here. Not even in exchange for a reciprocal visit to Highheim.’ An offer I had no means of honouring, of course, but by the time he was in Azyr I was confident that an aggrieved aetar king would have been someone else’s problem.
Aeygar’s head tilted until it was almost completely sideways. I couldn’t decipher the gesture, but I felt an unfamiliar pressure beneath my ribs, a faint memory of a time when a woman had looked at me with the same mixture of superiority and fondness.
I sighed.
Aeygar, meanwhile, had stepped off her perch and spread her wings, gliding into an oddly graceless landing on the filth-encrusted ground before me. She hopped awkwardly from foot to foot, claws scraping at the griping rock in unease. With a softly trilling warble, she lowered her head to the ground, long neck angled upwards like a ramp.
‘For… me?’
She issued the exact same warbling note and despite everything I’d just done and been through to get here, I laughed.
‘Better than being borne in your talons, I imagine.’
She shuffled and cawed, tapping the ground with her beak.
‘Apology accepted.’
I took a handful of the soft feathers at the back of her head, tugging on them to make certain that my weight wasn’t going to hurt her before swinging my leg over her shoulders. She didn’t even seem to register it. She reared up sharply, almost throwing me from her back before I could grab a second fistful of feathers. Then she was turning to face the wall of sky, wings thumping, powerful muscles shifting beneath the seat of my armour.
One step.
Two.
And then we were aloft.
I bellowed for the joy of it. There were many godly feats and supernatural acts I had performed in Sigmar’s name, but flight had never been one of them. Keeping a firm grip on Aeygar’s feathers, I leant over and looked down past her working wings. The rock shelf I had been standing on shrank as though it were being absorbed into the mountain, and I looked up again, laughing uproariously at the aquiline bewilderment that greeted this unprecedented thing – a Stormcast Eternal bestride the back of an aetar princess – from the warmth of their rookeries. I waved to them.
