by Warhammer
‘We’ll fight!’ I yelled. ‘And we’ll win! For Sigmar and the God-King!’
‘For Hamilcar Bear-Eater!’
‘This house of stone is a distraction,’ Brychen hissed. ‘No different to Malikcek.’
‘These are Sigmar’s people,’ I said, speaking loudly enough for everyone to hear.
‘Sigmar has cast his people freely across the Mortal Realms. If we do not end Ikrit here, do you think these will be the last to suffer?’
I frowned.
It wasn’t that they were Sigmar’s people as much as that they were my people.
‘He slaughtered my people too,’ Brychen went on. ‘He murdered my brother, polluted our sacred grounds, stole the gifts of my goddess. This does not end for me until I have fed his dead body back to the earth.’
‘I will not abandon my people.’
‘Then this is where our two winds blow apart.’
‘Don’t be so drama–’
I turned to face her but, much to my chagrin, the priestess had simply left. Nassam, at least, was still there, his massive quartz greatsword held in two hands and resting against one shoulder. I narrowed my eyes. I couldn’t shake the feeling that he must have combed his moustaches during his brief sprint from the square. Shaking my head, I turned back to the crowd.
I reasoned that as long as I was the one seen saving the Seven Words then it really didn’t matter if Brychen got in there first. I still had Sigmar to satisfy, of course, but one problem at a time – that was the Bear-Eater approach to war.
‘Go then,’ I shouted after her. ‘I will join you by the pyre of skaven dead that I will raise over the Morkogon gate when my city is saved.’ A boisterous cheer went up at that, and I saluted them with my halberd. The skaven warrior had long since ceased struggling. I knew that I was getting a little carried away, but none of my many great victories had been achieved by doing what sensible heads would have done in my place. Would Gardus have charged headlong into the stronghold of Uxor Untamed with just fifty warriors at his back? No, he would not. Would Vandus have had the foresight or the common touch to get himself euphoric on fungus beer, accidentally start a war with the Skarabrak lodge, only to then wake the next morning with a sore head and fifty thousand moonclan berserkers ecstatically avowed to Sigmar’s cause?
No and no and no again.
Only Hamilcar.
‘When every last skaven in the Seven Words is dead!’ I yelled.
‘When they’re dead!’
‘Hamilcar is back!’
‘What now then, lord?’ said Nassam, as though we’d just arrived in an unfamiliar city and he was uncertain whether ale or lodgings should take precedence.
‘The Seven Words are home to five thousand soldiers and almost thirty thousand civilians,’ I told him. ‘We rally them all. We arm them. And then we drive the skaven from our walls.’
A voice interrupted me.
‘That is not a plan, Hamilcar Bear-Eater,’ called Vikaeus, freezing my heart stiff. ‘It is a prayer.’
Chapter thirty
The exuberance of the crowd fell cold, dead. Magnificently barded in white plate and silver, Cryax walked with cold-blooded malevolence down the narrow street. The muscular roll of the Dracoth’s shoulders caused his rider to sway. Vikaeus herself inspired every bit as much terror as her Celestial mount, if not more so. Her white armour shone, hard and untouchable as a glacier, and faintly luminous as though a light had been encased within. A plume of the same colour and a frost-blue cloak tore in the wind. She was a crack in the ice. A portent of doom from the heavens. She stared with cold judgement through the slits in her mask as the two Concussors riding as her escort reined in behind her. I felt the warmth drawn right out of my bones. I tried to think of something biting to say to her, something bold and witty to fire the people’s passions to my side, but my tongue was tied.
‘This plan of yours rests on blind faith and self-confidence,’ she said, and harder words have never been carved in ice and rammed through a Stormcast Eternal’s chest. ‘It hardly requires a prophet of Sigmar to foresee as much of you.’
I was too occupied by staring to notice her dismount. I only realised she was walking towards me on foot when I heard the creak of the little yard’s gate, the Lord-Veritant pushing it open on the glittering ferrule of her abjuration staff.
My heart pounded. As if it had never done anything so pure and unforced in all its long years in my hard, storm-forged chest. It was fists on an ice wall. Broken knuckles and torn nails. Suddenly the Eternal Storm and Sigmar’s great war of liberation seemed trivial, trifling concerns, matters of no consequence to beings with hearts free to think and choose, and most of all to feel. My heart and mind must have gone through several rounds of this between themselves before I managed to moisten my tongue sufficiently to make a word.
‘Vikaelia.’
‘That is not my name,’ she said, simply.
‘It was. Once.’
I couldn’t make out the Lord-Veritant’s expression through her mask. I had no doubt that she would have been puzzled by mine.
‘How would you know such a thing?’
‘I…’
In an act of astounding rarity, speaking volumes for my state of disarray, I thought before I answered.
It came to me then, in sudden, abject clarity, exactly what Vikaelia had been to me in life. She had been my queen. I had coveted her, I had taken her, and I had loved her fiercely. Everything I had felt for her before, I felt again then. It was heat and noise. Emotion without consequence. Plunging without course or anchor into the unformed insanity of the Eightpoints was as nothing compared to what I felt then. It was a rush, bubbling and messy, an indiscriminate mess of feelings that knew only what they wanted and couldn’t conceive of a future in which they might care who got hurt in the taking. All of this I ached to tell her, but before the words came to me, I found that I could not.
Because though a part of Hamul might have been reborn in me, she was no longer Vikaelia. She was the property of no one, not even Sigmar, for the God-King demanded only the respect of his warriors, not the fealty that a weak lord demands of his vassals.
She would remember none of it.
As delirious as my earlier revelation had been, this one was the kick in the liver that, in my experience, inevitably followed any feeling that intoxicating.
It felt like the greatest evil ever committed against the good order of the God-King, that a man could carry such love beyond death only to find it not only unrequited, but forgotten.
Vikaeus made to grab me.
I backed off, swatting aside her gleaming white gauntlet.
I’m not sure what I was afraid would happen if I let her touch me. That I would petrify in a block of ice, perhaps? Or, less spectacularly – but far more likely, and all the more terrifying for that – that I might just surrender.
Nassam stepped in front of me. Vikaeus looked down on him as though he were a blemish on her boot.
‘The ire of the God-King is not towards you, Jerech. But it can be.’
‘Lord?’ he asked.
‘It’s alright.’
He surprised me by looking relieved. ‘Lady,’ he said, bowing to the Lord-Veritant, and then withdrew.
‘So you are capable of being reasonable,’ said Vikaeus, the mortal already dismissed from her thoughts. ‘The lords-sacristan did indeed speak truthfully. You have been changed.’
‘Would you believe me if I told you that I was a Knight-Questor, here on a mission of divine significance from Sigmar himself?’
‘Akturus wove me the same tale. He should have known better from the last time you tricked him.’
‘This is different.’
‘Because Sigmar sent you?’
‘Yes!’ I shouted, smacking my hands together. Retreating into the old habits helped obscure the fact t
hat my hands were shaking.
Vikaeus took another step towards me.
‘And yet it was Sigmar who sent me to bring you back. Explain that.’
‘He had to, because you see, Ong, the first of the Six Smiths–’
‘I do not need you to spin me a tale, Hamilcar. I need you to surrender your weapon and come with me.’
‘Now?’
‘Yes. Now.’
I laughed, incredulous. ‘The skaven are going to destroy this city. Sigmar’s city, Sigmar’s people.’ I spoke louder, warming to my theme and the growing grumbles of the men and women watching our exchange. ‘What kind of Lord-Veritant would allow such a thing on her watch?’
Vikaeus looked coldly around her. ‘If Sigmar wished this city saved he could have sent another. He sent me. You will return with me through the Seventh Gate, Lord-Castellant Hamilcar Bear-Eater, and back to the Forge Eternal where the Relictor and Sacrosanct temples of your brothers have commanded your soul be incarcerated.’
A spontaneous cry of ‘No!’ went up from the people around us.
A snarl from the Dracoths silenced them, but Vikaeus looked up again, as if conscious for the first time that she was in the middle of a powder keg. ‘He is a danger to himself and all he touches,’ she announced, absolute in the authority of her words, but with all the rhetorical nous of a bloodletter of Khorne.
‘He’s the Bear-Eater!’ I roared, pumping my fist in the air, and bringing an outraged cheer from the mob.
‘It is for his own wellbeing as much as all of yours,’ Vikaeus responded, calmly.
‘What is your wellbeing worth to you in a skaven slave pit, or worse, a cook pot? Am I dangerous? Hah! I say let the skaven be the judge of that!’
‘The God-King commands otherwise.’
Now I may not have had Vikaeus’ vaunted – and to my mind, grossly oversold – gift for prophecy, but I had a good sense for when a crowd was about to turn. After everything that had happened to me during my last escape from the Seven Words, I wasn’t about to underestimate how beloved I was by the people of the Gorkomon again. I didn’t doubt that the citizens of the Seven Words would attack if Vikaeus tried to take me by force.
Dracoths or no Dracoths.
And then things really would turn ugly.
‘You’ll have to kill a lot of people to get at me,’ I warned her.
‘The Hamilcar I know would never shield himself with the blood of those he claims to protect.’
Vikaeus advanced on me. I continued backing away until my back hit the hovel’s door.
‘They are the men and women who should be defending this place,’ I said.
‘Given that it was your misguided rebellion that broke the Freeguild in the first place, I find your concern of dubious sincerity now.’
‘That was never my intention,’ I said, feeling for the door handle behind me. ‘If you want someone to blame for that, you should help me look for Broudiccan.’
Vikaeus tutted in disappointment. ‘Are you trying to shift blame?’
‘Is it working?’
She stepped in closer. Near enough for my skin to shrink from the cold emanating from her reforged skin. ‘No one ever speaks the truth to a Lord-Veritant. Not at first.’
‘I was afraid of that. I’ll have to try something else, then.’
‘You have nothing left to try, Hamilcar.’
‘You really are the worst prophet, Vikaelia,’ I said, as I ripped the door from its frame and hit her with it.
Chapter thirty-one
Those things I told you earlier, about how you’ve never seen a Stormcast Eternal at full tilt? Forget it all – you don’t know what haste is until you’ve run through a sacked city with three Knights Merciless on Dracoths behind you.
I ran into the side of a building at a full sprint. It looked like an alehouse, but I paid it no mind. Grabbing hold of the projecting eave, I pulled myself up, my feet scrambling on the wall, and rolled onto the sloped roof. Quickly onto my feet, I drew enough acceleration from somewhere to leap the small rear yard and the narrow ravine it backed onto, landing onto cobbles in a clattering roll that carried me immediately back into a sprint.
The alehouse collapsed behind me.
Cryax bellowed and pounded through the back wall. I glanced over my shoulder. Vikaeus’ icy halo burned through the pall of crushed mortar and dust and stung my eyes. The following Concussors smashed what was left of the alehouse to rubble as Cryax bunched the gargantuan muscles of his haunches.
I’d wager you’ve never seen a Dracoth jump.
It’s not a sight for the faint-hearted.
Even from where I was, halfway down the street, I felt the ground shake and heard the shutters in the windows around me rattle. I found an extra push of speed.
‘Hamilcar is here!’ I screamed, one of the shutters ahead of me nudging warily open on the barrel of a longrifle. ‘The battle is not yet over!’
I sprinted past.
While I knew most of the alehouses in the Seven Words (and indeed, most of the Free Cities of the Mortal Realms), I’d been in too great a hurry to notice which one I’d just passed, or which street I was on now. The Seven Words was a honeycomb of narrow, ill-kept little lanes like this one, switchbacking their way around the Gorkomon’s inhospitable crags. It was hardly suited to the trio of enraged Dracoth knights and I knew it.
If Vikaeus had ever ventured beyond the keep then she would have known it too.
Skidding around a razor-sharp bend, I veered past the eviscerated remains of a Gorwood horse still lashed to a cart, my armour scraping the wall, bouncing and rattling off downhill.
I heard the Dracoths bellow behind me, the scrabble of foot-long claws on cobbles, then the crash of a Celestial war-beast bursting side-on through the stone wall of a house. The beast roared in outrage as the roof cascaded over its armoured head. I heard the muffled clang of a Concussor pitching from the saddle.
I grinned, glancing over my shoulder as Vikaeus and the last Concussor slowed through the turn before urging their monstrous mounts on after me. I had already doubled my lead on them. I knew where I was going. They couldn’t catch me now. I even felt confident enough to slow down at the sight of a group of armed Freeguilders holding their little patch of drystone wall.
‘You need more than a Dracoth to beat Hamilcar Bear-Eater in a race to the fight,’ I bellowed as I flashed past.
The ground shook as Cryax built back speed.
Too late now.
Like every street in the outer wards, this one wound its involuntary little way around the rough terrain to feed into the main traffic of the Bear Road. Exactly where I wanted to be.
I burst out of the lane and onto the wide, ruined concourse of the Seven Words’ one genuine road. I quickly looked both ways. The devastation that had been wrought by the skaven’s wheel machine was plain to see. It had ploughed through Freeguild stockades and Frankos’ diligently erected chokepoints like a stampede of wild beasts, leaving behind wooden debris and a warping haze of charge. And into the destruction had come the skaven, as surely as rotten meat produced flies. Judging from the earthy hummocks of spoil poking up through shattered cobblestones, they had come from beneath. The Seven Words had more holes in it than one of my alibis for failing to attend early morning drills, and I could hardly fault Akturus for letting a few slip his notice. In any case, shock-vermin were still shimmying down ropes dangling from the keels of low-hovering airships while several thousand more had gone for the expedient route of simply smashing open the main gate. The surrounding swathe of road was awash with armoured skaven warriors and verminous beasts, bludgeoning through a stubborn, but ever-diminishing line of Heavens Forged.
I tried to pick out Broudiccan, Xeros or Frankos from the mayhem, but I didn’t have the time for a proper look.
Swinging its huge arms, as if needing that init
ial boost to get the massed musculature of its upper body moving, one of the skaven war-beasts rounded on me and roared. Its head was that of a rat, hunched into gigantic shoulders, albeit enlarged to twice the size of a man’s. Its gargantuan build was that of an ogor. The skaven beastmakers call them rat-ogors, the famed ingenuity of their race inexplicably deserting them at the end. I had encountered several of the mutated rat-beasts before, but this one was the first to have been encased in cogwork battle armour, warpfire dribbling from nozzles appended to each fist.
Trust Ikrit to make a foul thing a hundred times worse.
Red eyes glittering with madness and childish hate, the rat-ogor lumped its balled fist at me. I ducked under the blow, and spun behind the beast, still working off speed as I backpedalled away from it.
I found myself perfectly positioned to watch as Cryax and Vikaeus emerged from the alley.
Anything less massive than a rat-ogor on the receiving end of a Dracoth would have been trampled, no questions asked, but the skaven war-beast was simply barged backwards – towards me. Claws and the ill-fitting armour plates nailed to its calves gouged sparks out of the cobblestones as it slowed down. Wrapping its arms around Cryax’s neck, it delivered a high-pitched mangling of squeak and roar. The Dracoth drowned it out with its own bellow. Lightning bolts sprayed from the Celestial beast’s open jaws and flayed the meat from the rat-ogor’s head. Incredibly, even with half its face dribbling towards its groin, the rat-ogor didn’t let go. Vikaeus swept up her sword, the bound energies of the merciless storm flickering along its length and haloing the Lord-Veritant in divine fury. She hacked through the rat-ogor’s clutching arm in a single blow.
The following Concussor did the rest.
Still running blind, the second Dracoth blundered into Cryax’s hindquarters, shoving him forwards, through the squealing rat-ogor, and finally throwing the pain-addled beast to the ground. A second rat-ogor waded towards the pair like an armoured ape, green light bleeding from the sutured ruin of its eyes. The Paladin swung his lightning hammer, shattering thick metal plates and knocking the rat-beast off its stride. The Dracoth smashed it to the ground with a swipe of its head, then proceeded to disembowel it with frenzied motions of its claws.
