by Warhammer
A streak of oily lightning leapt from the warlock’s outstretched paw.
I dived to the ground. The blast careened over my head and obliterated a war-wagon that had been lying on its axle behind me. It died in splinters and flame. Bits of shrapnel rattled off my backplate as I crawled away from the pyre. Another energy blast blew a crater out of the ground. I found my knees, rising messily into a sprint as the third blast carved open a company of Freeguilder polearms and hit the rat-ogor that had been bludgeoning its way through them, reducing them all to ash and jelly and a foul taste in the back of my mouth.
‘Run-flee, Bear-Eater. I know-see what you crave over all else. I know-know how to make you hurt.’ The warlock cackled. ‘Let them see you run.’
Fire engulfed both his gauntlets, white hot and searing. His arms trembled as he drew them back, the flames shrinking into the metal until they glowed, then thrust his paws towards me.
A sun ignited on the Bear Road, and warriors of all ilks burned.
Skaven used their last breath before they were blown to ash to squeal. Men and women disappeared like tallow sticks in a flame. Lightning bolts tore free from the maelstrom, warriors of the Heavens Forged and the Imperishables, their thrice-blessed no proof against the monstrous fireball. It spanned the full width of the road, two-score feet across. Stone ran from the frontages of the buildings like fat from a roast. Scaffolds, awnings, and windows simply ceased to be. Lead tiles glowed like coals. Running out of the blast even as it was erupting, I avoided the worst, but then I think that that had always been Ikrit’s intention. Heat raced ahead of the explosion and threw me to my face. I skidded over the ruined cobbles on my breastplate before running out of push.
I threw my head back like a drunk who could not comprehend how he had come to be on the floor. I could barely see. Blood matted my hair to my face. I could smell it.
‘Vikaelia!’ I roared.
Broudiccan had been somewhere close by too, but it wasn’t his face that filled my mind then, nor goaded my strength to fury. I rose with a groan of sigmarite heated to murderous temperatures, the burnt muscles in the back of my neck stretching painfully as I turned my head towards Ikrit.
He was walking towards me, but, borne on a gryph-charger of complicit storm winds, he came as a thunderbolt of corroded bronzes and Azyrite blues.
I beat my halberd back across his path like a scythe. There was no finesse to it. I targeted no weak point in the armour nor gleaned vulnerability in his form. There was only the burning need to reap. My halberd hacked into a skein of Ulgu shadow, slowing the blade noticeably before it clanged against his armour. My fury became incandescent. Divine. I was a mountain man, and the boiling point came for me well before it would have taken another. Everything this rat had done, everything he had taken from me. I no longer cared if I lived or died. Life in the Winterlands was brutal and brief, and death unmourned. Let my soul burn, let it set the Heavens ablaze this one final time as it returned to the Cosmic Storm. I didn’t care, so long as I could hurt this rat in my passing.
Howling like a wounded ghurlion, I threw myself at my aggressor.
The warlock squeaked in surprise as my arms wrapped around him and locked behind his back. He shrieked. I sank my teeth into his snout. Cold blood oozed into my mouth. For a moment I relived the vision of my first, mortal death at the hands of the ogor frostlord and his giant bear, and was pleased. There was a circularity to it that appealed to my vanity, that fate would accord me such a thoughtful gesture for my passing. Spitting out a whisker, I smashed my head into Ikrit’s. It was like head-butting a statue. Pain rang outward from my forehead. I felt Ikrit’s jaws snapping for my throat. We grappled. My fingers went through the eye slit of his helm and mushed something glutinous and rotten. My other hand found the warding lantern in his claw.
With an outraged squeal, Ikrit caught the hand by the wrist and twisted. Pain exploded into the forefront of my mind, bringing me screaming back to my senses.
Bone spurs scraped over the inside of my vambrace as Ikrit dangled me by my limp hand. I screamed. He screamed back at me. Then he spun me once around and hurled me through the wall of a roadside inn.
Still cooling from the wrath of Ikrit’s fireball, the wall disintegrated as soon as I hit it. It collapsed onto me, followed by the ceiling, then the roof. I coughed, snarled, bellowed in pain and pointless fury as the building sought to bury me alive under rock that fell apart into cinders as soon as it came loose. I shook my face and my hand as if to dig my way out of the grave of cinders, glimpsing clear sky overhead as the last of the structure gave way. The blue thickened and turned green even as I flapped at the flames. Ectoplasmic muscle swelled across the open sky like angry clouds, thick-veined and bristling with Ghurite strength. A colossal in-breath snuffed out the flames around me as the Foot of Gork came crashing down, demolishing what little was left of the inn and smashing me into the rubble.
The gigantic foot broke into a virulent green fog as soon as it made impact with the ground.
I lay in the midst of it, gasping and broken, staring up at blue skies once again. My breath hitched as I struggled to fill my lungs. I had broken at least one rib and had collapsed a lung, by the frantic wheezing of my breath.
Ikrit stepped off the road and into the flattened inn.
The residual smog parted before him. I saw now why he did not need an army. An army was almost an encumbrance to a being like him, useful only insofar as he could not be everywhere at once.
One-handed, I drove the butt of my halberd into the ground and made myself meet death like a warrior. My armour protested the movement, rubble sliding off its curves. Anyone but me would have been dead already, but Sigmar had made my bastion armour thick and warded where it mattered. He had known that my next death could be my last, and had done all in his power to ensure that it never came to be. He did not want me dead. He wanted me triumphant.
Not nearly as much as I did.
The warlock’s surprise at seeing me alive was bettered only by that at seeing me upright. The sight of his snout still black and oozing gave me the strength to pull the last few inches of my spine straight.
‘What does it take-need to put you down?’
‘More than you can throw,’ I wheezed. I spat blood, then looked down at my broken hand. The claws of my fingers were still gripping the warding lantern that I had wrenched from his grip. ‘You haven’t got the strength in you to finish Hamilcar Bear-Eater. Chosen of Sigmar. Knight-Questor! Champion of the Gods!’
Gritting my teeth, I slid back the lantern’s shutter and hurled it like a Kharadron grudgesettler bomb with the pin removed.
Strobing starlight flashed across the smouldering rubble as the lantern spun, end over end, a weaponised pulsar encased in sigmarite, amethyst and gold. Where light slashed Ikrit’s armour, black steam rose, and he stumbled back from me with a hiss of pain. A stone from the inn’s foundation wall protruded from the ground behind him, and he went backwards over it in a billow of sparks.
He thrashed about, driving up fresh cinders as he struggled to right himself, only to shriek all the louder as he discovered a halberd piercing the palm of his gauntlet, driving into the rock, and pinning his paw to the ground.
Ikrit swung with his other gauntlet. Not for me but for my halberd. I knocked his paw aside on the outside of my knee, and then, my chest an agony, trod down hard on his elbow. Dropping my knee into his stomach plating, I punched him across the jaw. And again. And again. Losing myself to the fury. ‘I told you.’ His helmet buckled. ‘It would.’ A bloody smear on his diamond teeth. ‘Hurt.’ My blood. Thoughtlessly, I hit him with my broken hand. With a dying fish gasp of pain, I rolled off him. Using just my feet, I pushed myself back, my head flopping finally to the ground as the madness that had loaned me its strength departed me with its due.
I lay there for a time, struggling to breathe, listening to the sounds of battle retur
n.
Of course, they had never left. Even so, I found it hard to credit that anyone else out there was still fighting. A hero had just fought a god into the ground. The realms should have taken a breath. They should have held back and taken heed. Instead, skaven and Freeguilder grunted and yelled like savages in the mud. The thunder of Stormcast and Ironweld weaponry warred with the piercing war-cries of the aetar.
I lifted my head just enough to look over at Ikrit. The warlock was slumped and beaten, his right arm half-melted by the fluids leaking from his own gauntlet, and speared to the ground. He looked even worse than I felt.
‘You’re mine,’ I managed to say. The breath coming in was agony. The voice going out was a rasp.
‘You cannot even… stand-stand.’
‘I’ll drag you to the Seventh Gate with my teeth if I have to.’
‘Try it… Bear-Eater. I do not need my… arm… to destroy you.’
‘Surrender! Show me how to restore my soul, and I will appeal to Sigmar to be merciful with yours. Tell me, and I will have him consign you to oblivion before the Smiths can lay their tools upon you.’
By way of answer, Ikrit turned his face to the sky and screamed.
He screamed with the vehemence of a beaten god. At first I thought it the venting of the indignity of defeat, but then I heard the familiar rifling of feathers, the whistle of air through an open beak. I saw the shadow that darkened the ground where Ikrit and I looked up. My heart forced pain wider through my chest.
With a blistering shriek, King Augus announced his intentions.
His plumage bristled with the fury of the seven winds. His mail coat and spiked crown caught Azyr lightning and warpfire, and were vengeful.
‘No!’ I screamed.
A furious beating of wings forced me back into the ground, as Augus lifted his enormous bulk off the crushed warlock, all the while keeping one enormous talon possessively over his body. Then the victorious king of the aetar closed his beak over the helmet and wrenched Ikrit’s head from his shoulders.
Chapter thirty-three
King Augus tossed the helmeted corpse head aside and turned to me with a look of aquiline satisfaction.
‘No!’ I cried again.
The word caused me so much pain that at first I didn’t recognise it as mine. It was a bladed imprecation that someone had pushed into my chest to the crosspiece and twisted. But it was just the broken end of my rib pushing into my lung. A trifling hurt, in comparison. On hands and knees, drawing my halberd through the rubble as if it were a paddle, I crawled towards Ikrit’s headless body, the co-vessel for my storm-forged soul. Ignoring Augus’ increasingly irate caws, I took Ikrit by the shoulder and shook him.
I don’t know what I was expecting.
‘No, no, no.’ I glared hotly at the aetar. ‘No!’
Augus lowered his head towards me and delivered an ear-destroying shriek.
‘You think I’ll let that insult pass?’ With the strength in my arms I pushed against my halberd to position my body upright until I was, on my knees, almost level with Augus’ breast. Pain flared in mine. The aetar swirled in my vision like cream poured into qahua. ‘You stole prey from the Bear-Eater. Do you think me so far gone that I won’t pluck every feather from your body before I spit you on my spear?’
As bluster went, this was a desperate attempt. Even hugging myself to my halberd like a tent around a pole, I swayed on my knees. I didn’t care. With Ikrit destroyed, his soul blasted into whatever aether awaited the souls of pariahs to the skaven race, the Smiths would never be able to undo what he had done.
What he had done to me.
I would never again be whole.
Augus was a proud king, but not so humane that he would not rip the head from a wounded foe, as I had just learned to my eternal cost. At least it would be quick. It would be bloody and honest. Better that than the slow dissolution of the soul that awaited me now.
‘Come on, Augus, why do you hesitate? Are you afraid?’
The aetar bristled, baring his gnarled and blood-stained beak.
A nearby voice interrupted. ‘Peace, Augus. Can you not see he is out of his wits?’
Lord-Veritant Vikaeus of the Creed crunched onto the rubble-strewn ground. Her sword was bloody, her plate battered. Her staff shone with a cold light that stung tears from my eyes. It was as though my body acted out of its own self-interest, for on top of everything else it had endured it knew that the sight of her, unblurred, would have broken me then. A pair of Concussors walked behind her, both as well-blooded as the Lord-Veritant herself. One was on foot. The other struggled through the wreckage on a rancorous, ice-blue Dracoth. Augus swivelled his head to glare at them, beating his wings threateningly to warn the Knights Merciless from his prize.
I, however, spread my arms and bowed my head, as though offering my neck as a gift.
‘The sun rises. The rule of the Day Queen comes,’ I said, speaking with bitterness the words that I could recall her once speaking to me when we had been mortal.
She looked at me quizzically. Her eyes unfocused, just for a moment. ‘What did you say?’
‘I am usurped,’ I said, continuing. ‘Come, take what is yours.’
Shaking off whatever moment had taken her, she gestured to the Concussors. ‘Seize him.’ Augus delivered a terrific screech as the warrior on foot passed close. He backed off, warily, hands raised. Vikaeus turned her staff towards the aetar. ‘I have no interest in your verminous prize, Augus. I am here for Hamilcar alone.’
Augus shuffled back, cawing, dragging the warlock with him, leaving a smear of hissing green oil on the rubble behind it.
‘Wait,’ said the mounted Concussor who had held back by the Bear Road. ‘What is happening to the warlock?’
Ikrit’s body was starting to dissolve, his armour buckling as green bubbles foamed from the seams.
‘Sigendil’s light,’ I swore, as the corpse began to buck and twitch under Augus’ foot.
‘Stay back, Lord-Veritant,’ said the other, drawing Vikaeus towards him by the elbow.
Vikaeus turned to address me. ‘Is this more foolery of yours, Hamilcar?’
I didn’t answer.
I was as captivated as they were.
A bang sounded from behind us, like popping corn, and we all jumped. Augus took to the air, alarmed. Vikaeus turned instinctively towards the Bear Road, the Concussors closing around her with lightning hammers raised. The battle for the Seven Words had been won, thanks to me, but it was far from over, and the Paladins were right to fear a skaven bullet aimed at their Lord-Veritant. This time, however, it was something less prosaic, but no less trying on the heart. It was Ikrit’s head, jumping about in the rubble where Augus had discarded it. The flesh, bone and metal seemed to be dissolving into a volatile mix of sickly gases and energy, leapfrogging the pulverised foundation slabs every time a belch of the former was released.
Vikaeus pushed aside her warrior’s lightning hammer for a clearer look.
‘What witchcraft is this?’
Augus settled onto an adjoining rooftop and shrieked down on us all.
Ikrit’s remains disintegrated into lightning, flares of poisonous green energy originating from his head and his body before crackling together above our heads. It was like an implosion, but of light rather than sound or energy, drawing it in and turning the realm around me dark. Combined into a single bolt, the lightning cut its chaotic path across the sky. I squinted, trying to follow its arcing course to whatever star marked its destination. I had a fair idea where it was going. A certain dark burrow with a Magrittan chaise and a strewn pile of ancient parchments, hurtling through the Allpoints towards realms unknown.
It didn’t help me very much, but even so I found myself smiling.
Ikrit had done it. He had done it. This was news of the darkest sort for Sigmar and the integrity of the S
tormhosts, and the grimmest of tidings for the grand alliance of Order in general, but I smiled like a boy who had been given a sweet to assuage his hurts.
‘It’s not over,’ I said.
‘How…?’ murmured Vikaeus. She stared up, transfixed, troubled to the ice-cold cavity of her chest. ‘Where has he gone? Surely not the soul-mills of the Forge Eternal?’
‘I mean to find out, Vikaelia,’ I said.
‘What? No. Enough of this.’
Stepping between her warriors, Vikaeus brought the butt of her staff crashing to the ground. The leaves of ice that enclosed the abjuration lantern at its crown fell aside and heavenly light blazed forth. It spilled over the two Concussors and the Dracoth, brought a pained squawk from Augus, and would have rendered me immediately chastened and helpless had something gigantic not cast its wing shadow over me at just that moment.
Princess Aeygar Ayr Augus announced herself with an ebullient screech, spreading her wings to shield me from the Lord-Veritant’s light as she scooped me effortlessly from the ground in one talon. She had timed her descent with the grace of a born hunter, and a single beat of her wings was enough to convey her back into the sky without ever setting a claw on the ground. I made a noise that fell somewhere between a cry of delight and a scream as the ground fell away from me, my broken ribs grinding into me in the aetar’s grip, and the Lord-Veritant’s abjuration grew increasingly distant and dim. Before I had a chance to adjust to the change in scenery, I found myself hanging in the midst of the battle for the skies of the Seven Words. Aetar knights swooped and soared, slowing only to savage what remained of the Skyre clan ruinfleet.
‘Forgive my tardiness, lord.’
Nassam sat high on the princess’ neck, his dark beard and moustaches flying in the seven winds. His Jerech greatsword was sheathed across his back, the better to cling onto Aeygar’s plumage.
Princess Aeygar gave a concerned squawk.
‘I’ve suffered worse than this and walked away to tell the tale.’
