by Various
Sigmar…
Lightning played around the edges of Ramus’ armour, ready at a word to cast him into the Mortal Realms once more. His wrathful heart sang with praise.
‘I will present him to my old foe in silver chains.’
The lightning struck. It hit not with the impulsive stab-and-return that a bolt from the heavens should, but with a raking stroke. It timed its moment, brightening until the air it touched hummed with the pent-up might of Azyr. Release came in a thunderclap of such staggering force that the resultant blast wave ripped into the leaves of the surrounding trees.
The light faded, and Lord-Relictor Ramus opened his eyes. Smoke rose from his armour, residual energies arcing from gauntlet to gauntlet, snapping between his fingertips and his bowed head. He was alive, whole, and his war-plate was once again unmarred. His reliquary blazed like a lightning rod in his hand, a halo flickering about its crown and bestowing fateful animation on the imagery of faith, death and the storm.
From his shoulder, a shield of mirrored silver carrying a relief of a twin-tailed comet hung on a strap. A gift from Sigmar. He was on bent knee, the closing utterance of a prayer on his lips as the last of the storm faded.
‘Only the faithful...’
‘Only the faithful!’ came the reply.
Sixty warriors stood at order behind him, their armour a perfect silver-gold. They were the Hallowed Knights, warriors who had spent their last breath before death to call out to Sigmar and who had been answered.
Retributors with spitting lightning hammers; Decimators, gauntleted fists grimly locked about their thunderaxes; Protectors, their proud bulk distorted by the mystic shimmer of their stormstrike glaives; and finally the Prosecutors, their celestial weapons alight with the glory of Azyr.
Ten of each stood in ranks. An Exemplar Chamber. The God-King’s elite. Surrounding them, twenty Judicators summoned bolts to their crossbows, locked the weapons’ stocks to their breastplates and made ready. Ramus could see no Lord-Celestant or ranking champion amongst their number. It appeared that Sigmar had tasked Ramus with the role of leadership.
His view was limited to two discontinuous portals by the bony sockets of the helm that encased his head like a second skull, and he darted his gaze from point to point until he had a sense of their new battlefield.
The Hallowed Knights had been delivered into a V-shaped plaza, not made of stone but wood, and staked out with fire-poles and animal skins that moved under the most stilted of breezes. The air was clammy with the respiration of slow, giant things, and bitty with wood smoke. It tasted third-hand and passed torpidly through Ramus’ lungs.
The scuffed wooden ground was carpeted with dried leaves bigger than both of his hands. Noticing them, and noticing the incongruity between what he could see and feel and the oceanic roar of wind through trees, he looked up. His head spun with unexpected vertigo. It was not the height, but rather a sudden reinterpretation of scale.
Contrary to his initial flash impression, he was not amongst trees but high, high up in the canopy of a tree. The sky wore a cloak of purple-red scales and rustled as if to conceal something dark. The hoots and cries of beasts and birds, and things that were neither, called out from myriad hiding places in the wooded fastness.
‘Who brings fire to the lightless places?’
‘Only the faithful!’
Tilting his head back, Ramus scanned the plaza’s high, sheer walls. They had been cut from a pair of gnarled, monstrous branches, and were banded with lines that more closely resembled a cliff face than the growth lines of a living tree. Twinkling eyes watched intently from above. Leaves stirred.
At every level of the exposed wood, rude huts had been cut. The frontages were hung with shaggy furs that swallowed them entirely, rippling sedately in the breeze. In death they were monstrous, and Ramus felt that even he might hesitate before confronting beasts so large in the flesh.
Under such a commotion of noises it was impossible to pick out what was happening beyond the first row of huts. He could see no one but his own warriors, but death had a way of breeding caution, and he could feel the threat closing in.
‘Anything?’
‘No, Lord-Relictor.’
‘No.’
‘Nothing.’
‘Nothing also.’
The leaders of the Retributors, Decimators, Protectors and Judicators sounded off.
Ramus raised his crackling reliquary aloft to stir texture into the murk.
‘Draw back,’ he ordered. ‘Form lines.’
Through the plaza’s wider, open end, the slow fall of reds, browns and golds permitted a partial and changing view of a city on a grand scale. A tangle of wooden girders and gantries, wire-trained branches and great winding staircases supported vast platforms that were smoky with fortified wooden townships. Both high up and way, way down, little squares of light flickered.
At the other end, it narrowed. An ever-constricting row of steps climbed towards the wooden plinth of a two-faced gargoyle – one man, one beast, both appearing to strain apart from the other – from which water trickled into a basin.
Judicators took position on the steps and swung up their crossbows with a rattle of sigmarite. They aimed.
The boards trembled underfoot. Ramus had not noticed that before, but now he was still it was as clear as the might of Sigmar. As though something massive was pounding on the same piece of wood. Retributors and Decimators formed staggered lines along the lower steps, reinforced every second or third warrior by the blurred mass of a Protector.
Ramus moved to join the crossbows where his view would be better.
‘Be alert,’ he said. ‘Whatever comes for us – and have faith that it comes for us – remember that Mannfred von Carstein is mine. Should I prove unworthy in that task and fall, then the vampire is a prize for whoever may claim him.’
‘Lord-Relictor!’ called the Judicator. ‘The skies.’
With a beat of broad, luminous wings, a being foreshadowed by its own otherworldly halo descended into the plaza’s hollow. Ramus’ first thought was of Mannfred’s abyssal mount, Ashigaroth, but one look was enough to see that it was something else.
The armoured angel flew in the characteristic mode of the God-King’s winged heralds, big powerful strokes generating uplift, then an earthbound plummet as mass told. It was peculiarly ungainly, a swan coming into land, but then nothing so graceful should ever have been compelled to fly.
‘We are here for the vampire,’ Ramus shouted up.
The beams of light that feathered the warrior’s wings slid down his helm’s sockets like knives from heaven. That which bled around the gilded shutter of the flyer’s lantern simultaneously soothed and strengthened.
‘Where is he?’
Confusion showed within the eyeholes of the warrior’s helm as he regarded Ramus and his weapons. Then he shook his head, wings working hard to lift him from his hover and into a climb. More lambent wing-shadows arrowed through the dark above him, lightning crackling from javelins and hammers unseen.
‘No time! I am Vandalus, Knight-Azyros of the Astral Templars. Fight first, and then we can all be brothers.’
The knight unshuttered his lantern, the full force of its illumination searing the gloom away. To Ramus, it was as though the light of all the stars that ever were had been lensed through that lantern, the disparate colours of the divine merging to white gold. It should have burned, but it was like cool water in tired eyes. It should have been blinding, but the coruscating glory highlighted every detail with a brilliance that could not be ignored.
And with the despatch of the leafy dark, Ramus saw.
They were huge, lumbering creatures, fully half again the size of a Stormcast with that excess made up in equal parts by muscle and by fat. Guts girdled with heavy armour plates swayed side to side as they charged the steps that came up from the tree-city into
the plaza. Mail flapped from their arms. Wheezes and grunts turned to howls of agony as eyes were sizzled dry and melted to the backs of eyelids. What had been a headlong charge under cover of darkness became a fumbling advance on hands and knees, blood streaming down jowly cheeks.
Vandalus slammed his lantern shut. The light snapped out, but by glowing, multicoloured outlines, Ramus could still see.
‘On them!’
The Prosecutors, visible now as a retinue about two dozen strong, strafed the ogors from above. Ramus’ own winged warriors moved to join them. Despite their speed, each was able to loose two or three missiles before reaching the mouth of the plaza, where they banked up and corkscrewed towards the canopy.
Javelins fell amongst the ogors, less like rain than bolts of lightning. Half-blind brutes skewered with several of the long shafts frothed and seized, Azyrite energy fizzing through their muscles. Thrown hammers smacked through the thunderstorm with stone-cratering force, punching down those creatures tough enough to still be standing.
The last of the Prosecutors turned their wings of light to the breeze and speared upwards, leaving a field of dead and moaning in their wake. Ramus smiled. This was not the foe he had been sent for, but their obliteration was beautiful, he could not deny.
‘Judicators, loose,’ Ramus instructed.
More ogors, these armoured even more heavily than the initial rush and supported by mounted warriors on huge shaggy war-beasts, shouldered through the remnants of the first wave. The first rank, a sweating line of about thirty with cavalry keeping pace on the flanks, cleared the final step and entered the plaza.
A vast brute waved a black standard carrying a bat-wing motif. The horde gave a roar and surged past into a rattling volley of fire delivered by the Judicators’ boltstorm crossbows. A handful went down, but the majority pushed through, armour and thick hide both bristling with sigmarite-tipped bolts.
‘You will need to do better than that!’ Vandalus roared.
With a scowl, Ramus raised his reliquary. He murmured a grim prayer, his words lost amidst the grunts as the first of the ogors’ heavy hitters smashed belly first into the thin rank of Protectors and sent them flying. Further back, the mounted ogors goaded their war-beasts into a ponderous trot, staying close in to the row of huts as they urged their steeds towards the Hallowed Knights’ flanks.
The purple sky darkened and roiled, flashes of sheet lightning visible beyond the bowing leaves. A bolt jagged down from the heavens and struck the upraised reliquary. Energy crashed outward, knocking an ogor flat, tendrils squirming over his armour. Ramus could feel the hairs of his body standing on end and tasted the charge in his mouth.
With a word and a gesture he blasted a lightning bolt through the flanking cavalry, reducing ogors to ash and turning their massive mounts into squealing fireballs. Teeth bared, he unleashed the lightning again and again until his power was spent and all around him was brittle devastation. His body was aglow with its after-effects.
‘Who will be victorious?’ he called.
‘Only the faithful!’ the Protectors responded as they redressed their line.
‘Now I feel your passion,’ Vandalus laughed, opening his lantern’s cover again and sending scores more of the ogors to their hands and knees, crying blood.
Ramus smashed the butt of his reliquary through the neck of an ogor that was writhing in pain on the lowest of the fountain steps. The first real shouts of panic went up from the ogors and they began to fall back. Ordered to hold, the disciplined line of Hallowed Knights simply disengaged and watched them go.
Ramus saw them dash against a second line of maroon and gold and animal pelts that had pivoted across the plaza’s entrance like a raising drawbridge. The gloom was too heavy for him to see what happened next, but he could hear well enough.
With a two-footed thump, the Knight-Azyros landed beside him, in his way as strange a sight as the ogors had been. His golden helm had been picked out with several small ideograms like tattoos, representing stars, storms and wild beasts. Odd, rustling totems of feathers and leaves had been affixed to his armour, partially masking the intricate, amethyst scrollwork. He took Ramus firmly by the shoulder.
‘A fine anvil you make, brother,’ the Azyros said. ‘Come, meet the hammer.’
The burly warrior stood with one armoured boot on the back of a particularly large and messily slain ogor, a wooden cup in his hand. The cup was empty, but the prop seemed important to his sense of theatre.
He carried his helm under one arm, its absence revealing a shaggy bearded face cut by shallow scars. Given that such injuries could not survive the Reforging they must have been relatively recent and, judging from the patterning, Ramus suspected self-inflicted to some ritual end.
‘His name is Hamilcar,’ Vandalus explained. ‘He is Lord-Castellant of the Astral Templars, Eater of Bears and champion of Cartha.’
The Lord-Castellant’s heavy armour was decorated, if that was the word, with bloody palm prints to which scraps of animal hair had been stuck. He looked like a man-wolf from Azyr’s Eternal Winterlands. To Ramus, it appeared he and his warriors had ‘gone native’ to an alarming degree.
‘See how even the greatest fall to the halberd of Hamilcar Bear-Eater,’ the Lord-Castellant said, addressing all present. ‘The ogors have come before and we have beaten them back. They will come again and be beaten again because I am still here!’ His voice rose to a shout, disturbing the trio of gryph-hounds curled up around his feet where they dozed off a feast of ogor flesh. They growled sleepily as he went on.
‘You are men and women of Azyrheim. You could have lived your lives in safety and comfort, but instead you came here, returned to your homeland to reclaim it from Chaos in the name of the God-King Sigmar. Your courage is proven beyond question. But if anyone here now doubts their courage then let them not doubt mine. I am your protector and I will protect you all.’
He raised his cup high. The forest’s growl filled the pause.
‘To my protection!’
The mortal men and women assembled in the plaza mumbled back with a weary chorus. It put Ramus in mind of the surly response of a starving wolf pack.
They were gathered into auxiliary bow and spear detachments, between ten and twenty strong, marshalled around a host of Stormcasts in maroon and gold, of which there were about forty. Liberators and Judicators mostly, their armour embellished with a variety of odd fetishes and tribal markings.
A Protector with the hissing head of a leopard painted over his face walked between them, delivering each mortal a wooden thimble bearing his dole of oozing grey liquor. At Hamilcar’s nod, they downed them, sucking on the emptied thimbles for every last sticky drop.
Its nose was of tree sap with a familiar, coppery trace.
Crushing his empty cup in his hand, Hamilcar threw it aside.
‘To your posts. I want the gates repaired and men upon them ready for the next attack.’
Another chorus of semi-human grunts and the auxiliaries filed out.
Vandalus put his hand upon Ramus’ shoulder, ushering him forward. ‘Come. Perhaps Hamilcar can tell you something I cannot.’
‘Vandalus! Victory is ours!’ the Lord-Castellant bellowed, greeting Vandalus with a powerful embrace. He pulled away, his smile disappearing as he looked Ramus up and down. ‘Maelstrom of Light?’
‘Hallowed Knights.’
‘Ahh.’
‘Ramus is hunting a vampire called von Carstein.’
The informality of address made Ramus wince. Hamilcar’s bark of laughter hardened it into a scowl.
‘Mighty game indeed – one that would not survive an hour in this wood.’
‘He is here,’ said Ramus. ‘Sigmar would not have sent us to you if he were not. The God-King desires him dearly.’
And I want him, he thought, but did not add.
‘This is a dark la
nd, and Sigmar sees little of it from Sigmaron.’
‘You sound as though you question him.’
‘A mighty gift you have there, Ramus, to know so keenly what is in here.’ He tapped on the side of his grizzled head. ‘What am I thinking now?’
Vandalus cleared his throat tactfully. ‘It was my beacon that guided you here. It is possible that your Mannfred is nearby, but our blindness spreads over a dozen cities, and many thousands of acres of forest, mountain and plain.’
‘Sigmar has never yet led me astray,’ said Ramus, stiffly. There had been as many Stormhost forgings as there were varieties of men, Ramus knew, but he could not entirely dismiss the indulgence that Sigmar was surely testing him in some way, by sending him to these Astral Templars. ‘Perhaps the ogors are involved? I can... sense... something evil behind them. It seems as though they have had you besieged for some time.’
‘They will fail,’ said Hamilcar dismissively. ‘Hamilcar’s arm never tires.’
‘I do not need your protection, Lord-Castellant. From truth least of all.’
Hamilcar grunted, stepping aside as equerries with stiff brushes, pails and what must have been grooming knives moved in to tend to his hounds.
‘Another few months and we would have been secure enough here to scour the brutes from their land ourselves. But then the darkness came. Rumours of dead men crossing the Junkar Mountains. Orruks on the plains, bigger than any yet seen. Something’s stirred them up, and ogor tribes have been heading this way for weeks. Any fewer of them and they might have passed right beneath us, but the forest floor is dark as all death.’ He was silent for a moment, scratching his bearded chin. ‘There’s nothing to eat down there, so while we’re still here they won’t stop coming.’
The leopard-faced Protector passed his cup to the leader of the final group of auxiliaries. She practically snatched it from him, spilling some and spattering his gauntlets with what looked like blood.
‘What is in the cup?’ asked Ramus.
‘Sap from younger branches, mixed with a little blood from the birds and animals the auxiliaries catch,’ Vandalus told him.
