Hammerhal & Other Stories

by Various

  The sepulchral echoes that rang back from the storm brought an animal growl from Vandalus’ mask. He raised his lantern and readied his starblade, warily. ‘I still don’t like this, brother.’

  Ramus ignored him. He did not like it either, but Sigmar demanded much of those to whom much was given, and the ogor was what Ramus had been given. If he was to recapture Mannfred, and in so doing atone for the failure of his embassy to the Great Necromancer and the loss of the Hallowed Knights’ Lord-Celestant, then he could ill afford to dismiss such gifts from his enemies.

  ‘Awake, Skraggtuff. It is I, Ramus, your brother in vengeance.’

  Frost rimed the weathered metal of Ramus’ gauntlet where it covered the skull’s mouth. A spark of blueish light took up deep within the dead thing’s eyes.

  ‘Ungh. You.’ A pause. They were creeping in more often, growing longer. ‘Are we there yet?’

  ‘You tell me.’

  ‘He’s near. I can smell him. Can’t you?’

  Ramus pulled his hand away. He felt the tenuous bridge between them snap and the light guttered and died. The frost on his palm needled to nothing, scoured to bare metal by the wind.

  ‘What did it say?’ Vandalus shouted after a moment.

  ‘He is near.’

  ‘That still leaves the problem of the Ironjawz.’

  To the left and right, haggard-looking Hallowed Knights marched, draped in dust cloaks so heavy that only the meanest sliver of gold or silver glinted through the storm. Nodding in thought, Ramus forced himself on into the wind.

  Were the Ironjawz a problem? Or were they just another gift from his enemies?

  ‘Sigmar has seen us this far, my friend. Have faith that he will not let us stray now.’

  The broad axe hit Ramus’ shield with the weight of a felled tree. It scratched, snarled, squealed for purchase, but the shield held firm. Sigmarite was more miracle than metal, able to take many colours and forms, and this part of his mortis armour was far tougher than the mirrored silver it appeared to be. All that force had to go somewhere though, and if the shield did not yield, then it would go through Ramus.

  He grunted with effort and the throbbing pain. His arm yielded, and the back of his shield struck his skull helm, twisted his face in, and drove his shoulder remorselessly down towards his bent knees. Metal scraped over metal. The crushing weight lifted, dragged back for a final, cleaving blow. Ramus imagined it scuffing along the dusty ground and looping up, up, glinting at arm’s length above his assailant’s monstrous head. The moment.

  With a roar, he uncoiled and slammed his shield through the brute’s unguarded jaw.

  The big orruk grunted. It was an ugly mound of muscle, sinew and scar tissue encased in armour plates, impractically thick. Sand-worn spikes thrust out from shoulders, forearms and thighs. Another set curved up from the collar, so long they almost doubled as a visor and forced the orruk to squint between the notched edges. There were no conventional ‘joints’ or obvious points of weakness. There were no buckles or straps. Rather, the plates had been bent into one another as if by hand.

  It swayed back maybe half a foot, braced its back leg, then drove a knee that sliced the lower rim of Ramus’ shield into his groin and knocked the Lord-Relictor’s legs from under him.

  Not the reaction he had been hoping for.

  ‘Tough, these Ironjawz,’ he muttered as he rolled sideways.

  He caught a glimpse of silver and blue where a Retributor and something hunched and dusty tussled in the wind, and then the orruk stomped down a boot.

  Ramus came up onto his haunches, grey sand spraying from his hammer as he smashed aside the orruk’s axe. This was not a duel. Neither axe nor hammer was a weapon of refinement. Each was designed for smashing and killing, as the orruks and Sigmar’s Stormcast Eternals had themselves been so designed.

  A lot of blood had been shed since Ramus had last crossed an opponent he could not overpower with the simple virtues of smashing and killing.

  They crossed hafts and strained, beast versus divine. The orruk’s nose flapped wetly where Ramus’ shield had broken it, green-black blood and snot bubbling out with every breath, but it concerned the brute not at all. Ramus felt the desert dust sink around his boots. His arm began to burn with the effort.

  ‘We are not… your… enemy!’

  Putting all his remaining strength into it, Ramus levered his haft up, turned the locked weapons like two halves of a wheel and forced the orruk to be turned with it or let go. It chose wrong. Ramus guessed right.

  ‘Hah!’

  The orruk folded after its weapon, its nose cracking against the headbutt coming the other way. Ramus heard the crunch and splatter of a half job being messily finished. The orruk bent across him, off balance, axe blade in the dust. Ramus rammed his shoulder into its ribs, this time sending it stumbling away, then lashed his shield back across its jaw with a sound like an iron pot being smashed through a wall.

  The blow actually straightened the orruk up. Its head snapped almost fully around, but it did not seem to feel a bit of it below the neck. It stuck out an arm and grabbed his throat.

  Ramus felt his feet kick away from the ground as the Ironjaw hauled him to the level of its spiked grille. It glared at him with scrunched up red eyes. The visible bit of its dark face, wedged in tight, was scabbed with tough stubble. Its breath stank of leaf mulch and mushrooms.

  Metal squealed as the Ironjaw tightened its grip, seeking to shape Ramus’ armour with its bare hands as it had presumably shaped its own. Like his shield, the armour held. It would take more even than the grip of an Ironjaw to make sigmarite bend. It still felt as though his eyeballs were going to burst out of his face.

  He smashed his hammer into the orruk’s grille, but could not deliver force enough to break it. At the same time he drove his boot into its gut, but could not hit anything more vulnerable than muscle and iron. He managed to hook a finger up the orruk’s nose and dragged it up towards him. The creature twisted irritably and snapped at his hand, spraying his faceplate with spittle.

  His vision began to blur. Bent, disjointed figures stumbled through the beating dust into his peripheral view and then faded to black. His ears, however, seemed to grow keener to compensate. The rasp of sand on dead throats, the pop of old joints.

  ‘Not… your… enemy.’

  There was a hiss, a string of metallic thunks and a row of foot-long Sigmarite-tipped bolts stitched up the Ironjaw’s side. It grunted, in surprise rather than pain, and glanced down at the striking line of starmetal piercings running from hip to armpit. Ramus swung his boot up onto the lowest bolt. The sigmarite shaft held true, blessed be, his kick twisting the bolt sharply and driving it deeper into the orruk’s guts.

  And that, by almighty Sigmar, it felt.

  Ramus had his feet on the ground and dry, dusty air in his lungs before the orruk had thought to let rip a howl. Letting his shield hang from the wrist strap, he took his hammer two-handed like a mallet and cracked it across the side of the Ironjaw’s head. Moving around behind it, Ramus hammered his weapon into its back and shoved it down onto its face. It struggled to push itself up only for its arms to sink into the sand and Ramus’ boot to step on the back of its neck.

  He ground in his heel until its spine finally snapped. The Ironjaw went limp, and Ramus made sure with a last hammer blow that cratered the back of its head and stippled his black greaves with gore.

  ‘Tough, these Ironjawz.’ He glanced sideways and nodded. The Judicator lowered his boltstorm crossbow, his dusty armour silver and blue. ‘My thanks, Sagittus.’

  The Judicator-Prime gave a quick nod, redressed his aim to a point just above Ramus’ shoulder and fired again. Bolts fizzed past, and punched into the shambling corpses until there was no longer enough meat left on them to stand.

  ‘Only the faithful, Lord-Relictor.’

  ‘Only the fait
hful.’

  With another tilt of the helm, the Judicator turned back to the fight.

  Ramus did the same. He spotted his reliquary where he had left it, plunged into the shifting bone sands, both a battle standard and a waypoint should any of his knights become lost in the swirl. A fuzz of Azyric power spread into the grey around it, illuminating the morbid imagery of faith, death and the storm depicted thereon, in fits and snatches. Big, hulking shadows brawled around it, tusks, blades and iron plates glinting blue, on the ground and in the sky above.

  As Vandalus had predicted, the dust had allowed the Stormcasts to walk right into the Ironjawz and given neither side warning. Finding the orruks themselves beset was something neither had anticipated. Mannfred had been wily enough to avoid an encounter with the warclans of the Great Red thus far.

  If Ramus had expected the orruks to be grateful for his aid – and in that initial flush of self-righteous glory in which he had almost felt his breath upon the vampire’s back, he had expected it – then he should have expected too his disappointment.

  It was impossible at a glance to tell who had the edge. Sigmar’s Stormhosts excelled in close combat, as they had been forged to excel in all things, but the Ironjawz took a savage delight in it, as if they had been purposefully bred to go toe to toe with the mightiest warriors in the realms, and some of the largest carried twice the weight in muscle and half again the breadth.

  Ramus stowed his shield and ran for his reliquary. He snatched it up, feet sliding in the shifting dust before he regained his footing, boot wedged under a sand pile of long, partially buried bones.

  ‘You!’ came the grunted, straightforwards challenge, from a veritable behemoth of armour plate mounted on a seething, boar-like beast veering from the churn of bodies. ‘You’re mine! The Great Red’s gonna be the first over the Bone Sea, and I’ll be there with ’im.’

  Its iron frame was so massive that it was almost as thick across the shoulders as it was tall. Each pauldron looked to have been remade from a complete anvil, and its elbows struck out like the two points of an upended diamond. Its mount was itself dressed in knotted sheets of mail that abraded its grizzled fur with every step and no doubt accounted for a measure of its wild-eyed ill temper.

  The beast swept itself a path through the dust with long, saw-edged tusks, snorted, and thundered into a charge.

  Ramus drew back his reliquary, lowered it as though it were a spear and the orruk a charging juggernaut. He growled the opening bars of a prayer. Lightning played around the metal haft. He felt a static tickle under his gauntleted fingers.

  Before he could unleash it, the orruk was gone.

  There was a creak, then a groan, as the Ironjaw’s hands flapped up despairingly, and it sank rapidly into the ground. Ramus backed up quickly, his own feet sinking into the sudden flow of dust.

  ‘Grindworm!’ he roared, biceps bulging as he pushed back with his staff against the swelling current. He sought out Sagittus and his other Primes, couldn’t see them in the confusion, but waved his arm back anyway. ‘Stay clear!’

  The ground flexed like a muscle and an Astral Templar Liberator disappeared in a plume of dust. There was a trembling deep underfoot. Stratified layers shuffled and restacked, the subterranean flows of sand shifting to accommodate the approach of some kraken of the desert sands, and then a terrific explosion carried the lot of it sky high, bones and debris blasted like grapeshot around the bolt of lightning that jagged up in search of the sky.

  Ramus swore as his body plunged a foot deeper into the sand. Knuckles and teeth and weathered nubs of bone he could not identify swirled around him like the surface manifestation of a developing whirlpool. Everywhere, fissures opened to drink in the desert dust and the shambling undead, while Stormcasts and Ironjawz wrestled for the skeletal islands the retreating sands laid bare, carcasses so vast that entire armies could have fought over them unnoticed.

  And then the Ironjaw leader and his boar mount reappeared.

  Thrashing about under six feet of dust, both orruk and beast were trapped in a hellish, faceless orifice large enough to swallow both whole with room to spare. Dust spouted around the struggling orruk and a segmented body that seemed to be made wholly of sand reared up out of the desert floor.

  Ramus scowled, trying to draw further away from the rising worm, but the suction on his legs was tremendous.

  He did not know whether the creatures were truly living predators or a natural phenomenon of the Sea of Bones. The Astral Templars, however, had dubbed them grindworms, for the screeching, sand-scratching roar they made as they appeared and killed. Their attacks seemed random, drawn by fighting or the movement of large numbers on the surface, but Ramus could not with certainty say that there was not some malign will driving this monster onto him before all others.

  He forced his staff into the sand, not deep enough to arrest his downward slide, but enough to slow it. He clamped his hammer to his belt and took the reliquary in both hands. Overhead, storm clouds boiled through the gravel-white sky. ‘If you hear this, Mannfred, if you see it, then pray tell me how this feels.’

  A bolt of lightning tore through the sandstorm and detonated the grindworm’s emerging head. Clods of sand and tiny pieces of glass rained over the desert. The Ironjaw, torso blackened, legs gone, hit the ground with a muffled clank.

  Ramus gave a roar of defiance as the headless sand-beast thumped to the ground not far from where he was caught. Every muscle heaved in the direction of one last gargantuan pull towards freedom. There was some give. He felt his legs beginning to slide out of the dust, could see the weathered black plate of his thigh. He bared his teeth for the coming effort.

  ‘Can I help you, Ramus?’ Vandalus called down. ‘Or do you mean to climb out yourself for a greater tale?’ The armoured angel beat his wings, dust fizzling and popping as it was blown through his lightning feathers. His attention was down, pointing at Ramus with his sword, clearly blind to the gaunt shape flapping furiously towards him.

  ‘Attend yourself, Azyros.’

  Vandalus turned his head, lifted and unshuttered his lantern in the same moment it must have taken him to recognise the threat, and burned the ghoul from the sky with a searing shaft of celestial light. The ghoul simply evaporated. By the time he had closed his lantern again and looked down, Ramus had dragged his body out and onto more stable ground.

  He looked around. The grindworm was sinking into the desert, the dust it had disturbed beginning to resettle into new formations, burying titanic skeletons greater than dragons and lifting still more from the depths. Already a whole new landscape, utterly alien to what had been before, lay about them. The surviving Ironjawz were withdrawing – and it was a withdrawal – into the storm. The remaining undead were being methodically hacked apart by the Astral Templars and Hallowed Knights. Ramus counted exactly two dozen of the former and about double that of the latter.

  More losses.

  Vandalus touched down on the sand and walked towards him, blade pointed accusingly at Ramus’ hip. ‘I told you that the dead cannot be trusted, brother. That thing you carry led us right into that battle.’

  ‘It took us on Mannfred’s trail, which is all it can be expected to do. The battle is on us.’

  The Knight-Azyros snorted and stowed his weapons. ‘As it should be. And with the Ironjawz occupied with the dead it was a battle we had every chance to avoid. Astral Templars will never grieve over a pointless exercise in killing, but I know you saw it too.’

  ‘I had believed that if the Ironjawz could see us fight alongside them then they might be persuaded to aid us in our quest. The Sea of Bones is vast. Even I am not so proud as to deny that we could use their aid if we are to search it fully.’

  ‘What you could use, brother, is ten full Stormhosts scouring this wasteland west to east, and driving your vampire into the desert sun. We should focus our energies on seeking out the Celestial Re
almgate.’

  ‘No!’ Ramus snapped, startling himself with his vehemence. ‘No,’ he growled, more softly, but with teeth still. ‘This path has been set before me by Sigmar himself and I will not veer from it one inch.’

  ‘Peace.’ Vandalus clasped Ramus’ forearm and with the other hand gripped his pauldron plate. Some barbarian embrace from the Azyros’ mortal heritage. ‘My Chamber has enough bad blood with Mannfred to follow you, you know that, but did the black-skinned orruk we captured on the Marrow Delta not tell us it was the Great Red himself who took the realmgate from my brother Lord-Castellant in the first place?’

  ‘A realmgate you cannot now find.’

  Vandalus flung out an arm. ‘Light of Sigmar I may be, but I defy anyone to find their way in a landscape that changes from moment to moment.’

  ‘And was it not also you who once spoke to me of the reasonable­ness of orruks? That all one needs to earn their trust is to win their respect?’

  ‘The orruks I knew,’ Vandalus muttered darkly. ‘These Ironjawz are another breed entirely. I don’t know what you would have to do to earn the respect of such foes.’

  Ramus shook his head, his hand drifting to the skull at his hip, a faint but reassuring whisper occupying the darker corners at the back of his mind that might otherwise provide a purchase for doubt. ‘I am resolved. If the Great Red can be convinced that Mannfred is the threat he surely is, if he can be won around by our strength…’

  He clenched his gauntlet and Vandalus took a step back. The look Ramus felt from behind that gilded, implacable mask was searching. The Knight-Azyros shook his head and raised his hands. ‘As you want it, brother. I had my Prosecutors follow the Ironjawz retreat. I heard one of them speak of a fort not far from here.’

  ‘Then gather the host, Azyros. We march the moment they return.’

  The Ironjawz had erected their fortress on what must have been the only example of static geography for a thousand leagues. It was certainly the first that Ramus had seen since crossing the Junkar Mountains.