Hammerhal & Other Stories

by Various

  The Ironjawz’ clan hall was cold. Air came in through a pair of iron-grilled fireplaces in the long side walls and ruffled the dyed skin hangings. A long feasting table filled most of the floor space, a mishmash of metals so beaten, rumpled and chewed on there was not flat space enough to set a jug.

  Ramus took it all in with a cursory sweep of his gaze. He stood with the open door behind him where it was coldest, dust circling, the big fireplaces either side, the table extending before him to a large, bloody iron throne. A hide banner covered the whole wall behind it, depicting two crudely drawn glyphs on a red background. He knew little of the orrukish languages, less of their written forms, but these he had seen everywhere.

  Great. Red.

  ‘We have searched the compound thoroughly, Lord-Relictor.’ Sagittus stepped in from outside, letting in the dull clangour of pots and pans, strung up wherever they might catch the wind. Mist clung to his grim-faced silver mask. His boltstorm crossbow hung by his side in one heavy gauntlet. ‘It is empty.’

  ‘Very good,’ Ramus murmured. In his mind he pulled those two symbols apart, turned them over, searching for the hidden complexity that was so jarringly absent.

  ‘Lord-Relictor?’

  ‘Look again.’

  ‘My lord, I assure you.’

  Ramus turned his head towards his second, the deep sockets of his skull helm boring in. ‘When I feel assured, I can guarantee that none will know of it before you.’

  The Judicator gave a stiff bow from the neck. ‘Very well, my lord. Once more.’ His boots clicked on the metal floor as he walked back outside.

  Ramus returned to his contemplation of the fluttering banner. Sagittus had not been part of the Warrior Chamber at the Bridge of Seven Sorrows and had not experienced the Reforging. He had not been given the time to reflect on the consequences of that quest’s failure. Tarsus was Sigmar’s and he had been stolen. To Ramus’ exhaustive knowledge of the histories, such a viol­ation had never befallen another Stormhost and the shame of his participation in it seared. And if he should fail to recover the Lord-Celestant now…

  The Hallowed Knights were a company of immortals. There was no precedent for the elevation of one of their number to leader.

  He touched his fingers to Skraggtuff’s skull and closed his eyes, giving himself to the cold. His lips parted in a wisp of vapour. They were numb and pinched.

  ‘Awake, Skraggtuff.’

  ‘Mmmmm,’ came the answering echo, the dull murmur of a dreamer.

  ‘How much ground has Mannfred gained on us? You are connected through the aether, Skraggtuff.’

  ‘Mmmm.’ Ramus felt the impression of a wretched spirit, tossing and turning, eyes flickering between sleep and wakefulness. ‘Not far. Time to sleep maybe. Just for a bit.’

  Ramus withdrew his fingers with a start and opened his eyes, his perceptions suddenly, jarringly normal. He blinked a few times, licked his lips, worked his fingers to restore them to some kind of warmth, and as he did so a door clicked open at the far end of the hall where there had been none. It put a ruck into the banner that had been draped over it and blew dust in underneath. A golden gauntlet felt under the fabric, swept it up and back over the top of the thick metal door. Vandalus peered around, looking slightly lost, then turned to Ramus and pointed to the ceiling.

  ‘I came in from the roof. Don’t be too harsh on Sagittus, it was bolted from this side.’

  ‘Did you–’

  ‘No,’ Vandalus sighed. ‘I did find a grot hiding back here, but I suspect it was his duty to open the door for whoever sat in that throne.’ He pointed to it and gave a dead-eyed smile. ‘Orruk bosses prefer high spots. It shows everyone else how important they are, and lets them see everything that’s theirs.’

  ‘See how far?’

  ‘The dust covers everything. Not far.’

  ‘Show me.’

  White, as deep as the eye could show. The one thing from his experience that Ramus could compare it to was being trapped in mist. It looked like mist, superficially perhaps, but to stand within it was to know what deceptive devils appearances could be. It was bone dry and bitingly cold. The wind hissed. Bone shards tinked against his armour and further out where he could not see, all around, the chitter of bone whispering across bone was constant. If the dead were to converse away from the ears of the living, then Ramus knew by the chill in his soul that this was how it would sound.

  He moved to the spiked, metal rampart, set his gauntlets on the sharpened edge, and peered down. White. All the way. He could not even see the spiral stair any more.

  The wind moaned against his helm’s frozen sides. Sound moved strangely in the Sea of Bones. It hung in the air, making it seem sometimes more like being under water than on a desert. The dull mutterings he heard could have been an army passing under his nose, a lone beast trumpeting a thousand leagues away, or even the tectonic wars of the Junkar, far, far behind them.

  Something on the rampart beside him blew its nose and he turned his scowl upon it. He had reasonably assumed that ‘found a grot’ meant ‘killed a grot’ but now the wretch was looking up at him with wide wet eyes, ears flat back against its head, Ramus had to concede that the mood was not exactly on him either.

  Gorkamorka had once been part of Sigmar’s great pantheon, he reasoned. It was belligerence, rather than fundamental theistic differences, that set the two powers at odds.

  ‘We are looking for the Great Red,’ he said, speaking firmly. ‘Where is he?’

  ‘’s not here,’ the grot squeaked.

  ‘I see that. I asked where he was.’

  ‘Gone.’ The grot swallowed, the big lump in its throat bobbing up and down. ‘Gone to fight at the thunder door.’

  The scrawny greenskin nodded vigorously.

  ‘Why?’ asked Ramus.

  ‘To fight.’

  ‘But why?’

  ‘To be first over the Bone Sea. Think of the fame. Even the old Junkar never did that.’

  Ramus turned to Vandalus, over by the door onto the stairwell.

  ‘The desert nomads that greeted us on our first arrival believed the Sea of Bones went on to the edge of the world. In Cartha’s libraries, we found texts describing distant lands, so far across the lifeless plain that even the Age of Chaos had yet to reach them.’

  Ramus snorted. ‘Stories told to give hope to children.’

  ‘’s true,’ piped the grot. ‘And the Great Red was all about to head off too. Had his boats loaded and everything, before the dead one snuck in and took his thunder gate.’

  Ramus’ jaw clenched. His chest had gone suddenly cold.

  Mannfred.

  ‘He means the Celestial Realmgate,’ said Vandalus, moving across.

  ‘There’s another fort there,’ said the grot quickly, warming to its theme. ‘’s very important. The Great was gonna use it to bring in stuff and store it. ’s a long way over the Bone Sea.’

  ‘Tell me about the dead one,’ Ramus demanded, dropping down beside the grot and eliciting a terrified squawk. ‘Tell me everything you know about Mannfred.’

  ‘Wait,’ said Vandalus, turning to the deep white view and cocking a gold-helmeted ear. ‘Do you hear that?’

  Ramus gave an irritated wave, but as soon as he did it he realised that the distant susurrus had changed. It was no longer so distant, for one. Drums. It was scores and scores of big, deep drums. The cracked chant of guttural voices. The tramp of armoured feet.

  ‘Clear the skies,’ said Vandalus urgently. ‘As you did before.’

  Though he ached body and soul from his efforts in the battle, Ramus raised his reliquary and gave voice to a doleful prayer. The wind picked up and the dust pall began to thin, the sky so cleared blackening and producing a rumble of distant thunder.

  ‘There!’ Vandalus shouted.

  Wearily, Ramus looked in the direct
ion the Knight-Azyros pointed. The stamp and clank of massed ranks rolled in from the desert plain towards the scrap fort. Several score of the damnable warchanters cavorted ahead of armoured columns, each a thousand strong, beating out a marching rhythm that held little in common with their neighbours’ to create a raucous banging. Steaming between the formations, vast ironclad paddleboats, top heavy with crowded siege decks and bristling with artillery, chugged through the sand. Energy coursed through them and occasionally arced off. Ramus could see one of the strange Ironjaw shamans enthroned on the main deck of each monstrous vessel. He could sense their power, swollen to near god-like proportions by the weight and vibrancy of their greenskin kith around them, and somehow understood that these vessels served equally as troop transports, shock weapons, and amplifiers to ward off the grindworms.

  The Great Red had planned his warclan’s migration well.

  Searching the marching files, Ramus saw him at last.

  ‘There he is. The Great Red.’

  A dark shape, a knot of ill-defined aggression, hung over the front ranks, mounted on a lumpen monstrosity of a creature that beat furiously at the surrounding air as though to physically subdue it with its small but muscular wings.

  Ramus was aware of Sagittus shouting from under the iron floor beneath him, Judicators charging for the walls and priming crossbows.

  ‘So many,’ Ramus muttered.

  ‘Too late to worry about that now,’ Vandalus snapped. ‘You wanted to impress the Great Red and I’d wager that’s him right there. Impress him. Be strong, show no fear, and if he doesn’t kill us both then maybe he’ll be intrigued enough to hear your piece.’

  Nodding his understanding, Ramus turned back and channelled his voice into the storm. ‘I am Ramus of the Hallowed Knights, orruk, and I have been waiting for you. Come to me, and let us settle this as equals.’

  He strained to catch the Great Red’s reaction as the wind failed and cloaked the space between them in dust. The last thing Ramus saw was the Ironjaw’s beast pulling ahead of his army and striving for height.

  ‘A maw-krusha,’ said Vandalus. ‘I saw one in the Carthic Oldwoods once. The native ogors used to leave living prey in the forest to keep the monster from their tribes.’

  Ramus caught the grot staring at him in open-mouthed, wide-eyed and flat-eared horror. He grunted and turned to Vandalus. ‘Will he come?’

  ‘He will. No orruk would let a challenge like that go unan–’

  The Azyros looked sharply up. Ramus heard it at the same time. It sounded like–

  ‘Waaaaaagh!’

  Ramus pushed himself back against the spiked battlement as an armour-plated boulder smashed into the centre of the rampart.

  The structure tilted sharply and squealed. Ramus clung grimly onto the rampart spike with one hand, arm hooked behind it and grinding on the metal. He saw the grot tumble past him, smack once against the wall, again on the skeletal structure, coming apart like a ball of yarn and disappearing into the pall.

  Unconcerned by the swaying tower and the alarmed clangour of chimes and bells, the maw-krusha unfolded arms and legs and rose up onto knuckles the size of Ramus’ fists. Forelimbs covered in hard scales, some of them carrying faded red paint, opened out like a pair of shield walls to reveal a head that was almost all mouth. A massive underbite, made even more pronounced by a muzzle of huge prosthetic fangs, chomped up over its small red eyes.

  Stooped under a mass of wargear with ironclad thighs around the monster’s neck and toes scraping the ground, was the largest greenskin Ramus had ever seen.

  He had had cause to say that many times over the past months, but he doubted he would ever have another. The brute was gigantic, clad in thick armour daubed half and half in red paint and black, with massive, clawed gauntlets and spiky boots, dull red with old blood. Only its head was exposed, the black and red pattern reversed with a slash of red paint over its brutalised, dark hide. One eye was nailed shut with an iron plate, a wandering green eye crudely drawn over it. The megaboss grinned down at the Stormcast, a slow, ape-like drawing in of muscles to reveal a mouth full of sharp, oversized metal teeth, bloody where they must have bitten into the roof of its own mouth.

  If Ramus and Vandalus had stood together and been clad in a single piece of armour, they could not have been as large.

  ‘I’m da Great Red,’ the megaboss bellowed, voice so deep it seemed to come up out of the ground. The beast snorted and dragged its knuckles over the floor in an agonising screech. The Ironjaw glared at Ramus with his one eye, then twisted to mark Vandalus with a squeal of metal plates. He turned back to Ramus. ‘Kill my boyz, take my stuff, you fink you’re big enough to take Korruk da Great Red?’ He dropped his heavy jaw and roared with laughter.

  Ramus planted his reliquary into the metal between them. ‘This land has been claimed. From the Celestial Realmgate to the Junkar Mountains and beyond the forests of Cartha, this land is Sigmar’s.’

  At the name ‘Sigmar’ power lashed from his staff and stung the hulking Ironjaw a blow to the shoulder. Korruk jerked back, bellowed in pain and shock, electric spasms forcing out a grunt of annoyance as he involuntarily yanked on the chain attached to his mount’s spiked collar and locked his thighs down on its neck. It choked out a growl and instinctively threw out a battering-ram punch that smashed Ramus in the gut and off his feet.

  His legs flipped over his head. Light to dark. Sky to metal. His face plate smashed the top of the crenel spike, a crack spidering from the left eye socket of his helm. Dark to light, the sky above him. He flung out a hand and caught the spike. His arm snapped taut and jerked him back, slammed his body hard against the fort’s metal wall. Ramus’ feet slid across the wall without getting any kind of purchase.

  ‘Haha!’ roared the Great Red. ‘Maybe you should both have a go. Hah! Take turns, maybe.’

  A flash of light burned like forked lightning through Ramus’ shattered orbit as Vandalus explosively took wing. There was another bark of pain from the Ironjaw, and the clash of blades.

  With a grimace, Ramus tested his bicep against his weight and heaved. He began to lift, bellowed as his shoulder passed his elbow, and then tossed his reliquary back inside and hauled himself after it. He collected his staff and rose, lightning pouring into him until the metal beneath him turned blue.

  Vandalus and the Great Red were fighting high up above the fort’s roof. The Azyros flitted agilely around the Ironjaw’s monstrous axes, leaving a glowing trail where he passed as though it were a net, cleverly lain to trap the brute in his own savagery.

  The megaboss’ metal teeth glinted hungrily, one booming growl rising from his vast jaw without any apparent need for breath. He was a green storm, destruction made manifest, his brute physicality merely the solid housing for a force of nature. His axes flashed down together, forcing Vandalus into a parry that sent the Azyros spinning. The maw-krusha’s claws clenched as though taking the air in its grip and then lunged out. A paw like a gargant’s spiked mace smacked the careening Azyros, and hammered him back down.

  Vandalus hit the roof in a blaze of spinning pinions and rolled until he hit the inside of the parapet. Ramus could hear armoured boots pounding up the staircase below. It would be Cassos.

  ‘Sigmar is the true lord here, beast!’

  Lightning stabbed from Ramus’ staff and coursed through the megaboss and his monster. The Ironjaw sprayed Vandalus in phlegm before he could grind his metal jaws shut. Blood ran down his chin as his enormous body seized. Howling, flapping with erratic fury, the maw-krusha crashed back down. Exhausted, Ramus recalled the flow of current and turned to check on Vandalus.

  The Knight-Azyros stood up, almost fell right back over, but steadied himself with a widened stance and shook out his light wings, creating a dazzling show of might and colour, as if to ward off a rival or a predator. To Ramus’ surprise, Korruk gave a rumbling chuckle. The Ironjaw dismounted
with a gravely structural clang and kicked his war-beast out of the way.

  ‘You fight good for thunder men. Better than the big boss I killed at the thunder door.’

  Vandalus started forwards, only for Ramus to hold him back.

  ‘Take him,’ hissed Skraggtuff, down by his hip. ‘While his guard’s down.’

  Of their own volition, Ramus’ muscles tensed to lift his reliquary, but then he frowned. ‘I did not summon you.’

  ‘He’s too strong. He doesn’t need you. He won’t listen. End him while you have the chance.’

  Ramus lowered his staff. ‘That is Skraggtuff’s voice. But those are not his words.’

  A sepulchral chuckle issued from the skull. Not one, in fact, but two, an eerie echoing effect as though he were being laughed at from both sides. The first was gruff and breathy, recognisably Skraggtuff, while the other was the sound of courteous good humour. Korruk ground his thickly armoured slab of neck around, one eye narrowed in annoyance. It was that, rather than the voices from the other side, that turned Ramus’ insides colder than the desert wind.

  Ramus was the conduit for the divine storm, the beacon for the soul-eternal.

  Only he could speak with the dead.

  ‘Awake, Skraggtuff,’ whined the skull in a wheedling falsetto. The ogor’s voice was gone, replaced entirely by the urbane imposter that Ramus recognised all too well. ‘So tediously stentorian. Where is Mannfred, Skraggtuff? You are connected through the aether, Skraggtuff.’

  Now that it was presented to him, it was clear that the voice had always been there behind the ogor’s words. How had he not heard it before?

  ‘That voice,’ breathed Vandalus.

  ‘The Betrayer.’

  ‘Here, O conduit of the tepid squall, beacon of arrogance eternal. Tell me, are the Stormcast Eternals prone to delusions or is it just you? Imagine, believing that your quaint, half-mastered talents could begin to rival mine.’

  The voice tutted, and Ramus realised that it was no longer coming from the skull. A hazy human figure had appeared, wavering about a foot above the rampart. His black, ridged armour was dented and scratched from countless battles, and the red cloak he wore, though magisterial still, was tattered. The wind blew through him, his long dark hair fluttering in some other breeze. His hair was wilder than Ramus remembered, his teeth longer, his eyes redder. His patrician features were horribly burned. Sigmar’s gaze was not so swiftly healed.