Champion of the Gods

Chapter eight

The clanrat ran at me with a squeal, spear lowered, like a Freeguilder recruit on the training fields determined to murder a straw dummy. I disarmed him with a turn of my wrist, then riposted with an open hand that broke his neck and flung him ten feet back down the passage. He probably would have gone at least ten feet more had his body not been rising at the same time and struck the tunnel’s low ceiling.

Barrach looked duly impressed.

‘Which way?’ he said

A thoughtful warrior would have been made cautious by his defeat at Kurzog’s Hill, but I was not that warrior.

‘Just follow me,’ I said, already striking off down the tunnel and giving the spear I’d plucked out of the clanrat’s paws a practice twirl. Or as much of a twirl as was possible given the height of the ceiling and width of the passage anyway, which looked more like a knock-off duardin time piece trying to chime the hour. But I was in buoyant mood. There was an enemy in front of me, an adoring warrior behind me, and a weapon in my hand. It’s safe to say that I was firmly back in my element.

‘Ham-il-car! Ham-il-car!’

It’s possible that I got just a little overexcited.

I smashed into the mass of skaven coming at me with a roar.

I say ‘coming at me’ quite loosely of course, as I doubt whether they had any idea who I was or even that I was there at all. They were just scrabbling down the wrong tunnel at the wrong time, with far too many furry bodies behind them to turn away now. They squealed shrilly as I punched, kicked, head-butted, grabbed, twisted, gouged and even, when space allowed, stabbed my way through. I’d like to pretend that there was some skill to any of it, but to be honest I’ve waded through blizzards with the exact same waving routines of my arms and legs as I performed through that deluge of skaven warriors. Brute strength was my weapon, brute confidence my armour, and invulnerable as that ordinarily proved to be I still managed to suffer my share of scrapes before the flow slackened off enough for me to push into a more-or-less empty tunnel.

I looked around, straining my eyes in the dark. The alarm must have passed far enough back for the skaven to dart down side tunnels or to start circumventing the dungeon passages altogether. I sniffed at the sour tang that had impregnated the air.

‘The fear scent,’ said Barrach.

I crafted a grin that could have outshone the night sky of Azyr. ‘I just call it the skaven scent.’

‘You’re bleeding.’ Barrach gestured to the angry lattice of scratch and bite marks that had ruined my gambeson.

After several weeks of captivity, it was as closely bonded to my body as any artifice of the Six Smiths was to my soul, believe you me.

‘They’ve barely even broken the skin,’ I said.

‘At least let me take the front.’

I was tempted. It would take time for the skaven to muster sufficient courage – or for the fear scent to tickle the right whiskers – for any of the lair’s real warriors to start considering an escaped Stormcast Eternal their problem. I expected the reprieve to be brief even so, and the thought of Malikcek, or even Ikrit himself, being roused to my recapture made my skin come out in sweats. I ground my teeth and looked at the ceiling, heavenward, furious with myself for my body’s fear.

Misreading the expression entirely, Barrach scowled.

‘I’m still a Champion of the Wild Harvest. I can fight for my own freedom.’

‘I know you can.’ I shrugged, and tried to smile to make light of it. ‘And you will.’ I pointed back down the passage. ‘Don’t think that the skaven will only come at us from the front.’

Barrach clenched his fists in frustration. ‘Alright. What’s your escape plan?’

I had a plan, but whether it could be called an ‘escape’ plan largely depended on your definition of ‘escape,’ and mine was considerably broader than I expected Barrach’s to be.

‘Just stay close. Watch my back, and follow me.’

Holding my spear short, just below the blade, I hunched low and crabbed forwards at about as close to full-tilt as I could achieve. I mentally clocked the landmarks that Milk Scar’s daily traverses of the lair had familiarised me with as I hurried past them. The side tunnel from which came the waft of cooked meat. The clamour of a flesh market echoing through the ceiling. A succession of urine-stained scratch posts pointing this way and that. Some I ignored, some I followed. I couldn’t read the scratch-writing, obviously, and I suspected that half of the information was conveyed by scent anyway, but even I couldn’t slavishly observe the same route every day for a month and not have something of it sink in.

On the wobbly wood-planked causeway spanning Ikrit’s infernal hell-foundries, we met the first real resistance to our escape.

The rope bridge was barely wide enough for two of the bronze-armoured skaven warriors to cross safely. Or for three to cross unsafely, and so naturally that’s exactly how the skaven tried to do it. I bellowed a challenge across the chasm as they clanked towards me.

They moved in lockstep, their armour plated with dirt-caked cogwheels that ticked like the gears of a music box as they walked. Sigmar, but I hate these things. It was as though I was facing a single animate thing of brass and steel that had grown and absorbed these living rats rather than individual skaven warriors in armour of their own design. They squeaked and chittered like any rodent though, even as they lowered their wire-pronged glaive-like devices as one. A weirdly greenish energy rinsed the weapons’ copper hafts, causing the wires to stiffen and the blades to incandesce.

I bellowed loudly as I ran to meet them.

‘I fought in the purges of Azyr, and in the first battles of the Realmgate Wars. I have tasted the blood of Mortarchs and shed the souls of lords of Chaos. Run away, rats. You barely qualify as sport to me.’

I was taking a lot on faith that Ikrit wanted me back in my cell alive. More than he wanted a few hundred of his warriors, anyway.

Let this be a lesson to you about relying overmuch on faith.

The warrior in the middle of the front rank issued an angry squeal as he dragged his glaive out of position and jabbed it towards me. A bolt of dirty lightning blasted from it, passing nearer to my shoulder than my favourite chamber serf would dare scrub with a sponge, leaving blistered skin that crawled with residual warp power. I made a fist against the pain and roared as I ducked into the crackling thicket of humming blades.

‘I’m Hamilcar Bear-Eater. I am the storm!’

And in the most precarious position possible, where the mid-section of the bridge swayed with every crude gesture and mistimed breath, the shock-vermin and I came together.

My spear pierced the rat I had panicked through the chest and exploded from his back, into the throat of the warrior directly behind him. I made to tear the weapon free, but over the last hundred years or so I’d grown accustomed to handling the finest weaponry that a semi-divine Smith could craft, and neglected the fact that I was working with something I’d filched from a skaven corpse. The bottom of it snapped away in my hand, leaving me facing a hundred shock-vermin with a mouldy stick. I stove in a warrior’s helmet with said stick, splintering it completely and robbing me even of that, before wading in with my fists. The bridge bucked beneath us like a wild Dracoth, dislodging about a score of the skaven here and there before the survivors had the chance to huddle into the middle and hang on.

I pumped my fists in the air, wobbling the bridge gratuitously with my feet and laughing at the skaven’s panicked squeals.

‘Ha!’

I struck one cowering warrior an uppercut that lifted him from the uneven slats, arcing salmon-like over the rail before disappearing into the emerald miasma of smog and despair beneath us without so much as a squeak. Another squealed shrilly, the cogwheels on his armour whirring as if it was the armour and not him that sent his storm-glaive lashing for my foot. By this point, they had probably taken the view that they could lop off a limb or two without upsetting Ikrit too fatally. I drew my foot back sharply and the warp-blade obliterated the slat it had been standing on. A blast of warp-lightning shredded the boards to either side, then a singed rope snapped and we all lurched to one side.

I flung my arms around the guide line on the opposite side, but the skaven are a nimble lot and now that they’d already lost those slow or stupid enough to be standing on the outside edge, no more were lost to the drop. A chitter of consternation arose from within their ranks, culminating in some minor pushing and shoving until someone finally impaled the bright spark in front of me through the back. Green lightning ripped through the shock-vermin’s armour, melting the gears, and he clattered to the bridge under a cloud of smoke.

‘Fool-fool.’ The skaven shoved him unceremoniously over the edge and then we all went at it again.

‘Behind us,’ Barrach yelled.

I turned to see more skaven massing on the other side of the cavern. Not the bronze-armoured elites that had mustered to bar our passage, but clanrats, stepping unenthusiastically onto the swaying bridge, goaded on by the snarls and threats of their clawleaders. One spear-armed warrior appeared to panic as soon as he set paws on the bridge and tried to fight his way back onto the stone berm. A black-furred skaven with a scar criss-crossing his jaw shoved him off. The clanrat wailed until he struck a chimney stack with a hollow clang. The clawleader waved another dozen clanrats onto the bridge in his place.

I knew that I could fight those sorts of numbers all day, but I realised that I had already ridden my luck about as far as I could expect it to carry me. Even coming on one or two at a time, that many clanrats would eventually overwhelm Barrach, and I wouldn’t be having nearly so easy a time once I was being attacked from both sides.

And I wasn’t forgetting that this was a Clans Skyre lair. Surely I could only run amok for so long before someone thought to bring out a jezzail.

I took a fistful of the bridge’s load-bearing cables in each hand and flexed my biceps, drawing the cables in towards me until we both started to colour. The shock-vermin squealed in alarm as the cables whined.

‘No-no!’

I grinned. ‘Yes, yes.’

The shock-vermin were already starting to scamper back the way they’d come when Barrach made a noise as though he were passing a stone. Curiosity got the better of me. I glanced over my shoulder to see the human warrior’s skin coming out in scales that thickened as I watched into hard plates of bark, fingernails lengthening into claws. By the time he emitted a woody growl and straightened up again, he looked more like something crossed between a sylvaneth and a bonesplitter orruk than a man.

I let go of the ropes.

‘How long have you been sitting on that?’

His mouth creaked as the rigid parts forced a grin. ‘I told you I was Champion of the Wild Harvest, a warrior of the Gorwood Gorkai. Didn’t I?’

‘Impressive.’

‘Now can I take the front?’

‘Don’t let me stand in your way.’

Grabbing Barrach by the barky protrusions of his chest I physically lifted him up and swung him around me, switching our positions. He burst towards the still-wavering shock-vermin like water from a crumbling dam, and would have taken me right along with him if I hadn’t had the wherewithal to let go. Wooden fists clubbed bronze armour to bent gears and bits of spring. Iron hard plates of bark turned aside storm-glaives and claws. Six ranks had been bulldozed before the rest simply squealed surrender and fled. The clanrats on what was now my side looked far less confident about facing me than they had been ten seconds ago about facing Barrach. Having just watched him work, they were giving me far too much credit.

Not that I’ve ever let that stop me before.

‘Hamilcaaaar!’

Clenching my fists, I shook them above my head, bellowing like a gargant with a hangover, until the clanrats shrieked and broke, scarper­ing for the safety of the tunnels in short order.

‘Remember the name!’

I turned around to find Barrach’s wooden armour already sinking back into his green skin. His muscular form seemed much diminished now that the fury of his goddess, dead or otherwise, had ebbed.

‘The Maiden is flood and rainstorm, forest fire and predator’s teeth,’ Barrach breathed, sinking to one knee and wheezing. ‘Destructive, but passing.’

‘Can you call on her again? I have a feeling we’ll need her.’

‘For a shorter time, maybe. I…’ He shook his head. His green skin was paler than it had been, his expression drawn, as though the Maiden’s gifts had come from within rather than some divinity without. ‘I just need to catch my breath.’

‘I’ll take the lead for now then, if it’s all the same with you.’

I counted my steps as my twice-daily commutes with Milk Scar had conditioned me to count them, albeit more quickly as I was running this time and no longer in chains. We hadn’t gone far when the squeak and chitter of pursuing clanrats gave way to bovine grunts and ursine barks. The odour changed too, becoming less musty and acidic and more of a pungent, physical presence alongside us in the tunnel.

‘What in spring, summer and winter is that?’ Barrach hissed, covering his nose.

‘Gorwood beastmen.’ Kurzog must have set up home in this part of the lair only after my capture, thus coinciding with the end of Barrach’s own daily visits to Ikrit’s burrows. ‘Think of it as guest quarters.’

‘Is this part of your plan?’

I nodded. ‘Think about it. The skaven would never let an ally too deep into their lair, and for practical reasons alone they would have to be kept near the surface. Have you ever tried getting a beastman herd underground?’ I adopted a passable impersonation of someone who had once done just that. Barrach shook his head. ‘We have to be somewhere close to an exit,’ I concluded.

‘You think.’

I tapped my heart. ‘In here, remember.’

Barrach snorted. ‘I remember. So all we need to do now is fight our way through a beast herd.’

‘Do not fear,’ I grinned, already striding out of the tunnel and into the main chamber. ‘Hamilcar Bear-Eater will go first.’

Various ideas spilled through my mind as I went. From creeping through the beast camp yurt to yurt, to crafting a distraction of some kind and then skirting around the walls for an exit, but the key to looking like a leader is to think quickly and act decisively. The trick to accomplishing the former is almost always to make the latter as straightforward as possible. So without actually thinking all that hard about it at all I stepped into the wavering light of the Blind Herd’s dung fires, cupped my hands around my mouth, and took a deep breath.

‘Brayseer Kurzog! Did you really think that a few thousand skaven could keep the Bear-Eater from you?’

Barrach hissed, and shrank back into the deeper shadows of the tunnel mouth. ‘That’s your plan?’

‘Kurzog is a cunning animal,’ I laughed. ‘But he fears me like mortal men fear death itself. He will want me and me alone. Stay back. And while his eye is on me you can make your escape.’

‘What about you?’

‘Fear not. The chain has not been forged that can leash Hamilcar Bear-Eater.’

Further conversation was immediately curtailed as the yurt beside me was ripped down and a bull-headed bestigor stamped through, swinging a flail. I ducked back, the ridiculously heavy weapon tearing open the rock at my feet. I countered with a sharp blow to the ribs and heard bones crack. The bestigor slobbered over me, bleating with pain, and struck out with a forearm. I blocked it on the muscle of mine, then grabbed the beastman literally by the horn. It snorted and huffed and wrenched its neck muscles, but was otherwise helpless as I led it, struggling, like a show pony around a circle and then let it go. I jumped well clear as it swept its horns across my belly with a roar, inadvertently hooking the spear with which a surprised (and now upside down) ungor had been about to stab me, and then disappeared under the flailing hooves of the rest of the beast herd. One enraged gor, his antlers partially entangled with the leather strapping of another, strained for a long-handled battle-axe. I kicked his ungulate fingers away from the haft and picked up the weapon for myself.

‘Not exactly the work of the Six Smiths, but when in Blight City…’

I looked around for Barrach, but couldn’t see him. I grinned tightly, assuming he was halfway to fresh air by now, and worked the battle-axe through a few trial routines. ‘Just you and me then, Kurzog. Honestly, I’m hurt more than anything that you’d just give me up to the skaven like that. After all we’ve b–’

A force simultaneously boiling and freezing struck me in the back.

It threw me onto my face, and drove me over the ground until the skin had been grated from one side of my face and I lay inches from a dung fire.

Brayseer Kurzog stamped about behind me like a spiderfang shaman on a mushroom trip, long jigging chains of weird tattoos scrolling around the corded muscles of his arms. I had apparently caught him unprepared as he was garbed only in a scratty loincloth and a charm necklace, his nine-pointed goatee ritually braided as if for sleep. He still wielded his dogwood staff, however. It droned hoarsely as he spun it in his hands, still prancing, the tretchlet-like familiar railing and cursing at me from his shoulder.

With an ululating bleat, the brayseer lunged for me.

I rolled clear and the staff hit the stone where I’d fallen, annihilating a crater out of it the size of me and blowing out the dung fire. Waves of change shook the ground, staggering me as I scrambled to my feet and lifted my beastman axe to meet the brayseer’s backswing.

In any honest contest between battle-axe and quarterstaff, you would expect only one outcome, but I’d call Kurzog a thousand different names before I reached for ‘honest’. His staff’s true edge seemed to be half a hair’s breadth beyond the outline of the rune-carved wood, a layer of Chaotic force that was harder than sigmarite and hit like a thunderbolt crossbow. I wasn’t at my strongest, and I knew that he knew it.

It was the only reason he dared to face me one on one. Of that I have no doubt.

‘After all these years,’ I breathed, struggling to match the bray­seer’s rabid pace. ‘This is the first time we’ve actually fought. I doubt even you could have predicted that it would go like this. In a skaven lair. In our underwear.’

‘Be silent!’

The brayseer beat aside a probe across the belly, then lowered his head, dislocating his hircine jaw, and brayed. A swarm of blue and pink flies poured out of his mouth and swept towards me, slamming into me like the palm of a glittering hand and hurling me clear across the cavern. Kurzog disappeared into the distance, the flies rustling over me, their wings buzzing, until I hit the hide wall of a yurt – which presumably smelled bad enough to make banishment back to the Realms of Chaos seem preferable, for the swarm didn’t follow me in.

I came up flailing, half buried in animal skins and missing my axe. I kicked the last flap of skin off my ankle and swatted at an incandescent blue fly that was still buzzing about my face. Kurzog came towards me with a breathy, barking laugh and my flapping hand transformed effortlessly into a rude gesture I had learned from the Bull Tide on the Amber Steppes.

The daemonic familiar squirreled viciously in Kurzog’s ear, and the brayseer took his staff across both hands like a crossbow and pointed it at me. ‘No, Oex’Xathane.’ He lowered the dogwood, apparently against his own arms’ better judgement. ‘Ikrit wants him warm. Until he can keep weapons from going back to Sigmar, at least.’

The familiar – Oex’Xathane, I presumed – practically bent Kurzog’s ear off to argue, but the brayseer shook his head, dislodging the winged creature to vent from a position a few inches above his shoulder. Apparently Ikrit’s interest in my wellbeing was not widely shared, which I wish I could say I found hurtful, but when you find yourself on the same side of the argument as a lesser daemon of Tzeentch you know you’re into some real uncharted wilderness.

‘I take it your true master has no great love for Ikrit,’ I said.

‘Kurzog got one master.’ The brayseer thumped his thickly matted chest. ‘Kurzog.’ He brought up his staff again and took a step towards me.

‘What does the warlock want from me? Tell me that, at least.’

The frenzy faded from the brayseer’s eyes. He passed his staff over to his left hand and planted it on the ground in a twinkling of braided beard-chimes. ‘You see, Bear-Eater. You see. After I give him you a second time, maybe Ikrit let Kurzog see it too. Kurzog like that. See you beg, maybe, before he break you.’ He swatted at the infuriated tretchlet with the head of his staff and brayed for his gors. ‘Take him. Do not br–’

A fist sheathed in hardened bark exploded from the brayseer’s chest.

‘–eak.’

Kurzog’s eyes misted over, his last breath relaxing out of his lungs as Barrach rotated his wrist – which was entirely unnecessary, but credit where credit’s due – and dragged his forearm out of the brayseer’s chest. He toppled over. Oex’Xathane looked pleased as the tretchlet thing dissolved into coloured motes and faded into the aether.

‘I told you to leave!’ I snapped.

Despite the wrathful demeanour I’ve cultivated over a century and a bit, I’m not nearly so easy to anger as you might think. Nothing endears a soldier like the belief that you are at least as bloodthirsty a maniac as the man in the other tent. On this occasion though, it was entirely genuine.

‘I’m not letting them take you again for my sake,’ said Barrach.

‘I had him.’

‘I saw. Come on, I can hold the Destroyer aspect for a little longer. With their leader dead we can fight our way out together.’

I had to agree that there was some sense to that argument, and was about to say as much when Barrach suddenly convulsed. At first I thought he was just fighting to hold onto his war form or had sneezed or something, but then I noticed the edged sliver of darkness propped against his throat. A pair of arrow-slit red eyes hovered above his shoulder, a dark void of a muzzle pressed to the other side of his face.

‘Surrender,’ said Malikcek, his voice like a whisper from Ulgu. ‘Now, or I kill-kill this one.’

‘Get out,’ said Barrach, struggling. But I’d seen Broudiccan held firm in that grip and knew that the Gorkai wasn’t going anywhere. ‘Kill him and run.’

This was grossly over-estimating my abilities at this point. I hold myself at least partially responsible, but the mortals I have dealt with have always had that tendency.

‘Always they squeak-say that,’ whispered Malikcek. ‘Warriors. Heroes. This thing they know-call courage. Lies. I smell his fear scent. I hear-feel his heart beat against my paw. He wants you to surrender.’

I met Barrach’s eyes and knew that what the assassin said was true.

‘Try me, Malikcek,’ I said, confident I could call the shadow’s bluff. ‘Ikrit wants him alive just as much as he does me.’

The shadow dipped its muzzle. ‘It is true. Ikrit wants the Gorkai alive.’ An almost insignificant twist of the wrist and Malikcek carved a thin slice across Barrach’s throat. He snickered cruelly as he let the human go. ‘But not so much-much as he wants you.’

The bark shrivelled from Barrach’s skin as his war form abandoned him, crawling for me on hands and knees before his elbows gave. He curled up onto his side, blood as red as yours or mine welling up from the hands he had clamped to his throat. The poison on the assassin’s blade was already causing his muscles to tighten. Fingers became claws as if, in desperation, he thought he might stem the bleeding by wringing his own neck. His arms bent and contorted. Joints reversed with sickening snaps of broken bone. His head ratcheted back, exposing his gashed throat to me for one last cruel spurt before I heard his spine break.

Malikcek floated over him.

I’d seen the assassin appear and disappear out of thin air, and turn aethereal at will, but seeing him simply move was somehow even more disturbing. He oozed through the air like a primordial slime, solidifying where he wanted to be with a hiss of amusement and a snicker of blades.

Even as I stand before you now, at my very best, telling this tale in my thrice-blessed, I’m not certain that I could actually best this creature. Then, I’d probably have stood a better chance of appealing to his better nature than I would fighting him.

‘What are you?’ I said.

He didn’t answer me, as I suspected he wouldn’t, but I had to ask.

‘Ikrit has been waiting. Ikrit hates waiting.’ I sensed something that was almost akin to envy in his voice as he went on. ‘This will all be over for you soon.’