Champion of the Gods

Chapter nine

‘Move-move!’

Starting at the crack of their overseer’s whip, the thirteen-strong team of skavenslaves bent forwards and pushed. The unfortunates had been spread out between the spokes of a giant wheel that was laid flat on the floor of the burrow. Their forepaws were bolted to the spoke in front of them, their ankles locked to the circular rail that ran beneath their footpaws by a loop of chain.

The wheel itself was connected to some hellish contrivance that my captors had enthusiastically described to me as a ‘shaft’. The thing rose through innumerable tiers of false metallic flooring, like a menhir to the black gods of slavish automation and artifice. On each of these levels, more slaves toiled under the supervision of coated and goggled warlock-engineers. They fed stoves and pumped bellows, jumped up and down on see-saw-like assemblages of pulleys. They ran along treadmills, rubbing together giant wool-coated pads, making all of their fur stand on end and sending energy zapping through an array of bristling, copper-clad conductors. As the shaft neared the roof of the chamber it found itself slaved to a further array of belts and chains and a bewildering set-up of smaller wheels.

I didn’t get to see too much of it, fortunately, pinned as I was like the shiny bit on a Lord-Veritant’s staff at the very pinnacle of the skaven contraption.

My platform rose in a stepwise series of monumental clunks, each one apparently an even more goliath effort than the last. My arms and legs had been spread about as far apart as arms and legs could be made to go without breaking something, wrist bound to wrist and ankle to ankle by heavy chains beneath the platform. Even my gambeson, or what was left of it after my attempted escape, had been ripped off me, leaving my tattooed chest bare and goose bumping in the cold.

‘Stop-stop!’

Whips cracked again, echoing up through the tiers of scaffolding, and with a final weary clunk my platform sank back into its final stage and stopped.

I tugged on my arm restraints, but came closer to dislocating my shoulder than achieving my freedom. I let out the breath that I’d been holding onto throughout my ascent and tried to make my muscles relax. I looked up.

The chamber’s ceiling was an imperfect, slightly knobbled dome, still about a hundred feet above me and beyond even the most teeteringly high bits of the scaffold. The fact that skaven will flee in terror from any Freeguilder they don’t outnumber six to one, but will happily scamper along a length of mouldy wood a thousand feet off the ground never ceases to astonish me. For a race that is practically defined by its cowardice, they have a peculiar blind spot in matters of common sense and personal safety.

The roof itself was dark and metallic. I was no expert in these things, but I guessed it to be something along the lines of lead or tin or an alloy thereof, a few coloured spots of corrosion showing where the damp had trickled through. I was near to the surface. It would be full winter out there now.

The realisation that the days had continued to turn even without Hamilcar Bear-Eater out there to witness it actually came as something of a shock.

Turning my head from side to side revealed more of the same madcap skaven industry, if nothing of obvious, actual use. Fewer slaves toiled on these upper levels, with more of the work undertaken by engineers, which suggested that – whatever it was – it was presumably important. They wore rubbery suits that made them look like great auk in overly complicated helmets, and fussed over large, grumbling machines. The air was damp as well as cold, and the occasional spasm of dark green lightning would cut through the mist towards the arcing rods that the warlocks had positioned around their machines (the density of such instruments apparently denoted status), only very occasionally frying a slave.

I struggled uselessly as a gaggle of junior-looking engineers waddled towards me with armfuls of cables, most of my best insults sorely wasted on a race that didn’t even have a word for ‘mother’. Ignoring me completely, they fixed the cables to my platform. The shock of hammer blows ran through my bones and sparks sprayed over my body. The smell of metal solder filled my nostrils, and still I felt cold. Sniggering amongst themselves, presumably at my expense, the engineers withdrew to their machines.

‘Do not fight-struggle, Stormcast. It goes easier if you preserve your strength.’

Ikrit clomped towards me, slowly. Clad tail-tip to whiskers in iron and bronze, he looked awfully like a rat-shaped lightning rod to me, but as I might have expected he knew his machines better than I, and managed to avoid being incinerated by a stray bolt before reaching my side. Joints squealed as he reached out, rotating his wrist and brushing his gauntlet fingers over my shoulder and down my chest. My skin crawled from his touch. At my heart his gauntlet turned in order to hover, claws down.

He seemed to shudder in some kind of dreadful anticipation.

‘I feel like one of Xeros’ blood sacrifices,’ I said, trying to keep my voice from trembling.

‘Xeros?’

‘Lord-relictor of my Stormhost.’ And somewhere very close about now, I fervently prayed.

‘Sigmar accepts such bloody offerings?’

‘He doesn’t deny them, and the realms are vast.’

Despite lacking the breath with which to chuckle or a face with which to express much of anything, Ikrit nevertheless looked amused. ‘Yes-yes. They are. Ever expanding and ever changing as well, did you know? They make the gods themselves seem insignificant. Even they are inadequate to what they would rule. Many are the dark corners. Many are the hidden places. Even in those realms where the rule of one god is total – Shyish, Ulgu, yes-yes, Azyr even – their attention covers but fractions of what they claim is theirs. That is how Malikcek came to lose his soul to the Shadow Realm.’

I looked around for the assassin, but didn’t see him.

‘That does not mean he is not near,’ Ikrit whispered in my ear. ‘He foolishly accepted a charge to kill-stab a favourite of Malerion. He was good. A Deathmaster of Clan Snikch. He got in. Kill-stab the aelf. Yes-yes. Only then did Shadow God note his intrusion, and even then he could not block Malikcek’s escape. Not entirely. Part of Malikcek’s soul is forever his prisoner now. But where he was fool-fool in going in the first place, he was much-wise to come to me after. Long ago now. Before the Thirteen banished me from Blight City.’ His eyes glowered blue-white in what I rook for wrath. ‘What he had done, what had been done to him, it showed me what could be crafted from mortal souls. My magicks could not lift Malerion’s curse. I am not his equal. Not yet. But I keep it from claiming him totally, and in trade he serves me well. He find-brings trinkets from the gods’ tables.’ He tittered tinnily. ‘Like you-you.’

‘Like Barrach?’ I snarled.

‘Yes-yes. Malikcek killed him to spite me, I am sure. He hates me. He hates that I made him a slave. But he needs me more. More than I need him now he has made me strong. He knows this. He knows too there are more Gorkai in the Nevermarsh.’

‘You’ll never plague them again. I’ll see to it.’

Ikrit looked at me for a second, then emitted a sandpapery sound that I took for a laugh.

‘When you are finished with me I will be sent back to Sigmaron,’ I said, my voice rising as confidence returned to it. ‘It might be a hundred days or a hundred years from now, but I will return, and it will be at the head of a host the like of which the Ghurlands hasn’t witnessed since the Realmgate Wars.’

‘You are like Malikcek was,’ said Ikrit, giving me an almost fatherly pat on the chest. ‘Too confident of that which cannot be done.’

With that, the master warlock tilted his head back, his armour complaining, then lifted his hands above his head and slowly drew them apart.

In response, the roof began to grind open, snow billowing in through the widening crack, which at the very least confirmed my impression that we were close to the surface. At first I thought that Ikrit was physically opening the roof by sorcery, and that was very probably what he wanted me to think. But then I noticed the slave-filled running wheels on either side of the chamber, rumbling as they went round and around, drawing on chains and a system of cranks that ultimately resulted in the opening of the doors. In the flurrying sky beyond, I glimpsed what I initially thought was a flash of lightning and my heart lifted for a moment until I recognised that the energy was green-tinged, rippling up a coiled mast the height of a ballista tower. There were four of them that I could see, sited at the corners of the open roof and leaning slightly inwards. The charge that was being so arduously generated by the skavenslaves through the many tiers of activity beneath me was being fed up there. The coils glowed with it. Emerald lightning bolted from mast to mast, the snow sublimating into a thick green mist that smelled like a distillate of ozone and chlorine.

The first flake of snow fell on my bare chest and I jerked as though it were a messenger bird from Azyr come with the promise of freedom, pulling again on my restraints and Chaos take my shoulder joints as the snowflake slowly melted.

‘I understand now,’ Ikrit mused. ‘I have understanding enough of Sigmar’s process now to copy-take.’

‘Hah! Unlikely.’

‘You lie-lie upon my Anvil of Apotheosis.’

I bared my teeth in a semi-feral snarl. ‘Sigmar’s is bigger.’

Ignoring me, the master warlock gestured upwards with an open gauntlet. ‘There is my divine storm.’

‘Sigmar’s is… less green.’

‘I own-have every tool. All I cannot create here is the essence of Sigmar himself. That is what you will gift-give to me, Hamilcar.’

I laughed at him. It was forced, but I laughed, and of that I’m more proud than of any hopeless stand or pointless act of heroism in my immortal life. ‘For what? To create your own Stormhost?’

‘I do not seek-plan to conquer the realms. I do not have the hubris of a god. My ambitions are small. One Stormcast alone will suffice.’

‘Is that all?’

‘You think me mad-mad. You are not the first. But I have outlived them all. What is made can be unmade. What is unmade can be remade.’

‘You’re talking about the forging of a god, not some new blasting powder from the Ironweld quarter.’

‘Look at me, Stormcast.’

Against my better judgement, I did. His metallic frame bristled with unmelting snowflakes, cold and still as an iron mummy.

‘Thousands of years I have endured. I no longer know how long, what I was before, only that I am dead more years than I was ever alive. Secrets I gleaned from the Books of Nagash, plundered from the ruins of Nagashizzar during the Death God’s long exile in the Age of Blood. More still I learned from the children of the Oak of Ages. With what Malikcek brought back from Ulgu have I hidden my plans from the Horned Rat and his daemons. They hunt me still, yet I fear their vengeance no more than I fear yours. They are gods, Stormcast. They are not omnipotent. Is Sigmar better? Is he special? You think his works must elude me where those of Malerion and Alarielle yield their secrets freely? No. He is not special. He is just a god. And I will have-take what is his.’

‘Sigmar is almighty,’ I said, straining hard enough to lift my chest an inch off the platform. ‘Only Sigmar had the courage to fight back.’

‘The powers of all the Pantheon went into Sigmar’s Stormcasts. Did you know that? Few know that. I know that. The powers of the Pantheon will be part of me now. Soon. And more.’ Ikrit laid his ice-cool hand on my stomach, my belly retreating from the abomination of his touch. ‘And yet. There is something about Sigmar that feels special. Is there not? The status he claims for himself as god of gods. God-King.’ He snickered at that. ‘Take-stealing from him will be my greatest prize.’

He turned ponderously about and started to walk away.

‘You know I never gave you an honest answer to a single question before now!’ I yelled after him.

‘Yes-yes. I know. The light-fire of Hyish burns away all untruth.’ He stopped walking and turned back, laying his gauntlet over the handle of a large lever. ‘But my immortality is flawed.’

‘Whose isn’t?’

‘I persist in unlife. I wax and wane with the seasons and the dying of years. I remember nothing of what was.’

I snorted. ‘I almost hope you succeed, just to see your face.’

He looked back at me quizzically.

‘You think a Stormcast’s immortality is perfect, but you’ve looked inside my head. You know better than that.’

‘I want only your immortality,’ he said. ‘Give it willingly and you may survive. Others did, and I released them.’

I remembered the Wild Maiden, the sylvaneth I had found drained and slowly decaying in the Low Gorwood after inadvertently massacring all of her followers.

Not exactly an end worthy of song. Certainly not one worthy of my song.

‘Do your worst, Ikrit. You and your…’ I rolled my head to indicate the warlock’s sprawling apparatus, ‘thing. We’ll see who surrenders first.’

‘You are not the first to think that either. You too are not special.’

I like to believe that the words do exist somewhere, hidden deep in the bowels of the fortresses of Teclis or Tzeentch, guarded from the lore of men, to describe what I felt in the moment that Ikrit pulled that lever, but all of mine fall woefully short. It is a blessing of a kind, I think, for how can you properly recall a thing if you haven’t even the word to name it? Do beasts without words remember as we do? Do fish? Do birds?

I don’t know, but I will try.

The first sensation was light. Not light of the sun or even of moon and stars, but something warped and of the blood. I felt it coursing through me, filling me with pain the way my own storm-forged blood filled me with vitality. Had I the wit at the time I would have recognised that it was being fed into my body from those four gigantic masts on the roof, through the cables that Ikrit’s underlings had soldered to my platform. But I hadn’t, and I didn’t.

Imagine, if you can, being nothing more than a vessel for agony. Imagine it. Go ahead, try. I promise you that you’ll fail.

Time stretched to mean less than nothing and there were moments where I think I truly did believe that I had died and been returned to the Anvil of Apotheosis. I felt myself broken, much as I would have had I indeed been upon the Anvil, but the faith that I would be remade to the best of a demi-god’s abilities was absent. The Six Smiths are callous, it’s true, as only a minor divinity with a major chip on his shoulder can be, but they are prideful in their work. Ikrit was too, I knew that much about him, but his goal was not restoration. I felt him inside me, digging through my spirit to seek that which glittered, that which was Sigmar and thus unbreakable.

I’d like to say that I fought back, so yes, by all means, say that Hamilcar Bear-Eater fought back, but in truth I have no idea if I did or even if it was possible. Shocking and unlikely as this may sound to you, as long as that lever was down I think there was no Hamilcar Bear-Eater.

Some eternities later I heard a snicker of triumph. It wasn’t Ikrit’s voice as I had come to know it, but something younger, lived in, the way he remembered his own voice sounding.

‘There it is,’ he chittered. ‘Sigmar’s storm. It is mine.’

I felt the me in me pushed carelessly to one side, the broken glass from a dropped window swept from a fine floor, to expose the beauty of the mosaic beneath. It wasn’t my heart or my mind. It corresponded to no physical place in my body that I could point out to you now and say: ‘This. Here. This is where Sigmar lives in me,’ but nevertheless I felt Ikrit reach out for that thing and take it.

I’d like to say I fought back. And maybe I did. Something did.

Something indivisible and divine announced its resistance, and for one instant, like a shadow glimpsed by lightning, I was not the only one inside my body in pain. And believe me, misery shared is misery halved. Ikrit shrieked as though he’d been given a Chammonic lead purge. I felt his claws withdraw and heard something metal fall against something else metal and considerably more yielding. The lightning scoured my veins and for a split-second I was conscious of every crack and break in my being where the fury of the Storm Eternal could not be contained.

I opened my eyes and wept like a god new-born to the world, straining against my bonds with all the tempestuous might of Azyr.

All around me, glass shattered. Metal bent. Cables snapped and twanged, whipping about like the tentacles of an ocean kraken, decapitating those engineers who were too well armoured against random discharges of lightning to do anything sensible like duck. Lightning raced from my body and back down the lines that the skaven had used to hook me to their warp-lightning machines. Those I saw caught fire or simply exploded, throwing engineers and slaves alike through the air. Another, below me, vomited forth endless quantities of black smoke until the skaven on that tier were left flailing about, blind and gasping for air. More than a few took the long trip to the bottom as the entire house of cards beneath them began to come apart at the seams.

‘HAMILCAR!’

I roared until my throat bled, the chains binding my wrists beneath the platform yielding to my strength as the steel slowly melted before wave after wave of lightning. Suddenly I was free, my hands flying apart, shattered metal links raining down over the tiers of machinery that surrounded the shaft. Before I had much chance to do anything beyond shout about it, the world pitched violently sideways. There was a splintering crack, like the mast of a sail ship as it disintegrates under a lightning strike, and my stomach lurched. I heard the squeals of about thirteen terrified skavenslaves from far, far below me, and understood that I was about to be reunited with them very soon.

I bellowed the name of the God-King as I fell.