Champion of the Gods

Chapter ten

‘Sigmar!’ I bellowed again, this time with feeling, as I dug my way free of the wreckage. If I thought that there was a snowball’s chance in Aqshy of him hearing me, then I would have cursed him for the fact that, despite every­thing, I was still alive.

Struggling to negotiate the release of my foot from the shattered ruin of the platform, I looked up. A fug of smoke now clung to the sagging bones of the skaven’s scaffold, any inclination it might have had towards rising for the open ceiling being slowly pummelled out of it by the snow. It was starting to settle, lumps of wood and metal and mangy fur covered in a respectful sheet of white. It reminded me of something I couldn’t quite fix in my mind. A mountainside after a battle. A barrow for a warrior. Something else I couldn’t picture. I shook my head. Pieces of thought crunched about inside like pebbles in a clay cup.

‘I’m going to kill you, Ikrit,’ I roared at the ceiling. ‘I’m going to destroy every­thing you hold precious.’

I pulled angrily on my foot, found that it was still chained to something buried under the wreckage and pulled again, harder, discovered this time that the chain was actually just bitten between two mangled bits of wood, and fell backwards when it gave. I rolled down the heap to land in a puff of snow at the bottom.

I lifted my face from the floor and blew snow from my beard.

‘Death is too clean,’ I growled under my breath. ‘I’ll feed you to Crow. No. Better. I’ll hand you to the Hallowed Knights. Half an hour in their company and you’ll be begging to be eaten by a gryph-hound. I know I would be.’

The tormented scaffolding above me creaked as if it were trying to find a comfortable position in which to die. The occasional despairing squeak of a trapped or injured skaven echoed down through the blizzard.

There was no sign of Ikrit, though.

I didn’t recognise the feeling that swept through me. Looking back, I think it was relief. I looked at my hand. It was shaking.

I needed to get out of there.

Out.

The thought ran round and around in my head like a fever dream.

I squinted into the thickening snowfall, trying, and mostly failing, to shake off the memories it evoked. The feel of the raiding season’s first snows on my hand. Watching the sun sink below the far peaks through a bitter flurry. The pride and power as a circlet of frigid metal was set upon my head.

‘Gah!’

I slapped furiously at my head.

The memories came in bits and pieces, a lot like I felt. I couldn’t seem to get rid of them, so I ignored them instead, something at which I was highly practised, and I had better luck with that.

I set my hand against a rusty steel upright that was currently listing at an uncomfortably steep diagonal and followed it with my eyes. I’d seen the sky when the roof had opened. I knew that there was a way out up there, but I can’t say that I thought much of trying to climb back up there, even if the structure wasn’t in the throes of coming apart. As if to prove the wisdom of that, the whole edifice gave a shuddering groan and sank another few inches towards me, snow wheezing through the compacted girders and beams.

I was going to have to find another way out.

Remembering my original plan of escape, I staggered away from the wreckage in the vague direction that Malikcek and Kurzog’s beastmen had dragged me, pausing occasionally to smack my head against sturdier-looking beams in an effort to unclutter my thoughts, flinging out my hands to rid them of pins and needles. None of it helped. I spotted the tunnel I had come in by and stumbled towards it, tripped like a drunk over a buried piece of planking and went flat on my face.

‘I’m going to tear you apart,’ I growled, spitting snow. ‘Limb from limb.’

The wall was trembling slightly as I pulled myself up. I sniffed, smelling smoke on the faint wind that blew through the tunnel. It looked as though whatever Ikrit had tried to do to me had backfired even more spectacularly than I could have hoped for.

I didn’t know the half of it, of course. If I had then I probably would have devoted more energy to getting out of there than I already was.

The Blind Herd’s camp was still the closest thing I had to a reliable way out, and with any luck the death of Kurzog and the current state of confusion would be enough for me to get past them. I had a vague intuition of the route back to the beast camp from where I was, having been in and out of consciousness as Malikcek had dragged me along it. But it turns out that thinking a thing and knowing a thing are even more different than usual when you’re staggering about with a headache through a skaven lair that was rapidly filling up with smoke.

It was almost enough to make me wish I’d just let Akturus Ironheel beat me in front of everyone and never left the Seven Words.

I stumbled through tunnels, fell into branches and out of them, tripped, got up again and ended up going sideways at one point, I think just for the support of the wall. Scratch posts and scent marks screamed meaningless directions at me, as useful as a buzzing chorus of birds hawking at me in aelvish. Shrieks echoed through the ­labyrinth of tunnels, but surprisingly few skaven crossed my path beyond the occasional half-chewed corpse. Every so often I heard claws scrabbling, but it was always from a parallel passage or a branching tunnel. At one point I came to a narrow hole in the wall onto a downward-sloping tunnel that I felt certain would lead me to the beast camp, only to recoil from the heat of its burning and convince myself that it had never been the way after all. I swayed towards the next tunnel just as the one behind me collapsed, pelting my back with grit and stones. I barely noticed. I took my head in both hands as if that might stop my vision from swimming. I growled, then roared, and smacked my forehead over and over with the heel of my palm.

‘Focus, Hamilcar. You entered the gladiatorum with Lord-Celestant Pharakis with a worse head than this. And won.’ Actually, it was more of a draw, but I maintain that the Knight-Excelsior had fiddled the chamber’s restorative properties in his favour somehow. ‘Concentrate.’

I stumbled on with the deliberation of a drunkard trying too hard to walk straight. I did my best to concentrate, but forgotten old memories continued to force themselves over what I saw.

A tunnel mouth became the entrance to a cave, bedecked in luminescent beetle shells and pink-glowing gemstones, a thick carpet of skins and furs laid out before it. ‘The nuptial cave,’ I mumbled to myself. Sigmar only knows where that knowledge came from. The same place, I presumed, that knew that pink stones represented fertility, the shells protection, and the skins hearth. ‘I carved those skins myself,’ I muttered, turning away. A clanrat slumped over a broken barrel with half its face opportunistically chewed off became a grey-haired man, his old skin thick with tribal tattoos and a bearskin over his shoulders, face down in a frozen ale spill on a stone slab. ‘Her… her father.’ I pounded my head with my fist and ­stumbled on. ‘Whose father?’ With every ounce of my willpower, I denied that the greenish gloam of the ceiling was interspersed with the twinkling starlight of the Eternal Winterlands.

It might have been more memories – albeit more recent ones and thus coming at me unnoticed – that did eventually bring me into tunnels I recognised, if not the ones I’d been trying to get to.

Again, I had that curious sensation of stepping out of the Ghurlands and into some other place, even as my toes and knuckles scuffed along simple, unchanging stone. It was like crossing a waterfall, knowing that what you had left behind you was still there, scant feet away, but that it had been obliterated by the roar of water. I was glad of the sense, in a strange way. It was real and familiar, even if I found it difficult to describe. With every­thing I’d been thinking and feeling since pulling myself out of Ikrit’s warpstorm, I’d actually started to worry that the warlock had damaged me somehow, but here at least was some evidence that my senses as a Stormcast Eternal remained intact.

I was in Ikrit’s tunnels.

The door to his warren had been left ajar.

‘Strange. I didn’t think it could be opened from the outside.’

I listened, and though my hearing didn’t come close to the acuity of even a one-eared skavenslave with his head in a bag, I was relatively confident that there was nobody inside. I looked over my shoulder. The corridor behind me was empty. Finding my way back towards the beastman encampment from here would be much more straightforward than doing it from the storm chamber. I’d done it close to a hundred times by my best count and, thanks to Milk Scar and his counting, I could do it with my eyes closed. Whether I could do it with my head spinning and the earth shaking all around me was something I looked forward to finding out.

But the lure of that open door behind me made me turn back.

A nervous prickle ran down my neck.

‘Curiosity will be the death of me.’

Steeling myself for the worst (about as well as you might imagine, given I could barely stand unaided), I went inside.

The place had been completely ransacked. Books had been torn from shelves, instruments and tools swept from the benches and onto the floor. A clanrat in relatively ostentatious dress comprising red and grey rags and a bronze sash, presumably one of Ikrit’s trusted lackeys, lay dead on the floor with his chest torn open. I wondered who would have the means and the sheer brass balls to break into Ikrit’s burrow and murder his underling. My list of culprits amounted to Barrach and Kurzog, both of whom seemed unlikely, considering. Blinking quickly in an attempt to settle my wandering vision, I went further in. I wasn’t sure what I was looking for, or if I was there for any reason at all other than to sate my curiosity, but then I saw something glittering amidst the debris that snatched my breath away.

My warding lantern.

It was on its side, still held in the clamps in which I’d seen it last. Clearly it was not what whoever had ransacked this place had been looking for, as it had been discarded along with every­thing else. Yearning burnished my chest with its warm glow, and drew me down to my knees beside this unsullied part of me. I freed it from the rubbish and practically tore it out of the warlock’s unsightly clamps. As ornate as a Lord-Castellant’s warding lantern might appear, its housing is sigmarite hewn from the molten core of the Mallus itself and I knew that the warlock’s rusted iron wouldn’t so much as scratch the gilt work. And I was right. The restraining rods snapped and ­crumbled as I pulled the lantern free and crushed it to my chest.

No new mother ever held an infant with such fierce pride.

I threw my head back and laughed. ‘Praises to the God-King!’ The blessings of Sigmar did indeed reach into the darkest corners of the realms. It looked as though someone owed a certain Lord-Relictor of the Hallowed Knights an apology.

I couldn’t see any of my weapons or armour lying around anywhere, which was sort of disappointing but not entirely surprising. Either they hadn’t interested Ikrit as much as the more arcane properties of my lantern had, or he had other burrows scattered about the lair where he or his underlings could work on them in peace. I didn’t spare too much energy thinking about that. The lantern was more useful to me just then than weapons or armour, in any case. Against creatures as steeped in the Chaotic as the skaven, the light of a warding lantern is deadlier than any halberd, and more than that, after every­thing I’d just been through its healing powers were exactly what I’d been praying for – the light of Azyr being a more reliable curative than successive self-administered blows to the head.

After the horrors of Ikrit’s warpstorm, I’d almost forgotten the savaging I’d taken beforehand in my thwarted attempt at escape. It was unsurprising then that I was a little shaky on my feet. Given every­thing I had endured over the last few days it was a wonder that even a Stormcast Eternal as robust as I was still upright. I certainly would have enjoyed watching Vandus or Gardus get up after all that and saunter out with half as much panache as I had managed so far.

I convinced myself that was all there was to it.

As you might by now have gathered, I’m incredibly good at that.

I pulled back the lantern’s shutters.

I was screaming before I really knew what had hit me. The lantern fell from my hands like a comet released from Heaven. Everywhere its light touched, it burned, as though I’d just walked into the jaws of a magmadroth or fallen into a lake of acid. I flapped wildly, bending backwards, away from the pain, until I fell over and from there curled onto my side. That only made it worse, exposing the entirety of my back to the light. Batting about blindly behind me, I found the lantern. My fingers closed over the handle and my first instinct was to hurl it as hard and as far from me as I could, but I fought it down, suffering the extra seconds of agony I needed to manipulate the catches and slide it shut.

The light snuffed out, and I slumped to the floor, gasping and breathless, steam curling off my reddened skin. A rainbow of weird and wonderful colours blurred across my eyes as I shifted to look accusingly at the lantern in my hand.

‘Ikrit! I’m going to strangle you with your own tail!’

I lay as I was for about a minute before I felt as though I’d mustered enough strength to stand. I may have been a little unsteady, but for better or worse the lantern had at least burned away some of the memories that had been fogging up my thoughts.

I cast a glance in the direction of Sigendil, the beacon star, dimly visible in the uncanny pseudo-realm that Ikrit’s warrens comprised.

I felt as though it was mocking me.

‘Is that the best you can do, a direction?’

Sigmar does answer prayers, but more often than not I am the answer. I should have known better than to expect more, but my experience on Ikrit’s Anvil had shaken me to my core. There have been many times over the years when men and women like you have asked me ‘where was Sigmar when this, that, or the other apocalypse fell?’ The answer is that while Sigmar might intercede on our behalf less than we might like, I assure you that he does so far more often than you think. He is simply subtle about it. We would all love to see Sigmar smiting his own enemies so that the likes of you and I do not have to, but if the God-King were to take to the field today, then tomorrow it would be Khorne, and the day after that we would all be wishing he had remained in Sigmaron ignoring our prayers.

I was bitter and hurting, however, and none of that was of any consolation. In spite of every­thing, though, I held onto the lantern. Whatever Ikrit had done to it, it was still a part of me, a part of Sigmar – and if push came to shove I could still hit something with it.

A rumble passed through the rock walls as I stumbled through the open door, the tables behind me rattling amidst the piled rubbish. Dust drizzled on me from the ceiling of the passage outside as I fled back for the common tunnels. Freed of the incessant distraction of lost memories filling my head in response to every little thing, finding the beast camp from Ikrit’s warrens was simplicity itself, like tracking back to a campfire after relieving yourself in the woods.

Don’t try that in the Gorwood though, just a little friendly advice.

I frowned at the unexpected, if not unwelcome, sight.

Where I’d been expecting to see a large cavern filled with the hide yurts and dung fires of cavorting beastmen, it was now… well, it was still a large cavern filled with hide yurts and dung fires, but it was as though a stampeding herd of ghroxen had just gone over it. The straight gouge of flattened tents and scattered fires went directly towards a wide tunnel, angled steeply downwards. I could smell the cooler, fresher air blowing from the mouth of it. I knew that it couldn’t have made much of a difference to the abusive stink of the beast camp, but to me, then, it smelled like the Stromfels after the first snows.

‘That’s the way out, then.’

A few of the dung fires to either side still flickered damply, fallen poles and lines casting wretched shadows that crawled over the cavern’s walls. I checked over my shoulder as I walked past a small tent, and almost rounded on it, lantern raised like a stone club, when what I would have later sworn was a shadow crept through the flap. The flaps never even rustled in the breeze though, and by the time I had my lantern up to brain the thing the firelight had moved on and there was no shadow there at all. I laughed hollowly. The echoes made it sound as though a few score men shared my black humour and that cheered me somewhat. Even so, I found myself scratching the burnt skin at the back of my neck, as though I were being watched, clutching my lantern close as I started walking for the tunnel.

If I’d run, maybe things would have been different.