Champion of the Gods

Chapter eleven

I ploughed near naked into the thick snow, like a wild gryph-charger into icy surf. It was packed up to my knees, forcing me to wade as I pushed myself on into the freezing cold. From the severity of the sudden incline and the sharpness of the air, I gathered that I was somewhere high on the side of a mountain. Knight-Venator Barbarus and the other winged scouts I had despatched into the Nevermarsh had never reported any mountainous regions, but it was a vast landscape. That’s why it was called the Nevermarsh. I think it was the Vanguard-Raptor, Illyrius, who had first named it that, complaining to me that it ‘never ends.’ I faced up to the grim likelihood that I was a long way from the Seven Words as I slipped and skidded on down the mountainside, snow flurrying about my bare chest and wild mane like nipping white birds with a numbing poison in their claws. I had no idea of where I was going. No hope of getting there before I froze to death, anyway. But I am Hamilcar Bear-Eater, King of the Eternal Winterlands, and I wasn’t about to let something like that slow me down.

Shadows prickled at the flurrying snow ahead of me. Barren trees, clinging to the lower slopes of the summit like frozen candelabra with their crooked branches bent towards the sky. I struggled towards them, thinking that shelter from the blizzard might keep me going for a few minutes longer at least, long enough to think of an actual plan if I could just get my head out of the wind, although even to me that seemed unlikely. It’s easy to laugh off the inevitable when there’s an army behind you. It’s just as easy to do it without one, of course; it’s just pointless. No, realism was the order of the day. I was going to die on that mountain, and I was determined to do it as far away from the skaven lair as I possibly could. It was conceivable that one of Ikrit’s minions or Kurzog’s beastmen might stumble across me before I froze to death and I wanted to fend off the possibility for as long as I could.

Keeping half an eye alert, I watched the flurrying snow for any sign of Ikrit’s clanrats or the Blind Herd. They had almost certainly left by the same tunnel I had, but there was no sign of them anyway. Given the conditions, however, that meant little. I had no way of knowing how big a head start they had over me and with snow coming down the way it was, two hundred beastmen could have been coming straight at me in tuskgor chariots with bells on the wheels and I wouldn’t have known about it until they were trampling over me.

With a teeth-chattering growl, I barrelled on towards the trees.

I’d rather go out to a beastman’s hatchet than the cold anyway. It’d be quicker, and quicker better suited my preferences just then.

Up close, the trees were gnarled and horribly twisted things, clad not in bark but something that looked like ice. I couldn’t tell if they were even alive at all but, accustomed as I was to the hostile flora of the Gorwood, I made sure to keep my distance. Unlike the honey traps of the Gorkomon’s leechwood pines and carniferns that would lure anything with warm blood and a pulse onto their roots, these twisted runts hardly invited my approach. They emanated a cold so piercing that I had to check my fingers to be certain that they hadn’t been cut on it, and even seemed to shun each other’s company, their branches angling sharply to avoid encroaching on another’s canopy.

If anything, it was actually colder in the forest than it had been further up the mountainside. Hugging my arms to my chest and gripping the bicep of the opposite arm, I gave a great huff of mist.

‘No changing my mind now.’ As a rule, I never change my mind once it’s set. Utter commitment to any course, however unwise, is what has won me half my battles, but in this case the decision to stick was made for me. I’d be half dead well before I made it back to the tunnel, and I knew it.

I hadn’t gone far into that eerie forest when a lonely shriek, as of a hunting bird, echoed from the sky. I ignored it at first, crunching over hard ground, before I realised that the voice was that of a hunting bird I knew personally. A smile stretched across my numb face like faltering ice, and I looked up into the snow.

I don’t know why it came as such a surprise and a relief that they had been looking for me all this time.

Isolation from my brothers must have affected me more deeply than I had realised.

‘Aeygar!’ I yelled, my voice echoing with wild joy between the trees, the mountainside and the low ceiling of the sky. I waved my arms overhead, though I doubted even the eyes of an aetar would have been able to pick me off the mountain in such a blizzard. ‘Princess! Hamilcar is here!’

‘You should not shout-shout like that. Not on a mountain. Thought you would know better.’

The voice whispered from a position right behind my ear, and I took my warding lantern’s loop handle in a firm grip and spun round with a roar. The lantern whooshed through the flurrying snow. The voice snickered amongst the lonely trees.

‘It’s going to be like that then, is it?’

‘Run-flee, Bear-Eater. Give me the challenge of hunting you.’

‘Considering you’ve bested me twice already, you’re strangely reluctant to show yourself.’ I flexed dramatically, and bared my teeth in what I hoped was the right direction. ‘Does Hamilcar scare you, assassin?’

‘You amuse me. Is not often I enjoy a challenge for challenge’s sake.’

I glared into the woods, but it was hopeless. The whole mountainside was swamped by black clouds and thick snow. If Malikcek was lurking out there then he had a few thousand square miles of shadow to choose from. ‘Ikrit’s probably dead, you know. I heard him fall. If I were you I’d get as far away from this mountain as my legs could carry me.’

‘You think I fear wrath of your god? See me, Bear-Eater. See me if you can. The gods have done their worst to me. Run-run now.’

‘Hamilcar isn’t afraid of the dark.’

‘Run-flee. Run-now. Or I will take you back to Ikrit instead.’

I turned on the spot with a snarl on my lips, but the voice seemed to be coming from everywhere at once. If Malikcek wanted to kill me then I was perfectly minded to let him take his best shot and get it over with, but I just didn’t have it in me to make it easy for him. Surrendering to the cold or even one nameless beastman out of a herd was one thing, but giving in to this cocksure little rat who’d be bragging about the day he slew Hamilcar until the day of my reforging?

Over my immortal body.

‘You should know, Malikcek,’ I bellowed, pointing myself downhill, ‘that my performances in the Azyrheimer marathons are the stuff of legend!’

With that, I was already tearing off downslope, slipping and running in roughly equal measure, occasionally flapping my arms for balance and yelling ‘Aeygar!’ at the top of my lungs. I heard her shriek again, but it was further off now. I sucked in a deep breath, only to lose it all to a heart shock of astonishment as Malikcek stepped out of the darkness in front of me. His blades back-and-forthed over my bare chest like gardening shears, and he sniggered as he sank back into the shadows and I ran straight through him, clutching my ribboned chest in one hand and waiting for the poison to take effect. As it had with Barrach, and with the Freeguild soldiers on Kurzog’s Hill before that.

A gruesome death if ever I’d seen one, but if going through it could erase some of the horror of being eaten by a Dread Abyssal then I would have considered that good value.

But nothing happened.

I started to laugh. ‘I should have known. Your poison is less impressive against the mettle of a Stormcast Eternal!’

‘A tool for every task, Bear-Eater. Ikrit would not believe you had escaped and been killed-slain by some mad-fool beastman if I return you with bones broken by my poison. Would he? His wrath would be mighty.’

‘Then why kill me at all?’

The wood snickered. ‘You talk-squeak too much. I told you to run-flee.’

Malikcek swept out of the darkness, like a bat transforming into a soulblight even as it dropped out of the sky. His knives were a blur and it took every ingrained scrap of skill I owned just to survive the first seconds of our exchange. I parried a blistering sequence of blows with my lantern, and was about to praise Sigmar for the unsung durability of his craftsmanship, when a tail looped about the back of my leg and yanked it out from under me. I hit the ground in a crack of ice, the assassin fading from the air above me and reappearing almost immediately bestride my chest. His knife was at my throat, another pressing into my belly. His tail wound tightly around the wrist of the hand that held my lantern until the fingers turned as blue as the trees that surrounded us.

I bared my teeth, fighting to keep them from chattering. ‘You aren’t bad against a half-dead Lord-Castellant.’

‘I already took you at your prime. Do you forget? Killed your second and lots-many of your men. Took you alive for my master.’

‘With a little help from the Blind Herd and the Legion of Bloat and a few tens of thousands of warriors.’

‘You walk-scurry into Kurzog’s trap because you thought you were invincible.’

I grinned fearlessly. ‘I am invincible. I believed that even before Sigmar made it true.’

‘We see now.’

I saw the arm inside its sleeve of shadow tense, but before it reached the blade at my throat, something howled and slammed into him from behind. Malikcek squealed in surprise, moulting into shadow before exploding back into tangibility a few feet further off from me, cloak flapping, lips drawn back over a snarl.

A woman stood over me, ivy-skinned and russet-haired. Even given my usual keen eye for the small details, something about that combination was strikingly familiar. She was clad in a few pieces of bark and circlets of thorn, and spun a branched spear through both hands like a tightrope walker about to perform for a hungry crowd.

‘He is mine,’ she said, her voice the dry-throated snarl of unseen predators in the woods.

My eyebrows lifted. ‘Yours?’ I wondered what I could have done to attract her attention – beyond the obvious, that is – but could think of nothing.

Malikcek flew at her with a snarl.

The pair of them exchanged blows with such ferocity that it was almost as if they simply lashed their weapons about without any real inclination of hitting one another at all. I might have convinced myself that that were the case were it not for the rapid-fire snick of metal on wood and the woman’s occasional grunt of effort. Slowly, though, Malikcek forced her on to the back foot. The skaven was faster and better. I was mildly relieved to note this, given that this was now the third time he had beaten me.

‘Hehehe. This was good-fun, but done-finished now.’

The woman propellered her spear, her eyes flashing to amber as she emitted a droning hum from her mouth and the air exploded with mosquitoes. Malikcek flapped his paws, squealing, as the woman backed off under the cover of the swarm and into a tree. And I do mean into a tree. She stepped through the ice-clad trunk and disappeared as if it were a curtain. Malikcek squeaked in confusion and annoyance.

‘Do not celebrate, Bear-Eater. She run-leaves you to me.’

‘I don’t think so.’

With an ululating scream, the woman leapt out of a wholly different tree. From the way she carried through the air it looked as though she’d taken a good run at it, but heavens knew from where. The pitch and volume of her war-cry made even me, hardly a stranger to loud noises, wince, but Malikcek with his sensitive skaven hearing was positively poleaxed. He hit the ground like a crying baby, which would have been amusing had it not carried him under the sweep of the woman’s spear. The effort broke her war-shout and Malikcek recovered quickly enough to kick her legs out from under her. She landed on her back just as Malikcek sprung to his feet. He reversed his grip on one of his knives and stabbed for the woman’s chest. She sank into the hard ground, leaving Malikcek’s knife to crack the ice. He hissed in annoyance, the canopy above him rustling as she dropped out of it, spear point-down to skewer the assassin from crown to crotch. He dispersed before she got near and she landed where he had been standing in a feline crouch.

‘Sigmar in Heaven, this is going to go on all day.’

Creaking and sore, I got up, watching the fight as it moved away from me. Idly I reached up to take a branch. It was cold, but brittle, and snapped off more easily than something of actual wood would have. The cold bit into my skin, spreading slowly to my wrist and up my forearm and I actually laughed aloud as I felt the branch beginning to transform my hand into ice. Hefting the branch overarm, I hurled it with all the venom that Ikrit, the cold, and several weeks of captivity had left me of my strength.

I would have made a magnificent Prosecutor; I think we can all agree on that.

The impromptu javelin impaled Malikcek through the shoulder blade and pinned him to the trunk of a tree. He shrieked in agony, bursting into nothingness with a fading cry before the warrioress had a chance to react. I grinned, raising my fist in salute, then grunted as I felt something punch me in the back. It barely hurt, but for some reason my next breath came raggedly, my knees shaking, and I almost fell back against the tree behind me. I looked down and around to see the hilt of Malikcek’s knife sticking out of my back. Malikcek’s hand was attached. It looked even uncannier to me somehow, now that the shadow it wore had been given proper definition by my blood.

‘That hurt-hurt.’

‘You look good for it,’ I admitted.

‘My soul is imprisoned in Ulgu, a plaything of the gods. I cannot die-die. Not here. Not to the likes of you.’ He twisted the knife, driving it up into my lungs, making me open my mouth in a breathless gasp. I shaped it into a big, oval grin.

‘I’ve… had… worse.’ While I had him pretty much exactly where I wanted him with his knife in my back, I lifted my lantern and, one-handed, thumbed the catch. ‘Have you?’

Then I slid the shutter.

Malikcek shrieked and evaporated, taking the knife with him, which I wasn’t exactly sure was a good thing or bad, but was as painless a method of removing a blade from a body as I knew. I couldn’t be sure exactly what became of him because the world turned white, searing hot, as though my face were being held against the surface of a star. Light streamed through every jagged, half-mended crack that Ikrit had left of my being to burn me from the inside. The knife wound in my side knitted shut and melted closed at the same time, as if it were some kind of contest to see what could hurt me more. Then something stepped in front of the light, cutting it and filtering it so that I was griddled in stripes while the rest of me suffered the bittersweet agony of being plunged into the sudden, bitter cold of the mountain.

The woman stepped on the lantern, forcing it under the snow and deadening the light, not quite enough to kill the pain but enough to let me concentrate on something else. I looked up and along the length of a spear.

‘My name is Brychen, priestess of the Savage Maiden. I am looking for my brother.’

‘Barrach,’ I murmured.

‘You know him?’

‘The skaven held us in the same dungeon.’

The cold tip of her spear burrowed into my collar. ‘Yet you fled without him.’

‘He died.’

I felt a flicker of emotion run down the haft of the spear. Her bark creaked, becoming spiny and thick, circlets of thorn lengthening to grow along her arms and legs in spirals. ‘How?’

‘Fighting.’

‘How very like him. I hope that made him happy.’

I thought about how the Gorkai champion had gone, bent double and practically broken in half by Malikcek’s poison and decided to say nothing. It wasn’t the sort of thing a sister needed to hear. Particularly not one as wrathful as this one. ‘Now that we’re all happy about which side we’re on, perhaps you could remove your spear?’

‘What did Ikrit want with you?’

‘You know of him?’

‘The Wild Harvest kept him at bay for many seasons, but when the Maiden left us…’ Her attention strayed for a moment, and had I any strength left in me at all then, even with the wan pain of my lantern in every muscle, I would have easily taken that spear from her. I hadn’t though, so I didn’t.

‘I am Hamilcar Bear-Eater,’ I said. ‘Lord-Castellant of the Astral Templars and the Seven Words. I expect you will have heard of me.’ Strange as it might seem to you, in those days the Mortal Realms were rich with folk who had long forgotten the name ‘Sigmar,’ much less ever seen one of his celebrated champions in the flesh. ‘He wanted what the God-King has given to me, as he did with your brother. He failed. With us both, I think. Take solace in the fact that he suffered for his pride.’ I knew I would. ‘He’s dead. I’m sure of that.’

‘Dead?’ she scoffed. ‘Hardly. If it were so easy that you could do such a thing, then someone else would have done it before now.’

‘You think any of this was eas–’

Before I could argue it further, Brychen had already pushed her spear into me, running between the thick tendons at the base of my neck, through my throat, and pinning me to the ice. The pain was as overwhelming as it was unexpected. I made several short, terrifically painful gulps for air, but nothing went down. The bloody neck wound frothed with my escaping breath.

‘Do not think of this as an act of malice,’ said Brychen, crouching beside me and cupping the back of my head with one cool, woody hand. ‘The Harvest takes life. That is simply what it does.’ My lips moved furiously, but my head was already beginning to feel heavy, my vision clouding. ‘I know what you are, Stormcast. I followed you from the Gorwood and watched your battle with the skaven and their allies. I know that a Stormcast’s gifts will return with him to his god on death. I will not let Ikrit keep even the smallest seed of you.’

The distant cry of an aetar echoed around inside my head, always distant, always fading, as the back of my head sank to the ice.