Champion of the Gods

Chapter twelve

It occurs to me now that I’ve spent a good portion of this tale describing how badly things have hurt. I wouldn’t want to describe what followed and have you accuse me of exaggerating my suffering to make for a better story. While that is certainly the sort of thing that I would do, I am also a master storyteller, my skills honed by a thousand firesides in Shyish and Ghur and Azyr, and I would be far more subtle about it than that. To spare myself the charge of embellishment, and you the ordeal, I’ll skip over the details of the reforging that followed my death beneath Brychen’s spear. Know only that it was by far the most painful of the procedures that I had yet endured upon the Anvil, as if the Smith did not remake me so much as bash the pieces of me together until they fused into a rough approximation of the hero I had been before. Yet there was a bliss of sorts, throughout the pain, to being once again in the charge of a master maker.

And when I opened my eyes for the first time after my third death, the last thing I’d expected to see was the inside of another cell.

‘This is someone’s idea of a joke, isn’t it? Zephacleas! Are you out there?’

I stood up. The movement caused me no pain. I felt strong again, but not quite yet myself. Things could become lost in the reforging, I knew, but whatever I thought I was missing I couldn’t place. I pushed the heel of my palm into my chest, like a hypochondriac feeling for a lump, but it eluded me, whatever it was. I shook off the empty feeling with a conscious shiver.

Soul searching never had been my strongest area.

I looked down at myself, my restored body clad in a fur-lined gown. The weave was finer than anything that mortal hands could match, even if they had access to materials as flawless as these. The lining was from the fur of no beast that ever lived in the Mortal Realms, I’ll tell you that.

The cell I now found myself in was practically luxurious compared to the one I had gone to such extraordinary lengths to escape. The floor was flagged and even. There was a cot with bedding, large enough for eight feet and four hundred pounds of Stormcast Eternal to lie comfortably. A plain-looking chair stood with its back to the dressed stone of the far wall. There was even a basin with taps for hot and cold running water, practically unheard of luxuries even in the rarefied echelons of the Collegiate Arcana. The bars were celestite. That was strange. The seraphon starmetal was too astoundingly rare even for the accoutrement of Lord-Celestants, but it was well-known about the celestine vaults that Grungni and his Smiths were able to source enough of the material for their own private needs. They vibrated musically. It was actually quite pleasant, but I expected it to get tiresome quite quickly.

‘A better class of prisoner then?’ I mused aloud. ‘Or a better class of captor?’

‘You’re no prisoner in my house, Hamilcar Bear-Eater.’

On the other side of the bars was a guard room, typical of the form. A single three-legged stool stood in front of a no-nonsense, steel-clad door. A duardin sat in it, slouched forwards, elbows on his knees, studying me intently and drawing the eye in kind.

The absolute size of him was oddly difficult to be sure about. He seemed to fluctuate between a roughly duardin-sized core of strength and something far larger than the room he occupied. That duardin centre was fantastically well muscled, stoking an ember of manly envy even in me, which you should know is the sort of thing I don’t admit to lightly. Even the plain workman’s leathers he wore couldn’t mask that kind of obvious power. His beard was the grey of good iron, split into two plaits that wound Sigmar alone knew how many times about his waist until they lay thicker than mail. His ruddy cheeks were blackened by soot and years, and by an implacability of expression that made him impossible to read.

‘That’s me,’ I shrugged. ‘The Bear-Eater. I talk before I think. And that’s if I think.’ I wrapped my fingers around the quietly singing starmetal and eyeballed the duardin through the bars. ‘It’s been over fifty Ghur-years since I’ve walked the rings of the Sigmarabulum. I’m sure every guest chamber in the Aetherdomes is barred with celestite these days.’

The duardin frowned. The room darkened with it, the very walls about me seeming to bow under some inward pressure. ‘Your reputation for tomfoolery goes before you, Hamilcar.’

‘Though it is an almost unheard of phenomenon, you have me at a slight disadvantage, then. Who are you?’

‘My name is Ong. I assumed you’d heard of me.’

I know a little of the duardin tongue. It’s not nearly the secret language so many of the Dispossessed clans seem to think it still is, and it’s a handy tongue to have a grasp of in Azyrheim where almost all of the bawdiest ale houses are duardin free-houses. The name meant ‘One’. My heart gave a traitorous little flutter. I did indeed know this duardin, for his name had been beaten into my armour, although not in a form that I or any Stormcast Eternal I knew of could read or speak aloud.

‘You are one of the Six Smiths,’ I said.

The duardin (the god, actually – though I suppose he must have been duardin once), Ong, produced a grimace and pushed his tongue against the gap left by a missing tooth. ‘I always hated that name, you know. It was Grungni as coined it, of course. As if he owned us. Never thought it’d catch on the way it did. Are you aught more than Sigmar’s will, lad?’

‘Some would answer yes.’

‘Aye, they would, but I didn’t ask them.’

I shrugged. ‘I’d say no.’

Ong clapped his thigh and nodded, grinning with the same meagre apportionment with which he had earlier frowned. The pressure on the chamber eased slightly and the celestite again began to sing. ‘Good answer, lad. Good answer. The right answer too, for what that’s worth. Under better circumstances, I think I’d have enjoyed having you about my Forge to put the realms to rights. Your legend around here doesn’t quite do you justice.’

‘You’ll hear a better class of story beyond Sigmaron’s walls.’

I never did understand why, but the Astral Templars aside, my fellow Stormcast Eternals never exactly took to me in the same way as the soldiers of the mortal races had.

Yet more evidence for the imperfection of the reforging process, I suppose.

‘Aye, I did hear that, but I can’t leave my Forge.’

It sounded like my personal kind of hell. ‘Why not?’

‘Busy.’

‘Then let me out of here, and I’ll show you all the best drinking halls in Azyrheim.’

‘After Sigmar has rid the Mortal Realms of Chaos. Maybe.’ This struck me as the godly equivalent of ‘when Aqshy freezes over’. The Smith’s frown deepened. ‘How do you feel?’

‘Feel?’ I felt as though there was a gaping hole somewhere in my chest, not that it was any business of his. ‘You put a bear in a cage and ask him how he feels?’ I rolled my wrists and made fists, my intention being to show how strong I felt, laugh it off, but some liga­ment of the soul, unconnected to any muscle, twanged and drew my face into a grimace.

Ong leant forwards. ‘What?’

I tried to smile. ‘If you weren’t right here in the room with me I’d say you hadn’t done your best work here.’

The Smith didn’t react to the insult. He reminded me a little bit of Ikrit in that respect, the way he would hold himself apart and grill me, uncaring of the answers I gave. But it was no dearth of emotion that made Ong inscrutable: it was the depth of it. Ikrit aspired to be a god. He masqueraded as a god. The Smith was a god. The thoughts inside his head passed a long way beyond my notice, and what he felt had an equivalent gulf of travel, and had to be powerful indeed, before it would show on his face.

‘What makes you say that?’ he said

‘It hurt. More than usual. And I feel…’ I hesitated, unsure what to say to get me out of here and back to Ghur the fastest. I settled for, ‘Different.’

Ong eased back on his stool, big hands clasped over his big knees. ‘I’ve never received a warrior in my Forge as broken in spirit as you were. The lords-arcanum almost threw you out, you know, before you even got near to my Anvil. They’d never seen anything like it, actually thought you some trick of the Dark Powers. Nor would it be the first time they’ve tried to sneak a corruption into the Forge Eternal.’ He held up his forefinger and thumb, an inch apart, the calluses almost touching. ‘This close to returning to the Cosmic Storm, lad, that’s where you were. Maybe you’d have preferred that. Many would. But we are what we are, and we do as that demands of us.’

I shrugged. It was all the opinion I had on any of that.

‘Remake the fallen,’ Ong pronounced. ‘That’s my task here. Repetitive, aye, it can be that, but never dull. You, though.’ He shook his head, pulling back his lips and sucking in through his teeth. ‘You can’t make right what isn’t all there. So my mother used to say.’

‘You had a mother?’

‘Once.’

I grunted. We had that in common.

It didn’t make me feel especially godly.

‘I’m not one for buttering words, Hamilcar Bear-Eater, I don’t get a lot of company down here, so I’ll just lay it out for you. I couldn’t reforge you right. Nor even close to right, since we’re being honest with one another. Only to the best of my ability, and that sits ill with me.’

‘I feel fine,’ I lied.

‘You ain’t anywhere near to fine. I wouldn’t allow an arrowhead to leave my Forge so imperfect.’

Every word he spoke was a pump at the bellows, drawing the air out of the room. I took a step back from the bars and spread my arms.

‘Come in here with me and we’ll talk about imperfect.’

Ong’s stolid frown cracked and he gave a dour chuckle. ‘Under better circumstances, aye. But when was then ever better than now. Never, I think.’ The false mirth faded and the walls again darkened, curving inwards to enclose us. ‘I take pride in my work. I’ll not have you walking the orrery bastions of Sigmaron bringing shame on me.’ He jabbed his thumb into his chest. ‘There’s a reason that I’m called “Ong”.’

‘So Sigmar doesn’t know I’m here?’

‘Reforging a warrior’s a tricky process, particularly after the first time. Can take days.’ He shrugged. ‘Can take centuries.’

‘Centuries?’

I didn’t know much about the affairs of gods, and I didn’t much care, but the idea of spending a hundred years or more in that airless cell had me practically scrabbling at the walls right then and there.

‘Release me to the Castellan Temple now. I’ll bathe in snow water, eat my own weight in meat, drink ’til I pass out, and then forget this conversation ever took place.’

‘Don’t try to intimidate me, lad. I’m not some hardlucked tinkerer looking to eke out some prospect in the Ghurlands, there to be browbeaten by some near-immortal I made.’ He thumped out those last words on his chest, and the walls and ceiling grumbled with him. The shadows cast by the bars of my cell pirouetted and stretched.

I held his stare, refusing to be cowed.

‘It’s for the good of the Stormhosts that you’re here. And if I do ever need to explain to Sigmar why you never emerged from the Forge, and don’t think you’re so important to him that I ever will, mind you, then I’ll answer him truthful – and believe you this, Hamilcar Bear-Eater, he’ll take my word on it. He’s a wise god, is Sigmar. He knows that when it comes to this Forge that Grungni and we Smiths know best. Until I can figure out what’s been done to you, and how to fix it, you’re going nowhere.’ He waved his hand vaguely. ‘I can’t guarantee you won’t break up into lightning the minute you’re beyond the Sigmarabulum, maybe take a whole command echelon and a ward of Azyrheim with you as you go.’

‘And how long will that be?’

‘Until I know more, I’d just be guessing.’

Ong stood up, shrinking and hardening as he did so, locking onto the form and size of an abnormally muscular duardin even as he walked towards the door behind him. The knock coincided perfectly with his arrival, and he opened it onto three Stormcast Eternals.

A young duardin stood with them. He said nothing, but his eyes carried a crackling intensity that was almost as terrible to look at as the demi-god Smith upon whom he waited. Perhaps even more so. The duardin nodded and withdrew, much to the apparent relief of the three Stormcast Eternals that had accompanied him. They filed inside.

Pulling up my chair and turning it backwards like the show-off I was, I planted myself in it. ‘You’ve surpassed yourself, Ong,’ I said. ‘You’ve managed to put all my favourite people into one room.’