Champion of the Gods

Chapter fifteen

One of these days, I am going to sneak a body out of Azyrheim, and it is Sigmar I will be going to for help moving it.

Sigmaron is without any doubt the mightiest fortress in the Mortal Realms. Perhaps in any of the realms that float in the aetheric cloud this side of the Great Nothing. Raised at the dawning of the Age of Myth and extended and fortified over aeons, it eclipses such pretenders as Hammerhal or Nagashizzar in every conceivable aspect. Its strength can be rivalled only by the molten fury of the Brass Citadel of Khorne, or the madness-inducing structures of the Impossible Fortress. ‘Impregnable,’ then, is a word that fits neatly alongside it. And yet neither the storm golems that stand sentinel of the Forge Eternal nor the Paladin Conclaves that patrol the walls and grounds of Sigmaron even noticed my passage. The Freeguilder companies that warded the First City below – tens of thousands of men-at-arms in a city of untold millions – simply waved me past. Even the star titans that watched over the Realmgates, capable of sniffing a single corrupt thought from a puritan’s mind, let me pass unchallenged.

I took a deep breath of the stale, subterranean air and grinned as I started down the marbled steps.

If you’d told me just six months ago that I would return to the Seven Words and be glad to see the place, then I would have laughed, and cut your ale ration for a month as a precaution.

The two Judicators in basalt-black armour at the bottom of the flight lowered their boltstorm crossbows.

‘Sigmar,’ breathed one. ‘He has come back.’

‘That’s right, brothers. Knight-Questor Hamilcar Bear-Eater walks amongst you.’

The Realmgate snapped shut behind me, the sudden quenching of its link to the Celestial Realm plunging the underground chamber into a wobbly, torch-lit darkness. I stood with arms spread to better display the magnificence of the armour that Sigmar’s gift had bestowed upon me.

‘Summon the Heraldors and Vexillors of your chamber that they might proclaim the good news to every ward of the fortress and into the wilds of the Gorwood beyond. Have the Angelos Conclaves take wing, and carry the word to all who shelter from their skaven oppressors.’ Fists clenched, I shouted to the cavern’s distant walls, bringing a flutter from the torches. ‘The Bear-Eater. Has. Returned!’

As my eyes adjusted to the gloom, I saw that the torches were held by a pair of Liberators, behind the Judicators, who carried them in their off-hands in place of shields.

One stepped towards me. His black helmet was almost invisible in the dark, torchlight crawling over the golden edging and the strange pictographic symbols that decorated his gorget.

‘Sheathe your warblade, my friend,’ I cried. ‘Look past the magnificence of this holy war-plate if you are able, ordered for me alone by the God-King himself, and see that it is I, Hamilcar.’

‘You have been absent for five years, lord,’ said the Liberator, sheathing his blade with apparent reluctance. ‘We had hoped… I mean, we had thought that Sigmar had bidden you do battle in some other land.’

‘Some distant land,’ murmured his brother, softly.

‘It heartens me that my absence has been noted and mulled over, mourned even, by those forged under a different storm.’ I looped out an arm and, before the Liberator could react, hugged him to my breastplate. I felt him cringe, as if he could shed his sigmarite layer and ooze out through my arms, which I put down to an aversion to emotion typical of Anvils of the Heldenhammer.

I was in a good mood, and determined to let everyone share in it, whether they had been forged under a darksome phase of the Mallus or not.

‘Come!’ I barked. ‘I have passed beneath the gaze of the solar wyrm Agraphon who wards the Seventh Gate and crossed its threshold. I would feel the icy breath of Ghur on my face, and see its mountains one more time.’ I brushed past the Liberator, who still appeared somewhat stunned by the passion of my greeting, and between the two Judicators before they had a chance to decide what to do with me. ‘Knight-Questor Hamilcar Bear-Eater will be about his sacred task,’ I thundered, just as I was hitting my stride.

The title of Knight-Questor actually conferred few privileges over and above that of Lord-Castellant, except when dealing with those of even higher authority, which I have to say I was looking forward to enormously. I had yet to tire of announcing it to every warrior I passed.

‘I have been set a geas by the grace of the God-King himself, and by the Twelve-Pointed Star I will see it done.’

I stopped sharply and turned back.

The four Anvils of the Heldenhammer stood there like the recently animated dead in a puddle of torchlight.

‘Is it still winter?’

‘No, lord.’

‘I suppose even I can’t have every­thing.’

‘Lord?’

‘Carry on.’

And with that, I left them to it. I had rarely ventured into the endless maze of catacombs that plumbed the Gorkomon during my time as Lord-Castellant of the Seven Words. I have little sense of direction in such spaces, and have no taste for confinement. But I had been Lord-Castellant.

I knew the way.

The Seven Words, as you may know, is a serviceable pile of fortifications situated upon the craggy lip of the Gorkomon, but as much of it exists inside the mountain as upon it. The first folk to build here had been duardin, but next to nothing was known of them, all trace of anything beyond their mere existence obliterated by millennia of serial reconquests. They had built the Seventh Gate, we think, linking the surface fortress to Azyr, but why they had built it so far underground and what the purpose of the rest of the labyrinth had been were mysteries lost to the Age of Chaos. Xeros, in one of his more lucid phases, had once told me that the old duardin had crafted worms of iron and steam to carve these tunnels, and that in the millennia since their makers’ demise the machines had burrowed on without purpose. But, the odd moonclan aside – left over from the last bloody change in occupation but one – nothing was ever found down there. I happily put the theory down to the Lord-Relictor’s usual inability to cope with too many days spent in one spot without blood to spill.

About twenty minutes and several equally awed and speechless Anvils of the Heldenhammer later, I strode through a flat dolmen of stone and into open air.

A small amber sun winked in a clear blue sky. The brightness fair kissed my eyelids, like a journeyman lector alighting once again upon hallowed soil. Summer, then – but sitting less than a mile below the highest point in Ghur, there was enough of a chill in the air for me to consider it homely.

It smelled of night soil, of livestock and dray beasts, beasts for hawking and hunting, of men and duardin and aelves. It smelled of tanneries and sawmills, butchers and brewers. Life, then. Vigorous and barely tamed. Ghur. Dogs barked from higgledy-piggledy little streets that scrambled along the clefts and crags of the Gorkomon. Children played there. Drays rattled over broken cobbles, hauled by men, by horses and by placid half-tree, half-beast things native to the Gorwood. The clash of steel rose from the Freeguilder blockhouses. Pennons bearing the fortress’ seven rings alongside the emblems of Azyr fluttered in a gale that could have knocked a grown man over, but which for the Seven Words could be considered gentle.

The Seven Words was a frontier fort in every respect. Every man, woman and child, regardless of species or trade, knew the precariousness of their adopted home, and they lived fully in the knowledge that death was at best one more day away.

My kind of people.

Despite an enviable position in command of the mightiest peak in Ghur, the Seven Words was almost laughably indefensible. The walls, for instance. For reasons known only to the old duardin who had built them, they were far too long, defending vast swathes of icy rock on which a flock of an Azyr breed of goat now dutifully grazed, presumably thankful for their security. Its situation several miles above the cloud layer also left the fortress entirely dependent on a network of messenger forts and watchkeeps for word of the Gorwood – a network which, if the Vikaeus-thing were to be believed, had been completely overrun by Ikrit’s skaven. And then of course, there was Ghur itself. Ever hungry, birds, insects and small animals chiselled away at the fortress almost as quickly as it could be repaired.

Hearing the mournful cry of an aetar, I looked up.

Shielding my eyes against the low sun, I caught a pinprick of something dark and shiny against the awesome blue of the sky, and followed it as far as I could manage with my eyes until it disappeared into the high crags.

At its summit the Gorkomon was encased in ice year-round, the source of the summer snows that would occasionally blanket the Seven Words. The timing and depth of which was a source of great interest to the gamblers amongst the local population, myself included. Even I, after a second attempt on the summit (coming, coincidentally enough, on the same night as my first summerfall revel), had accepted that the final few hundred feet of the Gorkomon were unconquerable.

There was a reason that the aetar had looked ambivalently down from their fortress-eyries on a hundred changes in ownership of the Seven Words.

My gaze dropped to the keep. Ostensibly the last and toughest redoubt of any fortress, this keep was a silver tower built upon an Ironjawz scrapfort built upon the rugged square block of a duardin keep-hold. It was a record of the disparate peoples that had fought here, foolishly tried to live here and ultimately died here. It was the single most anarchic thing I have ever seen – and I had once spent the night in an Ironjawz camp – and naturally I thought it was wonderful. Useless at what it was meant to do. But wonderful.

Crossing my arms, I looked out over the mess of wards and defensive works towards the main gate. From there, a bridge flew across to the shoulder of the neighbouring peak. The mountain had not had a name when we arrived, but Broudiccan, in a rare moment of high levity, had dubbed it the Morkogon. It had stuck. That solitary approach was the Seven Words’ one true concession to actual defensibility, being as it was the only decent way in or out. There were plenty of indecent ways of course, and all I needed to do was find myself one of those and–

‘Hamilcar!’

The shout from the streets below interrupted my thoughts before I could finish.

A big, bald-headed man in soiled overalls, stained red up to the elbows, stood on the cobbles outside a slaughterhouse, caught mid-hurl with a bucket full of offal. The bucket dropped from his fingers and clattered across the cobbles. He backed away from it, slapping his hand to his mouth.

‘Hamilcar!’ someone else yelled.

I didn’t see exactly who, because before I had realised what was happening there were men and women piling into the street, abandoning their animals, throwing open their doors, looking up and pointing.

‘Hamilcar is back!’

I raised my hand immodestly and the cry became a cheer.

‘Hamilcar!’

Then a chant.

‘Hamilcar! Hamilcar! Hamilcar!’

Then a wave that wasn’t really words at all, but a rush of raw emotion and sound, worship in the mindless roar of the sea. I thought about what Sigmar had said to me, that he had been mortal once, that all the great divinities of the Pantheon once had been, and wondered for a moment if to these people I could actually be a god. If the Wild Maiden could do it and Ikrit could aspire to it, then why not Hamilcar Bear-Eater? Laughing at the absurdity of the thought, I raised my palms in an appeal for quiet, but, as I had known it would, the recognition only spurred them to greater volume. My name came faster and faster, and my grin grew broader and broader.

I hadn’t realised how much I had missed this.

‘Yes!’ I bellowed, shouting over them all. ‘You are saved now. Hamilcar has returned!’

The roar that greeted that declaration made what had come before sound like a ripple of applause through the Collegiate Arcane’s private galleries (so I’m told – a friend of mine has been there). The crowd suddenly rushed towards me. A narrow staircase meandered its way from the inner wards to the catacombs’ entrance, warded by a pair of Liberators in black aegis war-plate and shields. The crowd forced them aside. And I waited for them, arms spread as if to welcome a horde of my children. We laughed and cried. I patted heads and brushed fingers that were raised to mine, allowing the amethyst and gold of my thrice-blessed to be kissed and prayed upon until it felt as though I had been manhandled by half of Ghur.

And I milked every moment of it.

‘Who will hold the Seven Words where all before have tried and failed?’ I bellowed.

‘Hamilcar!’

‘And you all will hold it with me.’

Their cheers were deafening.

‘For the God-King!’

‘Hamilcar!’

I wasn’t here to save them, of course, unless I happened to do so indirectly, which wasn’t impossible, but I couldn’t help myself.

‘Hamilcar!’

‘Hamilcar! Hamilcar!’

I leapt off the last step and into the Seven Words proper, a grin as broad as the sea gates of Stardock on my face.

The sloping courtyard was strangely empty of people but for a single Stormcast Eternal, walking towards me with the metronomic clack-clack-clack of a castellant’s halberd on stone. A blazing sun masked his face. Golden serpents coiled about his forearms and legs, their distending jaws the plates for elbows and knees. A thick yellow and black cloak rippled out behind him in the seven winds, a warding lantern rattling against his thigh.

The crowd around us grew suddenly quiet.

As if a grownup had just entered the fortress.

‘You are late, Hamilcar Bear-Eater.’

No two Stormcast Eternals are alike, not even two Lord-Castellants, but like me, Akturus Ironheel knew how to make an awesome first impression.

He let his halberd droop a fraction so that its blade turned towards me.

I felt my shoulders sag.

Akturus’ eyes glinted inside his golden mask.

‘I have been waiting five years for this.’