Champion of the Gods

Chapter eighteen

You’ve never seen a Stormcast Eternal at full tilt. I see it on your faces. You’re thinking of the armoured warriors you are familiar with, mortal knights in iron plate. Don’t. Cast the image of such encumbered warriors struggling towards battle from your mind. We are something other. Imbued with the might of the Cosmic Storm. Elevated by a spark of the Celestial divine. We are capable of feats no mortal being could contemplate, matching blades with the greater daemons of Chaos, or sprinting in full plate and panoply as though girded by nothing but the lightning of our creation. The closest mortal analogy for being in the path of such a warrior is to be a foot soldier before a heavy cavalry charge. Put yourself in that place. The ground shakes. You feel it in the wall of your gut. Fear takes you. All the lies you have been told, all the lies you have allowed yourself to believe, taking up your meagre arms and joining a war fought between gods, they are exposed for what they are, burned away by the Light Celestial. There is nothing you can do. Not against this. Stand firm and die. Flee and die. This is above you. It is greater.

That is what it is to face a Stormcast Eternal.

Tradesfolk and Gorwood refugees screamed as I peeled off the Bear Road and tore down Warder’s Score.

Named in remembrance of the sacred lanterns with which Akturus and I had purged this particularly narrow and winding corner of the Seven Words, it was home now to chandlers and tallow makers, taper weavers and glasswrights. They scattered as I hurtled through, upsetting carts and stalls, unfinished candles spilling across the street to be crushed into wax crumbs by the Liberators pounding on my heels.

I flashed past a lighter’s shop, distantly heard the keeper hurling curses at the warriors behind me. The mould boy in the adjoining yard pelted them with hot wax from his stove, while his friends screamed insults that even I had never heard of.

If my heart were not already practically aflame with the aetheric energies of the storm it was pumping, then pride would have burst it.

A retinue of Heavens Forged pursued me through their streets, and yet without any need for an explanation the townsfolk had chosen to stand by me regardless.

I whooped as I rattled fully armoured round a tight bend.

An old woman, face wrapped in a scarf, pinched by the wind, pushed a handcart filled with animal dripping for tallow out of a gate and into the street.

I roared as I veered round her, hearing her shocked expletive as she drew back into her yard just in time to avoid being crushed by Wullas. The Liberator-Prime smashed her handcart to smithereens and splattered his immaculate war-plate with fat.

Under other circumstances I would have found it funny, but someone was going to get killed.

I bared my teeth, the wind whistling through the gaps as I thought.

About a hundred yards ahead of me, the score took a sharp bend around the jutting rocks of the Gorkomon. A gulch of about ten to fifteen feet separated the cobbles of Warder’s Score from the next meandering shamble of rooftops.

I leapt it with ease, landed heavily into a roll and immediately resumed running, tearing off to the left, away from the gate and back towards the horizon-obliterating enormity of the Gorkomon.

Wullas sailed over the gap behind me, haloed in red hair and lightning discharge from his unsheathed warblade. He landed on his knees and rolled, coming up after me in a sprint. He was good, but then I would have expected no less. He was a Stormcast Eternal. Better, he was an Astral Templar.

‘Surrender,’ he snarled. ‘There’s nowhere for you to go.’

Now I knew he was new-forged. There were a thousand ways out of the Seven Words, and they were just the ones I knew about.

The row of rooftops ended abruptly in a sheer slab of Gorkomon.

I ran into it and pushed off, using the borrowed momentum to hurl myself clear over the street and the crowds stood in it, gaping. I didn’t bother with a landing, instead banging onto the opposite rooftop on my back. I rolled like a log, roofing slates breaking under me, until I ran out of push.

I looked back.

I’d been hoping that Wullas would have been so hard on my heels that he’d just slam into the rock face, but I’d overestimated his ability to keep pace with the Bear-Eater. He was far enough behind that all he had to do was angle himself to the roofline and throw himself over.

He bellowed, legs scissoring the thin air, then crunched into the roofing slates two-footed.

I rolled out of the way as he struck with his warblade. The lightning-charged sword tore a hole in the roof, powdered slate and mould spores falling over the screaming family huddled in their one room below. Somewhere in the ward a hand bell was clanging for the Freeguild. Some patrolman screamed out in the mistaken belief that the skaven were inside the fort.

I kicked Wullas between the legs, but as he was fully armoured my toe-cap thudded hollowly against it. He grunted, drew back his arm to strike me again. I got fingers around his wrist before he could angle it properly. He snarled down at me, but whatever bewitching power my soul held over my brother Stormcast it was less debilitating second time around. We struggled for a moment until I heard the thump, thump, thump of his Liberators joining us on the roof.

A look of triumph displaced the warrior’s scowl.

I wasn’t having that.

With a roar, I threw all my strength into Wullas’ shoulder, rolling us both off the roof and into the street below.

The ground was not a great distance away, but I made sure that he hit it first. My bastion armour slammed into him a moment later, winding him enough for me to drive my fist through his teeth and smack the back of his head against the road. Cracks splintered out through the already broken cobbles and the Liberator-Prime’s eyes blazed once with lightning before rolling back in their sockets.

I bared my teeth, heart thumping, as I wound my arm back to finish him off.

Townsfolk pointed and screamed. I hesitated, looked at my bloodied fist, then at the man beneath me. I staggered to my feet, working towards a sprint as Wullas’ enraged Liberators began jumping down.

We were not in the gladiatorum now. I would not fight myself bloody, then emerge onto the Sigmarabulum all smiles to trade bragging rights for a night of ale out of Makvar’s or Gardus’ or Imperius’ war chests.

And yet, something in me had wanted nothing more than to smash Wullas’ skull into the ground.

Ikrit hadn’t broken me – he’d made me more me than I’d been in two hundred years.

Another street swept past me on my right. Gor Lane. A switchback of scattered housing all the way to the Morkogon Gate. I caught something out of the corner of my eye as I charged past, people scattering. It was white and muscular, loping towards me like a great cat in pursuit of some foundering prey beast. I heard a warbling cry and risked a look, just as the gryph-hound leapt.

Its jaws clamped over my wrist, its weight dragging us both to the ground.

My pauldron hit the ground first. Then my face. Blood splattered. My own speed sent my body tumbling forward over the cobbles, only for the savage anchor of the gryph-hound’s beaked jaws to drag me back. I screamed as my full armoured weight yanked on my shoulder socket. The gryph-hound ripsawed from side to side on my arm. It dragged me back. I stuck my boot heels into the cracks between the cobbles, but it was too strong. Powerful muscles rippled under the snowy white feathers of its massive forelimbs and thick neck. I slid myself around so as to kick the dumb beast in the head, knowing that I had mere seconds of grace before the Liberators caught up to me and my quest was finished before it had even begun.

Recognition hit me like a troggoth with a grudge.

I recalled the scruffy-feathered foundling that I had seen scavenging around the Aetherdomes of the Sigmarabulum after my return from Cartha, plagued by nightmares, my own hounds slain. Eyes as bright and wise as Sigmar’s own. Feathers like Winterlands snow. I remembered nights curled up against the cold, journeys across bog and desert and oceans of bone. The battles we fought together at their end.

‘Crow. By Sigmar.’

In answer to his name, the gryph-hound yanked on my wrist and twisted. I screamed, spots exploding through my eyes.

‘It’s me, Crow!’

‘Here, Crow.’

Letting go of my arm with a snarl, Crow padded round me, flicking his twin-forked tail and clacking his beak.

‘Surrender yourself to me, Hamilcar.’

I turned, sprawled on the cobbles and hoarse from screaming, and looked back to the junction with Gor Lane. A giant in purple and gold sigmarite stood in it.

Broudiccan.

His immense shoulders were draped in a cloak bearing the anvil and storm heraldry of the Heavens Forged. His helmet plume was white. His Mask Impassive, no longer dented by the scowl that he had diligently preserved in it for over a hundred years, was pristine. Reforged. In place of the monstrous starsoul mace with which he had proven so unstoppable, and which had received more prayers of thanks from me than Sigmar ever had, he wielded a halberd. And in the other hand, a warding lantern.

‘You are Frankos’ Lord-Castellant now?’ I said.

‘Lord-Castellant Broudiccan Stonebow, of the Heavens Forged.’ His voice was resonant, as if echoed by an empty shell of armour before emerging from his mouth slit.

‘And Crow?’

The gryph-hound opened its beak and hissed at me as if I were a stranger. Coming from my boon companion of over a hundred years, that cut deeper than beak or claws.

‘I come seeking no approval from you.’

He lowered his halberd like a barrier, bidding the pursuing Liberators to stop.

They did.

‘Hamilcar never surrenders,’ I said, grinning fiercely. ‘You should know that.’

Broudiccan was quiet for a moment. His mask turned down. ‘I do. I think. I remember dying on a nameless hill for your pride.’

‘It had a name.’

‘A name you gave it. A name to embellish your legend.’ He swung his halberd, striking sparks from the cobbles and forcing me to scramble backwards. ‘You always considered yourself the greatest among us, Hamilcar Bear-Eater. Prove it now. Let us settle this as champions.’

The growing evil in me did yearn to test my skills against Broudiccan’s, but do you recall when I said I could count the Stormcasts who could best me on the fingers of my hands?

Broudiccan’s name is number four.

Self-interest won out, but it was close fought.

‘I will not.’

‘You fear being bested.’

‘I won’t fight you here, brother. Not in anger. Not like this.’

‘Brother? You mistake what we had for friendship. You were my lord and I was your second. You were an embarrassment to the reputation of the Astral Templars.’

I knew that these words he spoke were a product of the Smith’s hammer on poor Broudiccan’s soul, distorting and destroying his memories. He wept when Sigmar returned him again to my service, some years later. Wept. Even so, they struck harder than any blow from a starsoul mace or a castellan’s halberd ever could.

I was still reeling from them when someone behind me yelled.

‘Hamilcar, Sigmar, and the Seven Words. Fire!’

The air about me exploded with gunfire, lead shot and sigmarite-tipped armour-killing rounds riddling Broudiccan’s amethyst breastplate.

The giant shrugged through the fusillade and swept up his halberd to skewer me to the cobbles before finally succumbing to the punishment.

I grinned for the briefest of moments, before it dawned on me what was going to happen.

My heart stopped.

‘Gods, no.’

Thirty men in leather and glass armour and bronze halfmasks depicting the unsetting sun blocked the street behind me in ranks. Powder smoke from their discharged pistols shrouded them and the bulk of the Gorkomon at their backs. ‘Reload!’ The front rank knelt and began doing something arcane with their firearms. ‘Target the Liberators!’

My face screwed up in concentration.

I recognised the leader.

Hamuz el-Shaah. The captain from Jercho. I cursed. The one city in the Mortal Realms where my star shone even brighter than it did in the Seven Words.

‘Fire!’

Another barrage of whistling cracks and explosive bangs riddled the scattered retinue of Liberators. Covering twice the range and four times the number of targets, the salvo lacked the stopping power that had put down Broudiccan, and the Liberators recovered with surpassing skill, unhitching shields and forming a line.

Crow lashed his tail and crouched protectively over Broudiccan’s body. No lightning bolt had consumed it to ferry his soul back to Azyr. He lived.

For now.

‘First and second ranks. Draw swords.’ There was a long, drawn-out scrape as the fourteen soldiers comprising the front ranks drew Jerech quartzswords from their scabbards. ‘Third and fourth ranks. Fire!’

Another fusillade of shot split the air above me. A bullet nicked Crow’s beak. He shrilled. A Liberator went down with a pinhole in the middle of his shield and disappeared in a crash of Celestial lightning that stove in doors, cracked stone, and splintered wooden shutters.

What had I done?

Half a day in the Mortal Realms and I had somehow managed to incite the Seven Words into armed rebellion and seen an Astral Templar cast back to the Forge Eternal.

Sometimes I don’t know my own strength.

I had to get out of the Seven Words, and now, before this uprising could spread any further. Flattering though it was, I had no wish to see the Seven Words torn apart in my name. We still had the skaven for that. I looked around for ideas. Gor Lane was tempting, but it only led down to the Morkogon Gate and there would be hundreds of Heavens Forged between me and escape. The catacombs were always an option, but they weren’t unguarded either. Akturus himself would doubtlessly be there by now, and if there was one thing I did still want to avoid then it was that.

An aetar shrieked, way above, and I looked up, my heart sinking.

That was a lot of mountain.