Champion of the Gods

Chapter twenty-one

Aeygar cawed at me, the short feathers of her head and neck forced back by the wind of her flight.

‘I see them.’

A force of about thirty men was strung out over the harsh, thickly wooded slope, fleetingly visible between the groping branches of the leechwoods and carniferns. Glassmarks and crystal armour glinted in the dusk light as they fought, the sound of quartzblades on rusted skaven steel like the clinking of china from up here on the aetar’s back.

‘It’s the Jerech Blue Skies,’ I yelled at her. ‘I am starting to think they are following me.’

Many Stormcast Eternals believe in things like fate, destiny, providence. Too many. Not me. I knew that some men were just dogged enough to keep on putting themselves in the right place at the right time.

I heard the crackling pop of gunfire.

With a gum-ache hum of the aetheric, Barbarus looped under the aetar’s wings and tucked in alongside me. His russety plume whipped out behind him. The star-eagle, Nubia, soared alongside, shedding starlight with every swift beat of her wings.

‘This is their battle now,’ he said. ‘Not ours. We have a quest and I would see it through.’

The Errant-Questor was probably right, but the idea of swooping to the rescue of the Freeguild on the back of an aetar princess in full armour was too good to resist. ‘For shame, Barbarus, where is your humanity?’ I pointed down with my halberd. ‘For Sigmar!’

‘Of course. For Sigmar.’

‘Sigmar!’

Aeygar issued a war-shriek of her own as we looped towards the embattled regiment.

Barbarus was first to the ground.

The princess may have had the clear beating of the Errant-Questor over open skies, but nothing drops out of the air like a knight in armour, believe me.

Aeygar and I were still some way up when his loosed arrow tore through a clanrat warrior like a lightning bolt, splitting him from shoulders to belly and crisping him from the inside out. It happened so suddenly that even the clanrat directly behind him hadn’t realised he was dead before Barbarus swept overhead. Branches snapped at the Errant-Questor’s beating harness as he ballooned his wings, allowing the winds aetheric to snatch him up and hurl him back into the sky.

‘King in the Sky!’ I shouted approvingly, as the Errant-Questor raked the milling skaven with arrows from his realmhunter’s bow.

The clanrats were still looking dumbly after Barbarus as Princess Aeygar’s shadow descended on them.

I thrust with my halberd like a lance as Aeygar’s claws slapped through the suckered leaves and barbs of the leechwood canopy, only managing to dent the back of a fleeing warrior’s helm before the aetar beat her wings and began to climb. I bellowed, barely holding on with just one hand and my thighs.

Nubia glittered across my face like an arrow and smacked into something furry out of sight.

I swore.

I didn’t doubt that I looked magnificent, but it wouldn’t count for much if I couldn’t hit anything and every Jerech on the ground was killed.

Even the star-eagle was making a better fist of this than I was.

‘We need to go lower. Blasted trees. I’ve seen a carnifern devour a deathrattle for the marrow in its bones.’ I shook my head. That’s the sort of sight that stays with you.

Aeygar gave a screech.

‘Fair enough, princess, this one will be all about Hamilcar Bear-Eater.’

I twisted to face the ground, just as a skaven in the overly complicated bronze armour of Ikrit’s engineers pointed a weapon roughly into Barbarus’ jinking path. It was a firearm of some kind, comprised of about a dozen barrels connected by belts to a drum borne across the hunched back of a skavenslave. The cackling engineer cranked the handle, hosing the sky around the Errant-Questor with warpstone bullets. Barbarus tried to pull out of the gun’s range, but one green-glowing missile punched a hole in his wing and he went cartwheeling to the mountainside.

He made a deep, sparking crater where he hit.

The Jerech cried out in alarm, while the emboldened vermin pressed their attack.

‘I’ll give them something to squeak about,’ I told Aeygar.

The aetar gave an enquiring caw.

‘Let me worry about the trees.’

I let go of her.

It might surprise you to learn that falling from a great height is every bit as exhilarating as flying. I dropped through the thrashing branches of the Gorwood, the predatory trees desperate to get a purchase on my plate, while I bellowed joyously. A few did manage to scratch my face, but not enough to stall the descent of a Stormcast Eternal in full armour, and I hit the ground with almost as much power as Barbarus had done moments before.

The impact ripped through the spongy topsoil, tremors rippling through the underlying rock and throwing clanrat warriors from their footpaws. I was back up before they were, bruised and dazed, but confident enough in my arm to whip out my halberd and nick the throat of a clanrat as he scrambled upright.

He scrabbled uselessly at the gushing wound as he keeled over.

The remaining clanrats sought to drown me in fur. I laughed as my halberd whipped out in looping circles, the height and width of them varying like the winds of Azyr so as to rip out jaws and chests and bellies as the gods willed it. One clanrat, panicked into an act of outright bravery, leapt through the storm of blades and clamped his jaws around my gorget. His claws scratched over my breastplate. His fangs worried against thrice-blessed sigmarite. I peeled him off, lifting him by the throat with my left hand. I regarded him for a moment, detached, as if I had just shaken a pebble from my boot, then, without thinking about it, brought my other hand to his scalp and tore the ratman’s head from his shoulders. His neck geysered hot blood into my face, and I laughed and bellowed with the battle joy of the Winterlands.

For a moment there, I wasn’t me.

Or rather I was a different, older me.

I was a king of battle, a God of blades, champion of the arctic steppe. Thoughts and needs that had not commanded my soul in centuries suddenly inflamed me, painting my vision red as I struck another clanrat across the jaw, shattering its teeth and breaking its neck.

‘For the God-Peak!’ I roared. ‘For the Twelve-Pointed Star! For the Sky-Hammer!’

I had no idea what these battle-cries meant or from whence they came, but they filled me with fury as I swept my halberd low across the ground, severing the legs of another three skaven warriors. Then I hurled the still-leaking head in my left hand, poleaxing the clawleader with a blow to the snout.

‘Lord Hamilcar!’

Someone was calling my name.

Blinking the berserker haze from my eyes, I looked around.

Captain Hamuz el-Shaah waved to me from the centre of a small box formation of Jerech Blue Skies. In addition to the usual mixed groupings of swordsmen and pistoliers, I saw a handful of heavier infantrymen wielding greatswords and two more that were hunched over a brass-barrelled field gun. I’d heard them call it a demi-cannon. A plainspoken name, for a daemon of brass and powder that speaks with Sigmar’s thunder. I counted twenty-five, with five more led by a heavily bearded greatsword bravely pushing towards the fizzing crater that marked the ground about fifty yards from their position. As I watched, I saw Barbarus flap up on one wing, smash a skaven to pulp with a blow from his bow stave, then stab another through the heart with a storm-gladius. The Jerech fighting towards him gave a ragged cheer.

‘Take down the standard-bearer!’ the captain shouted to me.

Other men yelled at one another, and the two human engineers pivoted their demi-cannon towards the figure that el-Shaah was alluding to.

A skaven warlock clad in a swollen incarnation of rubberised armour pushed his ‘standard’ ahead of him on a set of clattering metal wheels. Surmounted by a branch-like array of wires and spinning prongs, the device emitted a strange amber radiance that seemed to be afflicting the surrounding skaven with an unusual savagery. I was no Lord-Arcanum or mage-sacristan (Sigmar being wise that way), but even I could see that the device was drawing on the energies of the Ghurlands somehow to empower the skaven warriors.

Trust the warlocks of the Clans Skyre to make something as simple as a battle standard complicated. Never mind Chaos. If the Pantheon could impose upon their mortal children to build fewer contraptions such as these then it would go a long way towards peace in the Mortal Realms.

I heard the boom of the demi-cannon. Skaven squealed as thirty pounds of Gorwood iron smashed through them. The warlock with the standard wasn’t amongst them.

‘Never trust a made thing to do a warrior’s work,’ I said.

‘Is the Bear-Eater. Kill-slay.’

Turning from the warlock, I saw five of Ikrit’s elite shock-vermin, each one clad in bronze plates and ticking wheels, fan towards me. Powered glaives hummed in their paws, each spinning like its own small piece of the larger work.

The first stroked his blade towards me. I clubbed it aside easily, but the second was already stabbing for my hip while a third carved towards the opposite shoulder. My halberd spun, knocking the low blow aside, and I drew in my shoulder. The withdrawal bled enough force from the blow to let my bastion armour take the hit. Angry sparks erupted around the blade as my halberd came up to uppercut the rat that had gone for my hip, only to hit glaive. It pushed my blow wide. The fifth shock-vermin aimed his glaive at my exposed midriff like a handgun and, from essentially point-blank range, fired. Purple lightning blasted from the tip of the blade. My vision soured as I was swept off my feet and into a steaming pile of armour several feet back.

I gagged on the poisonous ozone aftertaste as I stumbled back up.

The shock-vermin were already spinning and twirling towards me. They reminded me of the wandering troupes of aelven wardancers that would occasionally grace the cities of Azyr. There was the same alacrity and grace, the same singleness of purpose. But where the aelves honed their spectacular abilities through centuries of practice and an inhuman understanding of their fellow dancers, these vermin acted out of a clockwork intensity, a routine plotted and set for them by another.

Still, it was effective.

My halberd moved as though it belonged to the same system, barely keeping up with the five of them. I felt the muscles in my arms begin to throb. Sweat gathered in the furrowed frown across my brow.

One of the shock-vermin squealed as a carnifern suddenly leant in, strangling the warrior in suckervines and hoisting the struggling ratman up into its foliage. I counted my blessings and fought on against the remaining four. Then the ground burst open beneath another, a writhing mass of puckered, blood-soaked roots ensnaring two more, and it started to dawn on me that something was going on. A wooden spear erupted from the chest of one of the ensnared skaven. His armour whirred, hacking his glaive through the grasping roots, only for the butt-end of a spear to smash enough cogs to kill him. The other shrieked and squealed as the bloodroots dragged him underground.

A woman clad in a loose-fitting lattice of stiff bark plates and barbed hollies stared at me from the other side of the torn ground.

‘You?’ she said.

‘You!’ I returned.

‘I thought I killed you.’

I grinned. ‘Wouldn’t be the first.’

The final two shock-vermin ran at me together. They were still quick, and fought exquisitely as a pair, but while five warp-lightning-powered skaven warriors had been about my limit, two were well within my gift.

I rammed my halberd through the first’s gut before he could react. I made to follow through on the second only for the woman, Brychen, to toss what looked like a flower stem in his muzzle. He blinked in surprise, and I was about to laugh at them both when the ratman suddenly squealed, dropping to the ground and clawing at his snout as flesh-eating flowers started sprouting from his fur.

I looked away with a grimace as he collapsed into a steaming pile of armour, flesh mush and pungent blooms.

I saw a skavenslave with an ammunition drum attached to a torn belt fleeing into the Gorwood. The engineer that had downed Barbarus was on the ground, surrounded by dead skaven and slurping roots, Nubia frenziedly clawing the ruin of his face. I heard a cheer, naturally assumed it was for me and turned towards the Blue Skies in time to see the warlock standard-bearer fall over with one of Barbarus’ arrows sticking out of his neck. He took his arcane standard down with him.

The Ghurite energies that had been emboldening the skaven’s black little hearts began to unravel.

‘I am here for Ikrit,’ Brychen hissed.

The cannon boomed out once more, followed by an ungodly shriek as Aeygar dropped low enough to shake the branches. That was enough for the skaven. They broke for the forest, leaving their dead behind like leaf litter.

‘Hamilcar!’ yelled Hamuz el-Shaah, and the cry went up among the Blue Skies. I saw Barbarus look at his bow and then at the dead around him in confusion. ‘Hamilcar has come to save us!’

Brychen arched her eyebrow at me.

I clapped my hand on her shoulder.

She brushed it off irritably.

‘Ikrit is going to regret the day he crossed the two of us,’ I said.