Champion of the Gods

Chapter twenty-three

It looked so different, I almost missed it.

Things appear different from on high than they do for those with little choice but to view it all from the ground. To recognise that is to be halfway towards understanding the apparent diffidence of the gods. Perspectives shift. Boundaries vanish. Impenetrable crags and impassable swathes of forest become flattened smudges, merging into an endless obscurity of indefinable features and the occasional nebulous shadow. What threw my eye most, however, was the indifferent passage of time. The last time that I had glimpsed the outside of Ikrit’s mountain lair it had been buried under a blizzard. To see it now, swaddled in long grasses and wild flowers, violently coloured and straining for every drop of sunlight and insectile attention, was unnerving. As if I’d closed my eyes for a moment in winter and opened them again in spring.

‘There,’ said Brychen, pointing.

The priestess was wedged in behind me, gripping my armoured thighs with hers. Her hair had been bound with thorns, but still whipped out behind her, holly leaves rustling over the barky lattice of her living plate. Directly below us, a string of great lakes shimmered against the mountain’s side like polished armour. They clung to the slope in perverse defiance of whatever native force should have had them gushing into the Nevermarsh.

‘I was just about to say that,’ I said.

Aeygar gave an amused shriek.

‘These lakes are what remain of the ice forests, where Malikcek hunted you after your escape,’ Brychen explained. ‘The warmer months are short on the mountain, and the trees wait them out in this molten form.’

‘I see no sign of skaven,’ screamed Hamuz, from the back.

The captain and his retainer, Nassam, sat further down Aeygar’s neck. Despite a few false starts in which one or both of them had almost fallen off as soon as Aeygar had spread her wings or lifted a foot, and some hair-raising episodes immediately after take-off, the two men had become reconciled to their terror over the hours it had taken us to over-fly the Nevermarsh. Nassam had even become relaxed enough to remember how abhorrent he found Brychen’s living armour and green flesh, and experimented with loosening his lock around her chest every once in a while.

‘They are gone. As I said,’ said Brychen.

‘The lair was below ground,’ I yelled back. ‘Beyond the lightning collectors that Ikrit had built over his apotheosis chamber, I don’t remember seeing anything up here.’

‘Then where are the collectors?’ said Hamuz.

I made a non-committal snort. ‘After five years in the Ghurlands, probably distributed between the bellies of every bird, mite and beast from here to Excelsis.’

‘That only proves my point,’ said Brychen. ‘The warlock has gone and the wild has reclaimed his lands.’

‘Not if the collectors had already done what he’d built them to do,’ I replied, a barely audible mutter in the wind of Aeygar’s flight.

Brychen remained quiet.

‘So what do we do, lord?’ shouted Hamuz.

‘We go in.’ Even if Ikrit was not here, and I was more certain than ever that he was, then he would have left something behind, some telltale piece of metal or arcana that to the eyes of Sigmar or Ong would tell the story of what was done to me. Or so, in my ignorance of such matters, I prayed. I patted Aeygar’s neck plumage and pointed to the silvery lake at the top of the necklace-like chain. ‘Take us down, princess. But not too close.’

The princess crowed her agreement and descended.

We landed in an explosion of pollen.

I coughed on the syrupy pungence of crushed flowers and rampant life. I blinked a few times, but my vision remained yellowed and tear-filled. Buzzing things swarmed through the ochre pall of seed pollen to breed and fight and prey on every­thing else. Including us. Hamuz and Nassam were already slapping at their skin, and even Aeygar looked discomforted until a smaller insectivorous bird flew too close and disappeared in a puff of amber feathers and a squawk. The princess tilted her neck back and swallowed. She was a creature of Ghur too, after all. The insects nibbled just as vociferously at Brychen, but it didn’t seem to bother her as much. The first to alight on my skin and jab its proboscis in died in a tiny snap of lightning, the stench of which seemed to ward off any others.

Brychen glared at me as though I’d just strangled a gryph pup.

‘And you claim to be a thing of nature?’

With a shrug, I dismounted, flattening the long stems beneath my boots and throwing up another cloud of disturbed wildlife and seed. The fingers of a shadow reached into the febrile miasma, almost reaching the ground, and I shuddered in spite of the cloying warmth. I looked up as a huge, pregnant cloud rolled across the sky between the sun and me. An itch crept down my spine, making me look away, back up the mountain’s slope.

There was nothing there.

Brychen leaned in to me, branched spear in hand, the single word she uttered making me tremble anew.

‘Malikcek.’

I nodded, doing my best to hide the fear I felt at confronting the skaven assassin again. Of course this was entirely out of concern for my companions. It would not do for Hamuz and Nassam to see their hero tremble. ‘Keep your wits about you and your swords to hand.’ I turned to Brychen. ‘I told you he was here.’

She didn’t argue.

‘You should have told them to run,’ she said instead.

And perhaps I should have, but that would not have been nearly so helpful to their morale.

‘The men of Jerech are fighting men,’ I said, thumping my breastplate, then pointing at Hamuz as though he personally exemplified the point I was making. ‘Don’t doubt their courage for the fight. They will fight, and maybe surprise you yet.’ I bared my teeth. ‘Malikcek too with any luck.’

‘Lord.’

Nassam had wandered a short way off, greatsword still in its sheath, as though he were strolling amidst the goats that grazed over the Seven Words, and was pointing to something far out in the lake. It glittered gold against the fierce brilliance of the liquid ice. Something about it tugged on my heart, stretching the glue that Ong and his apprentices had smeared over the ill-fitting shards of my soul.

Hamuz started towards it at once.

‘Stop!’ I shouted, the twang of genuine terror in my voice causing the captain to freeze as though he’d just put his foot in a bear-trap, thigh high reed stalks butting hungrily against the glassy skirts of his armour. He turned to me, white-faced. I remembered the prickling sense of cold as it had travelled up my arm from where I had touched the bark of one of those trees. I’d probably be an ice tree myself about now, had Brychen not killed me. ‘Don’t touch the ice.’

Hamuz carefully lifted his foot and drew it back from the lake-shore.

‘I think it’s your lantern, lord,’ said Nassam, surprisingly deadpan in the face of his captain’s near brush with death.

I peered out, my eyes adjusting slowly to the white glare of the lake.

It was indeed my warding lantern.

I almost laughed in surprise. I had dropped it during my fight with Malikcek, and had managed to lose it shortly after that when Brychen had stepped in to finish what the assassin had started. I had assumed that it had gone back to the celestine vaults, only to be discarded, spoiled, along with the rest of my wargear – with the exception of my halberd. For which I had Sigmar to thank. But there it was. My heart felt as though it was trying to pump air, an ache spreading through my chest. Was there some power in the ice trees that had held the lantern from Sigmar’s grasp? Or was it me? Had Ikrit broken me so completely that even its link to my soul had been weakened?

Brychen joined me at the lakeside.

‘Is that the weapon that burned Malikcek?’

I nodded. ‘Not just him.’

‘We need it,’ she said, simply.

I frowned over the burning shimmer of ice. ‘Too bad.’

She looked me up and down. ‘Your armour looks as though it covers almost all of you.’

I rapped knuckles on my forehead and winked to Nassam. ‘Only the bits that need protection.’

‘I think you can make it,’ she said.

‘You think?’

‘The trees sleep out the season. They will produce their pollen again only with the coming of the first snows.’ She lifted her gaze to meet mine. ‘How well do the Stormcast Eternals bear the cold?’

I gave a laugh, clapping her shoulders hard enough to splinter her armour. It regrew with a creak of stretching plant life as I subtly massaged my hand. ‘One day I’ll take you to the Eternal Winterlands of Azyr. Then I’ll ask the same question of you.’

Behind us, Aeygar shrieked and flapped her wings, stirring air into the fug of seed pollen and buzzing wildlife.

‘No,’ I told her. ‘I’ll not have you dipping your claws in there, not for me. Hamilcar Bear-Eater fights his own battles.’

She squawked again, but quieter.

I shook my head. ‘Snatching my lantern from the ice without touching it would take some skill. Nubia might have been able to do it, but if you’ll forgive me for pointing it out, you’re much bigger than a star-eagle.’

She clawed at the ground, beak lowered.

‘I know. But you can keep watch from the air. If anybody can spot Malikcek before Brychen or I, then it will be you.’ In truth, I doubted whether even the aetar princess would have been able to pierce the assassin’s peculiar form of obfuscation, but I wasn’t strictly lying. If anyone could do it, then it would certainly be her.

Aeygar bobbed her head, issued a shrill call, then with a paddling of her wings pulled herself back up into the sky.

I found myself unusually underawed by the feat. Had the air been any thicker, I think I could have walked on it.

‘Keep your head above the surface, and you should be fine,’ said Brychen.

‘Head up, mouth shut,’ I repeated. ‘I tell aspirants to the castellant temple the same thing before they face their first trials.’

‘Probably,’ she qualified.

‘Hamilcar spits in the eye of “probably”.’

Unfastening my belt, I tossed my halberd at Nassam. He claimed it with as much grace as he had my qahua cup the night before, which is to say it almost speared him through the chest and decapitated Hamuz. With exaggerated care, as though handling a live serpent that also happened to be a sacred relic, he clutched the weapon in both hands.

‘You can do it, my lord,’ said Hamuz.

‘I expect Sigmar left the lantern here for you to find,’ said Nassam, with a faith that, in other circumstances, some other Stormcast Eternal might have found stirring. The Jerech soldier had never met Sigmar (or so I assumed), but it did sound like exactly the sort of thing that the God-King would try to pull on me.

I am thinking of how he sent the Steel Souls into the Garden of Nurgle – twice.

Fixing my jaw, I waded into the lake.

‘Ghal Maraz, that’s cold!’

On the bank, Brychen looked smug. Ignoring her, I waded in deeper.

Whatever liquid the lake was made of, it didn’t move or feel like water. It clung to my armour as my boot went in, lapping up the greave as though trying to climb it before oozing back down. Ripples fanned out from my legs after a short delay, moving with a crystalline creak that sounded like a gryph-charger moving across too-thin ice.

‘Remember,’ Brychen called out to me. ‘The surface of the lake looks smooth, but the mountain beneath is not. The ice will be deeper in some places than others.’

I made no effort to keep the grimace from my face.

My thrice-blessed plate had already started to sing with the cold. With every deliberate step, I heard it splinter and creak. The frozen burn reached even my wool underlayers, and into the bone and muscle of my leg. Cold, though – bitter and unnatural as it surely was – was one thing I knew I could always bear. I felt no prickling sense of invisible tiny creatures crawling up the inside of my leg in the chill. Only a slowly rising numbness.

The feeling was familiar, almost comforting.

I remembered long hunts. Lying in wait. Buried in snow. Shivering in ice. Waiting for a storm petrel to return to her nest, and to my spear. For the mournfang herds to pass on their migratory trails.

The memories ached and creaked like the ice around me, just as thin.

I pushed myself away from them.

Now wasn’t the time.

Taking a deep breath, as if I could breathe body mass up from my legs and into my chest, I pressed on.

The way dipped. Ice lapped languidly up to my girdle plating. Cold pinched through the warming layers into my groin, my hips, questing into my belly from below. Still down. The ice slurped as high as the great bear emblazoned in gold on my pectoral plate. I tilted my chin away from the radiant cold and pushed on. A little further.

‘It’s too far out,’ yelled Hamuz, his voice reedy and faraway. ‘Come back.’

‘Never,’ I muttered.

A submerged stone, or something like it, slid under my boot as I put my foot down. My foot rolled over it and I started to pitch forwards. The mirror-perfect ice threw up a snarling reflection as I tipped towards it, back bent to hold my face above the surface for as long as possible.

‘My god! Hamilcar!’ Hamuz cried.

My other boot thudded to the lake bottom just as the ice ground as high as my gorget.

I let out a relieved breath. Had it been mere water then I would have been splashing around half-drowned by now. But the eerie semi-liquid I was wading through was as thick as treacle and colder than the bleakest outer reaches of Azyr.

Half frozen, I managed to straighten up.

The ice slimed back down my breastplate to chest height.

‘Nothing to it,’ I called, biting back on a snarl.

‘Then hurry up,’ said Brychen. If I could hold my teeth together without them chattering I would have ground them. ‘If Malikcek attacks now then I will have to face him alone.’

‘Nonsense,’ I managed to gasp, my chest wall freezing slowly rigid. ‘You have two of the finest warriors in Sigmar’s Freeguild there with you.’

‘And Aeygar,’ said Nassam.

‘And Aeygar,’ I acknowledged.

‘Nearly there then, lord,’ said Hamuz, reluctantly. ‘But take it slowly. Ignore her.’

‘Hamilcar heeds all advice,’ I stuttered, splashing and crunching my way towards where my lantern lay on the ice. ‘And ignores only that which he disagrees with.’ It was not far from me now, encased in the not-quite-liquid, a faint light bleeding through the crystal packing. I bared my teeth, remembering how the lantern had been unshuttered, burning Malikcek and me both, when I’d dropped it. The light did seem to have been somewhat diminished by five years of unceasing operation. Freeze-thaw damage to the glass, I supposed. It would take a few million times the five years it had been lost here in the ice to dim the light of Azyr.

Either way, I was grateful.

It was probably the only reason I wasn’t already screaming in agony.

With ice up to the rim of my gorget, I probed for the lake bottom with my toecaps. Nothing. Head tilted back, I strained my fingers for the lantern’s golden loop handle.

I clenched my chattering teeth and growled as my fingertips began to sizzle.

‘Just… a little… further.’

I made a grab for the loop handle, only for the compression wave from the movement of my own hand to push it back, just out of reach.

‘Nearly, lord,’ Nassam called out.

‘Nothing’s… ever… simple.’

As I tried to figure out how I was going to reach the damned thing, I felt the ice around my hand beginning to contract. It was the heat of my own smouldering gauntlet. It was tricking the living ice into thinking that the sun was shining on it, making it retreat further into its winter stores of chill. The turgid play of currents sucked on my arm. I fought it back up, but I saw my lantern start to sink.

‘Sigmar, damn it.’

Letting my breath out in a frozen roar, I kicked off from the bottom and lunged for the lantern. My wave caused it to wobble, the movement throwing out dulled lances of Azyr light that papered over chilblains and scrapes even as it seared my soul. I bit my knocking teeth together as I grabbed it in both hands and pulled it in to my chest.

‘Haha!’ I roared, quickly shuttering it as I treaded ‘water’. ‘Hamilcar Bear-Eater always triumphs!’ I hoisted the lantern up high, splashing my face with droplet-shards, which probably wasn’t the greatest idea in the realmsphere, and shouted, ‘Hamilcar!’ Hamuz and Nassam whooped from the lake-shore and clapped each other’s backs as my armoured body sank, my feet kicking out for something to stand on.

And kept on sinking.

‘Bloody God-King,’ I burbled, as the ice lapped over my head.