Champion of the Gods

Chapter twenty-five

‘What think you of your conquest, my king?’

Vikaelia stood before me in spousal furs, hands on hips. Her body was clad in a bodice of finely stitched leathers and hides, the individual squares of leather crawling with the warrior motifs of her tribe. A pair of black bear paws cupped her breasts, the claws sharpened to lie against pale skin. A zephyr feather skirt glittered and dazzled down to her ankles. Her arms, hardened by axe and spear and sling, were strapped into vambraces of soft minkgor leather. The outfit left her shoulders bare. The sight of even that much uncovered skin was enough to arouse a fever in me.

Her lips parted, powdered with goldspar, inflamed by too much ale and no little pride.

‘You stay your final blow,’ she said, her voice slurring slightly. ‘Does your courage fail you at the last?’ She stepped back.

She was a queen. My queen.

Sigmar, I wanted her.

And Hamul of the White Spear Tribe got what he wanted.

I barked like an animal, unsettling the hounds curled up around the ember coral in the corners as I rose to tackle her. She yelped in surprise as I lifted her off the ground, the muscles in my shoulders bunching as I locked my hands together behind her back.

‘Hamul has nothing if not courage.’

We fell together into the bedding furs. Even with a dozen layers of fur between us the ground was hard, but I was accustomed to ice and naked rock and so was she. Light and glitter from her zephyrarch skirt settled on us like a dusting of snow. I laughed as she scratched her nails down my chest, and grabbed at her wrist.

The grave chill of her touch seared the passion from me, and I pulled my hand away to stare at her arm.

The hard muscles had somehow atrophied to become sinewy and thin, clad no longer in minkgor but in a stiff matt of white fur. I looked up, and into the scintillating witch-glare of a demi-god’s gaze.

The warlock recoiled from me at about the same moment that I recoiled from him.

‘Hssss,’ said Ikrit.

‘Aaaargh!’ I countered.

I woke up with a scream and the taste of warpstone breath in my mouth, rubbing my hands vigorously up and down my forearms as if to rid them of every trace of fur. Slowly becoming aware of someone standing over me, I threw out a heel to kick them off. But it wasn’t a dream anymore, and it wasn’t Ikrit. It wasn’t Vikaeus, or Vikaelia, anymore either, more’s the pity.

It was Brychen.

The priestess brushed off my wayward boot and thwacked me on the head with her spear.

‘Aaagh.’

Rubbing at my head, I backslid into a sudden recollection of lying in a bed with Ikrit on top of me. My throat clenched as if preparing to throw up. ‘Sweet Sigendil.’ The warlock had been unarmoured, very much a living, breathing, warm-blooded rat with the exception of his eyes. They had burned like dying stars. ‘Sweet Sigendil. We’re appearing in each other’s dreams now? Well, I hope you enjoyed that one, you–’

Brychen raised her spear again.

I held up a hand.

‘Wait!’

‘Are you back with us?’ said Brychen.

‘I think so.’

‘It sounded as though you were wrestling a tigress.’

‘Something… like that.’

I looked up at a familiar rock ceiling. Familiar that is except for the powerful sense of vertigo that was doing my stomach few favours. I could see that it was still and yet I could tell that it was spinning. I could feel the solid ground beneath my back and yet I knew that in reality I was falling. I tried closing my eyes, but the sense of tumbling through the aetheric cloud was even worse without the illusion of solid rock around me.

‘Did I save us all?’

‘See for yourself,’ said Brychen, more grimly than I had ever heard her speak.

With a grimace, I sat up.

I looked around.

I allowed myself a moment.

‘Well. That wasn’t what I was expecting.’

We were still in Ikrit’s burrow. Or at least a chamber that was identical in every detail to it. Every piece of parchment and stray bolt was exactly where I remembered it being. Even the two halves of the book I had torn apart lay where I’d tossed them. Hamuz el-Shaah and Nassam had made something like a pair of chairs out of the stacked papers and had collapsed into them, clutching the arms and staring at the ceiling as though on the ride of their lives. Hamuz was sporting a livid black eye and a bloody lip, his left hand draped across the arm of his paper throne in a way that suggested a break or at least a sprain. Nassam’s magnificent moustache looked a little askew and his armour scuffed, but, a spot of dizziness aside, the Jerech greatsword appeared otherwise hale and whole.

‘L-lord,’ Nassam slurred.

Hamuz’s gaze rolled towards me. I smiled reassuringly, but he recoiled as though shown a glimpse of fang. Fear and love warred over his face, and I recognised the look that mortal men and women showed to the Stormcast Eternals all over the Mortal Realms. Except for me. No one ever wanted the mortals’ fear, but I had never even desired their respect, which was probably why they had always given it so whole-heartedly. I just wanted them to love me enough to forget their fear of death, to fight beside me in Sigmar’s name.

Only now he had seen something of that which my brother Stormcasts had sensed.

I was a broken hero.

Part of me wanted to apologise for my loss of temper but, as with so many of the traits that lifted a man above the dogs in his cave, the skill of doing so just wasn’t in me.

‘I think that the mortal man I once was… wasn’t a very good man.’ I sighed. I looked at the floor as if the words I sought might be there amongst the scattered pages, taunting me with my inability to know them. ‘Why me?’ My voice had become a hiss. It was unused to articulating these kinds of thoughts. ‘Why did the God-King choose to raise up someone like me?’

Hamuz attempted to say something, his head lolling back into his seat.

I took it as encouragement.

‘You are right, my friend. And you too, Nassam. Thank you, both.’ I offered a hand, which the Jerech captain regarded woozily. ‘Sigmar wanted a warrior and that was what I gave him. The rest was in his power to reshape, and he did. He made me better than the man he found. Fair enough, a lot better. And though Ikrit would strive to see that great work undone, I make you this promise now that I’ll always strive to be the best man I remember being rather than the worst. And with you men here to help me, how can I fail?’

‘Ungh.’

Nassam slipped off his seat and flopped onto his side.

I frowned at him, then at Hamuz, glancing sideways at Brychen.

‘Do they seem a little off to you?’

‘It is this place,’ said Brychen, and I detected a hitch of tension in her voice that I hadn’t before, as if she was concentrating very hard on one small thing and even talking to me was a distraction she could do without.

‘I wonder where that is,’ I said.

‘The realm roots,’ she whispered.

She stared up at the ceiling with plates for eyes as if it were a circling aetar.

It felt like one.

‘The realm…’ And then I understood what she meant. A Stormcast Eternal always knew where he was in the realm, and I had been here before.

It wasn’t in the realms.

‘I’ve felt the formless magic of this half-realm before. Once. When I fought against the Varanguard of the Everchosen and their daemonic allies at Beast’s Maw. The Arcway Fortress of Gorgonsarr.’

‘Gorgonsarr,’ breathed Hamuz, eyes rolling. ‘Lord-Celestant… Kaedus Fulgurine… led that assault.’

‘Why do you think we lost?’ I frowned as I looked around. ‘We’re in the Allpoints.’

‘Sigmar…’ the Jerech moaned.

‘But this sense of tumbling, falling, this is new. It was not like that when I stepped through the Maw. It’s as if a piece of Ghur has been shorn away and cast into the aetheric cloud.’ I turned to Brychen. ‘Why aren’t you feeling it too?’

‘Am I not?’ She giggled, before she could control herself. ‘Our place within the realm roots is unsettled. We are still burrowing through the void. The ghurlines grow thin but I can feel them still. If I concentrate. They are a point of focus for me. I…’ She smothered another high-pitched laugh. Whatever she was feeling had pushed her to the edge of madness. ‘I think that Ikrit meant for us to be cast adrift in the realm roots, but we have not yet travelled far.’

The voicing of Ikrit’s name made me shiver.

I pushed the image of him bestride me far away.

‘Do you mean to say that this entire burrow is travelling through the Allpoints?’ I said. No one replied so I nodded in answer to my own question. ‘Of course. That would explain how Ikrit has managed to keep ahead of the Horned Rat and every other god he’s irked over the centuries. You thought he was nomadic, priestess, but he never really goes anywhere. When he’s ready to move he just unmoors his entire burrow to cast back into the Allpoints. Whatever damage I caused in my escape, it must have unintentionally begun the process.’

‘So… all of these flayed trees?’ Brychen toed aside a piece of parchment from the general ground litter.

‘Must be what Ikrit couldn’t bear to leave behind,’ I said. I didn’t want to add that Ikrit had lured me into yet another trap, so I didn’t, but that didn’t do much to alter the fact that he clearly had. ‘He’s probably ransacking the Seven Words about now,’ I sighed. ‘Looking for Akturus’ lantern.’

‘Which would suggest that he would want a way back.’

I snapped my fingers. ‘Yes! You said that you can still feel the energies of Ghur nearby. These… ghurlines?’

‘I can, but I told you that they are weak and becoming weaker. I will need to be able to concentrate if I am to find a path back to the Gorwood.’

‘Just try to avoid the Varanspire.’

‘You do understand that the realm roots run through the entirety of the Mortal Realms, and beyond.’

‘I was making a joke,’ I said, trying – successfully, I think – to cover for the fact that I had not been.

‘Varan… spire?’ murmured Hamuz.

‘The fortress of the Three-Eyed King,’ I told him. ‘It’s supposed to be in there, somewhere, though I know of no one who’s ever seen it and returned.’

Hamuz grinned like a lunatic, then passed out.

I looked at him. Then at Nassam, splayed out on the floor. Brychen, staring at the door, lips peeling, unpeeling, fighting to keep her eyes from crossing.

‘This is going to be harder than I’d imagined,’ I muttered.

Isn’t it always?