Champion of the Gods

Chapter twenty-six

Within the bounds of Ikrit’s chambers, all was much as it had been when the lair had still been tethered to the Ghurlands. Beyond his door, the insanity of unreality reigned. Passages flexed towards some immaterial end-point, their walls smooth to the touch, but otherwise indistinct, as though the matter to make them had yet to be fully mined from the aether. Pinpoints of light that weren’t true stars, waypoints in the lunatic substrata of the Allpoints perhaps, streaked as we plunged deeper through the plane of the realmsphere, smearing the half-made walls a virulent green. Energy and motion vibrated the walls, the ground underfoot. We were accelerating, spinning out of control, beyond Sigendil’s light and un-anchored from the Mortal Realms. It was becoming too much even for my awesome constitution to bear.

‘Which way to the Gorwood?’ I roared.

Our descent was soundless, the Allpoints a void, but in my soul it screamed and it was over that imagined cry that I strained to be heard.

‘Do not talk to me,’ said Brychen, voice high with strain. ‘Just follow.’

Staggering, as though her legs were of variable and changing lengths, the priestess veered towards a flapping maw in the substance of the wall. It took me a moment to recognise it as the fork to another passage. I blinked. The maelstrom of energy was overwhelming, but my eyes were starting to adapt to it. Either that or the lair itself was starting to impose some kind of stability on the raw flux of the aether. If I looked hard enough and concentrated, I could even see through the wall in front of me, visualising instead the whole labyrinth of tunnels and caverns, boring outwards through the Chaos until my eyes crossed. I blinked and tried again, but it was like holding a finger in front of your nose and forcing yourself to see double.

All I could see was wall.

Hamuz murmured desperate nothings in my ear, struggling limply where he lay across my pauldron.

‘It’s alright, my friend.’ I gave him a reassuring pat on the back, but he didn’t seem to notice it, which was hardly surprising.

Nassam, on the other hand, stumbled along behind us under his own power. The Jerech greatsword actually seemed to be coping a little better out here than he had been in Ikrit’s chambers. I assumed it had something to do with at least now being able to see the madness he was feeling. Whatever the reason for it, I was grateful. I had broad enough shoulders to carry both men, but I preferred keeping one hand free for my halberd and a spare blade at my back. Somehow I doubted that Brychen was going to be much use if we ran into anything that objected to our presence, which experience told me we would, eventually.

The priestess shuddered and sank into the upright support of her spear.

‘Bounteous destruction!’ she wailed. ‘It is failing.’

‘What is?’

‘My sight. My breath. I can feel the ghurlines stretching thin. The lair falls deeper into the foundations of the realm, leaving the sphere entirely.’

‘Do you have any idea where it’s taking us?’

‘No, I…’ She ground her forehead to the wood of her spear and groaned. ‘There is a destination. That I can say. But where? I am a bird on her first migration. I feel my course though I cannot know it. I am Ghur. It is all I can recognise.’

It was reassuring to know that if Brychen failed to guide us back to the Gorwood then we would eventually wash up somewhere in the Mortal Realms, but kicking back and waiting to face Ikrit at a time and place of his convenience was hardly my plan of choice. And besides, being inside this place as it had detached from Ghur had been traumatic enough. Being in it when it crash-landed gods knew where was something I was keen to avoid.

‘I believe in you,’ I said, imbuing those words with all the strength of confidence I could muster. ‘Take a moment.’

‘We don’t have a moment,’ she snapped. ‘The trail weakens by the second.’

‘Well then, try concentrating.’

‘I am concentrating!’

‘Lord?’

‘Not now, Nassam.’ I crouched down beside Brychen and spoke softly. ‘It’s like holding a wild, monstrous beast by the leash. It’s difficult to imagine that you could lose it and ever have it under control again.’

‘Yes,’ Brychen hissed, staring.

‘But it’s too savage. Too bright. This is prey that can’t hide, that won’t hide. Hear its roar. Feel the ground tremble.’

‘Lord?’ Nassam tugged on the bearskin draped over my armour.

‘Shhh.’

‘I feel it.’ Brychen drew her head from her spear and turned towards me, her eyes so de-thorned, so round, that just meeting her gaze felt like an abuse of her vulnerability. ‘Can you feel it too?’

‘Not here, no. But I am a Stormcast Eternal, I have felt it before.’

‘Thank you.’

‘You did it yourself,’ I said, confident that we both knew otherwise.

‘Lord.’

‘What is it, Nassam?’

‘I can see through the walls, lord.’

I sighed. ‘Just blink a few times. It’ll pass.’

‘I think I see something coming towards us.’

‘What? Where?’

‘Skaven. Over that way.’

The Jerech lifted a hand to point a shaking finger. I stared at the solid (ish) patch of wall in question, but forcing yourself to relax at sword point seldom works, and is far more likely to achieve the opposite of what you were aiming for. Nassam, however, was proving to be the most reliably nonchalant mortal I’d ever encountered which, for a man who consumed as much qahua as he did, was quite the gift. After a few seconds’ determined squinting I did see something. A silhouette, like a night skyline glimpsed for a split-second beneath a lightning flash. Ten or eleven elongated snouts. Long implements that might have been pikes or firearms. Admittedly, they could have been lamplighters or extra-long-handled paintbrushes for all I knew. There was no depth, no texture to the impression, the hunched figures superimposed over one another like the blast shadow of some kind of mutant spawn.

Then I lost it.

I rubbed my aching eyes.

‘What should we–?’ Nassam began before I shushed him.

Skaven eyesight, I knew from experience, was so poor they probably couldn’t make out the tail waving about in front of their snouts. Even if they could peer through the tunnel walls, as we could, I doubted very much that they would have been able to pick anything as insignificant as a Stormcast Eternal and three mortal humans from the roiling mayhem of the Allpoints. Provided we stayed quiet, then unless the skaven got behind us and managed to pick up our scent, they would probably scurry on by us, no harm done. It wasn’t that fighting a dozen skaven of unknown armament and intention with just one arm and while dizzy troubled me unduly, but Brychen looked one small upset from complete mental disintegration.

And I didn’t think much of my chances of getting out of this place without her.

I put a finger over my lips.

Nassam nodded, understanding.

‘I have lost the trace of them, most understanding of overseers.’ The nervous chitter carried through the spongy barrier between us.

‘Then find-find it again.Warlock-Master Krittak smelled an intruder in these tunnels, and I will not scurry home empty-pawed.’

‘I am trying, most patient of potentates.’

‘What do you think is down here?’ A third squeak.

‘A daemon-thing from the Eightpoints,’ said the authoritative voice. ‘Until Krittak and his tinker-rats close-finish the walls they will find-burrow a way through.’

‘Daemon-thing?’

Nassam shifted position to better free his sword. ‘Are they talking about u–?’

I waved him urgently to stay quiet.

‘A small daemon-thing. If it was scary-big then Pekreek would not have lost-lost.’

‘I still look-feel for most understanding of masters.’

‘We cannot stay here,’ hissed Brychen. ‘With every moment, the great beast moves further from us.’

I held my hand up, waiting – aware, through a discombobulated assortment of senses that was not exactly sight, not exactly sound, of the skaven shuffling away from us. I exhaled and let my hand drop.

‘Alright.’ I tapped Brychen on the shoulder. ‘Go. Quietly.’

She nodded and tiptoed forwards.

‘Wait-wait!’

I squeezed Brychen’s shoulder. She stopped with a stifled groan. Nassam drew up against the tunnel wall, looking to get his sword out from between his legs. The half-formed ground sponged and quivered underfoot.

Suddenly, it dawned on me just how the skaven had been tracking us.

‘Nassam. Stop moving.’

‘That way.’ I was aware of a long, tubular apparatus like a broom being swung across the floor of a separate passage towards ours. ‘That way, master. Go-go!’

Before I even had the chance to shout a warning, a dozen tin-pot skaven warriors wielding a motley collection of spears, man-catchers and what looked like spring-loaded nets came spilling around the flex of the passage behind us. Typical skaven, they seemed preternaturally at home in the insane environment they had chosen to lair in, sprinting sure-footedly and with little obvious fear as Nassam and I struggled to stand upright and just about managed to avoid decapitating one another as we readied our weapons.

‘Stand behind me,’ I bellowed, turning to place the solid width of one Hamilcar Bear-Eater between the delirious Captain el-Shaah and the onrushing skaven.

‘Yes, lord.’ Nassam dropped back.

‘That is no daemon-thing,’ squeaked one superior thinker.

‘And there is four of it,’ added another, not to be outdone.

‘Dread whiskers of the Great Horned Rat. It is the Bear-Eater!’

That was more like it.

Some rabid breed of courage drove them on just the same, the first two frothing at the mouth, squealing in a frenzy of racial hatred and terror as they stabbed at me with spear and man-catcher. I welcomed the former into my breastplate, presenting myself as a human shield for the still-fumbling Nassam. The weapon delivered some kind of pathetic lightning charge that splashed against my armour even as the blade snapped. The man-catcher closed over my shin, snap-releases firing a ring of steel splints into my greaves. The slavers’ implement didn’t have a prayer to any god of breaking sigmarite, of course, and my sense that my attacker hadn’t really thought things through was confirmed a moment later when I pulled my leg back and dragged the ratman squealing along the ground towards me.

‘I can wait no longer!’ Brychen cried, breaking suddenly for the passage behind me.

‘Go with her, Nassam.’

‘Yes, lord.’

‘The Bear-Eater shall hold the vermin here. I–’

I glanced over my shoulder, but the Jerech was already stumbling after the departing priestess. I frowned, faintly annoyed at having my inspirational cry cut short. With a snarl, I kicked off the skaven that was still holding furiously to his man-catcher, then punched into the pack with my halberd. What I lacked in orientation I more than made up for in stature, and with the haft held diagonally I could cover most of the passage. The spear-rat ducked under the high end, but the skaven leaping over Man-catcher got a broken kneecap and a rendezvous with the floor as just reward for his keenness. Hamuz mumbled something as he was jostled against my breastplate.

‘Look-smell how the others run-flee,’ came the clawleader’s snarl. The skaven leader held the traditional position of high rank at the very back of the pack, urging his warriors on with what looked like an Ironweld blunderbuss, only ten times worse. The green fumes dribbling from the barrel seemed to be working the clawleader up into a hyperbolic state. ‘Kill-kill the storm-thing. It is alone. Kill-kill!’ He clapped the heavy gun-barrel into his palm, squeaked something that I hoped for his comrades’ sakes was Queekish for ‘get down’, and fired.

There was no solid projectile that I saw. It was as though the clawleader had just triggered the cantrip for a spell-trap to turn the air between us into a screaming, murderously glowing blizzard of shrapnel.

I hate guns. I always have, and always will. It is something I have borne with me from my mortal life, I think. In the Eternal Winterlands, a man killed and was killed in turn by the strength and reach of his own arm. Give a mortal a gun and he can hit near as hard as a Stormcast Eternal, but it is more than power that forges one of Sigmar’s chosen. It is wrong. It is unearned strength. It is unnatural, foul-smelling, and arcane. The limit of a warrior’s fury should be the throw of his spear. I have barely reconciled myself to bows.

I roared back as warpstone dust and scrap metal cut through the packed skaven bodies. It rattled against my armour like daemon hail and tore the skin from my face. I staggered back, hand belatedly rising to shield my eyes, and heard a cry from Hamuz.

The Jerech had been hit.

The clawleader tittered, drunk on warpstone vapours, already stuffing another bag full of sharp objects down the fat barrel of his gun.

‘The storm-thing bleeds. Kill-kill. Kill-kill now.’

He looked expectantly over his warriors, but unless this lair was currently hurtling towards Shyish, none of them looked as though they would be springing up any time soon.

The clawleader gulped.

He was scampering back down the tunnel before I’d even lowered my hand from my eyes.

I was tempted to give chase. I am a hunter, a wild beast at heart, and it ran against my nature to let a foe escape. There was also a chance that he would lead me right back to his brothers and the way out, but my odds of keeping pace with a fleeing skaven in this place were about as good as finding my way back without Brychen. Reluctantly, I turned around, giving Hamuz a gentle nudge as I started after the priestess.

‘Hamuz?’ Another shake. ‘El-Shaah?’

‘Still here. My lord.’

I grinned with relief. On top of the broken hand that the Jerech captain had taken falling out of the Ghurlands, he could now add a buckshot grazing to his unlikely collection of injuries. The freckling of hits to his upper thigh and forehead looked superficial to me, but there was a poisonous glitter to the wounds that didn’t look good. My smile fractured. I knew without needing to consult the knowledge of wiser heads that the captain wasn’t going to make it. The ghurite herbalists, spirit healers and warrior priests of the Freeguild talked as good a medicament as I did a campaign, but this was of a level beyond the usual flesh-eating and blood-ravaging complications of doing battle in the Realm of Beasts. This was warpstone poisoning. Even a warrior of the purity of Akturus or Vikaeus would have struggled to cleanse this wound.

‘We’re really in… the Allpoints,’ he mumbled. He was staring at the floor. The waypoints struck by beneath us like shooting stars, all falling in a line. ‘I meant to take something back… for my… daughter.’

‘Your…’ My expression wavered between a forced laugh and a full grimace. ‘What?’

‘I… brought her a… soulblight tooth from… Shyish, and… a snowflake from… Azyr. So she knows… I’m… thinking of her. She…’ He gritted his teeth against a violent shudder. ‘She’ll never believe I was… here… otherwise.’

‘I knew it,’ I said.

‘Knew what?’

‘That you were disappointed that we weren’t really going to the Varanspire.’

The captain’s chuckles faded to shallow breaths. ‘You should… leave me.’

‘You think that Hamilcar Bear-Eater, Champion of the Gods, cannot carry you?

‘Of course… not.’

‘Then don’t suggest it again.’

‘Hamilcar. Sigmar. Seven Words.’ The Jerech’s words grew quieter as he slipped back into unconsciousness. I shook him gently against the shoulder where he lay, but this time he didn’t rouse.

‘Fight, my friend. This is one battle I can’t win for you.’

I may not have been able to trace the Ghur energies as Brychen could, but I was a trapper and a hunter; I could see the depressions that Brychen and Nassam had left in the amorphous ‘rock’ and follow them. Sounds came back to me. Hushed voices. Stumbling feet. They didn’t rebound back to me in the manner of an echo, but rather trembled out of the walls like ripples through a pond. Every so often, I even trained my eyes to catch a glimpse of them. Two figures, greyed out and blurred together by several feet of intervening rock, leaning into one another like a three-legged gor, and running.

After what I presumed to be a few hundred feet, but could not be sure as the passage had a nasty habit of flexing and stretching at random, Hamuz and I came to a large half-finished cavern. The walls rippled and bulged like the skin of an under-inflated bladder. Skaven clambered over ramshackle timber scaffolds to chip away at them, others remaining below to slap at them with nothing more esoteric than paint rollers. Where their instruments passed, the walls of the cavern became marginally more opaque. They were making this place real, mining solid rock from the aether stuff of the Allpoints.

In amongst the labourers, overseeing the work, were large, black-furred skaven encased in armoured suits veined with warpstone.

They put me in mind of the lightning golems that mined the hollow core of the Mallus for sigmarite on the God-King’s behalf.

I had never ventured into the remains of the World-That-Was of course (not at that time, anyway) for it was forbidden to all but Grungni and Sigmar himself, and I had the horrible feeling that this was the vision I would hold every time I thought of it thereafter.

The skaven seemed to be in a state of some disarray, and I noticed that one armoured miner was spraying green sparks from the cracked joints of his wrist. Almost as if his arm had just got in the way of a Jerech quartz greatsword. I couldn’t help but admire Nassam’s composure. The ratman squeaked in fright at the sight of me and managed to avoid making the same mistake by getting well out of the way.

Ignoring him completely, I belted past, after Brychen and my way out, down the tunnel that he’d been hunched in front of.

The place was a warren, a howling madness of coiling trails and endlessly snaking paths that seemed to lead nowhere but always, nearly, somewhere. I’d been harbouring the hope that it would start to show some similarity to the old Nevermarsh lair, but I should have known better. That’s not how skaven minds work. Dig first, plan later. Even if Ikrit had wanted every­thing to be exactly so, I doubted even the Horned Rat himself had the power to make his minions do so, not without getting down here and doing the work himself. And neither Ikrit nor his horned god seemed like the dirtied hands type.

Without slowing down, I allowed myself a moment to close my eyes and get my bearings, to set aside the sense of acceleration. Brychen was right. We were tearing free of the realmsphere.

The reminder that I was speeding through an infinite cosmos and not, in fact, in a confined underground space, actually came as something of a relief.

Feeling surer about things, I took a deep breath and blundered on.

My first indication that I was actually getting somewhere came in a flash of amber and gnashing teeth. I felt a low growl, as low as the fire in the earth beneath the permafrost, rumble through my marrow – the challenge of one alpha beast sensing the return of another. Ghur. It knew me, and the part of me that was still of Azyr responded in kind.

My second indication was the bullet in my rondel plate.

The warpstone shell punched into the circular disc covering my armpit and threw me back against the wall of the tunnel almost as soon as I’d charged out of it and into another cavern. A second blew a hole out of the rock between my legs. A third and a fourth missed by more appreciable distances, but close enough still to cover me in an acrid haze of debris. Coughing, I stumbled across to the opposite wall, Hamuz still unconscious across my shoulder, while a fifth shot smacked into the wall where my chest had been. I looked back at the crack in the wall and grinned ruefully. The sound of ringing sigmarite had numbed my ears, but I could hear combat up ahead. Steel on glass. Wood on steel. Inhuman squeals. I couldn’t see any of it, of course, but I was taking that as a positive sign that my attackers couldn’t see me anymore either. The fingers around my halberd jangled from the shot to my armpit, but I ignored it, charging through the green fugue and back into the cavern.

I blinked, disoriented as much by the grotesquery that milled about in front of me as the warpstone poison in my eyes. Banners hung like tithes of flesh from walls that were so thin as to be practically non-existent. Stars screamed past, coloured with the reds, yellows and bilious browns of Ikrit’s colours. And not just Ikrit’s. As well as cogwork shock-vermin, engineer-piloted warsuits, chittering clan warriors kitted out with warpfire throwers, ratling cannons and poison wind launchers, the chamber heaved with heavily armoured bestigors of the Blind Herd and a score of swollen knights in the putrid iconography of the Legion of Bloat. I’ll admit, I hadn’t given a second thought to the remnants of Manguish’s forces since defeating their champion at Kurzog’s Hill, but the long-suffering adherents to Nurgle’s creed were nothing if not apathetic in the face of life’s blows.

The sounds of fighting were still coming from somewhere, but the chamber’s disorder was so great that I didn’t even know where to start.

I looked instead to where that unclean alliance of Ruin seemed to be heading.

It was a portal. It looked and smelled like the Arcway gate I had described at Beast’s Maw, although I assumed it to be an artificial and temporary one, veined with warp-lightning and surrounded by a steel ring that was suspended from the ceiling by rusted hawsers. Something about it tasted familiar. As if it were my power that had blasted this hole between realms.

The only way towards it was by a single flight of metal steps, currently groaning under the stupefying weight of Ikrit’s blightkings. Slavering and snarling, it stained the horrific warriors under its maws with amber light before devouring them wholesale. Trying to look through the portal to what lay on the other side was like looking through an orange-coloured pool in the rain. To either side of the portal apparatus, tiered gantries had been set up, bristling with skaven jezzails and ratling gunners who would occasionally pummel the liquid surface of the portal with fire, presumably with the intention of convincing whatever was on the other side to keep their heads down.

Only about half a dozen or so seemed more intent on me.

Brychen and Nassam had to be in there somewhere.

I was good, but I wasn’t quite this good.

Unshipping my lantern, I held it at arm’s length. ‘Look at me!’ I yelled, easily shouting over the mixed braying of a few thousand skaven, beastmen and plague knights. ‘Turn and be awed when Hamilcar Bear-Eater speaks to you.’ A few hideously malformed heads turned my way and I inched open the lantern’s shutter, delivering a blast of Azyr light that, even directed away, seared my eyes and burnt a scream out of me.

The blubbering squeals of gors and skaven made me feel marginally better.

When my vision cleared I saw that I had burnt a swathe through the Ruinous horde. Up on the gantry, the jezzails that had been aiming at me had all dropped their guns in favour of pawing at their bleeding eyes. I grinned at them for a moment. I’d never seriously doubted it, but it was good to be reminded that I still had it.

‘Over here, lord.’

Nassam stood at the outer rim of an expanding wedge of scorched bodies, sword glittering amber, but looking otherwise immaculate except for a few specks of blood in his magnificent beard. Brychen, on the other hand, apparently much recovered for the snarling proximity of the Ghurlands, had hurled herself onto a bestigor twice her size with an icon of Tzeentch stapled through its nose and was disembowelling it with obvious relish.

‘No time for that,’ I yelled at her.

‘The summer fades!’ Brychen shrieked over the beastman’s terrible lowing, spraying the surrounding transparency with bloody entrails. ‘The days shorten. The bowers turn red. And now comes the reaping time!’

‘Brychen. What in the–?’

I covered my mouth as something cancerous and black, and yet unmistakeably stomach-like, was skewered on the priestess’ spear, ripped out, and flung towards me. It sailed over my shoulder and burst on the ground with a wet splat. I made a face. Even I had limits. Getting as far as Nassam, I pushed the Jerech towards her, then turned to smash a blightking across the face with my lantern. Hamuz’s limbs flapped. The pox knight’s helmet snapped around with a wheeze of lanced sores. Then he hacked up yellow pus, sounding suspiciously as though he were laughing at me as it dribbled through his grille. I backed off after the greatsword.

Sigmar, but they were hard-wearing.

Brychen emitted an ululating shriek from behind me. I looked over my shoulder as she launched herself at the Skyre clan warsuit at the top of the portal steps. It raised an arm. Her spear clanged against the riveted metal. It raised the other, a pulse of green lightning stiffening trailing whip-claws into six-foot long blades, and swiped at her head. She knocked it over her head on the butt of her spear, then let the weapon fall from her hands. The warsuit’s engineer-pilot squealed in delight. Brychen’s fists burst into roaring flame. The engineer stopped squealing as Brychen tore open the machine’s chest armour and roasted the contents of the pilot’s cradle.

‘My lord.’

Nassam greeted me at the bottom step with a nod. I assumed it was for me, but then I realised he was gesturing towards el-Shaah, on my shoulder. I gave the captain a shake.

He wasn’t breathing.

‘No,’ I snarled.

I’d lost men before, I’d lost them by the tens of thousands, but Hamuz and Nassam were the first two I’d ever known well enough to really lose.

I was surprised by how angry it made me.

‘Hamuz is dead, lord,’ said Nassam, matter-of-factly.

‘Hamilcar does not answer to Death.’

I pounded up the metal steps, Nassam falling behind me, just as the skaven gun teams sorted themselves out and started firing on us. I ran past Brychen, the priestess swiping a bark-encrusted hand to swat aside a bullet and, giving a furious yell, flung myself head first into the portal.