Champion of the Gods

Chapter thirty

The exuberance of the crowd fell cold, dead. Magnificently barded in white plate and silver, Cryax walked with cold-blooded malevolence down the narrow street. The muscular roll of the Dracoth’s shoulders caused his rider to sway. Vikaeus herself inspired every bit as much terror as her Celestial mount, if not more so. Her white armour shone, hard and untouchable as a glacier, and faintly luminous as though a light had been encased within. A plume of the same colour and a frost-blue cloak tore in the wind. She was a crack in the ice. A portent of doom from the heavens. She stared with cold judgement through the slits in her mask as the two Concussors riding as her escort reined in behind her. I felt the warmth drawn right out of my bones. I tried to think of something biting to say to her, something bold and witty to fire the people’s passions to my side, but my tongue was tied.

‘This plan of yours rests on blind faith and self-confidence,’ she said, and harder words have never been carved in ice and rammed through a Stormcast Eternal’s chest. ‘It hardly requires a prophet of Sigmar to foresee as much of you.’

I was too occupied by staring to notice her dismount. I only realised she was walking towards me on foot when I heard the creak of the little yard’s gate, the Lord-Veritant pushing it open on the glittering ferrule of her abjuration staff.

My heart pounded. As if it had never done anything so pure and unforced in all its long years in my hard, storm-forged chest. It was fists on an ice wall. Broken knuckles and torn nails. Suddenly the Eternal Storm and Sigmar’s great war of liberation seemed trivial, trifling concerns, matters of no consequence to beings with hearts free to think and choose, and most of all to feel. My heart and mind must have gone through several rounds of this between themselves before I managed to moisten my tongue sufficiently to make a word.

‘Vikaelia.’

‘That is not my name,’ she said, simply.

‘It was. Once.’

I couldn’t make out the Lord-Veritant’s expression through her mask. I had no doubt that she would have been puzzled by mine.

‘How would you know such a thing?’

‘I…’

In an act of astounding rarity, speaking volumes for my state of disarray, I thought before I answered.

It came to me then, in sudden, abject clarity, exactly what Vikaelia had been to me in life. She had been my queen. I had coveted her, I had taken her, and I had loved her fiercely. Every­thing I had felt for her before, I felt again then. It was heat and noise. Emotion without consequence. Plunging without course or anchor into the unformed insanity of the Eightpoints was as nothing compared to what I felt then. It was a rush, bubbling and messy, an indiscriminate mess of feelings that knew only what they wanted and couldn’t conceive of a future in which they might care who got hurt in the taking. All of this I ached to tell her, but before the words came to me, I found that I could not.

Because though a part of Hamul might have been reborn in me, she was no longer Vikaelia. She was the property of no one, not even Sigmar, for the God-King demanded only the respect of his warriors, not the fealty that a weak lord demands of his vassals.

She would remember none of it.

As delirious as my earlier revelation had been, this one was the kick in the liver that, in my experience, inevitably followed any feeling that intoxicating.

It felt like the greatest evil ever committed against the good order of the God-King, that a man could carry such love beyond death only to find it not only unrequited, but forgotten.

Vikaeus made to grab me.

I backed off, swatting aside her gleaming white gauntlet.

I’m not sure what I was afraid would happen if I let her touch me. That I would petrify in a block of ice, perhaps? Or, less spectacularly – but far more likely, and all the more terrifying for that – that I might just surrender.

Nassam stepped in front of me. Vikaeus looked down on him as though he were a blemish on her boot.

‘The ire of the God-King is not towards you, Jerech. But it can be.’

‘Lord?’ he asked.

‘It’s alright.’

He surprised me by looking relieved. ‘Lady,’ he said, bowing to the Lord-Veritant, and then withdrew.

‘So you are capable of being reasonable,’ said Vikaeus, the mortal already dismissed from her thoughts. ‘The lords-sacristan did indeed speak truthfully. You have been changed.’

‘Would you believe me if I told you that I was a Knight-Questor, here on a mission of divine significance from Sigmar himself?’

‘Akturus wove me the same tale. He should have known better from the last time you tricked him.’

‘This is different.’

‘Because Sigmar sent you?’

‘Yes!’ I shouted, smacking my hands together. Retreating into the old habits helped obscure the fact that my hands were shaking.

Vikaeus took another step towards me.

‘And yet it was Sigmar who sent me to bring you back. Explain that.’

‘He had to, because you see, Ong, the first of the Six Smiths–’

‘I do not need you to spin me a tale, Hamilcar. I need you to surrender your weapon and come with me.’

‘Now?’

‘Yes. Now.’

I laughed, incredulous. ‘The skaven are going to destroy this city. Sigmar’s city, Sigmar’s people.’ I spoke louder, warming to my theme and the growing grumbles of the men and women watching our exchange. ‘What kind of Lord-Veritant would allow such a thing on her watch?’

Vikaeus looked coldly around her. ‘If Sigmar wished this city saved he could have sent another. He sent me. You will return with me through the Seventh Gate, Lord-Castellant Hamilcar Bear-Eater, and back to the Forge Eternal where the Relictor and Sacrosanct temples of your brothers have commanded your soul be incarcerated.’

A spontaneous cry of ‘No!’ went up from the people around us.

A snarl from the Dracoths silenced them, but Vikaeus looked up again, as if conscious for the first time that she was in the middle of a powder keg. ‘He is a danger to himself and all he touches,’ she announced, absolute in the authority of her words, but with all the rhetorical nous of a bloodletter of Khorne.

‘He’s the Bear-Eater!’ I roared, pumping my fist in the air, and bringing an outraged cheer from the mob.

‘It is for his own wellbeing as much as all of yours,’ Vikaeus responded, calmly.

‘What is your wellbeing worth to you in a skaven slave pit, or worse, a cook pot? Am I dangerous? Hah! I say let the skaven be the judge of that!’

‘The God-King commands otherwise.’

Now I may not have had Vikaeus’ vaunted – and to my mind, grossly oversold – gift for prophecy, but I had a good sense for when a crowd was about to turn. After every­thing that had happened to me during my last escape from the Seven Words, I wasn’t about to underestimate how beloved I was by the people of the Gorkomon again. I didn’t doubt that the citizens of the Seven Words would attack if Vikaeus tried to take me by force.

Dracoths or no Dracoths.

And then things really would turn ugly.

‘You’ll have to kill a lot of people to get at me,’ I warned her.

‘The Hamilcar I know would never shield himself with the blood of those he claims to protect.’

Vikaeus advanced on me. I continued backing away until my back hit the hovel’s door.

‘They are the men and women who should be defending this place,’ I said.

‘Given that it was your misguided rebellion that broke the Freeguild in the first place, I find your concern of dubious sincerity now.’

‘That was never my intention,’ I said, feeling for the door handle behind me. ‘If you want someone to blame for that, you should help me look for Broudiccan.’

Vikaeus tutted in disappointment. ‘Are you trying to shift blame?’

‘Is it working?’

She stepped in closer. Near enough for my skin to shrink from the cold emanating from her reforged skin. ‘No one ever speaks the truth to a Lord-Veritant. Not at first.’

‘I was afraid of that. I’ll have to try something else, then.’

‘You have nothing left to try, Hamilcar.’

‘You really are the worst prophet, Vikaelia,’ I said, as I ripped the door from its frame and hit her with it.