Champion of the Gods

Chapter thirty-one

Those things I told you earlier, about how you’ve never seen a Stormcast Eternal at full tilt? Forget it all – you don’t know what haste is until you’ve run through a sacked city with three Knights Merciless on Dracoths behind you.

I ran into the side of a building at a full sprint. It looked like an alehouse, but I paid it no mind. Grabbing hold of the projecting eave, I pulled myself up, my feet scrambling on the wall, and rolled onto the sloped roof. Quickly onto my feet, I drew enough acceleration from somewhere to leap the small rear yard and the narrow ravine it backed onto, landing onto cobbles in a clattering roll that carried me immediately back into a sprint.

The alehouse collapsed behind me.

Cryax bellowed and pounded through the back wall. I glanced over my shoulder. Vikaeus’ icy halo burned through the pall of crushed mortar and dust and stung my eyes. The following Concussors smashed what was left of the alehouse to rubble as Cryax bunched the gargantuan muscles of his haunches.

I’d wager you’ve never seen a Dracoth jump.

It’s not a sight for the faint-hearted.

Even from where I was, halfway down the street, I felt the ground shake and heard the shutters in the windows around me rattle. I found an extra push of speed.

‘Hamilcar is here!’ I screamed, one of the shutters ahead of me nudging warily open on the barrel of a longrifle. ‘The battle is not yet over!’

I sprinted past.

While I knew most of the alehouses in the Seven Words (and indeed, most of the Free Cities of the Mortal Realms), I’d been in too great a hurry to notice which one I’d just passed, or which street I was on now. The Seven Words was a honeycomb of narrow, ill-kept little lanes like this one, switchbacking their way around the Gorkomon’s inhospitable crags. It was hardly suited to the trio of enraged Dracoth knights and I knew it.

If Vikaeus had ever ventured beyond the keep then she would have known it too.

Skidding around a razor-sharp bend, I veered past the eviscerated remains of a Gorwood horse still lashed to a cart, my armour scraping the wall, bouncing and rattling off downhill.

I heard the Dracoths bellow behind me, the scrabble of foot-long claws on cobbles, then the crash of a Celestial war-beast bursting side-on through the stone wall of a house. The beast roared in outrage as the roof cascaded over its armoured head. I heard the muffled clang of a Concussor pitching from the saddle.

I grinned, glancing over my shoulder as Vikaeus and the last Concussor slowed through the turn before urging their monstrous mounts on after me. I had already doubled my lead on them. I knew where I was going. They couldn’t catch me now. I even felt confident enough to slow down at the sight of a group of armed Freeguilders holding their little patch of drystone wall.

‘You need more than a Dracoth to beat Hamilcar Bear-Eater in a race to the fight,’ I bellowed as I flashed past.

The ground shook as Cryax built back speed.

Too late now.

Like every street in the outer wards, this one wound its involuntary little way around the rough terrain to feed into the main traffic of the Bear Road. Exactly where I wanted to be.

I burst out of the lane and onto the wide, ruined concourse of the Seven Words’ one genuine road. I quickly looked both ways. The devastation that had been wrought by the skaven’s wheel machine was plain to see. It had ploughed through Freeguild stockades and Frankos’ diligently erected chokepoints like a stampede of wild beasts, leaving behind wooden debris and a warping haze of charge. And into the destruction had come the skaven, as surely as rotten meat produced flies. Judging from the earthy hummocks of spoil poking up through shattered cobblestones, they had come from beneath. The Seven Words had more holes in it than one of my alibis for failing to attend early morning drills, and I could hardly fault Akturus for letting a few slip his notice. In any case, shock-vermin were still shimmying down ropes dangling from the keels of low-hovering airships while several thousand more had gone for the expedient route of simply smashing open the main gate. The surrounding swathe of road was awash with armoured skaven warriors and verminous beasts, bludgeoning through a stubborn, but ever-diminishing line of Heavens Forged.

I tried to pick out Broudiccan, Xeros or Frankos from the mayhem, but I didn’t have the time for a proper look.

Swinging its huge arms, as if needing that initial boost to get the massed musculature of its upper body moving, one of the skaven war-beasts rounded on me and roared. Its head was that of a rat, hunched into gigantic shoulders, albeit enlarged to twice the size of a man’s. Its gargantuan build was that of an ogor. The skaven beastmakers call them rat-ogors, the famed ingenuity of their race inexplicably deserting them at the end. I had encountered several of the mutated rat-beasts before, but this one was the first to have been encased in cogwork battle armour, warpfire dribbling from nozzles appended to each fist.

Trust Ikrit to make a foul thing a hundred times worse.

Red eyes glittering with madness and childish hate, the rat-ogor lumped its balled fist at me. I ducked under the blow, and spun behind the beast, still working off speed as I backpedalled away from it.

I found myself perfectly positioned to watch as Cryax and Vikaeus emerged from the alley.

Anything less massive than a rat-ogor on the receiving end of a Dracoth would have been trampled, no questions asked, but the skaven war-beast was simply barged backwards – towards me. Claws and the ill-fitting armour plates nailed to its calves gouged sparks out of the cobblestones as it slowed down. Wrapping its arms around Cryax’s neck, it delivered a high-pitched mangling of squeak and roar. The Dracoth drowned it out with its own bellow. Lightning bolts sprayed from the Celestial beast’s open jaws and flayed the meat from the rat-ogor’s head. Incredibly, even with half its face dribbling towards its groin, the rat-ogor didn’t let go. Vikaeus swept up her sword, the bound energies of the merciless storm flickering along its length and haloing the Lord-Veritant in divine fury. She hacked through the rat-ogor’s clutching arm in a single blow.

The following Concussor did the rest.

Still running blind, the second Dracoth blundered into Cryax’s hindquarters, shoving him forwards, through the squealing rat-ogor, and finally throwing the pain-addled beast to the ground. A second rat-ogor waded towards the pair like an armoured ape, green light bleeding from the sutured ruin of its eyes. The Paladin swung his lightning hammer, shattering thick metal plates and knocking the rat-beast off its stride. The Dracoth smashed it to the ground with a swipe of its head, then proceeded to disembowel it with frenzied motions of its claws.

Cryax crunched over the body of his rat-ogor, his ice-rimed eyes intent on me.

The currents of battle drove a pack of clanrat warriors squealing into the space between us. Cryax snatched a clanrat up in his jaws, bit the screaming ratman in half, and flung the pieces over his shoulders. Vikaeus levelled her sword towards me, her staff held high. She blazed like a star-goddess, a divine creature of vengeance.

‘You cannot flee Sigmar’s judgement, Hamilcar.’

‘Come here and get me, Vikaelia!’

Even as I yelled it, a drover-engineer in spiked armour (designed, I expect, to make the wearer less appetising to his charges) snapped a charge-rod into the backs of a pair of half-machine rat-ogors until they gave in and lumbered towards the Lord-Veritant.

‘Hamilcar!’ she screamed at me before she and Cryax disappeared under a sheet of warpfire from one of the rat-ogor’s fist weapons.

I spun away.

I was sure that she’d be fine.

Then I saw something that stopped me short.

‘Broudiccan.’

The Lord-Castellant held his ground at the centre of a ragged crescent of Heavens Forged Paladins. Thunderaxes and stormstrike glaives took a fearsome tithe of the endless hordes being flung at them, matched only by the castellant’s halberd of the huge warrior himself. The Imperishables’ approach to warfare might have been as alien to me as Lord-Ordinator Ramhos’ approach to castle-building, all squares and lines and structural members, but the Astral Templars still did it the old-fashioned way. The way that Hamul of the White Spear would have recognised it. The Heavens Forged were no different. Every warrior before me was the hero of his own saga, turning his or her god-like vigour and unbound strength to their own glory with only half a nod towards ‘victory’ or the survival of their brothers and sisters. If it appeared to the uninitiated as if the Paladins were tearing every sinew in the defence of their Lord-Castellant then it was only because someone – and this had Frankos of the Heavens Forged drawn all over it – had had the presence of mind to put them next to him before the fighting had begun.

The ground before the Decimators and Protectors was heaped high with skaven dead, a corpse moat ten feet wide and five deep that would have been impressive were it not also grim testament to how far the skaven’s rabid ferocity and sheer numbers had driven the Paladins back.

As I watched, I saw a Decimator dazzled by the glaive-routines of a shock-vermin cog-pack a dozen strong before finally going down. Another fell to a sniper’s bullet. I snarled upwards as the lightning bolts bearing the two warriors back to Azyr blew the circling airships aside.

Broudiccan bellowed for more from his Paladins. More strength. More courage.

He was good, but he was no Hamilcar Bear-Eater.

I started towards them, only to feel my legs waver at the first step. The encroachment of an all-too-familiar evil had made them freeze. I wouldn’t go so far as to call it dread. Not exactly. Not unless pushed. But unease washed through me like the icy breath of a frost-drake. My guts knotted, tugging on my insides, as if to pull away from me and towards some titanic outward force.

I looked in that direction.

The battle fell away from me. Scales fell from my eyes.

I gripped my halberd as though it was the last implement of pure sigmarite in the Mortal Realms.

Ikrit had joined the battle.