Champion of the Gods

Chapter thirty-two

Encased in armour of gold and bronze and iron rust, the master warlock stood a head taller than even his largest warriors. The air cooked where he strode, engulfing all but him alone in a haze of raw heat and brutalised power. The cobblestones beneath his tread cracked and steamed, as though bearing the weight of a being many times his physical size. Whether it was the broken glass trail that linked our damaged souls or some divine gift of his, the warlock sensed my presence as I had sensed his and turned. Frenzied clan warriors scurried on between us, oblivious to the witching glare of his lensed eyes that passed over them. Death leapt from his eyes to mine, and it was only by the turbulent energies of the storm in my veins that I was able to resist the explicit command of his gaze to cease living.

Ikrit’s jaws parted in what might have been a snarl. Diamond-edged teeth flared with a faint corona of trapped Azyrite light, and the sight of that pure energy on his decaying lips purged my muscles well and truly of any lingering paralysis.

I gripped my halberd until my knuckles whitened.

‘I’m going to–’

The outraged bellow of a Dracoth cut me off just as I was about to get started.

I looked over my shoulder to see Cryax and Vikaeus hacking and trampling their way through the skaven horde. The other Concussor was still caught some way behind, but closing the gap determinedly.

‘I know-smell this one from our dream,’ said Ikrit.

‘My dream.’

‘You like-like her smell.’

‘I don’t need to hear that from you.’

‘I know-see what you need. We are connected now. Let me help-help.’

The warlock raised his giant metal claw, curling in the stiffly jointed digits until only one remained, pointing at me. The skaven around him suddenly flopped to the ground, grasping at their throats and gasping. Then they shrivelled, their flesh ageing a thousand years as if their perishing were fuel for the dark purple and green flames that enveloped the warlock. An amethyst bolt lanced from Ikrit’s paw. The skaven in its path fell by the score, slain instantly, their souls banished from their bodies and drawn in to empower the sorcerous bolt still further. I reached instinctively for my warding lantern, a little burnt flesh be damned! But I was too slow.

It lanced over my head.

I spun around with a cry, and a blast strong enough to have brought down the wall of a stormkeep hit Cryax in the chest. His sigmarite peytral, that’s the chest-plate to you and me, cracked. I heard ribs break. Flayed skaven souls broke from the amethyst firestorm in a screaming torrent, ripping away frost-white scales and armour plates as the mighty Dracoth was tossed to the ground like an emptied aleskin. Lord-Veritant Vikaeus was hurled from the saddle. She rolled along the ground, arms flailing, losing her staff, but by accident or sheer indomitability of will managing to keep hold of her sword.

I lost her to the melee.

‘Vikaelia!’

Part of me wanted to run to her. A powerful and still growing part. But the better part, that which I had promised Hamuz el-Shaah would always remain dominant, held true.

I turned to Ikrit.

‘Sigmar has reforged me as Knight-Questor. He has charged me with your banishment to Sigmaron, and I will see it done.’

I had expected a sneer, a cackle, a disappointed shake of that mechanical muzzle, but the warlock appeared to take my threat entirely at face value. ‘I will go-scurry to Azyr-place, storm-thing. One day. When I am strong enough. Too strong for your God-King to stop me take-stealing it from him.’

‘What could you want with Azyr?’

‘There is a throne in the mountain-place you call Highheim. It will be mine.’

Ikrit ran at me.

Clad in rusted plate, he didn’t look as if he should be able to move anywhere like that fast, but the air seemed to be complicit, drawing aside as if giving him a free run while the ground itself propelled him forward.

Without waiting for him to make the distance, I threw myself at him with a roar.

My halberd crashed down onto the shoulder joint of his armour. It was like striking a shard of the Mallus, thinner than my finger, denser than worlds. The shock of hitting it threw back my arm. Sparks of energy with at least six different colours crawled over my halberd blade. At the same time Ikrit grabbed the device on my breastplate. I must have been twice his height, yet he lifted me off the ground like a broken toy. I backhanded him across the jaw, snapping his head back, then brought my elbow hammering down into the joint of the arm that held me. It collapsed under the blow and released me. I backed quickly away. My halberd continued to bleed a rainbow as I spun it warningly between us.

Ikrit cocked his head.

The ground beneath me trembled.

I looked down, just as the cobbles beneath my feet broke open, green shoots ripping free of the earth beneath. They whipped for me, one of them finding an ankle and dragging it down. Had I simply been caught while standing then that would have been bad enough, but it snared me as I had been pedalling back from the warlock and sent me crashing down onto my back. More creepers erupted from the broken ground, lashing around my arms, legs, waist and neck before I had a chance to rise.

‘Do not fight-struggle, Hamilcar. You should know-learn by now. Things become painful when you struggle-fight.’ Lightning surged through the creeping vines. I howled in pain and the warlock chittered, watching me writhe, before dismissing the spell with a twitch of his whiskers. ‘Give-give the lantern.’

‘Come and take it, Ikrit. Or are you afraid I’ll bite?’

‘I like-like you, Hamilcar. You remind me of… life. I do not want-wish to hurt you again.’

I made a dismissive snort. ‘You think that hurt?’

The warlock’s armoured jaws clanked silently open and shut, which I was taking for laughter, or at least the physical manifestation of the idea of laughter. ‘I was a living rat once. I lived in a place other to this. A gone place. All over that world I travelled, seeking knowledge, power. I found-learned immortality of a sort.’ With the lighter gauntlet of his left paw, he indicated to his undead, armour-plated frame. ‘But not like this. True immortality. The power to die and come again. That you gift-gave to me.’ His eyes flashed with the madness of power. ‘And to remember. Many things I had forgotten. One day… One day I hope-want to remember my real name.’

He crouched over me with a squeal of joints and set his heavy claw over the lantern where it was hooked to my waist.

‘I knew that Sigmar would resist me. I knew it would do damage and was prepared. Yes-yes. I knew. That is why I made certain-sure to take a Lord-Castellant. For the lantern-light.’ He looked down, snarling. ‘But Malikcek let you escape-flee.’

‘If it makes you feel better, he’s dead now. I killed him.’

Alright, it had been Nassam that had killed him, but Ikrit didn’t need to know that, did he?

‘That you are here now squeak-told me that already. He was good-good at what he did for me, but a god must outgrow even his mightiest servants.’

‘I have been in the presence of a god or two lately. You don’t walk on the same plane.’

‘You hope-hope to goad me? Anger withered from this flesh a hundred lifetimes ago.’

He pulled the lantern hard, twisting the loop handle out of shape and snapping my belt. It came away in his oversized claw.

‘It’ll hurt,’ I warned.

‘The dead do not know-feel pain. Not as you understand it.’

‘It’ll probably kill you too.’

‘I am already dead. I have been dead-dead for thousands of years.’ He pulled his gaze from the lantern to look down on me. ‘There are those in your own Pantheon who would stop-think before facing me alone. What madness possessed you? To think that you could best-slay me?’

With a growl of effort, I lifted my head from the ground. The vines that held me dug into my flesh, groaning as they thickened to counter me.

‘I’m about to tell you something that you can never share.’

Ikrit leaned in. His voice was husky and low. ‘Never-never.’

‘I am Hamilcar Bear-Eater. I always win because I am never alone.’

The warlock looked puzzled for a moment, then sneered. ‘Vikaelia? Bringing her and her warriors with you was a smart-clever trick. But the Veritant-Lord is as fearsome to me as you are. They are nothing. Two more warriors will be swallowed-killed by the numbers of my great-great horde.’

‘Two warriors? I assumed warlock engineers could count if nothing else. Look again.’

With my head fixed to the ground, I glanced aside with my eyes.

From the shattered buildings to either side of us, bowmen and handgunners of a rejuvenated Freeguild poured fire onto the Bear Road. I recognised some amongst them from the men and women I had seen on my flight through the Seven Words, and heard my name being shouted like a rallying cry. From every side street, back alley and gutted shop front, leather-armoured soldiers and lightly armed civilians pushed into the flanks of the skaven horde. I thought I caught the glitter of Nassam’s quartzsword amongst them, but there were too many of them to be certain.

‘Mortals,’ said Ikrit, in the same tone with which one might dismiss ‘insects’.

With a quip of my eyebrows, I gestured behind me.

The warlock hissed in displeasure.

‘No,’ Ikrit hissed.

‘Yes,’ I grinned.

It was Akturus Ironheel.

I couldn’t see him, but I could hear the rhythmic, almost mechanical tread of his Liberator shield walls closing off the road behind me. A few flashes from the Lord-Castellant’s warding lantern had patched him up nicely, and thanks to my efforts in the catacombs, the Imperishables had had a few warriors to spare. I heard the terrified squeals of skaven warriors falling between the relentless advance of the Imperishables and the weapons of the Freeguild and Heavens Forged.

‘I still command-rule in the air,’ Ikrit snarled. ‘My airships will–’

He was cut off by a terrific shriek and an explosion high in the sky, as an armoured body half again as massive as a Stardrake tore through the hull of one of the Skyre clan airships. Bits of wood and flailing bodies rained over the battlefield as the eagle knight chomped on the larger airborne pieces, scattering the debris with an almighty beat of its wings. Ikrit stared up in horror.

‘No-no.’

I chuckled harshly. One benefit of being lashed to the ground was having a fine view of what was happening in the sky.

‘I always knew that Augus liked me.’

Ikrit turned from the battle for the air and glared down at me. ‘You think me beaten? You think I want-need my army. I will make-build a new army.’ He held up my lantern. ‘I need-want only this.’ He stood with a squeal and turned to walk away, only to stop abruptly when a viperish green shoot broke through the road beneath his footpaw to wind about his shin. He looked down at it, then back at me. ‘This is your doing as well?’

Breaking free of the earth behind the warlock like a particularly vigorous weed, Brychen drove her spear between his shoulder blades.

‘No,’ said the wild priestess. ‘It is mine.’

It snapped in two. The warlock staggered towards me, chittering annoyance, as the priestess cast aside the broken halves to sprout another with a thicker haft.

‘This power is not yours to command,’ she said, radiating anger like coloured light from a flower. The verdant growth that covered me pulsed and shrank back into the earth. Buds swelled and burst, throwing a sickly floral scent over us all as exploratory shoots lashed around Ikrit’s iron claw, dragging it towards the ground and binding my lantern tightly in its palm. ‘It is time for it to be returned to the soil.’

Ikrit looked over his shoulder at the priestess, his expression blank. ‘I am dead-dead. Many times over I have been given-fed to the black earth. Rarely does my buried form lie still. Death always conquers Life. In the end.’ Ribbons of entropic energies coursed the vines that held his gauntlet pinned. They withered, turned yellow, then black. The embrittled stalk husks fell off him like dust from a coat of armour as he turned. ‘Always.’

The look he gave Brychen was a thunderclap that hurled the priestess back into the melee on a comet tail of splintered armour and blood.

I didn’t watch her go.

I didn’t wait to see her land.

As I had instinctively known during my brief, albeit unwitting, altercation with Sigmar in the Forge Eternal, there was no way I was going to defeat Ikrit with strength alone.

Sucker-punch and surprise would be my weapons here.

I threw myself at the warlock while he was still facing the other way. My halberd carved a searing arc towards the wrist joint of his gauntlet. A black wind billowed about Ikrit’s body and carried him out of my reach. The halberd whistled past his midriff. He hissed his displeasure. I reversed my grip, roared, the muscles across my upper body bulging as I struck back with the butt. The sigmarite ferrule countered the weight of the entire foot-long blade. It could crush conventional plate and shatter immortal bone. Ikrit didn’t give it the chance. A whoosh of warpflame from his gauntlet flicked me contemptuously aside.

The ichorous green jet was severed almost as soon as it had been unleashed, warpflame dribbling from the nozzle to hiss off the cobbles.

It had been a playful shove, a jepard batting a doomed animal between its paws.

Surprise had not served me nearly as well as I might have hoped.

‘Fool-fool,’ Ikrit hissed. ‘After all you have seen you still challenge me.’

At the warlock’s gesture the ground between us shuddered and fell away. The road tore itself in half, noxious fumes gasping from the rent in the earth, swallowing clanrats and Freeguilders alike. ‘I need-want no army!’ the warlock squealed, shrill with power. ‘The very earth of the realm answers my summons-call.’ A nimbus of multi-hued energies encompassed him as he extended a gauntlet. ‘I am the Ur-Rat, the Rat-That-Was. You will kneel-die!’

A streak of oily lightning leapt from the warlock’s outstretched paw.

I dived to the ground. The blast careened over my head and obliterated a war-wagon that had been lying on its axle behind me. It died in splinters and flame. Bits of shrapnel rattled off my backplate as I crawled away from the pyre. Another energy blast blew a crater out of the ground. I found my knees, rising messily into a sprint as the third blast carved open a company of Freeguilder polearms and hit the rat-ogor that had been bludgeoning its way through them, reducing them all to ash and jelly and a foul taste in the back of my mouth.

‘Run-flee, Bear-Eater. I know-see what you crave over all else. I know-know how to make you hurt.’ The warlock cackled. ‘Let them see you run.’

Fire engulfed both his gauntlets, white hot and searing. His arms trembled as he drew them back, the flames shrinking into the metal until they glowed, then thrust his paws towards me.

A sun ignited on the Bear Road, and warriors of all ilks burned.

Skaven used their last breath before they were blown to ash to squeal. Men and women disappeared like tallow sticks in a flame. Lightning bolts tore free from the maelstrom, warriors of the Heavens Forged and the Imperishables, their thrice-blessed no proof against the monstrous fireball. It spanned the full width of the road, two-score feet across. Stone ran from the frontages of the buildings like fat from a roast. Scaffolds, awnings, and windows simply ceased to be. Lead tiles glowed like coals. Running out of the blast even as it was erupting, I avoided the worst, but then I think that that had always been Ikrit’s intention. Heat raced ahead of the explosion and threw me to my face. I skidded over the ruined cobbles on my breastplate before running out of push.

I threw my head back like a drunk who could not comprehend how he had come to be on the floor. I could barely see. Blood matted my hair to my face. I could smell it.

‘Vikaelia!’ I roared.

Broudiccan had been somewhere close by too, but it wasn’t his face that filled my mind then, nor goaded my strength to fury. I rose with a groan of sigmarite heated to murderous temperatures, the burnt muscles in the back of my neck stretching painfully as I turned my head towards Ikrit.

He was walking towards me, but, borne on a gryph-charger of complicit storm winds, he came as a thunderbolt of corroded bronzes and Azyrite blues.

I beat my halberd back across his path like a scythe. There was no finesse to it. I targeted no weak point in the armour nor gleaned vulnerability in his form. There was only the burning need to reap. My halberd hacked into a skein of Ulgu shadow, slowing the blade noticeably before it clanged against his armour. My fury became incandescent. Divine. I was a mountain man, and the boiling point came for me well before it would have taken another. Every­thing this rat had done, every­thing he had taken from me. I no longer cared if I lived or died. Life in the Winterlands was brutal and brief, and death unmourned. Let my soul burn, let it set the Heavens ablaze this one final time as it returned to the Cosmic Storm. I didn’t care, so long as I could hurt this rat in my passing.

Howling like a wounded ghurlion, I threw myself at my aggressor.

The warlock squeaked in surprise as my arms wrapped around him and locked behind his back. He shrieked. I sank my teeth into his snout. Cold blood oozed into my mouth. For a moment I relived the vision of my first, mortal death at the hands of the ogor frostlord and his giant bear, and was pleased. There was a circularity to it that appealed to my vanity, that fate would accord me such a thoughtful gesture for my passing. Spitting out a whisker, I smashed my head into Ikrit’s. It was like head-butting a statue. Pain rang outward from my forehead. I felt Ikrit’s jaws snapping for my throat. We grappled. My fingers went through the eye slit of his helm and mushed something glutinous and rotten. My other hand found the warding lantern in his claw.

With an outraged squeal, Ikrit caught the hand by the wrist and twisted. Pain exploded into the forefront of my mind, bringing me screaming back to my senses.

Bone spurs scraped over the inside of my vambrace as Ikrit dangled me by my limp hand. I screamed. He screamed back at me. Then he spun me once around and hurled me through the wall of a roadside inn.

Still cooling from the wrath of Ikrit’s fireball, the wall disintegrated as soon as I hit it. It collapsed onto me, followed by the ceiling, then the roof. I coughed, snarled, bellowed in pain and pointless fury as the building sought to bury me alive under rock that fell apart into cinders as soon as it came loose. I shook my face and my hand as if to dig my way out of the grave of cinders, glimpsing clear sky overhead as the last of the structure gave way. The blue thickened and turned green even as I flapped at the flames. Ectoplasmic muscle swelled across the open sky like angry clouds, thick-veined and bristling with Ghurite strength. A colossal in-breath snuffed out the flames around me as the Foot of Gork came crashing down, demolishing what little was left of the inn and smashing me into the rubble.

The gigantic foot broke into a virulent green fog as soon as it made impact with the ground.

I lay in the midst of it, gasping and broken, staring up at blue skies once again. My breath hitched as I struggled to fill my lungs. I had broken at least one rib and had collapsed a lung, by the frantic wheezing of my breath.

Ikrit stepped off the road and into the flattened inn.

The residual smog parted before him. I saw now why he did not need an army. An army was almost an encumbrance to a being like him, useful only insofar as he could not be everywhere at once.

One-handed, I drove the butt of my halberd into the ground and made myself meet death like a warrior. My armour protested the movement, rubble sliding off its curves. Anyone but me would have been dead already, but Sigmar had made my bastion armour thick and warded where it mattered. He had known that my next death could be my last, and had done all in his power to ensure that it never came to be. He did not want me dead. He wanted me triumphant.

Not nearly as much as I did.

The warlock’s surprise at seeing me alive was bettered only by that at seeing me upright. The sight of his snout still black and oozing gave me the strength to pull the last few inches of my spine straight.

‘What does it take-need to put you down?’

‘More than you can throw,’ I wheezed. I spat blood, then looked down at my broken hand. The claws of my fingers were still gripping the warding lantern that I had wrenched from his grip. ‘You haven’t got the strength in you to finish Hamilcar Bear-Eater. Chosen of Sigmar. Knight-Questor! Champion of the Gods!’

Gritting my teeth, I slid back the lantern’s shutter and hurled it like a Kharadron grudgesettler bomb with the pin removed.

Strobing starlight flashed across the smouldering rubble as the lantern spun, end over end, a weaponised pulsar encased in sigmarite, amethyst and gold. Where light slashed Ikrit’s armour, black steam rose, and he stumbled back from me with a hiss of pain. A stone from the inn’s foundation wall protruded from the ground behind him, and he went backwards over it in a billow of sparks.

He thrashed about, driving up fresh cinders as he struggled to right himself, only to shriek all the louder as he discovered a halberd piercing the palm of his gauntlet, driving into the rock, and pinning his paw to the ground.

Ikrit swung with his other gauntlet. Not for me but for my halberd. I knocked his paw aside on the outside of my knee, and then, my chest an agony, trod down hard on his elbow. Dropping my knee into his stomach plating, I punched him across the jaw. And again. And again. Losing myself to the fury. ‘I told you.’ His helmet buckled. ‘It would.’ A bloody smear on his diamond teeth. ‘Hurt.’ My blood. Thoughtlessly, I hit him with my broken hand. With a dying fish gasp of pain, I rolled off him. Using just my feet, I pushed myself back, my head flopping finally to the ground as the madness that had loaned me its strength departed me with its due.

I lay there for a time, struggling to breathe, listening to the sounds of battle return.

Of course, they had never left. Even so, I found it hard to credit that anyone else out there was still fighting. A hero had just fought a god into the ground. The realms should have taken a breath. They should have held back and taken heed. Instead, skaven and Freeguilder grunted and yelled like savages in the mud. The thunder of Stormcast and Ironweld weaponry warred with the piercing war-cries of the aetar.

I lifted my head just enough to look over at Ikrit. The warlock was slumped and beaten, his right arm half-melted by the fluids leaking from his own gauntlet, and speared to the ground. He looked even worse than I felt.

‘You’re mine,’ I managed to say. The breath coming in was agony. The voice going out was a rasp.

‘You cannot even… stand-stand.’

‘I’ll drag you to the Seventh Gate with my teeth if I have to.’

‘Try it… Bear-Eater. I do not need my… arm… to destroy you.’

‘Surrender! Show me how to restore my soul, and I will appeal to Sigmar to be merciful with yours. Tell me, and I will have him consign you to oblivion before the Smiths can lay their tools upon you.’

By way of answer, Ikrit turned his face to the sky and screamed.

He screamed with the vehemence of a beaten god. At first I thought it the venting of the indignity of defeat, but then I heard the familiar rifling of feathers, the whistle of air through an open beak. I saw the shadow that darkened the ground where Ikrit and I looked up. My heart forced pain wider through my chest.

With a blistering shriek, King Augus announced his intentions.

His plumage bristled with the fury of the seven winds. His mail coat and spiked crown caught Azyr lightning and warpfire, and were vengeful.

‘No!’ I screamed.

A furious beating of wings forced me back into the ground, as Augus lifted his enormous bulk off the crushed warlock, all the while keeping one enormous talon possessively over his body. Then the victorious king of the aetar closed his beak over the helmet and wrenched Ikrit’s head from his shoulders.