Champion of the Gods

Chapter four

The oldest memory I have is of violence. I can’t remember who I was fighting, or where, or why. Only that the ground was frozen, the air so cold that it was like breathing knives, and the stars were out with us in force. Sigendil, the beacon star of Azyr, hung bright and fierce above our heads like a banner, and I remember the battle-lust that it gave me. When the high star took to the field, so too did we, the tribes of the Eternal Winterlands. I don’t remember why. For the glory of our tribe? For the notice of our gods? To display our ferocity before Sigmar’s shining herald, locking horns like rutting beastmen for the favour of our patron? To be honest, no one really cared what a few thousand barbarians in the back end of Azyr got up to at night; what matters is that we fought, and none better or more joyously than I. It’s why Sigmar chose me, why he re-made me in the manner he did. Despite what you may have heard about me, it’s all I know how to do well.

And anyone who thinks that immortality detracts from the thrill of it has never felt the hammers of the Six Smiths upon their soul.

But you came for blood, didn’t you? So let me show you blood.

I pulled my blade from the blightking’s belly, drawing out his rotten intestines like a string of butcher’s sausages. Even with his guts looped around his ankles, he fought me, looking to bludgeon me with his cleaver-like sword. I spun my halberd like a bladed gyre, switching hands, direction, speed, drawing the squalid blightking’s cyclopean eye to my blade when it should have been paying closer heed to my boot. I kicked the base of his shield into his greaves. The flat top tilted forward and exposed the mouldering iron of his helmet to my fist. His grilled visor was not rigid, like metal. Rather, it was hard and gelatinous, like clotted blood, and quivered with the impact of my punch. Yellow bile oozed from the breathing slits, his grille otherwise settling back into shape.

The blightking gurgled with amusement as I shook out my knuckles, his voice a liquid rasp. ‘In the demesnes of the Fenlords the name “Bear-Eater” is spoken with–’

I rammed my halberd through his mouth with a wordless yell.

Unoriginal, I know, but from the heart. Even so, I was somewhat regretful of his passing. To this day I occasionally wonder what it was that the Fenlords had thought of me.

His white feathers rippling with power, Crow bore another pustulent warrior to the ground. The gryph-hound broke open the blightking’s rib cage and started ripping out ulcerated lung tissue. The Chaos knight chortled wetly even as his limbs twitched and his chest wall was sprayed over the freezing ground.

I knew that Nurgle commanded jovial acceptance in the face of despair, and by his own tenets I supposed that the blightking died well.

‘I’d spit that out if I were you,’ I said.

Crow turned his viscera-stained beak to me and warbled.

‘Fine. But expect no sympathy from me in the morning.’

Funnelled right across the narrow approach to Kurzog’s Hill, Astral Templars and Freeguild soldiers were tangling with the putrid blightkings of the Legion of Bloat. The Bear-Eaters fought like barbarian kings of old, each warrior a champion unto the reach of his own blade. The mortal soldiers, though possessing neither the strength nor the ferocity of the Stormcast Eternals, were disciplined and inspired. Under their combined onslaught the Nurglites were taking an almighty beating, but they were proving as difficult to break as I’d feared. The occasional snap of lightning arced towards the heavens, the fiery marker for a hero’s passing. Whole blocks of infantry fought themselves into the mud. Groups of ungor and Freeguild skirmishers tussled in the gaps between them, arrows and throwing spears whistling back and forth through the flurrying snow. Horns blared. Drums pounded. Horses whinnied and screamed.

I raised my halberd in the air and yelled, ‘Hamilcar!’

For what am I to these men but Vexillor, Heraldor and Relictor in one god-kissed sigmarite frame?

Another blightking took up position against me in the shield wall. He delivered no battle cry to announce his arrival, to intimidate me or to bolster his own courage, or to drown out the sounds of Crow chugging down his erstwhile comrade’s insides. Just a grim acceptance of his lot as he hoisted his heavy shield.

‘Why do the beastmen not attack?’ Broudiccan shouted between apocalyptic blows from his starsoul mace.

Aside from the skirmishers nibbling at our proverbial coat tails, I could see that the Decimator-Prime was right. Kurzog was still holding his biggest hitters back.

‘The brayseer is as much a stranger to pitched battle as I am to the Grand Library of Sigmaron, brother,’ I bellowed at the top of my lungs. ‘He hopes the Legion of Bloat will bleed our strength, enough for him to prevail. Hah!’ Broudiccan obliterated a blightking’s shield with a trouncing blow from his mace, spinning its wielder neatly into my field of attack. My halberd sliced wetly through the warrior’s vision slit. Crow dragged him out of the line by the knee and finished the job. Another heaved up and raised his shield to replace him. I blew out through my lips. This was starting to turn into real work. ‘Stormcloud! I think we’ve been banging our heads long enough against this wall.’

‘Praise be to Sigmar.’

Denied the basic succour of conflagrating his enemies en masse with the balled fists of the Eternal Heavens, the Lord-Relictor had been battling alongside the men of Jercho. While they hammered the shield wall with pistol shot and courage, he had resigned himself to annihilating it piecemeal, his expression as thunderous as any storm of Azyr.

He lifted his reliquary staff skyward, his eyes taking on a crackling lambency as dark clouds boiled across the sky. The snowfall intensified, coming in flurries, the wind tugging on my bearskin cloak and long hair. A rippling sheet of lightning illuminated the swamp of struggling combatants and Xeros pointed towards the thunderous peal with his staff. ‘God of Thunder, God of War, show the infidel your hammer!’ A bolt of lightning tore from the heavens to explode against the tip of his staff. The mummified relic-king it held flashed against the back of my eyes as lightning whipped out from the Lord-Relictor’s staff. It arced around the Jerech as if repelled by their honesty and faith, crawled wildly over Broudiccan’s aegis war-plate, and cracked against the wall of blightkings like the whip-tentacles of an Azyr beast. Dozens were blasted from their feet, poisonous steam billowing from eye slits and the warped seals of ancient war-plate as they roasted in their armour.

The Lord-Relictor inhaled deeply, and grinned. ‘Bare your hearts on the altar of the God-King, unbelievers.’ He raised his reliquary to call forth another blast when a terrific shriek rang through the swollen clouds.

‘No more, Stormcloud. They saw.’

Another shriek echoed across the marsh, and this time a colossal winged shape clad in blued metal scales dropped beneath the layer of clouds. It was King Augus. I clenched my fist and roared in welcome as the King of the Aetar, my friend, descended on Kurzog’s Hill. Beastmen brayed in alarm, rattling up their spears, but Augus was just too skilled a warrior, and too large. He ploughed through the thicket of spears, scattering beastmen to the ground before rising again with a bleating creature struggling in each clawed foot. I laughed as two dozen magnificently armoured eagle knights broke through the clouds in an arrowhead formation. With the grace of a flock of aesterlings in flight, the formation split into two smaller ‘V’s. Half of their number tucked in alongside Princess Aeygar to strafe Kurzog’s Hill. The rest, led by Queen Ellias, flew after Knight-Venator Barbarus, coming about to engage the aerial screen of rot flies and beastman disc-riders that continued to harry my flanks.

‘He’s with me, Kurzog!’ I bellowed, shaking my halberd vaguely towards the hilltop. ‘You’re not the only one who can pull off a trick.’

As I sought without success to bait the brayseer into showing his face, I saw Queen Ellias snatch a daemon disc from the air, catch the flailing beastman rider in her beak and then shake it viciously to death. The plague drones and disc-riders had the aetar heavily outnumbered, but the eagle-kin were mighty warriors and ferocious when aroused to battle.

I found myself counting my good fortune that King Augus had satisfied himself with mere ambivalence towards Sigmar’s return to the Ghurlands. The thought of trying to dislodge them from their Gorkomon fastness was not one I particularly relished.

In response to their arrival, Frankos blew a resounding note on his horn and the Freeguilds redoubled their efforts to dislodge the blightkings and push on Kurzog’s Hill.

‘Broudiccan. Xeros. Men of Jercho. To me!’ I plunged into the hole that the Stormcloud had gouged out of the blightkings’ shield wall with his lightning. My halberd chopped hands from wrists, heads from shoulders, tentacles from wheresoever they sprouted. I clove shields and splintered armour. I stabbed and clubbed, driving on until I was hemmed in by the stink of it, my warriors wedging their muddy boots in the door I had forced open with my strength.

It was time to win a battle.

‘You challenged me, Bear-Eater.’

The bitter voice seeped from the crush of bodies around me, like juice forced from a rotten lemon.

Manguish the Bloatlord was as tall as I was, but twice as wide at the middle. He was a pox toad in slime-covered armour, a sloughing skin bladder wobbling from under his throat. The plating around his gut was warped hopelessly out of shape, slapped in sticky bandages and leaking a corrosive bile that had turned the ancient metal to yellow. One arm was a mess of tentacles wrapped around a spear. The other held a huge shield bearing the repellent icon of Nurgle. My eyes near wept to look at it. Simply being in the warrior’s presence made my throat sore. He leered at me. Helmet and face had rotted away, blurring any distinction that might have existed between the two, a squamous amalgam of metal, bone, orphaned teeth and a blubbery vocal sac.

‘I accept,’ he rasped.

I bared my teeth in anticipation and made to push my way towards him.

Before I’d taken one step, I was startled by a loud crack.

I’d grown accustomed to the periodic crackle of the Jerech pistols, but this was louder. From something bigger, and I had nothing bigger. The Gorwood was no place for the arcanery of the Ironweld, but the real reason I had none of their weaponry with me that day is that their black powder sorcery terrifies me more than any lord or daemon or god of Chaos ever could. No good will ever come of it, I tell you that now.

‘What was that?’ I yelled.

‘Nothing that I can see,’ said Broudiccan, a few strides behind me.

Crow gave a trilling bark, beak turned skyward, and I looked up.

An aetar fell.

She was belly up, wingtips rippling in the updraft, blood staining the downy feathers of her chest. My heart clenched like a fist around a good luck charm as I watched her corpse descend and then strike the snowy earth.

‘Ellias Ip Augus,’ grunted Xeros, smiling tightly as though that was one less annoying patch of grey in his neatly black and white realm.

Now don’t let this pillar of flawless machismo stood before you fool you into thinking that I don’t know the pain of losing a queen.

I don’t remember much about it now besides how it made me feel. Anger. Weakness. As though her death was my failing somehow, naturally turning the loss of another human being into something entirely about me. But such memories are mortal ephemera, baubles of gold dust and light, too fine to endure the Cairns of Tempering or the attentions of Sigmar’s Smiths. I’ve heard it said that a warrior can protect a thing that’s precious to him from Apotheosis. A child’s name. A lover’s face. A father’s gift.

Clearly, my queen was none of those things to me.

And yet Augus’ shriek cut through to it, to a grief I’d forgotten I held onto, and I knew without needing the entirety of my recollection that things were about to become dicey.

With a disharmonious creak of cloth paddles, an unlikely airship rowed into view, rising into the air from behind Kurzog’s Hill. It looked like an ironclad canoe with a sealed top, hung beneath a giant gasbag. A hunched and goggled pilot was enthroned at the rear behind a nautical wheel, adjusting the craft’s tailfin with an enormous lever and punching at an array of knobs and dials to bring flashes of green lightning and verminous squeals, followed by a brief surge of enthusiastic rowing, from the lower decks. Several of the creature’s kin, similarly outfitted against wind and cold, scuttled about the weather deck slotting long-barrelled firearms into tripod mounts and taking pot-shots at the aetar.

‘Skaven!’ I yelled.

If I distrust the Ironweld then you can well imagine what I make of the wild technotheurgical contraptions of the skaven race.

More of the obscene aircraft were rising from hiding places on the lee side of Kurzog’s Hill, shedding ice and woven mats of swamp grass with every stroke of their paddles. I scowled. That was how they had avoided detection from the air. Crackling gunfire riddled Aeygar’s eagle knights, forcing the princess into an ungainly climb. One airship almost capsized as it turned to target my warriors on the ground. Jezzails cracked and popped, one Stormcast Eternal disintegrating into lightning as his undying soul leapt towards the celestine vaults. His final conscious act was to angle his ascent through the airship that had slain him, but he was moving too fast. The airship yawed crazily as the lightning bolt ripped across its bows, paddling furiously as its pilot attacked his controls.

With a tumult of squeaking, the skaven poured out of the Nevermarsh.

They were beyond counting. Hunched, hooded, clothed in swamp-coloured rags and poorly fitted armour, weapons rusted and notched. The numberless majority anyway. Hundreds more scurried alongside the horde, clad in baroque suits of bronze studded with dials and valves like runes of power, armed with bizarre interbreedings of halberd and rifle. There were globadiers. Ratmen in homemade protective gear hauling dribbling fire throwers and rusty machine cannon. Warpstone-powered automata the size and build of bronze troggoths, bedecked in the emblems of the Clans Skyre, crushed the occasional clanrat as they clanked awkwardly towards the battle.

Broudiccan had been right, though the Six Smiths themselves would have a task in beating that admission out of me when my time again came.

I probably should have scouted the battlefield more thoroughly.

An answering bray came from the Blind Herd on Kurzog’s Hill, and I finally figured out why they hadn’t attacked yet.

They were attacking now.

‘Clever goat,’ I muttered.

From further down the hill I heard Frankos screaming for the Freeguild to turn and reform to face the skaven, but most were doing so already. There wasn’t much that could cover ground like a skaven horde on the attack, and that had a way of setting a person’s priorities for him. Beside me, Xeros’ eyes rolled back into his skull. The Lord-Relictor gibbered manically as he sent lightning bolt after lightning bolt crashing through the line of blightkings and into the gors now pounding downhill towards us.

Broudiccan grabbed me by the arm and hauled me back towards the dubious protection of the Jerech.

‘The battle is lost,’ he growled. ‘We must withdraw.’

I shook him off. ‘Hamilcar does not lose.’ I shouted it at the top of my voice, the Jerech heartening to it with cries of ‘Hamilcar!’ Such was the reputation that I had built for myself that even now, outnumbered and surrounded, they didn’t believe that I could fail. And I wouldn’t. I would drag victory from the gums of defeat, no matter how diseased, no matter how many pieces it came out in. I would have sooner gone back to the Celestial Forges for a century of agonies than walk back to the Seven Words from there and explain to Akturus and Vikaeus how I had marched two thousand men into a skaven trap.

Manguish the Bloatlord was still within my grasp and Hamilcar Bear-Eater would have his prey. I lunged for him with a yell.

The Nurglite was a blob of corpse flesh in armour and about as mobile. My first blow neatly skewered one of the bandaged splits in his armour and slid my halberd’s spike into his belly. He was remarkably stoic about it, even for a follower of Grandfather Pox. His throat sac quivered wetly, which I took for laughter.

‘You will need to try harder than that, Bear-Eater.’

‘We’re not even sweating yet.’

I ripped my halberd from the Bloatlord’s belly and spun it overhead. No blood trickled from the wound. A little pus. A solitary maggot. I chopped down. Manguish whacked my wrist with his shield, then thrust at me with his spear. I jumped back, but the tentacles with which the Bloatlord held his spear seemed to have several feet of length bound up in their coils. A few inches of extension saw me stabbed in the shoulder. The sigmarite shrugged off the blow, but even so, that had been too close.

I had a reputation to protect.

Manguish cackled. ‘The energy Kurzog put into laying this trap, it would have been simpler just to kill you.’ He gave a sigh of long and joyful suffering. ‘But what is done is done.’

With a roar, I went at him again. Woodsman’s strokes. Looping figures of eight. Looking to just lop bits off now, rather than waste time and effort piercing or impaling. Possessed of neither extraordinary weapon skill nor layers of guile to supplement his glaring immobility, the Bloatlord had little option but to give out as he received. Spear and halberd were hardly classic duelling weapons anyway and to any onlooker we must have looked like frenzied pugilists rather than warring champions, two titans thwacking one another with pointed sticks.

Not that anyone was watching.

The implosive retort of a starsoul mace told me that Broudiccan was quite busy nearby, while Xeros’ lightning continued to craze across my peripheral vision. Crow yipped and snarled, but muffled, as though his beak were full. Even the Jerech were too occupied to notice me, a cordon of glassy blades and leather struggling to hold back a rising swell of blightkings and beastmen and, already, skaven. Any other mortal regiment under any other commander would have broken by now.

But not my regiment.

Not while I still lived.

The ground beneath us shuddered, a blast of Frankos’ war-horn demolishing a massed skaven assault on the base of the hill. Men and beasts toppled all around me, and Manguish wobbled like a jelly­fish in an earthquake. Freezing air billowed from my mouth and fogged about my beard as I hacked through the Bloatlord’s spear with a cry. Bits of tentacle flopped to the ground with the broken spear half, wriggling like beheaded worms. Manguish blubbered in fury until my backswing split his throat sac. Noxious air fled in a wheeze. He struggled to say something, black teeth sticking out of his lipless mouth clacking together. The flaccid skin of his neck quivered breathlessly. He retreated behind his shield as I drew my halberd overhead. I kicked his shield hard, knocking him down. He squirmed like a turtle on its back.

‘Bah. Try harder, he says.’ I unhooked my warding lantern from my thigh-plate. It was a beacon of Azyr, encased within ornate shutters of orichalcum and electrum and purple stones. The engravings depicted a diorama of winged warriors leading a retinue of mail-clad bears towards the High Star. ‘Crow will have to try harder than this when he comes to passing your brethren tomorrow.’

I unshuttered the lantern.

The globe of a warding lantern is more than a receptacle for the light of Azyr. It is a lens for the storm energy and purity of its wielder’s soul. I feel it uplift me. My aches diminish. The cold departs my skin as an inner warmth rises to displace it. Even the dents and nicks in my armour are glossed over. Where my soul’s fury alights on the impure however, flesh sizzles and armour corrodes.

The Bloatlord gurgled noisomely, but mercifully quietly. He was a puddle of fat and liquefied armour when I closed my lantern again.

I looked up at an excited chittering to see a particularly large skaven in red-brown armour pointing at me with a cleaver. Its warriors squealed, the glimpse of my light working the ratmen into such a lather that I wondered if some sorcery of theirs was affecting my lantern somehow. As things would turn out, that was horribly prescient, if premature. And so, holding the lantern towards the clawleader, I unshuttered it again. The big skaven shrieked as smoke poured off its fur. It dropped its weapon and fell, rolling through the snow until Hamuz el-Shaah, neither hindered nor healed by my light, stabbed it through the neck.

It seemed to be doing the trick as far as I could see.

With the demise of their leader the remaining skaven were typically swift in turning tail, but there were plenty more where they came from, all equally determined to get through. The Blue Skies were crumbling like stone before a chisel holding them off, and the verminous warriors were boiling through by the score. I beheaded one before it could reach me. Xeros obliterated another dozen, but the vermintide was coming in and it was unstoppable. That the skaven were trying quite obviously to get to me struck me as entirely within the realms of the ordinary, given my repute in the Ghurlands, and I didn’t consider it further.

‘Lord-Castellant!’ Broudiccan screamed. He was grappling with a blightking, his armour gashed and bloody. The starsoul mace throbbed hungrily in the mud that had been churned up beneath the two warriors’ feet. ‘Call the retreat!’

Before I could give that my blessing I heard an all-too-familiar bleat of laughter.

My face hardened.

Kurzog.

In defence of what comes next, you should understand that I’d had little practice in handling a personal nemesis. Mannfred von Carstein had been a pox on the Hallowed Knights’ house, not mine. The Great Red had been swiftly despatched. The battle of Gnarlwood had been too impersonal and too vast. Kurzog, on the other hand, had left me looking the fool a few times too many, and today was shaping up to be a bad day of a particularly brazen and noteworthy kind.

I spun away from my second and glared into the braying ranks of the beast herd.

Brayseer Kurzog was a hound in his master’s clothes. Goat-headed. Dreadlocked. Dark skin pierced with human bones. A tattered magister’s robe wrung the life out of too-broad shoulders and backward-jointed legs. It was torn open at the chest, revealing a wiry scruff of black hair. Tattoos moved about beneath it like armies through the Gorwood. He wielded a dogwood staff, scent-marked by his daemonic patrons and the demi-beasts of the dire wood, scratched with the ninety-nine secrets of the Architect of Fate. A hideous little tretchlet thing fluttered about his brow, shedding glitter, pausing every now and then to whisper something in one bent ear or to gesticulate furiously down at me.

I scowled at him and he laughed back, the breathless panting of a dog.

‘See great Hamilcar brought low. All his furless brought low with him. Glory day. Glory day! Tzeentch be pleased by this if you not so easy to trap.’

‘He is goading you,’ Broudiccan roared, forcing the blightking in his embrace to the ground.

‘I know he is. I’m going to rip his head off for it!’

‘Leave him. While we still have half a chance.’

‘And be forced to hunt him again? Never.’

Manguish was dead, but he was and would have always been a nothing. With Kurzog in the ground, I could at least claim to have achieved something there that day. Some burnish I could take back with me to Sigmaron.

I looked for the rest of my army, but my own determination to conquer Kurzog’s Hill had left the bulk of Frankos’ formations behind me. Everywhere in between skaven ran rampant, pulling down Freeguilder and Astral Templar alike. Beastmen brayed their victory. More than a few blightkings were still standing.

The remaining Jerechs, driven almost onto my toes by the mass of skaven, had to have been aware of what Broudiccan and I were arguing about, even as they fought for their lives. I could see the fear starting to weaken their sword-arms, the unconscious shift towards block over cut that was spreading through their line. They wanted my permission to live. They wanted me to let them run. Crow beat his tail sagely, looking up at me from the gutted remains of a bestigor with criticism in the frosty glitter of his eyes.

They all needed to be reminded of who I was. I am Hamilcar.

I could exhort green shoots from ice. I could talk a Kharadron longbeard out of his last copper comet, or a mother stymphalion from her nest. I was a one-man command echelon, and yes, I’ve convinced more than a few experienced soldiers who should have known better that a crushing defeat was a pyrrhic victory there for the taking.

‘You say you are here in defence of heart and kin in the Seven Words,’ I bellowed, at my most inspirational. ‘Leave now and you may live to see your loved ones again, see them perish in the battles to come. Or you can fight, and see this war ended for their lifetimes. Die here with me, heroes all, and maybe, maybe, feast with me in the Heldenhall!’

The soldiers erupted with savage cheering.

‘For Hamilcar!’ screamed el-Shaah. ‘For Sigmar and the Seven Words!’

The signature war-cry of the Jerech Blue Skies. It had always pleased me that they shouted their vindications in that order.

Broudiccan finally got an arm free and thumped the blightking he had been grappling with to the ground. He collected his starsoul mace with a grunt. I turned and brandished my halberd at Kurzog.

‘Kill the brayseer and all this is over!’ I roared.

‘Bull-head fool,’ Kurzog panted. ‘You would be good beastman, Bear-Eater.’

I took a step towards him, then felt Broudiccan’s hand against my back, shoving me on. I tripped over one of Crow’s disembowelled leavings with a curse and landed on my face in a clatter of sigmarite. A chittering wind swept over me.

Swearing at the Decimator, for Broudiccan had been trying to protect me from myself since the dawning of the Age of Sigmar, I rolled over onto my back.

Broudiccan was entangled with what looked like a shadow. The vague shape of something ratlike and humanoid moved about inside it, like some sort of scrawny creature being harried by a swarm of dark bees. A pair of slanted red eyes glowed fiercely within the head, but otherwise it was smoke layered in smoke. Broudiccan struck the creature with his starsoul mace. The weapon seemed to slow drastically as it hit the shadow, the weapon’s throbbing aura fading into the pits of Ulgu. The figure inside, a skaven I was assuming – and rightly, as I was later to learn – bent around the impeded mace and slammed a shadow-clad footpaw into the Decimator’s chest. The sigmarite cracked and staggered Broudiccan back a pace.

That, if nothing else, gave me reason enough to treat this creature seriously. I’d seen Broudiccan stand up on tables when he had supped too deeply – for my second became surprisingly extrovert when sufficiently watered – inviting hits from ogors and gargants and remaining standing.

Before he could even get both feet back on the ground the Decimator found himself fending off a flurry of blows, black knives wielded in paws, footpaws, tails.

A Jerech ran to his aid, hollering, quartzsword high.

A shadeknife nicked his arm before I, and no doubt he, had even seen it. The soldier dropped his sword immediately, convulsing as his veins turned black and his eyes clouded over. He keeled over, jerking about as his spine bent backwards. It snapped, but continued to contort until the man’s back was flat against the backs of his legs.

‘This one is mine,’ Broudiccan growled, to any other man who might be tempted to intervene, his heavy mace struggling to keep up with the shadow’s attacks.

‘Let Sigendil rise!’ Xeros boomed, striking his staff into the ground and jutting his forehead towards the shadowed rat. Twinned forks of lightning blasted from his eyes, but they sank into the shadow, slowing, dimming, emerging on the other side in full fury to pass harmlessly through Broudiccan and drive a dance of electrocution and death through the mass of skaven and beastmen beyond.

The shadow was unfazed.

I threw Broudiccan a look, but I had yet to meet the foe that the Decimator could not grind down through sheer obstinacy and this rat I expected to be no different.

Rolling back onto my knees, I ran straight into a sprint, bulling through a pair of bestigors as I went. I heard the muscular glide of Crow, gaining on me from behind, his four legs and Celestial grace tackling the icy incline more easily than I was. I was glad to have the gryph-hound with me. If he was still prepared to follow me, then anyone would. A towering bullgor in armour of blued iron and electrum stamped its shod hooves and snorted, steaming up the thick metal ring that pierced its nostrils. I drove it back with a flash from my lantern, and at last there I was, unimpeded before Kurzog. My nemesis. Chittering, squealing, braying voices hemmed us in. The clash of steel against quartz. The crack of lightning. The daemon familiar sat on Kurzog’s earlobe with crossed arms and crossed legs and whispered in his ear. Whatever it was made the brayseer chuckle. Crow responded with a low chirp.

‘You beaten Bear-Eater. And it so, so easy.’

With a roar, stung by truth perhaps, I drew back my halberd.

Kurzog extended an open hand.

A typhoon of blue fire ripped from the brayseer’s palm and hit me full in the chest. My halberd was blasted off to the side somewhere – I didn’t see it go – and I was flung back, going several feet before the spell burned out and dumped me to the ground in a crash of sigmarite. Groaning, I tilted my head back, my view of the battlefield upended. I saw Broudiccan, upside down, struggling against a shadow that had wrapped around his arms and chest. There was something pressed against his neck. I thought I saw a dark grin split the inky space beneath the creature’s eyes, and it sawed the object across Broudiccan’s throat.

‘Brother!’

Blood jetted from the Decimator’s helmet seals, arterial pressure keeping it spraying even as his armour and wargear dissolved into motes. There was a moment of transition where I could still see him, arms folded over his goliath chest, defined in lightning, and then it was over. Thunder rolled outwards in a wake that scattered snowflakes and crushed stone, and the soul of Broudiccan Stonebow leapt free of the shadow creature’s embrace, and the Ghurlands, and tore towards the celestine vaults.

I followed his escape with my eyes.

We are a fractious bunch, we Astral Templars, every man of us a conqueror and a king in life, slave to no whim but his own. Immortality can bond even such men as us. Either that or break us. And if there is one thing an Astral Templar can rail against more violently than the company of equals then it is being broken by a challenge.

Angry tears stung my eyes as I heard the cries of eagles. I looked up in hope, swiftly crushed.

King Augus was quitting the field.

A phalanx of eagle knights went with him, bearing the body of Queen Ellias back to the aetar eyries of the Gorkomon. A handful under Princess Aeygar were still fighting, flying circles around the ungainly skaven gunboats whilst picking off beastman disc-riders and rot flies. Barbarus’ arrows fell as thick as the storm rains over the Stromfels, his star familiar, Nubia, a twinkling incandescence in his wake, but they were too heavily outnumbered. I heard Aeygar shrieking for vengeance, becoming quieter as her eagle knights dragged her from the fray, after her father.

Part of me wished that Broudiccan or Frankos had had half as much courage in confronting me over my haste to do battle over this accursed hill.

The hircine dreadlocks and nine-pronged beard of Brayseer Kurzog filled my view. He stood over me, flanked on either side by burly gors. Black lips drew back to reveal a grin of predator’s teeth.

‘This time it is all about you. And you not even see it.’

Then he raised his staff and smashed it into my face.