Champion of the Gods

Chapter five

I don’t know how long I spent unconscious, or where it was they took me in that time, only that when I did awake I was no longer in the Nevermarsh. I was somewhere underground, or so I judged from the abominable dark and the dank taste of the air. The floor that I was lying on was cold and smelled of wet stone, a film of water bubbling under my top lip with every breath out. It also vibrated slightly. A hum, similar to that which arced through the convalescent domes of the Sigmarabulum, ran through the uncut stone. The pitch was entirely different however, grating and disharmonious, a hellish chorale of belts and gears rather than the palliative hymns of Sigmar’s smithies. I sat up carefully, minding my head on the ceiling, my eyes adjusting to what light they could find. It was sickly and green, emanating from every surface as though the whole place had been daubed in some bioluminescent slime.

I was in a cell. In retrospect that was not entirely surprising, but it struck me as quite revelatory at the time.

The floor was noticeably uneven and its walls were haphazard, sort of bowl-shaped, as if a gouge had been taken out of the wall and some bars installed in the open side as an afterthought. There were cuts in the stone. I reached out my hand to run my fingers along one. Claw marks, I assumed, or teeth.

A skaven cell then. That, too, should probably have come as little surprise, but again my mind seemed set about taking its plight step by step.

Drawing my fingers from the claw mark on the floor, I brought my hand to my face. Despite the illumination, such as it was, I could barely make out the outline of individual fingers. I touched my chest, then my thigh, feeling the coarse weave of the padded gambeson that I wore beneath my sigmarite. They’d taken my armour. Like a blind man in an unfamiliar bed, I groped over the rest of my body and around the meagre floor space of my cell. My weapons were gone too. I reasoned that they would be somewhere nearby – they were bonded to my soul, and difficult to destroy or even damage so long as I remained in this realm. And knowing as much about the Clans Skyre as I did, which was actually very little, though give me five minutes and I could fool even a master warlock otherwise, I was sure that the opportunity to tinker with the artifice of the Six Smiths would be too great to resist. I convinced myself then and there that it was most likely my wargear that they were interested in, and that I’d been thrown into a cell while they figured out how best to make use of a Lord-Castellant of the Astral Templars. Unless leaving me to rot down here was simply Kurzog’s idea of payment in kind.

My hand moved to my face and I hissed. The brayseer had broken my nose. Dried blood had formed a ridged crust over my top lip. The skin around my mouth was bruised and torn.

Useful to know.

‘Akturus is going to love every minute of this story.’ My voice echoed back like a half-hearted impersonation of me.

A bit like Zephacleas Beast-Bane then, in other words.

I stood up, my body aching from however many hours it had spent unconscious on the hard stone, and walked unsteadily towards the bars. I found it strangely difficult to keep my balance, as though the floor was at an unnatural tilt, but fortunately my cell had not been excavated with a Stormcast Eternal in mind and I was able to keep a hand to the ceiling until I made it the handful of steps to where I wanted to be. I gripped the bars with one hand. They were cold and flaky with rust. I took another bar and tensed, the muscles of my chest and arms standing firm as I tried to bend them. After about two minutes of effort, I let go, breathing hard. They were too strong. Either that or I was still too weak from being beaten unconscious and dragged down to a skaven dungeon.

Pressing my face to the bars, I peered out.

The passage outside was of a similarly roughshod appearance to my cell, dug out of the rock by skaven teeth. It was empty. Not even sconces or brackets on the walls. That bemused me for a moment until I remembered that skaven preferred to function by scent and sound rather than rely on their relatively feeble sense of sight. It was actually a little humbling – though admittedly, only a little – to consider that when I’d fought the skaven on the Nevermarsh they’d essentially been doing it blindfolded. If I needed another reminder that I was incarcerated on their terms, then that was it.

Another ragged line of gouged out cells and corroded bars faced me from the other side of the passage, extending beyond my slime-lit bubble and on into actual darkness.

They were empty too.

I felt a fluttering in my belly that I didn’t much like.

‘I know there must be someone out there. Show yourselves!’ My voice rang down the passage, then back again, so weak it was almost unrecognisable as me by the time it returned. ‘I have the loudest voice in Azyr, you know.’ There was no answer. I growled. ‘No mountain can contain Hamilcar Bear-Eater!’

Nothing.

‘Do you not even guard me, Kurzog?’

Still nothing.

I sat back down, more or less where I’d started.

All my bravado seemed wasted with no one to intimidate or impress. I laid my hand on my stomach, unnerved by the sensation of butterflies batting about inside. I was reminded of something that Broudiccan had said to me. That I would do anything for an audience. Alone, I think for the first time since my reforging as a Stormcast Eternal, and perhaps before even that, I understood what he meant. I felt as if I’d been parted from a twin. Bereft of my better half. Discovering that my persona had been little more than an artifice built to appease the needs and expectations of others was disconcerting. Ordinarily I would have laughed it off, but I found that I couldn’t face the mirth of my own soulless echo just then.

And the reminder of Broudiccan only made me feel worse.

I couldn’t avoid thinking back to my own reforging.

A warrior’s death is never going to be a joyful experience, but my last one was about as unpleasant as a soldier of Sigmar can hope for. My body ripped apart by the Dread Abyssal Ashigaroth, my soul halfway down its throat before the pull of the Mallus dragged me from its gorge. Broudiccan’s end had been a peck on the cheek by comparison, but no matter the means of return, a soul’s experience on the Anvil soon renders the pain of its delivery insignificant.

Imagine that you are steel. Hot and impure. You are material, and to the Smith that is all you are. You are not a man to him. You are something to be worked, something functional yet wondrous to be remade. With every blow of his hammer you feel yourself broken, elements both precious and half-remembered coming off you in hissing sparks of mortality. Then you are turned and you are broken again. And again. And again. You are doused in steam, heated in fire, returned to the Anvil and the ministrations of the Smith once more. It can last for days or for decades. Time matters not on the Anvil. Vandus Hammerhand is said to have emerged from the Forge Eternal mere heartbeats after his entry, which is just one more reason why Sigmar’s golden boy and I will never see eye to eye. For the rest of us mere immortals it is a trial of endurance and pain, and it is the trial that makes us in the end. And when the Smith holds up his finished work to the light of the Broken World, most of us are less than what we were before, as anything that has been broken and remade must be. We are not perfect. Even Sigmar is not perfect. Grungni, as sure as Tzeentch has eyes, isn’t perfect and neither are his Six Smiths. But we are good enough to sheathe anew in sigmarite and send back to war.

Because war is like snow.

Even if you can’t see it, it’s falling on someone, somewhere.

A traumatic death and a lengthy reforging had left me damaged in more ways than I think I understood at the time. Nightmares of both had plagued me for years, and had only just begun to subside before Sigmar returned me to the Ghurlands, to capture the Seven Words alongside Akturus Ironheel’s Imperishables. It was one of the few subjects that I never talked about, but there are no secrets within a warrior chamber on campaign. They all knew. Broudiccan certainly knew.

Thinking of my steadfast second-in-command going through the same experience made my stomach knot. We have all gone through it once, of course, but the best of us need never do so again. This would be Broudiccan’s first return to the Anvil, and that he went in my stead left me feeling hollow.

Do you hear that sound, my friends? It is the Bell of Lamentation tolling for poor, sorry Hamilcar.

I sat there in my self-recriminations and silence for hours or minutes. As it was upon the Anvil, so too did time matter little in sunless solitary confinement. I had no way of knowing how long I wallowed like that before the sound of a key turning in a lock jolted me out of my misery.

I stood up quickly as a fantastically obese clanrat strutted past my cell. He was blind in both eyes, missing an ear and several teeth, and the right side of his face was a mess of milky white scar tissue that only enhanced his good looks. Despite being in the heart of his own lair, he wore an iron hauberk. Though if I’d been through what he apparently had, I think I’d wear one too. A fat ring of keys clinked from a leather belt that was almost white with the strain of closing around his belly. Given the well-known skaven proclivity for consuming one’s rivals, I assumed that this one had to be near to the top of his particular hill.

He sniffed at me and grinned, baring his teeth and chittering something to the two thugs that followed him in, which I somehow doubted would be complimentary.

They were big, broad across their shoulders, thick ropes of muscle rubbing together under their mangy brown fur. They were mostly naked but for fur and a bit of loincloth, their bodies covered instead in brands that reminded me of street gang tattoos or the tribal runes that I had idly painted into my own flesh. Theirs were crude and angular things, the horned cross of their repellent god drawn in various pigments and sizes. Unlike theirs, I did not know what mine were supposed to represent. Perhaps they depicted gods too.

I could, however, recognise low-lifes when I saw them.

Call it a gift.

While Milk Scar watched me, his heavies dragged another prisoner, one arm apiece, to the cell across from mine. I felt my chest swell. I’d been consciously captive for less than a day, or so I guessed, and I was already overwhelmingly grateful for the gift of another furless being. In size and proportion, he was clearly human. Judging by the scars on his flesh and the size of his bones, he had probably been a well-built one too until incarceration had worked its curse on his muscles. His skin, though, was a mossy shade of green, and his hair was the colour of autumn leaf fall. He appeared to be unconscious. If not for the fact that the skaven were bothering to lock him up and hadn’t already eaten him I would have thought him dead.

Squeaking at his henchrats, Milk Scar locked the cell door, then hauled himself around to go back the way he’d just come.

Something in me snapped at the thought of being left alone in the dark so soon.

I drove my arm through the bars and grabbed for the keyring hanging from Milk Scar’s expanse of waist. He didn’t so much as flinch, which was unexpected as the skaven aren’t exactly well known for their cool under duress. It occurred to me then that, blind as he was, he must have known exactly where to stand so as to be well out of reach should anyone take exception to their confinement. He turned his pearly eyes to me and snickered, air whistling through the gaps in his smirk. He chittered something I didn’t understand to one of his henchrats who then smacked me on the wrist with a wooden cudgel.

I made a barking noise, surprise and anger, and grabbed for the skaven’s club, but he knew his business and it was already out of my reach.

‘Bad dog,’ said Milk Scar in passable Azyri. ‘I do not like-take disobedience.’

‘My name is Hamilcar Bear-Eater, vermin.’

‘I know-smell who you are.’

‘And who are you? I would know the name of my captor.’ I pressed my face back to the bars and bared my teeth. ‘Before I eat him.’

The clanrat leered at me, tongue lolling over the side of his mouth. ‘Fool-fool. I am not your captor.’

I thumped the bars in frustration, the ratman tittering as he strolled off. ‘I will find a way out of here! I will walk out wearing your skin for boots and gloves and with your skull to sup from when I grow weary of slaughtering your kin. You hear me, rat? Answer me!’ His wheezy laughter faded as the dungeon door clanked shut behind him, leaving me again in semi-darkness.

When I had calmed down enough, I sat back down. I frowned through the bars. I frowned at the ceiling. I turned to frown at the other cell across the way.

‘Friend,’ I called over. Nothing. ‘Talk to me, brother.’

He was out cold, only the shallow rasp of his breaths to answer my welcome.

I sighed.

I wondered if his being imprisoned here where I could see him was a deliberate ploy on the part of my captors. That he had been badly abused, and over a significant length of time, was obvious. Was this the psychological equivalent of a torturer displaying the paraphernalia of his craft? Did they expect me to spend my hours of solitude henceforth consumed by the terror of what awaited me at its end? If so, then they sorely underestimated the fortitude of the Stormcast Eternals.

I may not have exactly edified myself with my response to captivity, but if there is one thing that unites all Stormcast Eternals it is our capacity to endure, and familiarity with, pain.

I looked forward to their attempt.

If only to give me someone to talk to.

The hours stretched by. I tested the bars one by one. I shook them, pulled them, threw myself against them. None of them budged. I tried scratching at the walls. Somehow I came to the conclusion that if a skaven could burrow through it, then so could Hamilcar Bear-Eater, but I lacked their claws, and I surrendered a fingernail long before the rock was ready to yield. Frustrated and bloody-fingered, I was the very model of a caged beast. My thoughts drifted from sullen defiance to my brothers, the Bear-Eaters.

‘They will come,’ I muttered to myself, quietly, so as not to disturb Zephacleas.

I had named my echo Zephacleas. It seems strange now, looking back, but it felt natural at the time.

Frankos had been far from me and the main thrust of the skaven attack when I’d fallen, along with the bulk of the Freeguild. The Knight-Heraldor had always been blessed with a cooler head than I would have known what to do with, and I was confident, as only I could be, that he would have been smart enough to get off Kurzog’s Hill before being overrun. Barbarus too. I hadn’t seen the King in the Sky after the aetar had abandoned us, and I could only hope that he had gone with them. And Xeros… Sigmar, I never thought I’d wish the Stormcloud well, but if the Lord-Relictor lived then there was no place in creation that the skaven could harbour me and hope to remain hidden from his stormsight.

I turned my gaze inwards.

Introspection had never suited me and I was about a century out of practice, but a Stormcast Eternal could always tell where he was. Every realm has a magical resonance that responds in its own peculiar way to the spark of Azyr we all bear within us. And the light of Sigendil shines upon us always, calling us to war just as it had in my mortal days. I was almost certain I was still in Ghur. I could sense the same savage gyres in the aether that my soul had felt as kindred when they had first met in the Free City of Cartha, but there was a scratching, chittering white noise running through it that gnawed at my confidence in that judgment.

‘Be alive, Stormcloud.’ I sat in silence for an interminable spell longer. ‘But pray Sigmar, don’t bring Akturus with you.’

The sound of the dungeon door being reopened startled me from my reverie.

How long had it been? Long enough to have become a moot consideration.

I was up and at the bars before Milk Scar had made the short swagger to my cell.

He looked pleased with himself. Never a promising sign in such a transparent sadist. In addition to his two thugs, who looked shifty and had their weapons out, he had brought two more clanrat guards with lowered spears to back them up. A heavy set of solid bar manacles fell from his paws and onto the floor beside him with a clunk. One of the spear-rats scurried closer to pole them through the bars and into my cell.

‘On-on,’ said Milk Scar. ‘Fast-quick.’

‘Why?’

‘We walk-scurry.’ The ratman bared his teeth at me, and clipped the ear of his spear-rat who obligingly prodded at the manacles until they butted against the outside of my foot. ‘To learn name of your captor.’