Champion of the Gods

Chapter fourteen

For a being of cold starlight and the slow Celestial cycles, I had some crazed dreams that night.

I dreamt of old stars. Oceans of ice. Wind in my hair, cold on my face, warmth in my blood. I dreamt of Vikaeus again. As she had been.

Her skin was not as pale, her hair less dark and rubbed with goldspar, clad in bearskin and decked with jewels, or what passed for them amongst our people, which meant bright shells and feathers, polished stones, painted teeth. The sun rose behind her over the summit of the snow-draped mountain that our tribe had lived on and worshipped, lighting her up like a goddess. I dreamt of a heart melting for the knowledge that this vision before me was mine and mine alone. ‘You are usurped, my king,’ she recited to me, her voice dripping like honey. ‘The sun rises. The rule of the Day Queen comes.’ Lucidity dissolved into a riot of feasting and fighting, women in Day armour of cured hide and ribbons that their mothers and grandmothers had tended for these once-in-a-generation hours of day, commanding their menfolk to fetch them ale, bathe their feet, and embarrass themselves performing feats of strength for their pleasure. I dreamt of odd things. Unexpected things. The warm taste of ale in a woman’s mouth. Being dizzy from too much dancing.

It was enough to stir me from my sleep but could not rouse me completely.

I dreamt of monsters. Long hunts across the eternal wildernesses in search of forage and game. A father, a huge man with arms like tree trunks and a laugh to break ice with. Brothers. I dreamt of the ogor frostlord and his raiders who had been tracking the same prey as us. He was mounted on a white bear the size of a Dracoth, draped in the tattooed skins of men and beasts and wielding a lance of solid ice as long as three men. I dreamt of teeth and white fur, my father’s screams, the memory of blood as I chewed the white bear’s ear off even as it shook my body in its jaws.

‘My Bear-Eater,’ spoke the thunder as it all went away.

It sounded amused.

I woke for a spell after that, and in that limbo of half-sleep I felt myself sealed within a seed pod of the kind that the sylvaneth use to nurture the young of their kind. Chittering voices came to me from the outside, muted by the viscous fluids of the pod, drowned out by the warped, but strident, pulse of Life.

I startled awake, kicking off my bedsheets and beating the foot of my cot with my heels – convinced, for reasons I could not quite divine, that there were rats at the end of my bed. The dream fog cleared from me as I came fully awake, but the corrupted throb of the Life song was more cloying. I sat up slowly, brushing off the hair that sweat had matted to my face. The room was too dark, too airless. The walls were too close. There were no windows. That was what it was. I swung out of the cot, intending to go to the wash basin and see if I could figure out the cold tap when I noticed the intense-looking duardin from before stood outside the door of my cell. The way he crossed his arms over his chest emphasised his incredible musculature, and somehow made him appear ten feet tall. The shadows cast by the thunderstorms in his eyes did the rest.

‘Ong sent you to watch me sleep?’ I growled, slightly unnerved, the restless night making me snappish.

He shook his head. His beard was well-kept and tawny-coloured. A pair of thin-framed spectacles sat on his bulb nose. Lightning flared across the inside of the lenses.

‘You came to watch me sleep because you wanted to?’

Without answering, he slotted a key into the lock of my cell. The door sang like a seraphon choir as it opened. I frowned at the strange duardin. Power swept through the open door of the cell like the winds of a coming storm.

‘You are no duardin,’ I said.

He regarded me sternly.

‘Do you serve the Smiths?’

Finally, he spoke. ‘Not exactly.’

Where the chamber’s walls had previously shaped themselves to Ong’s moods, they shuddered to this duardin’s. Thunder peeled. Rain hammered upon the roof of the realm. I narrowed my eyes against the sudden gale.

‘I feared as much,’ I said.

I wanted to ask who he was, what god he served, why he had been sent for me and how he had managed to breach the Forge Eternal, but I sensed that the delay would have been my death. His power was sublime.

I felt it the moment that my punch made contact with his face.

Lightning bolted between us. His spectacles shattered. I knew I had no right even to be entertaining the idea of challenging a semi-divinity of this order, but surprise could be a powerful weapon.

The duardin stumbled back, storm clouds gathering about his shoulders like a cloak. I followed through the cell door, not giving him a chance to recover. An uppercut lifted him off the ground. He didn’t go far. It was as if he weighed twenty times what he appeared to. The flagstones split beneath him as though I had struck them with a starsoul mace.

When I got to the door, I dragged it open.

‘Whoah!’

I wobbled over the threshold, my hand still gripping the door handle for dear life as a sort of multi-dimensional vertigo crashed over me.

The Forge Eternal, even just Ong’s sixth of it, was a labyrinth of staircases and columns, celestine pillars carved with stylised duardin faces and crackling lightning forges. Trying to take in the entire vista at once was like trying to capture the entirety of the night sky. From where I stood, clinging to the door frame, it appeared as though duardin in work leathers and aprons blitzed up and down golden staircases, trailed by lightning, blithely unconcerned by the others doing the exact same thing on the flip side. Other sets just hung unsupported, or terminated mid-step only to emerge from behind an obstructing pillar elsewhere, going down where before they had been running upwards. Where walls were visible through the layers of lightning stairs and supports, I saw only storm haze and smoke, duardin and humans and the occasional aelf labouring like ants alongside the Smiths’ lightning automata in the creation of weapons – and beings – of power. If there was a ceiling, or a floor, then I couldn’t see one. Ordinarily, this was the sort of topsy-turvy stuff that I couldn’t get enough of, but it made my stomach roil.

Concentrating solely on the steps in front of me, I started running. Corposant lightning flickered about my feet, the view about me blurring as the stairs swept me through the labyrinth at mind-bending speeds. Just as it had been when fleeing Ikrit’s lair I had no idea what I was doing, but Ong was about to wake up to the same fact that the warlock had before him, and that was this: confinement does not a cooperative Hamilcar make. I would find Ikrit or Malikcek, preferably both, and beat the answers out of them if I had to before returning to Sigmaron in triumph. That was my plan – staggering in ambition, light on detail. The way I liked them. Focusing on the end goal made all the steps I had to take along the way seem individually smaller. Small enough to be ignored for now.

Just think about the glory.

The sound of heavy booted steps whisked up (or possibly down) the stairs towards me. I tensed, ready for a fight with anything this realm within a realm could throw at me, but the pair of duardin in leather jerkins and gauntlets simply tugged on their beards and grunted ‘lord’ as they flashed past, as though Stormcast Eternals in bed robes ran up and down these stairs all the time. I had visions of more broken warriors like myself. Retinues of them. Conclaves. Chambers. Lost in the Forge of Ong and running for all time like lightning gheists in a bottle. The feeling came over me with such force that I dived headlong for the next door I saw and slammed it behind me. I leant my back against it, my mind a whirl of speed, the terror of a trapped animal tight about my chest.

‘I should have expected that you would do something like that.’

I gave a shout of alarm and raised my fists.

I was in an armoury. Dummies and racks stood in rows in the dark, the storms within them subdued, their final colours muted, awaiting bondage to the souls of Stormcast Eternals as yet unstruck.

The duardin stood in front of me, his expression stormy as he removed his now unbroken spectacles. Lightning flared behind his eyes. Recognition struck me like a bolt from above, and I dropped immediately to my knees.

‘S-Sigmar.’

The duardin touched his face where I had struck him. ‘A good blow, Hamilcar. But you are not a god.’ He drew his hand from the unblemished skin. Lightning played about the fingers as he extended it towards me. ‘You have not earned the right.’

A bolt of lightning tore from the duardin’s open palm. He did not summon it as would a Lord-Relictor or Sacristan. Rather it was as though he ceded a tiny, infinitesimal portion of his being to become lightning. The bolt struck me, and in that heart-flash of divine communion we were connected. My chest. His hand. My soul.

My god.

The duardin had been seared from existence, burned away in full by the soaring majesty of a man, bearded and great, clad in armour of burnished gold and auroral light. In physicality he stood little higher than I did, and yet I looked up. The gaze that met mine was luminous and ancient, curious and wise, wrathful as the stars, yet with a capacity for empathy and courage that barriers of realm or race could not deny. He looked like me. All of that, and more yet that I could not now describe, I felt in the cosmic eye-blink that it took for his lightning to leap fully from his gauntlet and into me.

After that, I am not sure what happened.

I must have flown backwards, cracked my head against the door that I had entered by and been thrown unconscious for a spell. I recalled none of it.

I came to lying on my chest, surrounded by a golden nimbus that might have been the antipodal opposite of the foul luminescence to which I had awoken in Ikrit’s lair. Lightning played across my fingertips, flashing between my eyelashes and the flagstones on which I lay. They had been dark when I had entered, granite grey, pleasing to its dour custodians, but now they were lustrous, marble white and veined with silver. The dummies that surrounded me, stick figures mere moments before, were now clad in the finest suits of thrice-blessed armour, and the weapon racks were full. Light lanced in through windows that had assuredly not been there, but it was not a kind light. It was the light of epiphany and judgement, damning me to glorious blindness while the greatest being ever to claim the Mortal Realms his own stood scant feet from where I lay.

‘Grungni forged you in my image,’ the light intoned, and ­trembled with the weight of its own words. ‘Not as I am, nor as I would wish to be, but as a memory of something that once was.’ It walked towards me, the light, until he reached out to tilt my face towards his with storm-wreathed fingers. My illumination brought with it a savage pain, tempest and thunder. And yet barely a fraction, I knew, of the boiling heart of the storm of storms he contained.

I must have made a sound, for the God-King looked fleetingly downcast, and withdrew his hand from my chin.

‘So it is true. That which I gave to alloy your mortal soul to mine has been broken. There can be no succour for you in Azyr.’

I shook my head, scrunching my eyes against the incandescence of the Storm Eternal. Denying his charge was the hardest thing I had ever bidden myself to do, and yet I did so all the same.

‘I am still me, sire.’

‘I grieve for what has been done to you, Hamilcar Bear-Eater. As if an injury has been done to a son of my own flesh and blood.’ Eyes of raw, torrential energy became darkly brooding, as if recalling a time when the mortal injury had been done to his inconceivably distant self. ‘But Ong is not wrong. What has been done to you is a threat to the very existence of the Stormhosts. If it can be repeated. If Ikrit succeeds…’ Sigmar looked at the floor and breathed a sigh that carried on it the woes of the eight Mortal Realms. ‘All the long centuries that I left the realms to the mercies of Chaos, allowing them to suffer and change while Grungni and I laboured to perfect the first Stormcast Eternals. It will have been for naught if the skaven, Ikrit, can create a host of his own corrupted design.’

I made to ask him what he knew of the warlock. Like Ong before him, Sigmar had referred to him by name, and with a casualness that spoke of prior familiarity. Before I could muster my courage, the God-King had turned his radiance from me and gestured towards an armour dummy upon which a harness of highly ornate and ­unusually heavy aegis war-plate had been assembled. It looked like the bastion armour that Broudiccan had worn, albeit far more elaborate and fine.

With the light on me diminished, I took a shuddering breath and sat up.

‘It is exquisite,’ I said. ‘Fit for a Lord-Commander or Celestant-Prime.’

‘Watch,’ rumbled the storm.

Nothing happened, but just as I dared to open my mouth to say so the harness began to change colour, shifting from a drab, even cream to sun-bright amethyst and dazzling gold. Beastmarks displaying snarling bears arose from the previously solid metal of the left pauldron and right poleyn. The cloak thickened to become fur and a necklace of long, grizzly teeth formed a ring around the gorget and a matching bracelet around the cuff of each vambrace. It was conspicuously more magnificent than anything I had worn as a Lord-Castellant of the Astral Templars.

‘You are Lord-Castellant no more,’ said Sigmar, drawing the thoughts from my head like bolts of lightning to a rod. ‘The lord of no Stormhost may command you.’ He tossed me a helmet. I caught it between my hands, residual lightning flaring from the eye slots, and looked down into a Mask Impassive that glittered purple. A golden halo swept around the face-plate, a single piece of metal swept into the form of a rearing bear. The feature most striking to me, however, was the lack of the coloured plume that would have indicated chamber allegiance. ‘You have fallen and been remade by my grace. You are Knight-Questor now, appointed by me, beholden to no cause or duty but the geas I lay upon you now.’

I positioned myself so as to be up on one knee, and lowered my head anew.

‘Find Ikrit. Learn his secrets. Destroy every trace of his work. Kill him if you must, but bring him to me alive if you can. I am far from the first to have fallen foul of his avarice.’

‘Sire?’

‘The name “Ikrit” was not unknown to me. Tyrion. Alarielle. Even Nagash. He has crossed many whom I would prefer to call ally.’ He spoke the names of gods as though they were petty lords or counsellors on whom he might call in passing. I nodded as though this were commonplace in my experience. ‘They are but the ones I know of, and even they do not speak of it freely. Can you imagine Nagash admitting to a mortal skaven violating the sanctity of Nekroheim and escaping with the direst secrets of undeath?’

‘I cannot,’ I said, honestly.

‘It sets a black precedent.’

‘You fear that other mortals will attempt the same.’

The brilliance sighed. ‘We all were mortal once. Even Nagash was once a living man, if you can believe that now. I am told this Ikrit is almost as ancient, even if for the moment he lacks our power.’

‘Told by whom?’

‘My brother and sister gods despatch agents of their own to capture him and his assassin. In secret, of course, but little transpires in the realms that the stars do not observe. Malerion has pursued him longest. Decades, at least.’

‘As has his own Horned Rat.’

‘Indeed?’ Sigmar turned to me, and I winced. His genuine surprise was like a tsunami wave, violent and unexpected. ‘No one else tasked with bringing in this quarry knows him as well as you can claim to, Hamilcar, for good or ill. It will be I to claim the warlock, and it will be you that brings him to me.’

I nodded, rising from my knee, but keeping my head bowed.

‘Why the deception, sire? You are the God-King. Why come to me in disguise?’

‘You are best-placed to find Ikrit first, Hamilcar, but I cannot have it known that you are on this quest. The injury that has been done to you is too great. It would weaken the resolve of the Stormhosts if it were to become known. When Ong finds you missing he will come to me, and I will claim ignorance. The Smiths are proud. Better for them to believe you headstrong and resourceful than that I work to the common good behind their backs. I will have no choice but to send hunters after you.’

I snorted. The hunter had not yet been reforged who could bring down Hamilcar Bear-Eater.

‘Where should I begin?’

‘Ghur.’

I nodded. I still had allies there that I could call upon. I was thinking of Frankos, Akturus. Perhaps even el-Shaah.

The radiance before me splintered around the sharp edges of something metallic as the God-King held forth a weapon. It was a halberd. It was my halberd. I held out my hands, palms flat, as Sigmar laid the haft across them. Closing my left hand to grip it, I ran my right along the shaft towards the blade, reacquainting myself with every notch and carving the way a blind man would a trusted staff.

‘You remade it.’

‘Ong thought it unsalvageable. I found another Smith.’

I did not enquire further, which I regret now, but at the time I could not have been any less concerned with the internecine struggles of the gods. Standing stiffly, as though I had been crouched in obeisance for a thousand years, I gave the weapon a practice twirl, stabbing finally at the armour dummy, holding the long-handled weapon unwavering in one hand.

‘As good as new,’ I said. ‘First forged under the Auroral Tempest.’

‘A more belligerent storm does not exist in Azyr.’

‘I am glad you did not insist on a Questor Warblade. I don’t think I would feel the same warrior with any other weapon.’ I lowered the halberd’s blade point to the flagstones.

‘What is it? You have doubts.’

‘Never.’ Despite what I said I touched the fingers of my left hand to my breast. The position matched about as closely as I could hazard to the injury in my soul. But how do you even go about explaining such things to a god? It was my god that addressed me now though, not Ong, and I felt that I owed him something of the truth. ‘I have been remembering things from my old life. Feeling things.’

‘What manner of things?’

I thought of Vikaeus in her Day armour and grew inexplicably defensive.

‘Things.’

A smile shone upon the God-King’s face, sunlight glimpsed through a break in the storm. The burn it inflicted on me was fleeting and light, an uplifting trill of power that cascaded between my ears and in the palms of my hands.

‘Then perhaps what Ikrit has given you is not wholly a curse.’

I smiled back at him. I was helpless to do otherwise.

‘Then I am ready.’ I threw the fabulously ornate helmet that Sigmar had given to me over my shoulder. I would wear the armour with pride, but the God-King himself could not make Hamilcar Bear-Eater cover his face with a helmet.

Knight-Questor Hamilcar Bear-Eater, I thought.

Lord-Celestant Frankos of the Heavens Forge didn’t sound nearly as impressive to me now.

‘Send me back, sire.’