Champion of the Gods

Chapter twenty-four

Brychen creaked softly as she padded barefoot down the dank, ­sloping tunnel into the skaven lair. I glared at her knotted back, not trusting myself to contribute anything worthier than a chatter of teeth or a rattle of half-frozen bastion plate.

After my carelessness had seen me dunked under the ice, I had managed to strike for shallower floes before my arms had numbed completely. I remember getting my toes on the bottom, but after that I’m not sure; a vague recollection of buffeting wings and entangling vines. However it had been done, it could have been done better. The cold clung to me still, encasing me like some kind of hoary mollusc in a shell of blistering chill. Even the heat from the torches that Hamuz and Nassam bore barely nibbled at its surface. I was shivering so hard that I barely noticed the subtle vibrations running through the rocky floor. My hand trembled towards the wall. There it was again. Faint, but there. Like rock pulling against rock.

‘My lord, you’re frozen through,’ said Hamuz. ‘Why haven’t you used your lantern to warm yourself? I’ve seen it restore far worse.’

‘I am saving its power,’ I lied, for it had been burning continuously for five years. Ignorant of the workings of Azyr, the Jerech captain accepted that explanation.

‘Never thought I’d miss the aetar,’ grunted Nassam.

The passage widened into a familiar cavern. The circle of torchlight expanded like an inflated bladder until it could go no further, thinning and straining as it pushed against the outer dark. Those shadows that it couldn’t reach stretched and grew massive, growing horns and claws to scrape at the tenuous skein of light as we passed beneath them. The Blind Herd’s camp. It was still here. The detritus of beast-hide yurts littered the uneven ground as far as the torches could reach, and presumably further still. Toppled beastpoles lay over skinning boards and scotched fireplaces. Hoofmarks preserved in hardened ash. A crouched figure, hooded and black, watching. The occasional glint of a femur or rib.

My heart stopped.

I looked back.

There was no figure crouched there.

‘What is it?’ whispered Hamuz.

‘Nothing,’ I said.

‘Now,’ Brychen added, ominously.

‘I wish Aeygar were here,’ Nassam muttered, holding his torch higher.

‘Courage, my friend. Hamilcar goes into this dark place beside you.’

I took the torch from the Jerech’s hand. He relinquished it gladly, instead drawing his greatsword with a sigh of creamy white quartz on rough Gorwood leather. I held the torch up, my greater stature digging another foot or so of illumination out of the black. I blinked, breaking the skin of ice that had built up over my lashes as I looked around. The position of Sigendil, the High Star – the ever-present beacon, fixed above the cosmic order of the aetheric cloud – was starting to blur in my awareness. I had felt that sense of being out of place before, but only in Ikrit’s private burrows. Not out here.

‘Do you see something, lord?’ asked Nassam.

‘The last time I came this way I was half-dead, disoriented by memories that Ikrit’s sorceries had broken loose. It doesn’t feel much better now.’

‘I know what you mean, lord.’ Hamuz shivered, and not with cold. ‘Where did everyone go?’

Realising belatedly that I had spoken aloud, I drew my attention back from the distant Celestial. ‘The entire place was falling down around my ears when I left. I thought the whole lair was going to collapse.’

‘A lot of it did,’ said Brychen.

‘Not all of it,’ said Hamuz. ‘So why didn’t they come back?’

I frowned, then shrugged. I was trying to work out the surest path to Ikrit’s apotheosis chamber and the answers I sought.

‘We should split up,’ said Hamuz, apparently regretting it as soon as he did.

‘What is the matter?’ The chittering voice echoed from the bowl of the cavern ahead of us. ‘Do you fear the shadow?’ From the crumpled yurts to my left. ‘Or he that bids them?’ The passage behind us.

Hamuz’s pistol darted from point to point. Nassam turned on the spot, the hilt of his quartz greatsword in both hands, the blade lying across his shoulders.

The echoes snickered, overlapping with and building off one another until we were surrounded by their chittering mirth, like beasts in a gladiatorum pit.

Brychen’s crooked spear hummed as she spun it. ‘The predator that dares not pounce has little to say on fear.’

‘Where is Ikrit?’ I shouted.

The shadows tittered. ‘Did you not learn-hear, Bear-Eater? He is away-gone. Long-scurried.’ The voice came from the ceiling now, and I held my torch up towards it, banishing the shadows from the claw-dug rock. Inky threads fled along gouged tracks and furrows towards the walls, away from the torchlight. ‘We were equal before, priestess of the Savage Maiden. But here-now?’ The walls chittered with quiet laughter. ‘Think not-not. Not without tree-things in which to hide-skulk.’

‘You overlook the Lord Hamilcar, vermin!’ shouted Hamuz, his voice echoing.

My grin was forced, but nobody seemed to notice in the dark.

‘I live lots-many years, but I forget nothing. My soul belongs to Malerion’s cage. Nothing escapes its shadow.’

The darkness at the edge of the torchlight suddenly swirled into humanoid form, Malikcek bursting from its diaphanous cowl like a newborn with a dripping knife. The Jerech captain screamed in surprise, pushing his torch into the path of the blade. An explosion of sparks showered the assassin. The assassin tittered, bursting into formless wisps of shadow as Nassam’s greatsword swept through him, and scattering before the injured sputtering of Hamuz’s torch. Nassam’s sword banged on hard rock. He cursed as it leapt out of his hand and clattered away.

‘Stay where you are,’ I yelled at him, walking quickly to the edge of the light and picking up the lost sword.

Holding it easily by the wide blade, I handed it back.

‘Go away-back. Do not squeak-say you were not warned.’

‘Hamuz. Nassam. Keep between Brychen and me. Watch each other’s backs.’

‘What if he’s right?’ Hamuz hissed. ‘What if the warlock isn’t here?’

‘Then why is he still here?’

‘And why does he wish for us to leave?’ added Brychen.

‘Unless…’ Hamuz trailed off as he thought. ‘Unless that’s what he means for you to think, and he’s trying to trap you here or trick you.’

I gave him a nonchalant shrug, which I certainly didn’t feel but which I knew would be reassuring. ‘That all sounds a bit too complicated for me, my friend.’

‘You should listen to the man-thing. Ikrit’s interest has moved on. Now you die-die.’

A flurry of throwing stars descended on us from all directions. Most were flung at me and ricocheted off my bastion plate, but the attack was sufficiently indiscriminate to send Hamuz and Nassam scrambling for whatever cover they could find amongst the scraps of hide and armour. Brychen issued a long, sonorous vowel sound, her voice deepening as her body stretched and hardened, shaping into a sweeping canopy above the two Jerech men. Metal stars thudded into her bark and stuck. The growth spurt lasted only a moment before it ran in reverse. The wild priestess frowned down at the twisted metal sticking out of her armour.

‘I wouldn’t try to pull them out,’ I said. ‘They’re probably poisoned.’

Her lips twitched. ‘Probably.’

A clang of steel pulled my attention from her.

Malikcek drove Nassam towards the edge of the torchlight in a blur of shadowed limbs and blackened steel. The greatsword was a soldier of great skill and tremendous pride, but the assassin had him grossly outmatched. I threw my halberd with a roar, only to see Malikcek evaporate with a shriek of laughter, and my storm-forged blade smash through the side-wall of a beast-cart.

‘I will wear you down. Claim you one by one. I am darkness. I am death. The light cannot flee from shadow forever.’

‘Use your lantern,’ said Brychen.

‘Not yet.’

‘If not now, then when?’ shouted Hamuz.

There was a whisper of silk moving through shadow as I bent to pick up my halberd and I spun, halberd spinning with me like the spoke of a wheel, knocking aside the knife that Malikcek had intended for the spot between my shoulder blades. Then I spun again, and repeated the same trick on the second knife that had been driven towards my groin. I threw a punch. The assassin melted around my fist. Darkness streamed over and around my arm to reform on the outside of my punch.

The assassin’s kick landed in my stomach with the force of a whole herd of warhorses.

I staggered back, one hand over my cracked plate.

A thunderous bang almost deafened me. Hamuz. I watched in disbelief as the Jerech’s bullet passed straight through Malikcek’s ear and out the other, before ripping through the flapping wall of a yurt. Hamuz wailed in horror as the assassin rounded on him with a snarl.

‘Sigmarite-tipped rounds!’ I bellowed, gripping my halberd short, like a sickle, and hacking it across the assassin’s midriff. He bent under it, then somehow flipped his body, wriggled back to front and whipped out with a tail knife that punched through my knee-plate and put me down on one knee. I grunted, the muscles in my leg ­spasming as storm-infused sinew repelled Chaos-bred poison. ‘Nothing less will stop him.’ I turned my halberd so that I held it like a spearman facing a wild dog, and stabbed it through the skaven assassin.

He reappeared behind me.

‘The first time was fun-good, Bear-Eater. Now it is almost boring.’

‘To live is to suffer and die, shadow-touched,’ came Brychen’s snarl.

The priestess’ hand suddenly ignited. Molten amber energy blazed through the leafy bark of her gauntlet fingers, her whole body shaking with its fury. ‘Feel the kiss of the sun.’ Malikcek shrieked, evaporating before my eyes as the priestess thrust her blazing hand towards him and irradiated him in amber. This was not the cleansing white light of Azyr. It was a wild, consuming energy, one that I was able to look on only for another second before the light surge forced my eyes away.

But it burned some of the chill from my armour, which was nice.

Brychen sagged to the floor. The light, untamed and ever hungry, continued to spill from her splayed palm and across the ground before she was able to seal the gates again. Nassam ran to her side.

‘Use… your lantern,’ she growled.

An ungodly howl of pain and rage shook the cavern. The shadows whipped and roiled, like a god-serpent of black scales and monstrous size that had attempted to swallow a mortal creature and been stung by it.

‘Run?’ I suggested.

‘You are wise, my lord,’ Hamuz cried.

‘Which way?’ Brychen hissed, leaning heavily on Nassam’s shoulder.

‘Follow me.’

I hurtled off in the remembered direction of the passage that would take us deeper into the skaven lair. Hamuz sprinted unquestioningly after me. I leapt over a rockfall where the tunnel mouth had partially collapsed, felt a momentary dizziness as I landed, as though the realmsphere were a plate that tilted and pivoted under my weight, before haring on. There was a hiss and a rush of shadow, the hum of quartz and a stab-flash of amber light telling me that Brychen and Nassam were busy holding the assassin at bay.

‘Where now?’ said Hamuz. His eyes were wide and gaping, the proximity of his torch narrowing his pupils to pinpricks.

‘This way.’

Without giving myself time to think, or the others time to doubt, I plunged into a branching passage. Then another. Then another. Zig-zagging my way ever deeper into the crumbling labyrinth of tunnels and slumbering rock.

I had a vague notion of the route in my head, but the lair itself seemed to be playing tricks on me. Tunnels and scratch-posts that looked familiar would lead to dead ends and cave-ins, as if the maze had restructured itself in my absence to twist me back onto paths of its own intention. Stringy-looking rats squeaked and scampered from my torchlight. Hamuz splattered one with a precious sigmarite-tipped round, which spoke highly of the Jerech’s marksmanship, if not his nerve. Brychen screamed and rammed her spear into the wall as Malikcek seeped out of the rock between. Around a blind corner, I came to a passage that I would have sworn led to Ikrit’s apotheosis chamber, only to find myself thumping against a blank wall. The passage was gone. Uncurling my fingers, I placed my palm against the stone and shuddered. The light of Sigendil had dipped almost below my horizon. I couldn’t say why or how, but I got the feeling that the chambers I was trying to reach were not there anymore.

Then the shadows behind us furled into a hissing, verminous shape, and we were running again.

A mile or more of tortuously winding tunnels brought us to the lip of an enormous bowl of a cavern. A wooden bridge had once spanned it, but it had broken and now hung against the two sides of the abyss. I remembered this place well. With a snarl of frustration, I went to the ledge and looked down. Twisted machines held in upright sarcophagi of warped iron lay silent in their own, darkly glittering filth. Movement from the other side of the chasm caught my eye and I looked up.

Malikcek waved to me and bowed before dispersing into the shadow.

‘I hate that rat,’ I growled.

‘Hate the ghyrlion, not its claws,’ said Brychen.

We took another way.

We wormed through a collapsed passageway on our bellies, Brychen last, me staring into the darkness for what felt like an age, with such high-strung alertness that I began to see assassins in every bulge of rock and chewed-on corpse. I think that he chose not to attack me then on purpose, amused by my fear. We ran through chambers that reeked of meat and spoil, airless pockets where the fear stench had been allowed to fester and left the four of us retching and gagging.

‘He’s not here,’ said Hamuz, covering his mouth with his hand as I shouldered open a mould-framed wooden doorway. ‘Nobody’s here.’ Then he walked into a stench that finally had him on his knees and vomiting over the blood-stained floor.

I grimaced. It looked like something between a charnel house and an abattoir. Sides of meat, including a number of human-looking limbs and torsos, hung from the ceiling on hooks over a system of clogged and rusted drains. Organs had been stuffed into drawers and cupboards. Bloody cutting implements and cookware was jumbled up on top of stoves and surfaces. It rattled softly together with a quiet vibration that nobody else seemed to be aware of but me.

Their attention was on other things.

Brychen prodded one of the hanging torsos with the butt of her spear. It swayed, creaking on its hook, butting against the one behind. They were pale and bloodless, but the skin was recognisably green.

‘This is what became of my people,’ she murmured. ‘The Wild Harvest. The Gorkai. First the vengeance of Ghur’thu, and the loss of the Maiden. And now this.’

‘I doubt your brother is here,’ I said, partly because I needed her mind on the assassin rather than her loss, but also because it was true. I thought of the crushed and twisted thing that Malikcek’s poison had left of Barrach.

Some things even a ratman would know better than to put in their mouth.

‘It does not matter,’ she said, lowering her spear. ‘When the jepard tears the throat out of the ghurzelle, or the fire consumes a forest and roasts all the life it harbours alive, it is no different to this.’ She turned to the Jerech and me, dead-eyed. ‘This is how we all end.’

Inspiring stuff, I think you’ll agree.

‘Let’s move on,’ I said. ‘Before he finds us again.’

I kicked in the door at the far end of the chamber. It had already rotted half away, what was left hanging off its hinges, but smashing it down seemed expedient and infinitely more satisfying at the time.

Nassam came next with Brychen under one arm, Hamuz following quickly, walking backwards, firelight and pistol both trained shakily on the passage behind us.

‘Her light fades fast-quick…’

‘Don’t let him taunt you,’ I called back, before the Jerech captain could waste another shot. ‘Remember who stands here beside you.’ I thumped my weapon haft against my halberd and roared, ‘Hamilcar does!’

‘Leave her to me. Maybe you get out-out alive.’

‘The warlock’s not here, lord,’ said Hamuz, a quaver in his voice. ‘We should get out of here.’

‘Not without her,’ I said.

As heroic as that came across, it was partly practical. I had been so intent on locating Ikrit’s apotheosis chamber – or better yet, Ikrit himself – that I’d been paying only a passing regard to our route.

I had been hoping that Brychen was paying attention.

‘We’re getting close to something,’ I said.

And we were. I could feel it. Sigendil had dipped out of view entirely, leaving me chilled and alone, but the nauseating sensation of the realmsphere tipping and turning beneath me had gone with it. Wherever the new makeup of the lair had been funnelling us, we were close to it, I was sure.

‘It looks like the apprentice workshops in the Ironweld armoury,’ said Nassam.

I nodded, though I’d avoided the place like it was a plague house.

Scraps of parchment lay everywhere, as though torn from the crooked metal cabinets and discarded drawers in some haste. The covers of books with their pages torn out. Bits of metal. Tools. Wires. Coloured glass.

‘Someone ransacked this place in a hurry,’ observed Hamuz.

‘Clearing out,’ agreed Nassam.

‘Going where, I wonder?’ I said.

Brychen looked thoughtful. ‘There have not always been skaven in the Nevermarsh. One day there were none and the next… it was as though the rains came.’

‘So they move on,’ I grunted. That was going to make my life harder. ‘I suppose that makes sense, the powers lined up in pursuit of Ikrit’s undead tail.’

‘How long ago was this?’ Nassam asked the priestess.

‘Nine seasons.’

‘A year and a half,’ Hamuz murmured. ‘No way they could have dug all these tunnels in a year and a half.’

I had no idea if it was possible or not, so I shrugged. ‘Deviant skaven sorcery. This would be the least impossible thing that I’ve seen it do.’ I gestured towards another passageway. ‘Over here. I think I know where we are.’

And to my immense satisfaction, I discovered that I wasn’t lying.

Ikrit’s burrows.

Leaving the others to catch up, I hurried towards the big circular door at the end of the undamaged tunnel. I stared at it for what was, in hindsight, an inordinately long time.

‘What is it, lord?’ said Hamuz.

‘This door was open before.’

‘What of it?’ asked Nassam.

‘Someone’s been here.’

‘One of Ikrit’s minions?’ said Brychen. ‘We have seen none now, but I despatched dozens when I came here the first time.’

I shook my head. ‘Not in their master’s own burrow. You haven’t seen him, but trust me. Even with the lair falling down around their ears they wouldn’t have dared shelter in there.’

‘Malikcek then,’ said Hamuz.

‘Not big on doors,’ I said. ‘You may have noticed.’

The Jerech captain glanced nervously back down the passageway. ‘You might be right.’

‘So… someone else has been in there?’ said Nassam, catching on.

‘Someone’s still in there,’ I said, a grin coming slowly. ‘It can only be opened from the inside.’

‘Well, let’s get what we came for.’ Hamuz pointed his pistol at the fiendishly complicated setup of rods and wheels and chains that constituted the lock. ‘Then get back out.’

‘No.’

Putting one hand over the Jerech’s wrist, guiding his aim down to the ground, Brychen placed the other against the door. At first, nothing much happened. Then there was a creak. Hamuz jumped back with a start as a strip of brass plating buckled outwards and a green shoot forced its way underneath it. My first thought was that the priestess was going to goad the dead wood to new life, ripping out the artifice of the warlock’s doorway, but where that idea came from, or how being presented with a tree rather than a door would have been preferable, I have no idea.

Before I had a chance to answer that question, the priestess was gone, sucked into the wood of the door through that sapling growth.

We all took a step back.

‘Gods… damn,’ muttered Nassam, signing the hammer.

There was a click, and the door hinged open. Brychen stood on the other side, leaning even more wearily on her spear than she already had been.

‘I’m glad she’s on our side,’ Hamuz whispered to me.

I clapped him on the shoulder and ushered him in. Having experienced Brychen from both sides, I wholeheartedly concurred. I went in last. My vision swam and my knees weakened the moment I crossed the threshold. At first I thought that my constitution had finally been defeated and Malikcek’s poison had won out, but it wasn’t that. The weakness was spiritual, not physical. The High Star was gone, its blurry radiance consigned below the strange horizon of this room. I touched the door frame, but the telltale tremors and aetheric vibrations of the Realm of Beasts were no more.

I hadn’t crossed a door. I’d gone through an Arcgate into some kind of dead zone between realms.

Or so it felt at the time.

‘Are you well, lord?’ said Hamuz.

‘Fine. Shut the door and lock it.’

‘Are you sure? It seems to be the only way in or–’

‘Are you wanting to go somewhere? Lock it.’

‘Lord.’

The Jerech captain set about his orders.

‘And you.’ I pointed at Brychen, spotting the ripped Magrittan chaise that Malikcek had dumped me in when I’d first attended upon his master in his lair. ‘Sit. Recover your strength.’

‘There can be no recovery for me here,’ she said. ‘Cut off from the currents of the Ghurlands as we are.’

I blinked at her. ‘You felt it too? Why didn’t you say something?’

‘I assumed you knew.’

I rolled my eyes.

‘What’s she talking about, lord?’ said Hamuz, just finishing up with the door.

‘Nothing to worry about,’ I said. ‘We’re here now. Let’s find the warlock.’

‘He is not here,’ Brychen observed, with annoying dispassion, and even more annoying accuracy.

I looked around. The burrow did indeed appear to be devoid of any obvious signs of life, but it wasn’t lacking in clutter. Every­thing that had been missing from the workshop-warrens and study-holes in the surrounding tunnels seemed to have been crammed in here. Blocks of browned and nibbled papers had been stacked up, tied with rattails or string, or just flung in wherever. There were half-finished devices. Complicated-looking firearms with no stock, strings and wiring spilling out the sides. A plethora of iterations around the theme of powered digging and cutting tools. What looked like a crude facsimile of my lantern in amberglass, warpstone and bronze. I smashed it with the butt of my halberd and some satisfaction. Shaped crystals and assorted gems sat in drawers, loose on the floor, alongside claw-scratch sketches, odd bits of machinery and rubber bands.

I rubbed at my head. It was starting to hurt. It was possible that being severed from Azyr was having a more profound effect on me than I’d imagined, but given how the realm’s focused energies burned me now, its eclipse should have been the opposite of painful. Being cut off from the Mortal Realms more generally then?

Perhaps.

Or maybe the man I was slowly remembering how to be didn’t respond too well to adversity.

‘Maybe it’s not Ikrit as we know him that we’re looking for. I hurt him the last time we parted. He has been recovering somehow, regenerating, using the powers he has stolen to regather his strength.’ I went on to explain, without going into the grisly details, of the vision I had experienced in the Forge Eternal, of being cocooned in a seed pod, feeling my ancient body mend.

‘A seed pod?’ said Brychen.

‘What are you, my Heraldor?’

‘The Wild Harvest used such magic to revitalise our warriors when they tire and rejuvenate our leaders when they age.’

‘Used?’ said Nassam.

‘It was a gift from the Maiden. Like the tide, withdrawn.’

‘Ikrit stole it from her,’ I said. ‘That and other things.’

She glared at me, and for a moment I thought she was going to strike me. ‘It would be large,’ she said at last. ‘Not like those of the Gorwood sylvaneth. We are flesh and blood and cannot be cut and re-sown as they are. It would be larger even than the skaven himself. It could not be hidden here.’

‘My lord.’ Hamuz was rifling through some of the loose papers. He picked up a clutch of them and held them up against the light of his torch. ‘I can’t read the language, but there are pictures here. Designs for…’ he struggled for a moment, ‘things.’ He flipped a piece of paper to show me what looked like the skeleton of one of the flying machines that had undone the aetar at Kurzog’s Hill. ‘Maybe there’s something here that can shed some light on what was done to your soul.’

‘You heard about that?’ I said.

He nodded.

‘And you followed me anyway?’

‘Hamilcar, Sigmar, Seven Words,’ he said, repeating the triptych that I’d heard him shout out before bringing down Broudiccan on my behalf.

‘In that order,’ said Nassam.

I felt a fuzziness in my chest, pushing out the stinging throb in my temples.

Hamuz tossed me a book.

‘What am I supposed to do with this?’

‘Have a look.’

I held the object in my palm as though it might shed its carapace and sprout wings.

‘How would you know that Ikrit had gained such gifts of regeneration?’ asked Brychen.

I ignored the question with a snarl of discomfort.

‘Look at these,’ Nassam called over from the bookshelf bolted to the rock wall. He proceeded to pull various tomes down, holding them together as a stack and examining the spines. ‘These are in Azyri, I think.’ He turned to me.

I stared at him, dumbly, the other book still sitting in my palm, stubbornly refusing to move or transform. Hassam waved another sheaf of papers at me.

‘Come on, lord. Let’s find anything that might be of value and get out of here.’

‘Why were you so certain that Ikrit would be here?’ Brychen went on.

‘Arrrgh!’

In a sudden, senseless rage, I ripped the book in half and threw the torn halves aside.

‘The nights I spent, night after unending night, huddled in the snow, lying in wait for mournfang or thundertusk and huskwolfen. Do you think we read? When we recalled the brothers and sisters, daughters and sons, fathers and mothers lost to war and winter, do you imagine we did it with these?’ I kicked over a table and sent papers flying. Hamuz stumbled back, his hands raised placatingly. ‘We saw by the stars, and by the unlight of Dharroth. Nothing grows in the Eternal Winterlands. Nothing that will burn. I was a grown man when I saw the sun for the first time.’ Feelings poured out of me. Rage. Shame. Guilt. I had no idea where they were coming from, but I couldn’t make them stop. I closed on Hamuz until I felt Brychen’s spear against my breastplate. I turned to her with a feral grin, uncaring. ‘And what did we do? We fought until we couldn’t stand, we drank until we couldn’t stand, we let the women abuse us until we couldn’t stand. Because that is how the Winterlands tribes have always seen in the Day.’

‘I’m sorry, my lord,’ said Hamuz, mortally terrified, in spite of Brychen’s spear. ‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry.’

I leaned in towards him, the spear-point digging in in a way no wood should have been able to mistreat sigmarite. ‘I. Can’t. Read.’

A slow hand-clap snapped me out of it before I or Brychen could do anything more lasting. It made an odd, muted clicking sound, as if the hands were gloved.

Or furred.

‘Ikrit squeak-say that this would happen. You are becoming less-less the perfect thing that your god tried to make you. More that of meat and bone which he took-snatch from the ice.’ Malikcek was sprawled comfortably over the chaise that I had bidden Brychen to sit in. Something in my face made him snicker in amusement. The indescribable bout of rage had left me as suddenly as it had come about, but anger doesn’t leave you just like that. It’s like oil. It blackens what it touches.

‘What does Ikrit know of it?’

‘What becomes of you becomes of him, only… opposite.’

I grappled with my belt, Hamuz and Nassam backing fearfully away from me, before finally unhitching my warding lantern. Malikcek regarded it in apparent surprise.

‘Your hell-light. I thought it lost.’

‘It was. To the ice lakes outside.’

The assassin clapped his paws together in front of his snout and sniggered in delight. ‘Teheheheh. Such beautiful irony. That which even now he invades the Seven Words to claim, he could have just took-found outside his own lair.’

I held up my lantern. ‘He wants this?’

‘You feel-know how it mends your soul, even as it burn-burn your body, yes-yes? Ikrit wants a hell-light for his own.’ He licked his lips. ‘He was most wrathful when he found you had taken it in your escape. He kill-flayed three engineers with Death magic from inside his flesh cocoon.’

Brychen shot me a look. I ignored her.

Malikcek bared his fangs at me. It could have been smile or snarl, I didn’t know.

‘But he not squeak-ask for me to take-steal your light from you. He squeak-ask for me to make sure you found his burrow.’

‘Hah! You lured me nowhere, shadow–’

‘Enjoy your oblivion, Bear-Eater.’

With that, he sank back into the shadows of the chair cushions and left me brandishing a lantern over an empty chaise.

‘Malikcek!’ I yelled. ‘Malikcek!’

I got no answer, and I had the sense that the assassin was gone for good this time.

And that I probably wanted to be going the same way, fast.

‘Nassam, get that door open.’

The greatsword hesitated a moment, looking at me fearfully, before hurrying to the door. He grabbed the wheel-lock mechanism, but recoiled with a cry before he could turn it as though he had just been burnt. An amber flood, muddied with polluting streams of Chaotic energies, shone from the very matter of the door. Substance dissolved into pure magic, and the door – and the entire wall – twisted into a puddle of discoloured fire that I was in no hurry to command anyone to try to open again.

I knew now why I had felt that the passages and chambers beyond the various collapses hadn’t been there anymore. They hadn’t. They’d sunk through the aetheric plane of the realm and gone to an entirely other place.

And we were about to join them.

‘Find another way out,’ I yelled, as the walls began to swirl and run, a bubble of non-existence closing in around us.

‘There’s none,’ screamed Hamuz.

‘Take my hand.’ Hamuz and Nassam didn’t hesitate, gripping my gauntlets tightly. Brychen frowned, then reluctantly held up her hands for the two Jerech to take.

‘This is your fault,’ she said.

‘We stand together. We fall together. We stand again by the God-King’s grace.’

The ground beneath us tilted, stretched, sliding towards an event horizon a billion billion miles below our feet. The rest of the lair and the Ghurite-Chaotic strands that it now existed as streamed in towards that amber-haloed maw, a smear of suns and moons and broken stars laddering all the way towards the High Star and its companion cosmos, an infinity and an eternity away.

‘Lean on me, brothers and sisters.’

I roared, fighting the cosmic drag on the three mortals with all my storm-forged might, but my voice was already being drawn out, disappearing into the abyss.

My legs started to stretch, my feet little more than dots in the Celestial nothing.

‘Hamilcar… stands! Hamilcar… lives!’