Trachos grunted and covered the hourglass up. He looked angrier than ever, and his head twitched again.
Gotrek snorted in amusement. ‘Something to hide?’
Trachos grabbed one of the wineskins and drank. He ignored Gotrek and Maleneth’s intrigued expressions and turned to Lhosia. ‘I fought with a retinue of Stormcast Eternals along the southern reaches of the Amethyst Princedoms. They were Hammers of Sigmar. My own retinues had been…’ He hesitated, then tapped his turquoise armour. ‘I belong to a Stormhost known as the Celestial Vindicators, but I was the last of my retinue. I was headed back to Azyr when I was attached to the Hammers of Sigmar. We were strangers to each other, but we fought well. We took back the Amalthea Keep then scoured the whole coast. No servant of Chaos now draws breath for nearly three hundred miles of those walls.’
Lhosia nodded. ‘The Amalthea Keep. I know the name. The Radican Princes. In the ancient times they were our allies. There are still sacred texts written by Radican Princes held in the libraries of the Lingering Keep.’ She shook her head. ‘You have claimed back the keep? It is centuries, countless centuries since those lands were free of Chaos.’
Something flickered in Trachos’ eyes, then vanished as quickly as it had come. ‘We claimed the keep and the land around it. I was attached to the Hammers of Sigmar to perform a specific duty.’ He tapped the devices clasped to his belt. ‘My job was to send a signal to Azyr so that the rest of their Stormhost could find a route through the aether-void. While my comrades rounded up the locals and armed them, I helped the retinue responsible for repairing the keep.’ He paused and took another deep swig of wine. ‘Weeks passed. No word from Azyr.’ He shook his head, frowning. ‘Well, nothing I could recognise. Only howls and screams. Someone was trying to warn me. But it was like cries heard through a wall. “Necroquake” was the only word I could decipher, but I had no idea what that meant.
‘We continued our work, scouring the plains for remnants of the Chaos dogs.’ His gauntlet screeched as he crushed the wineskin tighter, as though imagining squeezing the life from someone. ‘We had them on the run. We attacked. With ferocity. Such brutality. I showed the Hammers of Sigmar how Celestial Vindicators fight. Even the Bloodbound were not prepared. They had grown lax. They never expected anyone to try to reclaim the princedoms after so long. They thought these lands were theirs.’
His voice grew louder, as though he were addressing a crowd rather than three people sitting right next to him. ‘But reclaim them we did! With barely a single loss. We tore down their idols and citadels. We ripped open their prisons. We freed wretched souls who hadn’t seen light for decades. It was glorious. The hammer fell. The Bloodbound died.’
Maleneth took the wineskin gently from his hand, interrupting his memories. She took a sip and spoke quietly. ‘And yet, when you approached me and the Slayer in Aqshy, you were alone. There were no Hammers of Sigmar with you when you found us on the Slain Peak.’
Trachos’ head was shaking as he stared at her, rage bleeding from his eyes.
She slipped a hand discreetly to one of her knives, wondering if she had pushed him too far.
Trachos’ anger subsided and he slumped back. ‘We crushed Chaos. We did as we were forged to do. Those beasts could not break through the armour of our faith, but…’ He hesitated. ‘But Chaos is not the only threat in Shyish. The voices from Azyrheim grew fainter and more desperate, so we focused all our attention on fortifying the keep and arming the slaves we had freed. We knew it would not be long before word of our success reached the warlords in control of the rest of the princedom. We had taken the keep through speed and surprise, not through superior numbers. Without reinforcements we would be hard pressed. The slaves were terrified of us at first, but as the weeks wore on they saw a chance. A chance for revenge, if nothing else. Some still knew legends of the time before Chaos. Times when man lived free of tyranny. Under our care they grew stronger. Braver. We started moving out into the surrounding villages, fortifying them, spreading across the princedom. When the attacks came we were ready. And so were the mortals.
‘But then we began to hear of other things.’ His expression darkened. ‘Cannibalism amongst the wretches we had armed and fed. We had shared Sigmar’s word with them. We had told them that the Age of Chaos was over and that a new era had begun, but as soon as we left them to their own devices they fell back into savagery.’ His voice trembled with rage. ‘If people knew what we sacrificed to fight for these realms. If they knew what it meant. We are immortal but we–’ He shook his head. ‘After so long under the lash of Chaos, they had fallen back into the debased worship of the Blood God. Or, at least, that’s what I thought. I rode out from the keep to see for myself what had happened.’
His voice fell quiet. ‘It was not Chaos. They were not worshipping Khorne. I saw it as soon as I reached the nearest village. Worship of any kind was now beyond them. They were no longer human. They had crawled into the mass graves left by their oppressors and dug up the remains.’ He grimaced. ‘They were eating corpses, feeding on them like animals. After all we’d done for them, I could not understand it.’ He pounded his fist against the ground, scattering embers. ‘We freed them and they turned into animals. Couldn’t they see that they were risking everything? They were leaving us open to attack. We saved them and they betrayed us! They did not even–’ Trachos cut himself off again and shook his head.
‘What did you do?’ asked Maleneth, sensing that he was reluctant to finish the story.
Clearly the wine had had the same tongue-loosening effect on Trachos as it had on Gotrek. He looked torn, but he could not stop talking. Maleneth had seen humans like this before. Too ashamed to speak of their deeds but too tormented to stay silent.
‘I was furious,’ he muttered. ‘Some of the Hammers of Sigmar were there and they tried to calm me, but I would not listen. I tore through the village. Those people were going to ruin everything, and I was determined not to… I butchered them. All of them. I showed them how the God-King deals with those who betray their saviours.’
Maleneth shrugged. ‘Seems reasonable. You saved them and they turned into ghouls. It’s ill-mannered, if nothing else. I don’t blame you for taking a hammer to them.’
Gotrek frowned. ‘You said the other hammer-hurlers tried to hold you back. Why? You were doing the work of Sigmar. They were ghouls. Like the things we’ve fought here, in Morbium. Why shouldn’t you slaughter them?’
Trachos would not meet their eyes, and his voice became flat. ‘I was furious. It was a kind of madness. I could hear my comrades calling me, but their voices were like the screams of the aether-void. They made no sense. Like a pack of animals howling at me. My hammers rose and fell, smashed and crushed, filling my eyes with blood. Only exhaustion finally forced me to pause. And then I saw the bodies I had left.’
Maleneth nodded, finally guessing the truth. Finally understanding why Trachos’ mind was as broken as his body. ‘They weren’t all ghouls, were they?’
Trachos did not answer.
‘You were killing humans,’ she continued. ‘That’s why the other Stormcast Eternals were trying to stop you.’
Trachos spoke quietly. ‘I walked back the way I had come, but I could not make sense of it all – of the corpses. Some were definitely the things I saw gnawing at the graves. But others were…’ He shook his head.
Gotrek grimaced, drinking more wine.
Lhosia looked at Trachos with new eyes, appalled.
‘What did the Hammers of Sigmar do?’ asked Maleneth.
Trachos’ voice was a dull monotone. ‘Tried to control me. Tried to… I fought them off.’