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.