Angry tears stung my eyes as I heard the cries of eagles. I looked up in hope, swiftly crushed.
King Augus was quitting the field.
A phalanx of eagle knights went with him, bearing the body of Queen Ellias back to the aetar eyries of the Gorkomon. A handful under Princess Aeygar were still fighting, flying circles around the ungainly skaven gunboats whilst picking off beastman disc-riders and rot flies. Barbarus’ arrows fell as thick as the storm rains over the Stromfels, his star familiar, Nubia, a twinkling incandescence in his wake, but they were too heavily outnumbered. I heard Aeygar shrieking for vengeance, becoming quieter as her eagle knights dragged her from the fray, after her father.
Part of me wished that Broudiccan or Frankos had had half as much courage in confronting me over my haste to do battle over this accursed hill.
The hircine dreadlocks and nine-pronged beard of Brayseer Kurzog filled my view. He stood over me, flanked on either side by burly gors. Black lips drew back to reveal a grin of predator’s teeth.
‘This time it is all about you. And you not even see it.’
Then he raised his staff and smashed it into my face.
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.