‘Why am I here?’ I asked.
‘Because I wished it. Because you are valuable to me.’ He tittered. It was a dry, retching sound, like a blade in need of oiling that wouldn’t come free of its sheath. ‘Because take-luring you was easy.’
I shook my head, trying to understand. ‘Kurzog said that it was about me. To capture me? Why?’
The warlock said nothing. His eye-glow was unblinking and his mask expressionless.
‘Who are you?’ I demanded.
He cocked his head. It was a skaven mannerism I was familiar with, but performed with a stiffness of movement more reminiscent of the newly animated flesh of a zombie or the bark of a slumbering treekin than a ratman. ‘In Blight City they call-squeak the Rat That Was, the Ur-Rat. To the Shadow Lords of Decay in the Realm of Ruin I am Outcast. In Phoenicium I am Life-Taker and Gnawing Winter. In the Fractal Fortress of the Legion of Fate I–’
I interrupted him with a chuckle.
‘They have a few good names for me there too.’
I had been expecting him to bristle. It is what most verminous maniacs would have done in his place, but he did not. He just studied me, as though I were a moving part in some mechanism of his and had just started running backwards.
‘What does your mother call you?’ I said.
‘Mother…?’ The warlock pondered the question, then performed another creaking laugh. ‘Ikrit is my name. Was. As good as any. Quicker to say than most.’
‘Why am I here?’ I said again.
Ikrit didn’t answer.
He clanked towards me, unclawing his huge mechanical hand one stiff-jointed digit at a time until his palm was open to me. I tried to draw myself out of reach – and you would too, under the circumstances – but my movements were hampered by my restraints, and by the back of the chaise. He laid his claw upon my chest. A frisson of power surged from the cold metal and into my skin. It was the wild vigour of Ghur. The steady life-pulse of Ghyran. The iron grip of Chamon. The enduring stasis of Shyish. More. Powers from realms I had never trodden and peoples I had never encountered, all somehow welded together and fused by skaven sorcery into that cold mechanical shell.
I understood then what I had felt from him before, and for the first time in my many lives, I think I felt afraid.
‘The lightning-god and his duardin slaves take-steal from all of Pantheon, and mix-meld to make something unique in the realms. And powerful.’ He tittered, excited, as he looked at me, his eye glow flickering. ‘First step is hardest, I know. Innovation not easy. But after that? What has been made once can be copied. What has been copied once can be made again. The lightning-god has a secret. I want-want.’
‘Why me?’
The warlock shushed me with a metal finger upon my lips. I growled and tried to shake my head, but for a skaven-sized creature Ikrit was obscenely strong. He pinned me down with one finger and bent in as if to sniff me in the manner of his race, but his ironclad snout emitted no mortal breath that I could hear, or feel against my face.
‘I ask-squeak the questions now.’
Chapter seven
Day and night didn’t exist in the warren, but the skaven had their own uncanny sense of routine. Sunrise came for me on the point of a spear in my ribs or in my back, depending on where my captors had left me to pass out the night before. There would be a squeak from the gloaming dark and then my two favourite rats in the eight realms would exchange spears for buckets. The first would contain a grisly slop that, the first time it had been spooned out and onto the floor of my cell, I wasn’t sure whether it was intended as a meal or a cellmate. I’d fought Chaos spawn with fewer tubes, eyeballs, and fingernails than one spoonful of what I reluctantly decided was breakfast.
For several days I refused to cooperate, and not just because I was waiting for my breakfast to make the first move.
For all our differences, you and I, we are more alike than not. I am a man still, albeit one who has passed through the Cairns of Tempering, and I would starve as well as any man would. I considered it. Death is never something to be welcomed, but when it ceases to be the end of all things… well, then certain unpalatable options become open to consideration. The only thing that made me hold my nose and eat was the knowledge that starvation would be a slow death, and Milk Scar undoubtedly had ways of forcing sustenance upon me were I to refuse indefinitely.
My brothers in the Hallowed Knights would have seen that as a capitulation, but that’s Hallowed Knights for you, bear them no mind. I prefer to see it as finding victories where you see them.
After all of that was dealt with, I would be taken to Ikrit.
We would always start with questions.
‘The Anvil of Apotheosis, how does it work-work?’
‘It is duardinium, mined from the heart of a still-living star by Grungni’s pick and kept alight by the prayers of ten thousand skink priests.’
‘How is the work-labour shared between the Smith-God and his servants?’
‘The Six Smiths are all just aspects of Grungni. If you look close enough you can see the differences in the character of the Stormhosts and the sigmarite they wear.’
‘The reforging – how does it hurt-feel?’
‘Like showering under starlight. Sigmar is a just and loving god.’
If you were to delve deep enough into the Well of Eternity, the font of all knowledge that resides at the heart of the Impossible Fortress, then you would surely find Hamilcar Bear-Eater shouting nonsense from the bottom.
With each day that this went on my lies became progressively more stretched and extravagant, until I was earnestly explaining how Sigmar had traded the mortal memories of the Stormcasts to Malerion in exchange for the secret of immortality and how every item of sigmarite was hand-nurtured from a single Dracothion scale. It is just not within me to keep quiet when invited to speak, and feeding my captor the most outrageous falsehoods I could imagine was an act of defiance. It was what got me through each day.
Ikrit, however, was unfazed by any lie. He would take his time to consider every answer, no matter how ludicrous, and then simply ask another question.
One time, I found him tinkering with my warding lantern.
The warlock had the ornate device held between a set of browned metal clamps, measuring, poking, poring over every groove and embellishment in the casing with a lensed instrument, which resembled a crystal butterfly that had been turned inside out. The lantern was glorious despite its confinement, and my chest swelled for the sight of it, the timely reminder that the same might also yet be said of me. My armour and my weapons are extensions of my soul. My warding lantern is an extension of Azyr as well, a sigmarite outpost of the Mortal Realms where I and the Celestial overlap, and I felt a glow simply from being near to it again.
‘How does it work?’ Ikrit would ask, as though speaking through his array of lenses to the lantern itself rather than to me. ‘Does energy come from within or is it sent-drawn from Azyr? Or from you? How does it chose-choose between those it heals and those it burns?’
I answered those questions in the same way as I had the others.
And regardless of how it began, how I chose to defy him, it would end with torture.
I call it that because I can’t think of any other word to describe it, but as soon as the implements were drawn and I was suitably restrained he would ask no further questions.
With tiny knives, he would cut into my veins and bleed me, filling vials that he would then subject to harsh lights and Chaotic energies. One day he neglected to question me at all, so excited was he by some new frolic he had in mind for us both. Between thumb and foreclaw of his gauntlet, he showed me what looked like a fleck of iron dust, explaining, so enthused was he, that it was a miniscule automaton of his own creation. Then he forced a vial full of the tiny constructs into my mouth and clamped my nose shut with his claws. Even a Stormcast Eternal cannot hold his breath forever. For days afterwards, I was laid low with hacking coughs and fevered dreams with the sense of things crawling beneath my skin. It was a period in which Ikrit seemed almost animated by what, in his words, his machines ‘told him’ about my body’s innermost workings. He would burn me, freeze me, hook me up via thickets of cables to spinning, ball-armed devices and jolt me with sorcerously generated power.