‘Just follow me,’ I said, already striking off down the tunnel and giving the spear I’d plucked out of the clanrat’s paws a practice twirl. Or as much of a twirl as was possible given the height of the ceiling and width of the passage anyway, which looked more like a knock-off duardin time piece trying to chime the hour. But I was in buoyant mood. There was an enemy in front of me, an adoring warrior behind me, and a weapon in my hand. It’s safe to say that I was firmly back in my element.
‘Ham-il-car! Ham-il-car!’
It’s possible that I got just a little overexcited.
I smashed into the mass of skaven coming at me with a roar.
I say ‘coming at me’ quite loosely of course, as I doubt whether they had any idea who I was or even that I was there at all. They were just scrabbling down the wrong tunnel at the wrong time, with far too many furry bodies behind them to turn away now. They squealed shrilly as I punched, kicked, head-butted, grabbed, twisted, gouged and even, when space allowed, stabbed my way through. I’d like to pretend that there was some skill to any of it, but to be honest I’ve waded through blizzards with the exact same waving routines of my arms and legs as I performed through that deluge of skaven warriors. Brute strength was my weapon, brute confidence my armour, and invulnerable as that ordinarily proved to be I still managed to suffer my share of scrapes before the flow slackened off enough for me to push into a more-or-less empty tunnel.
I looked around, straining my eyes in the dark. The alarm must have passed far enough back for the skaven to dart down side tunnels or to start circumventing the dungeon passages altogether. I sniffed at the sour tang that had impregnated the air.
‘The fear scent,’ said Barrach.
I crafted a grin that could have outshone the night sky of Azyr. ‘I just call it the skaven scent.’
‘You’re bleeding.’ Barrach gestured to the angry lattice of scratch and bite marks that had ruined my gambeson.
After several weeks of captivity, it was as closely bonded to my body as any artifice of the Six Smiths was to my soul, believe you me.
‘They’ve barely even broken the skin,’ I said.
‘At least let me take the front.’
I was tempted. It would take time for the skaven to muster sufficient courage – or for the fear scent to tickle the right whiskers – for any of the lair’s real warriors to start considering an escaped Stormcast Eternal their problem. I expected the reprieve to be brief even so, and the thought of Malikcek, or even Ikrit himself, being roused to my recapture made my skin come out in sweats. I ground my teeth and looked at the ceiling, heavenward, furious with myself for my body’s fear.
Misreading the expression entirely, Barrach scowled.
‘I’m still a Champion of the Wild Harvest. I can fight for my own freedom.’
‘I know you can.’ I shrugged, and tried to smile to make light of it. ‘And you will.’ I pointed back down the passage. ‘Don’t think that the skaven will only come at us from the front.’
Barrach clenched his fists in frustration. ‘Alright. What’s your escape plan?’
I had a plan, but whether it could be called an ‘escape’ plan largely depended on your definition of ‘escape,’ and mine was considerably broader than I expected Barrach’s to be.
‘Just stay close. Watch my back, and follow me.’
Holding my spear short, just below the blade, I hunched low and crabbed forwards at about as close to full-tilt as I could achieve. I mentally clocked the landmarks that Milk Scar’s daily traverses of the lair had familiarised me with as I hurried past them. The side tunnel from which came the waft of cooked meat. The clamour of a flesh market echoing through the ceiling. A succession of urine-stained scratch posts pointing this way and that. Some I ignored, some I followed. I couldn’t read the scratch-writing, obviously, and I suspected that half of the information was conveyed by scent anyway, but even I couldn’t slavishly observe the same route every day for a month and not have something of it sink in.
On the wobbly wood-planked causeway spanning Ikrit’s infernal hell-foundries, we met the first real resistance to our escape.
The rope bridge was barely wide enough for two of the bronze-armoured skaven warriors to cross safely. Or for three to cross unsafely, and so naturally that’s exactly how the skaven tried to do it. I bellowed a challenge across the chasm as they clanked towards me.
They moved in lockstep, their armour plated with dirt-caked cogwheels that ticked like the gears of a music box as they walked. Sigmar, but I hate these things. It was as though I was facing a single animate thing of brass and steel that had grown and absorbed these living rats rather than individual skaven warriors in armour of their own design. They squeaked and chittered like any rodent though, even as they lowered their wire-pronged glaive-like devices as one. A weirdly greenish energy rinsed the weapons’ copper hafts, causing the wires to stiffen and the blades to incandesce.
I bellowed loudly as I ran to meet them.
‘I fought in the purges of Azyr, and in the first battles of the Realmgate Wars. I have tasted the blood of Mortarchs and shed the souls of lords of Chaos. Run away, rats. You barely qualify as sport to me.’
I was taking a lot on faith that Ikrit wanted me back in my cell alive. More than he wanted a few hundred of his warriors, anyway.
Let this be a lesson to you about relying overmuch on faith.
The warrior in the middle of the front rank issued an angry squeal as he dragged his glaive out of position and jabbed it towards me. A bolt of dirty lightning blasted from it, passing nearer to my shoulder than my favourite chamber serf would dare scrub with a sponge, leaving blistered skin that crawled with residual warp power. I made a fist against the pain and roared as I ducked into the crackling thicket of humming blades.
‘I’m Hamilcar Bear-Eater. I am the storm!’
And in the most precarious position possible, where the mid-section of the bridge swayed with every crude gesture and mistimed breath, the shock-vermin and I came together.
My spear pierced the rat I had panicked through the chest and exploded from his back, into the throat of the warrior directly behind him. I made to tear the weapon free, but over the last hundred years or so I’d grown accustomed to handling the finest weaponry that a semi-divine Smith could craft, and neglected the fact that I was working with something I’d filched from a skaven corpse. The bottom of it snapped away in my hand, leaving me facing a hundred shock-vermin with a mouldy stick. I stove in a warrior’s helmet with said stick, splintering it completely and robbing me even of that, before wading in with my fists. The bridge bucked beneath us like a wild Dracoth, dislodging about a score of the skaven here and there before the survivors had the chance to huddle into the middle and hang on.
I pumped my fists in the air, wobbling the bridge gratuitously with my feet and laughing at the skaven’s panicked squeals.
‘Ha!’
I struck one cowering warrior an uppercut that lifted him from the uneven slats, arcing salmon-like over the rail before disappearing into the emerald miasma of smog and despair beneath us without so much as a squeak. Another squealed shrilly, the cogwheels on his armour whirring as if it was the armour and not him that sent his storm-glaive lashing for my foot. By this point, they had probably taken the view that they could lop off a limb or two without upsetting Ikrit too fatally. I drew my foot back sharply and the warp-blade obliterated the slat it had been standing on. A blast of warp-lightning shredded the boards to either side, then a singed rope snapped and we all lurched to one side.
I flung my arms around the guide line on the opposite side, but the skaven are a nimble lot and now that they’d already lost those slow or stupid enough to be standing on the outside edge, no more were lost to the drop. A chitter of consternation arose from within their ranks, culminating in some minor pushing and shoving until someone finally impaled the bright spark in front of me through the back. Green lightning ripped through the shock-vermin’s armour, melting the gears, and he clattered to the bridge under a cloud of smoke.