Coming in behind the vanguard was a trio of ogors in tattered surcoats, hauling a bridge of coppery lumber behind them. Their faces were snarled with effort, muscles standing like boulders from a mountainside. A few of the soldiers dropped their gear to run in and help push, the ogors hissing something that probably wasn’t all that complimentary through their teeth.
I put my hands on my hips and watched them, my heart ready to burst with pride.
I loved them all.
Only slightly less than they loved me.
‘Who is first upon the Nevermarsh?’ I called out to them, thumping my breastplate. ‘He who waits upon no man, beast nor creature of Ruin.’ I thrust my gauntleted fists in the air, wringing the musty stink of bear from my cloak.
‘Hamilcar!’
Cheers rippled through the treeline. The ogors took the opportunity to draw up and wipe the sweat from their sledgehammer-like brows, before readjusting the draw-chains wrapped round their fists.
I made a grand show of pulling off my gauntlets, rubbing my hands together and blowing into them, despite the fact I have little feeling for the cold. I am a champion of Heaven, and to be of Heaven is to be as cold as starlight. And yet it means something to the common soldier to see his hardships shared. Most Stormcast Eternals, broken from humanity in order to be elevated to that space beyond, would never even have considered such a gesture. There are better warriors than I in Sigmar’s Stormhosts. I’ll not name them, and I’ll only deny saying it should it get back to them. Let’s just say I have all the fingers I need to count them. But if you think that any of them can get as much as I can from a mortal man, then I would say you have passed too many times over the Anvil of Apotheosis, my friend.
‘The winter is cold,’ I yelled. ‘The Ghurlands are dangerous. But you know cold, you know danger. Every man and woman here is a veteran of the Gorwood. You have fought beside me against beastman and skaven and orruk, yet here you all are with me still. Why?’ My breath shrouded my tattooed fist in fog. ‘Because Hamilcar Bear-Eater is your brother and your champion, ahead of you every step of the way!’
‘Hamilcar!’
The cry came back louder now, men still spilling out of the forest to hear my words.
I unhooked the halberd from its bracket across my back. The black wood of the haft scraped over my armour as I drew it. The head sang as it came free. The blade was sigmarite, forged by the first of the Six Smiths under the Auroral Tempest, imbuing the metal with the storm’s vicious power. Bands of amber and violet rippled through the blade as I turned it and held it aloft. A pair of predator birds that I had managed to trap and kill myself dangled from the head on chains. Runes of my own inscription decorated the haft. They imparted no power I know of, and I had no idea from which ice hole of my memory they emerged, only that in those days you could not leave me with a flat surface and a knife and not return to find the former filled with the strange pictograms.
I had always assumed them to be a facet of my lost life as a mortal, which would of course prove to be correct, though I never gave it much thought at the time.
‘The Nevermarsh is another challenge again. No army of Sigmar has ever crossed its border, and yet…’ I spread my arms to indicate the river running across me. The soldiers chuckled, a few of them still shouting my name. A cloaked and helmeted veteran in a glittery cuirass of leather and glass and a rash of insect bites on his browned face choked with laughter. Even I didn’t think my remark was that amusing, but I acknowledged the old-timer with the point of my halberd. I recognised him from some battle or other, and I always liked to give the impression of familiarity with every woman or man who bore the Twin-Tailed Comet in my name.
‘This is where our enemies seek to hide from us, so this is where we hound them. We will run them to the ground, my friends. We will kill them, we will butcher them, and we will feed their bloody carcasses to the carniferns of the Gorwood!’
The bank erupted with a mighty cheer.
‘For Sigmar!’
‘Sigmar!’
‘For the God-King!’
My voice was the coming of thunder. I held the final syllable until my throat was hoarse and my body shook with passion.
I rehoused my halberd, leaving my fist raised in salute.
The men would all be warm now. If my Vanguards were right about the position of the hole that our enemy had found to hide in, and they generally were, then I expected the fire I had put in the soldiers’ bellies to last them until it was needed.
‘A good speech, lord,’ Frankos shouted to me.
I could almost sense Broudiccan’s eyes rolling.
‘Go and aid with the bridge,’ I told the Heraldor. ‘You’re as strong as any ogor, brother.’ One hand on the pommel of his broadsword, Frankos bowed low, his white crest bobbing in the frozen muck. I called after him as he departed. ‘Be sure that it’s good and flat. I would hate for Broudiccan to fall off.’
I chuckled to myself, Broudiccan still wearing that disdainful look of his.
Now ordinarily, these sullen spells were precisely the reason I chose the Paladin for my second. The long silences gave me more room to talk, but a man can only bear so much.
‘Spit it out, brother,’ I barked.
‘It is nothing.’
‘With you, it’s never nothing.’
The big Paladin grumbled. ‘You are like a boy on his first hunt, lord.’
I smiled wistfully. ‘You remember your first hunt?’
‘No.’
‘Nor I mine.’ I cocked a grin as though he had just made my point for me. ‘Every time is the first now. The realms are so vast, the enemy so numerous. It is always new.’
‘You are a Lord-Castellant, not an Azyros or a Venator to go seeking out new dangers.’
I blew out through my lips. ‘The best defence…’ Broudiccan’s eyes narrowed reproachfully, and I motioned towards the Freeguild further uphill, dragging the bridge towards us with renewed vigour. ‘They will work faster knowing I’m here on the far side. I don’t forget my calling, brother.’
Frankos had joined the labourers as I spoke, jostling in between the ogors and taking up some of the chain to help pull.
‘He is a bad influence upon you,’ said Broudiccan.
I laughed at that. ‘I suspect most would say it was the other way around.’
‘I have known Frankos longer than you. He is perfectly incorruptible. You, on the other hand, will do anything for an audience.’
I frowned across the water, but Broudiccan had nothing more to add. Frankly, I should have been astonished to have got as many words out of him as I had, but I was justifiably distracted by what happened next.
Lightning struck earth a few feet from where I was standing.
Not an actual lightning bolt, of course. Deliverance from the Celestial Stair remained as possible as it ever had been during the Realmgate Wars, but it had become rarer in those days as Sigmar’s wars spread his attention thinner. Azyrite energies crackled and burst as the Prosecutor furled his wings then stood. His armour was the black of freshly dug soil, richer in gold even than my own, and embellished with images and inscriptions as one would a tombstone. It put me in mind of the mortis armour worn by Xeros Stormcloud, my Lord-Relictor, who had earned his war name for the black mood that followed him wheresoever he chose to darken with his tread. Or so I chose to believe, and tell all who ask.
Despite having just risen, the Prosecutor dropped again to one knee. ‘Lord-Castellant, I bear an urgent missive from my lord, Akturus.’ His delivery smacked of some ritual phrasing, the effect only slightly ruined by the breathlessness that came with a long flight from the Seven Words. He presented a tightly furled scroll, sealed with a flickering Azyrite rune.