‘Not exactly the work of the Six Smiths, but when in Blight City…’
I looked around for Barrach, but couldn’t see him. I grinned tightly, assuming he was halfway to fresh air by now, and worked the battle-axe through a few trial routines. ‘Just you and me then, Kurzog. Honestly, I’m hurt more than anything that you’d just give me up to the skaven like that. After all we’ve b–’
A force simultaneously boiling and freezing struck me in the back.
It threw me onto my face, and drove me over the ground until the skin had been grated from one side of my face and I lay inches from a dung fire.
Brayseer Kurzog stamped about behind me like a spiderfang shaman on a mushroom trip, long jigging chains of weird tattoos scrolling around the corded muscles of his arms. I had apparently caught him unprepared as he was garbed only in a scratty loincloth and a charm necklace, his nine-pointed goatee ritually braided as if for sleep. He still wielded his dogwood staff, however. It droned hoarsely as he spun it in his hands, still prancing, the tretchlet-like familiar railing and cursing at me from his shoulder.
With an ululating bleat, the brayseer lunged for me.
I rolled clear and the staff hit the stone where I’d fallen, annihilating a crater out of it the size of me and blowing out the dung fire. Waves of change shook the ground, staggering me as I scrambled to my feet and lifted my beastman axe to meet the brayseer’s backswing.
In any honest contest between battle-axe and quarterstaff, you would expect only one outcome, but I’d call Kurzog a thousand different names before I reached for ‘honest’. His staff’s true edge seemed to be half a hair’s breadth beyond the outline of the rune-carved wood, a layer of Chaotic force that was harder than sigmarite and hit like a thunderbolt crossbow. I wasn’t at my strongest, and I knew that he knew it.
It was the only reason he dared to face me one on one. Of that I have no doubt.
‘After all these years,’ I breathed, struggling to match the brayseer’s rabid pace. ‘This is the first time we’ve actually fought. I doubt even you could have predicted that it would go like this. In a skaven lair. In our underwear.’
‘Be silent!’
The brayseer beat aside a probe across the belly, then lowered his head, dislocating his hircine jaw, and brayed. A swarm of blue and pink flies poured out of his mouth and swept towards me, slamming into me like the palm of a glittering hand and hurling me clear across the cavern. Kurzog disappeared into the distance, the flies rustling over me, their wings buzzing, until I hit the hide wall of a yurt – which presumably smelled bad enough to make banishment back to the Realms of Chaos seem preferable, for the swarm didn’t follow me in.
I came up flailing, half buried in animal skins and missing my axe. I kicked the last flap of skin off my ankle and swatted at an incandescent blue fly that was still buzzing about my face. Kurzog came towards me with a breathy, barking laugh and my flapping hand transformed effortlessly into a rude gesture I had learned from the Bull Tide on the Amber Steppes.
The daemonic familiar squirreled viciously in Kurzog’s ear, and the brayseer took his staff across both hands like a crossbow and pointed it at me. ‘No, Oex’Xathane.’ He lowered the dogwood, apparently against his own arms’ better judgement. ‘Ikrit wants him warm. Until he can keep weapons from going back to Sigmar, at least.’
The familiar – Oex’Xathane, I presumed – practically bent Kurzog’s ear off to argue, but the brayseer shook his head, dislodging the winged creature to vent from a position a few inches above his shoulder. Apparently Ikrit’s interest in my wellbeing was not widely shared, which I wish I could say I found hurtful, but when you find yourself on the same side of the argument as a lesser daemon of Tzeentch you know you’re into some real uncharted wilderness.
‘I take it your true master has no great love for Ikrit,’ I said.
‘Kurzog got one master.’ The brayseer thumped his thickly matted chest. ‘Kurzog.’ He brought up his staff again and took a step towards me.
‘What does the warlock want from me? Tell me that, at least.’
The frenzy faded from the brayseer’s eyes. He passed his staff over to his left hand and planted it on the ground in a twinkling of braided beard-chimes. ‘You see, Bear-Eater. You see. After I give him you a second time, maybe Ikrit let Kurzog see it too. Kurzog like that. See you beg, maybe, before he break you.’ He swatted at the infuriated tretchlet with the head of his staff and brayed for his gors. ‘Take him. Do not br–’
A fist sheathed in hardened bark exploded from the brayseer’s chest.
‘–eak.’
Kurzog’s eyes misted over, his last breath relaxing out of his lungs as Barrach rotated his wrist – which was entirely unnecessary, but credit where credit’s due – and dragged his forearm out of the brayseer’s chest. He toppled over. Oex’Xathane looked pleased as the tretchlet thing dissolved into coloured motes and faded into the aether.
‘I told you to leave!’ I snapped.
Despite the wrathful demeanour I’ve cultivated over a century and a bit, I’m not nearly so easy to anger as you might think. Nothing endears a soldier like the belief that you are at least as bloodthirsty a maniac as the man in the other tent. On this occasion though, it was entirely genuine.
‘I’m not letting them take you again for my sake,’ said Barrach.
‘I had him.’
‘I saw. Come on, I can hold the Destroyer aspect for a little longer. With their leader dead we can fight our way out together.’
I had to agree that there was some sense to that argument, and was about to say as much when Barrach suddenly convulsed. At first I thought he was just fighting to hold onto his war form or had sneezed or something, but then I noticed the edged sliver of darkness propped against his throat. A pair of arrow-slit red eyes hovered above his shoulder, a dark void of a muzzle pressed to the other side of his face.
‘Surrender,’ said Malikcek, his voice like a whisper from Ulgu. ‘Now, or I kill-kill this one.’
‘Get out,’ said Barrach, struggling. But I’d seen Broudiccan held firm in that grip and knew that the Gorkai wasn’t going anywhere. ‘Kill him and run.’
This was grossly over-estimating my abilities at this point. I hold myself at least partially responsible, but the mortals I have dealt with have always had that tendency.
‘Always they squeak-say that,’ whispered Malikcek. ‘Warriors. Heroes. This thing they know-call courage. Lies. I smell his fear scent. I hear-feel his heart beat against my paw. He wants you to surrender.’
I met Barrach’s eyes and knew that what the assassin said was true.
‘Try me, Malikcek,’ I said, confident I could call the shadow’s bluff. ‘Ikrit wants him alive just as much as he does me.’
The shadow dipped its muzzle. ‘It is true. Ikrit wants the Gorkai alive.’ An almost insignificant twist of the wrist and Malikcek carved a thin slice across Barrach’s throat. He snickered cruelly as he let the human go. ‘But not so much-much as he wants you.’
The bark shrivelled from Barrach’s skin as his war form abandoned him, crawling for me on hands and knees before his elbows gave. He curled up onto his side, blood as red as yours or mine welling up from the hands he had clamped to his throat. The poison on the assassin’s blade was already causing his muscles to tighten. Fingers became claws as if, in desperation, he thought he might stem the bleeding by wringing his own neck. His arms bent and contorted. Joints reversed with sickening snaps of broken bone. His head ratcheted back, exposing his gashed throat to me for one last cruel spurt before I heard his spine break.