‘You’ll never plague them again. I’ll see to it.’
Ikrit looked at me for a second, then emitted a sandpapery sound that I took for a laugh.
‘When you are finished with me I will be sent back to Sigmaron,’ I said, my voice rising as confidence returned to it. ‘It might be a hundred days or a hundred years from now, but I will return, and it will be at the head of a host the like of which the Ghurlands hasn’t witnessed since the Realmgate Wars.’
‘You are like Malikcek was,’ said Ikrit, giving me an almost fatherly pat on the chest. ‘Too confident of that which cannot be done.’
With that, the master warlock tilted his head back, his armour complaining, then lifted his hands above his head and slowly drew them apart.
In response, the roof began to grind open, snow billowing in through the widening crack, which at the very least confirmed my impression that we were close to the surface. At first I thought that Ikrit was physically opening the roof by sorcery, and that was very probably what he wanted me to think. But then I noticed the slave-filled running wheels on either side of the chamber, rumbling as they went round and around, drawing on chains and a system of cranks that ultimately resulted in the opening of the doors. In the flurrying sky beyond, I glimpsed what I initially thought was a flash of lightning and my heart lifted for a moment until I recognised that the energy was green-tinged, rippling up a coiled mast the height of a ballista tower. There were four of them that I could see, sited at the corners of the open roof and leaning slightly inwards. The charge that was being so arduously generated by the skavenslaves through the many tiers of activity beneath me was being fed up there. The coils glowed with it. Emerald lightning bolted from mast to mast, the snow sublimating into a thick green mist that smelled like a distillate of ozone and chlorine.
The first flake of snow fell on my bare chest and I jerked as though it were a messenger bird from Azyr come with the promise of freedom, pulling again on my restraints and Chaos take my shoulder joints as the snowflake slowly melted.
‘I understand now,’ Ikrit mused. ‘I have understanding enough of Sigmar’s process now to copy-take.’
‘Hah! Unlikely.’
‘You lie-lie upon my Anvil of Apotheosis.’
I bared my teeth in a semi-feral snarl. ‘Sigmar’s is bigger.’
Ignoring me, the master warlock gestured upwards with an open gauntlet. ‘There is my divine storm.’
‘Sigmar’s is… less green.’
‘I own-have every tool. All I cannot create here is the essence of Sigmar himself. That is what you will gift-give to me, Hamilcar.’
I laughed at him. It was forced, but I laughed, and of that I’m more proud than of any hopeless stand or pointless act of heroism in my immortal life. ‘For what? To create your own Stormhost?’
‘I do not seek-plan to conquer the realms. I do not have the hubris of a god. My ambitions are small. One Stormcast alone will suffice.’
‘Is that all?’
‘You think me mad-mad. You are not the first. But I have outlived them all. What is made can be unmade. What is unmade can be remade.’
‘You’re talking about the forging of a god, not some new blasting powder from the Ironweld quarter.’
‘Look at me, Stormcast.’
Against my better judgement, I did. His metallic frame bristled with unmelting snowflakes, cold and still as an iron mummy.
‘Thousands of years I have endured. I no longer know how long, what I was before, only that I am dead more years than I was ever alive. Secrets I gleaned from the Books of Nagash, plundered from the ruins of Nagashizzar during the Death God’s long exile in the Age of Blood. More still I learned from the children of the Oak of Ages. With what Malikcek brought back from Ulgu have I hidden my plans from the Horned Rat and his daemons. They hunt me still, yet I fear their vengeance no more than I fear yours. They are gods, Stormcast. They are not omnipotent. Is Sigmar better? Is he special? You think his works must elude me where those of Malerion and Alarielle yield their secrets freely? No. He is not special. He is just a god. And I will have-take what is his.’
‘Sigmar is almighty,’ I said, straining hard enough to lift my chest an inch off the platform. ‘Only Sigmar had the courage to fight back.’
‘The powers of all the Pantheon went into Sigmar’s Stormcasts. Did you know that? Few know that. I know that. The powers of the Pantheon will be part of me now. Soon. And more.’ Ikrit laid his ice-cool hand on my stomach, my belly retreating from the abomination of his touch. ‘And yet. There is something about Sigmar that feels special. Is there not? The status he claims for himself as god of gods. God-King.’ He snickered at that. ‘Take-stealing from him will be my greatest prize.’
He turned ponderously about and started to walk away.
‘You know I never gave you an honest answer to a single question before now!’ I yelled after him.
‘Yes-yes. I know. The light-fire of Hyish burns away all untruth.’ He stopped walking and turned back, laying his gauntlet over the handle of a large lever. ‘But my immortality is flawed.’
‘Whose isn’t?’
‘I persist in unlife. I wax and wane with the seasons and the dying of years. I remember nothing of what was.’
I snorted. ‘I almost hope you succeed, just to see your face.’
He looked back at me quizzically.
‘You think a Stormcast’s immortality is perfect, but you’ve looked inside my head. You know better than that.’
‘I want only your immortality,’ he said. ‘Give it willingly and you may survive. Others did, and I released them.’
I remembered the Wild Maiden, the sylvaneth I had found drained and slowly decaying in the Low Gorwood after inadvertently massacring all of her followers.
Not exactly an end worthy of song. Certainly not one worthy of my song.
‘Do your worst, Ikrit. You and your…’ I rolled my head to indicate the warlock’s sprawling apparatus, ‘thing. We’ll see who surrenders first.’
‘You are not the first to think that either. You too are not special.’
I like to believe that the words do exist somewhere, hidden deep in the bowels of the fortresses of Teclis or Tzeentch, guarded from the lore of men, to describe what I felt in the moment that Ikrit pulled that lever, but all of mine fall woefully short. It is a blessing of a kind, I think, for how can you properly recall a thing if you haven’t even the word to name it? Do beasts without words remember as we do? Do fish? Do birds?
I don’t know, but I will try.
The first sensation was light. Not light of the sun or even of moon and stars, but something warped and of the blood. I felt it coursing through me, filling me with pain the way my own storm-forged blood filled me with vitality. Had I the wit at the time I would have recognised that it was being fed into my body from those four gigantic masts on the roof, through the cables that Ikrit’s underlings had soldered to my platform. But I hadn’t, and I didn’t.
Imagine, if you can, being nothing more than a vessel for agony. Imagine it. Go ahead, try. I promise you that you’ll fail.
Time stretched to mean less than nothing and there were moments where I think I truly did believe that I had died and been returned to the Anvil of Apotheosis. I felt myself broken, much as I would have had I indeed been upon the Anvil, but the faith that I would be remade to the best of a demi-god’s abilities was absent. The Six Smiths are callous, it’s true, as only a minor divinity with a major chip on his shoulder can be, but they are prideful in their work. Ikrit was too, I knew that much about him, but his goal was not restoration. I felt him inside me, digging through my spirit to seek that which glittered, that which was Sigmar and thus unbreakable.