I’d like to say that I fought back, so yes, by all means, say that Hamilcar Bear-Eater fought back, but in truth I have no idea if I did or even if it was possible. Shocking and unlikely as this may sound to you, as long as that lever was down I think there was no Hamilcar Bear-Eater.
Some eternities later I heard a snicker of triumph. It wasn’t Ikrit’s voice as I had come to know it, but something younger, lived in, the way he remembered his own voice sounding.
‘There it is,’ he chittered. ‘Sigmar’s storm. It is mine.’
I felt the me in me pushed carelessly to one side, the broken glass from a dropped window swept from a fine floor, to expose the beauty of the mosaic beneath. It wasn’t my heart or my mind. It corresponded to no physical place in my body that I could point out to you now and say: ‘This. Here. This is where Sigmar lives in me,’ but nevertheless I felt Ikrit reach out for that thing and take it.
I’d like to say I fought back. And maybe I did. Something did.
Something indivisible and divine announced its resistance, and for one instant, like a shadow glimpsed by lightning, I was not the only one inside my body in pain. And believe me, misery shared is misery halved. Ikrit shrieked as though he’d been given a Chammonic lead purge. I felt his claws withdraw and heard something metal fall against something else metal and considerably more yielding. The lightning scoured my veins and for a split-second I was conscious of every crack and break in my being where the fury of the Storm Eternal could not be contained.
I opened my eyes and wept like a god new-born to the world, straining against my bonds with all the tempestuous might of Azyr.
All around me, glass shattered. Metal bent. Cables snapped and twanged, whipping about like the tentacles of an ocean kraken, decapitating those engineers who were too well armoured against random discharges of lightning to do anything sensible like duck. Lightning raced from my body and back down the lines that the skaven had used to hook me to their warp-lightning machines. Those I saw caught fire or simply exploded, throwing engineers and slaves alike through the air. Another, below me, vomited forth endless quantities of black smoke until the skaven on that tier were left flailing about, blind and gasping for air. More than a few took the long trip to the bottom as the entire house of cards beneath them began to come apart at the seams.
‘HAMILCAR!’
I roared until my throat bled, the chains binding my wrists beneath the platform yielding to my strength as the steel slowly melted before wave after wave of lightning. Suddenly I was free, my hands flying apart, shattered metal links raining down over the tiers of machinery that surrounded the shaft. Before I had much chance to do anything beyond shout about it, the world pitched violently sideways. There was a splintering crack, like the mast of a sail ship as it disintegrates under a lightning strike, and my stomach lurched. I heard the squeals of about thirteen terrified skavenslaves from far, far below me, and understood that I was about to be reunited with them very soon.
I bellowed the name of the God-King as I fell.
Chapter ten
‘Sigmar!’ I bellowed again, this time with feeling, as I dug my way free of the wreckage. If I thought that there was a snowball’s chance in Aqshy of him hearing me, then I would have cursed him for the fact that, despite everything, I was still alive.
Struggling to negotiate the release of my foot from the shattered ruin of the platform, I looked up. A fug of smoke now clung to the sagging bones of the skaven’s scaffold, any inclination it might have had towards rising for the open ceiling being slowly pummelled out of it by the snow. It was starting to settle, lumps of wood and metal and mangy fur covered in a respectful sheet of white. It reminded me of something I couldn’t quite fix in my mind. A mountainside after a battle. A barrow for a warrior. Something else I couldn’t picture. I shook my head. Pieces of thought crunched about inside like pebbles in a clay cup.
‘I’m going to kill you, Ikrit,’ I roared at the ceiling. ‘I’m going to destroy everything you hold precious.’
I pulled angrily on my foot, found that it was still chained to something buried under the wreckage and pulled again, harder, discovered this time that the chain was actually just bitten between two mangled bits of wood, and fell backwards when it gave. I rolled down the heap to land in a puff of snow at the bottom.
I lifted my face from the floor and blew snow from my beard.
‘Death is too clean,’ I growled under my breath. ‘I’ll feed you to Crow. No. Better. I’ll hand you to the Hallowed Knights. Half an hour in their company and you’ll be begging to be eaten by a gryph-hound. I know I would be.’
The tormented scaffolding above me creaked as if it were trying to find a comfortable position in which to die. The occasional despairing squeak of a trapped or injured skaven echoed down through the blizzard.
There was no sign of Ikrit, though.
I didn’t recognise the feeling that swept through me. Looking back, I think it was relief. I looked at my hand. It was shaking.
I needed to get out of there.
Out.
The thought ran round and around in my head like a fever dream.
I squinted into the thickening snowfall, trying, and mostly failing, to shake off the memories it evoked. The feel of the raiding season’s first snows on my hand. Watching the sun sink below the far peaks through a bitter flurry. The pride and power as a circlet of frigid metal was set upon my head.
‘Gah!’
I slapped furiously at my head.
The memories came in bits and pieces, a lot like I felt. I couldn’t seem to get rid of them, so I ignored them instead, something at which I was highly practised, and I had better luck with that.
I set my hand against a rusty steel upright that was currently listing at an uncomfortably steep diagonal and followed it with my eyes. I’d seen the sky when the roof had opened. I knew that there was a way out up there, but I can’t say that I thought much of trying to climb back up there, even if the structure wasn’t in the throes of coming apart. As if to prove the wisdom of that, the whole edifice gave a shuddering groan and sank another few inches towards me, snow wheezing through the compacted girders and beams.
I was going to have to find another way out.
Remembering my original plan of escape, I staggered away from the wreckage in the vague direction that Malikcek and Kurzog’s beastmen had dragged me, pausing occasionally to smack my head against sturdier-looking beams in an effort to unclutter my thoughts, flinging out my hands to rid them of pins and needles. None of it helped. I spotted the tunnel I had come in by and stumbled towards it, tripped like a drunk over a buried piece of planking and went flat on my face.
‘I’m going to tear you apart,’ I growled, spitting snow. ‘Limb from limb.’
The wall was trembling slightly as I pulled myself up. I sniffed, smelling smoke on the faint wind that blew through the tunnel. It looked as though whatever Ikrit had tried to do to me had backfired even more spectacularly than I could have hoped for.
I didn’t know the half of it, of course. If I had then I probably would have devoted more energy to getting out of there than I already was.
The Blind Herd’s camp was still the closest thing I had to a reliable way out, and with any luck the death of Kurzog and the current state of confusion would be enough for me to get past them. I had a vague intuition of the route back to the beast camp from where I was, having been in and out of consciousness as Malikcek had dragged me along it. But it turns out that thinking a thing and knowing a thing are even more different than usual when you’re staggering about with a headache through a skaven lair that was rapidly filling up with smoke.