It was almost enough to make me wish I’d just let Akturus Ironheel beat me in front of everyone and never left the Seven Words.
I stumbled through tunnels, fell into branches and out of them, tripped, got up again and ended up going sideways at one point, I think just for the support of the wall. Scratch posts and scent marks screamed meaningless directions at me, as useful as a buzzing chorus of birds hawking at me in aelvish. Shrieks echoed through the labyrinth of tunnels, but surprisingly few skaven crossed my path beyond the occasional half-chewed corpse. Every so often I heard claws scrabbling, but it was always from a parallel passage or a branching tunnel. At one point I came to a narrow hole in the wall onto a downward-sloping tunnel that I felt certain would lead me to the beast camp, only to recoil from the heat of its burning and convince myself that it had never been the way after all. I swayed towards the next tunnel just as the one behind me collapsed, pelting my back with grit and stones. I barely noticed. I took my head in both hands as if that might stop my vision from swimming. I growled, then roared, and smacked my forehead over and over with the heel of my palm.
‘Focus, Hamilcar. You entered the gladiatorum with Lord-Celestant Pharakis with a worse head than this. And won.’ Actually, it was more of a draw, but I maintain that the Knight-Excelsior had fiddled the chamber’s restorative properties in his favour somehow. ‘Concentrate.’
I stumbled on with the deliberation of a drunkard trying too hard to walk straight. I did my best to concentrate, but forgotten old memories continued to force themselves over what I saw.
A tunnel mouth became the entrance to a cave, bedecked in luminescent beetle shells and pink-glowing gemstones, a thick carpet of skins and furs laid out before it. ‘The nuptial cave,’ I mumbled to myself. Sigmar only knows where that knowledge came from. The same place, I presumed, that knew that pink stones represented fertility, the shells protection, and the skins hearth. ‘I carved those skins myself,’ I muttered, turning away. A clanrat slumped over a broken barrel with half its face opportunistically chewed off became a grey-haired man, his old skin thick with tribal tattoos and a bearskin over his shoulders, face down in a frozen ale spill on a stone slab. ‘Her… her father.’ I pounded my head with my fist and stumbled on. ‘Whose father?’ With every ounce of my willpower, I denied that the greenish gloam of the ceiling was interspersed with the twinkling starlight of the Eternal Winterlands.
It might have been more memories – albeit more recent ones and thus coming at me unnoticed – that did eventually bring me into tunnels I recognised, if not the ones I’d been trying to get to.
Again, I had that curious sensation of stepping out of the Ghurlands and into some other place, even as my toes and knuckles scuffed along simple, unchanging stone. It was like crossing a waterfall, knowing that what you had left behind you was still there, scant feet away, but that it had been obliterated by the roar of water. I was glad of the sense, in a strange way. It was real and familiar, even if I found it difficult to describe. With everything I’d been thinking and feeling since pulling myself out of Ikrit’s warpstorm, I’d actually started to worry that the warlock had damaged me somehow, but here at least was some evidence that my senses as a Stormcast Eternal remained intact.
I was in Ikrit’s tunnels.
The door to his warren had been left ajar.
‘Strange. I didn’t think it could be opened from the outside.’
I listened, and though my hearing didn’t come close to the acuity of even a one-eared skavenslave with his head in a bag, I was relatively confident that there was nobody inside. I looked over my shoulder. The corridor behind me was empty. Finding my way back towards the beastman encampment from here would be much more straightforward than doing it from the storm chamber. I’d done it close to a hundred times by my best count and, thanks to Milk Scar and his counting, I could do it with my eyes closed. Whether I could do it with my head spinning and the earth shaking all around me was something I looked forward to finding out.
But the lure of that open door behind me made me turn back.
A nervous prickle ran down my neck.
‘Curiosity will be the death of me.’
Steeling myself for the worst (about as well as you might imagine, given I could barely stand unaided), I went inside.
The place had been completely ransacked. Books had been torn from shelves, instruments and tools swept from the benches and onto the floor. A clanrat in relatively ostentatious dress comprising red and grey rags and a bronze sash, presumably one of Ikrit’s trusted lackeys, lay dead on the floor with his chest torn open. I wondered who would have the means and the sheer brass balls to break into Ikrit’s burrow and murder his underling. My list of culprits amounted to Barrach and Kurzog, both of whom seemed unlikely, considering. Blinking quickly in an attempt to settle my wandering vision, I went further in. I wasn’t sure what I was looking for, or if I was there for any reason at all other than to sate my curiosity, but then I saw something glittering amidst the debris that snatched my breath away.
My warding lantern.
It was on its side, still held in the clamps in which I’d seen it last. Clearly it was not what whoever had ransacked this place had been looking for, as it had been discarded along with everything else. Yearning burnished my chest with its warm glow, and drew me down to my knees beside this unsullied part of me. I freed it from the rubbish and practically tore it out of the warlock’s unsightly clamps. As ornate as a Lord-Castellant’s warding lantern might appear, its housing is sigmarite hewn from the molten core of the Mallus itself and I knew that the warlock’s rusted iron wouldn’t so much as scratch the gilt work. And I was right. The restraining rods snapped and crumbled as I pulled the lantern free and crushed it to my chest.
No new mother ever held an infant with such fierce pride.
I threw my head back and laughed. ‘Praises to the God-King!’ The blessings of Sigmar did indeed reach into the darkest corners of the realms. It looked as though someone owed a certain Lord-Relictor of the Hallowed Knights an apology.
I couldn’t see any of my weapons or armour lying around anywhere, which was sort of disappointing but not entirely surprising. Either they hadn’t interested Ikrit as much as the more arcane properties of my lantern had, or he had other burrows scattered about the lair where he or his underlings could work on them in peace. I didn’t spare too much energy thinking about that. The lantern was more useful to me just then than weapons or armour, in any case. Against creatures as steeped in the Chaotic as the skaven, the light of a warding lantern is deadlier than any halberd, and more than that, after everything I’d just been through its healing powers were exactly what I’d been praying for – the light of Azyr being a more reliable curative than successive self-administered blows to the head.
After the horrors of Ikrit’s warpstorm, I’d almost forgotten the savaging I’d taken beforehand in my thwarted attempt at escape. It was unsurprising then that I was a little shaky on my feet. Given everything I had endured over the last few days it was a wonder that even a Stormcast Eternal as robust as I was still upright. I certainly would have enjoyed watching Vandus or Gardus get up after all that and saunter out with half as much panache as I had managed so far.
I convinced myself that was all there was to it.
As you might by now have gathered, I’m incredibly good at that.
I pulled back the lantern’s shutters.