If anything, it was actually colder in the forest than it had been further up the mountainside. Hugging my arms to my chest and gripping the bicep of the opposite arm, I gave a great huff of mist.
‘No changing my mind now.’ As a rule, I never change my mind once it’s set. Utter commitment to any course, however unwise, is what has won me half my battles, but in this case the decision to stick was made for me. I’d be half dead well before I made it back to the tunnel, and I knew it.
I hadn’t gone far into that eerie forest when a lonely shriek, as of a hunting bird, echoed from the sky. I ignored it at first, crunching over hard ground, before I realised that the voice was that of a hunting bird I knew personally. A smile stretched across my numb face like faltering ice, and I looked up into the snow.
I don’t know why it came as such a surprise and a relief that they had been looking for me all this time.
Isolation from my brothers must have affected me more deeply than I had realised.
‘Aeygar!’ I yelled, my voice echoing with wild joy between the trees, the mountainside and the low ceiling of the sky. I waved my arms overhead, though I doubted even the eyes of an aetar would have been able to pick me off the mountain in such a blizzard. ‘Princess! Hamilcar is here!’
‘You should not shout-shout like that. Not on a mountain. Thought you would know better.’
The voice whispered from a position right behind my ear, and I took my warding lantern’s loop handle in a firm grip and spun round with a roar. The lantern whooshed through the flurrying snow. The voice snickered amongst the lonely trees.
‘It’s going to be like that then, is it?’
‘Run-flee, Bear-Eater. Give me the challenge of hunting you.’
‘Considering you’ve bested me twice already, you’re strangely reluctant to show yourself.’ I flexed dramatically, and bared my teeth in what I hoped was the right direction. ‘Does Hamilcar scare you, assassin?’
‘You amuse me. Is not often I enjoy a challenge for challenge’s sake.’
I glared into the woods, but it was hopeless. The whole mountainside was swamped by black clouds and thick snow. If Malikcek was lurking out there then he had a few thousand square miles of shadow to choose from. ‘Ikrit’s probably dead, you know. I heard him fall. If I were you I’d get as far away from this mountain as my legs could carry me.’
‘You think I fear wrath of your god? See me, Bear-Eater. See me if you can. The gods have done their worst to me. Run-run now.’
‘Hamilcar isn’t afraid of the dark.’
‘Run-flee. Run-now. Or I will take you back to Ikrit instead.’
I turned on the spot with a snarl on my lips, but the voice seemed to be coming from everywhere at once. If Malikcek wanted to kill me then I was perfectly minded to let him take his best shot and get it over with, but I just didn’t have it in me to make it easy for him. Surrendering to the cold or even one nameless beastman out of a herd was one thing, but giving in to this cocksure little rat who’d be bragging about the day he slew Hamilcar until the day of my reforging?
Over my immortal body.
‘You should know, Malikcek,’ I bellowed, pointing myself downhill, ‘that my performances in the Azyrheimer marathons are the stuff of legend!’
With that, I was already tearing off downslope, slipping and running in roughly equal measure, occasionally flapping my arms for balance and yelling ‘Aeygar!’ at the top of my lungs. I heard her shriek again, but it was further off now. I sucked in a deep breath, only to lose it all to a heart shock of astonishment as Malikcek stepped out of the darkness in front of me. His blades back-and-forthed over my bare chest like gardening shears, and he sniggered as he sank back into the shadows and I ran straight through him, clutching my ribboned chest in one hand and waiting for the poison to take effect. As it had with Barrach, and with the Freeguild soldiers on Kurzog’s Hill before that.
A gruesome death if ever I’d seen one, but if going through it could erase some of the horror of being eaten by a Dread Abyssal then I would have considered that good value.
But nothing happened.
I started to laugh. ‘I should have known. Your poison is less impressive against the mettle of a Stormcast Eternal!’
‘A tool for every task, Bear-Eater. Ikrit would not believe you had escaped and been killed-slain by some mad-fool beastman if I return you with bones broken by my poison. Would he? His wrath would be mighty.’
‘Then why kill me at all?’
The wood snickered. ‘You talk-squeak too much. I told you to run-flee.’
Malikcek swept out of the darkness, like a bat transforming into a soulblight even as it dropped out of the sky. His knives were a blur and it took every ingrained scrap of skill I owned just to survive the first seconds of our exchange. I parried a blistering sequence of blows with my lantern, and was about to praise Sigmar for the unsung durability of his craftsmanship, when a tail looped about the back of my leg and yanked it out from under me. I hit the ground in a crack of ice, the assassin fading from the air above me and reappearing almost immediately bestride my chest. His knife was at my throat, another pressing into my belly. His tail wound tightly around the wrist of the hand that held my lantern until the fingers turned as blue as the trees that surrounded us.
I bared my teeth, fighting to keep them from chattering. ‘You aren’t bad against a half-dead Lord-Castellant.’
‘I already took you at your prime. Do you forget? Killed your second and lots-many of your men. Took you alive for my master.’
‘With a little help from the Blind Herd and the Legion of Bloat and a few tens of thousands of warriors.’
‘You walk-scurry into Kurzog’s trap because you thought you were invincible.’
I grinned fearlessly. ‘I am invincible. I believed that even before Sigmar made it true.’
‘We see now.’
I saw the arm inside its sleeve of shadow tense, but before it reached the blade at my throat, something howled and slammed into him from behind. Malikcek squealed in surprise, moulting into shadow before exploding back into tangibility a few feet further off from me, cloak flapping, lips drawn back over a snarl.
A woman stood over me, ivy-skinned and russet-haired. Even given my usual keen eye for the small details, something about that combination was strikingly familiar. She was clad in a few pieces of bark and circlets of thorn, and spun a branched spear through both hands like a tightrope walker about to perform for a hungry crowd.
‘He is mine,’ she said, her voice the dry-throated snarl of unseen predators in the woods.
My eyebrows lifted. ‘Yours?’ I wondered what I could have done to attract her attention – beyond the obvious, that is – but could think of nothing.
Malikcek flew at her with a snarl.
The pair of them exchanged blows with such ferocity that it was almost as if they simply lashed their weapons about without any real inclination of hitting one another at all. I might have convinced myself that that were the case were it not for the rapid-fire snick of metal on wood and the woman’s occasional grunt of effort. Slowly, though, Malikcek forced her on to the back foot. The skaven was faster and better. I was mildly relieved to note this, given that this was now the third time he had beaten me.
‘Hehehe. This was good-fun, but done-finished now.’
The woman propellered her spear, her eyes flashing to amber as she emitted a droning hum from her mouth and the air exploded with mosquitoes. Malikcek flapped his paws, squealing, as the woman backed off under the cover of the swarm and into a tree. And I do mean into a tree. She stepped through the ice-clad trunk and disappeared as if it were a curtain. Malikcek squeaked in confusion and annoyance.