‘Do not celebrate, Bear-Eater. She run-leaves you to me.’
‘I don’t think so.’
With an ululating scream, the woman leapt out of a wholly different tree. From the way she carried through the air it looked as though she’d taken a good run at it, but heavens knew from where. The pitch and volume of her war-cry made even me, hardly a stranger to loud noises, wince, but Malikcek with his sensitive skaven hearing was positively poleaxed. He hit the ground like a crying baby, which would have been amusing had it not carried him under the sweep of the woman’s spear. The effort broke her war-shout and Malikcek recovered quickly enough to kick her legs out from under her. She landed on her back just as Malikcek sprung to his feet. He reversed his grip on one of his knives and stabbed for the woman’s chest. She sank into the hard ground, leaving Malikcek’s knife to crack the ice. He hissed in annoyance, the canopy above him rustling as she dropped out of it, spear point-down to skewer the assassin from crown to crotch. He dispersed before she got near and she landed where he had been standing in a feline crouch.
‘Sigmar in Heaven, this is going to go on all day.’
Creaking and sore, I got up, watching the fight as it moved away from me. Idly I reached up to take a branch. It was cold, but brittle, and snapped off more easily than something of actual wood would have. The cold bit into my skin, spreading slowly to my wrist and up my forearm and I actually laughed aloud as I felt the branch beginning to transform my hand into ice. Hefting the branch overarm, I hurled it with all the venom that Ikrit, the cold, and several weeks of captivity had left me of my strength.
I would have made a magnificent Prosecutor; I think we can all agree on that.
The impromptu javelin impaled Malikcek through the shoulder blade and pinned him to the trunk of a tree. He shrieked in agony, bursting into nothingness with a fading cry before the warrioress had a chance to react. I grinned, raising my fist in salute, then grunted as I felt something punch me in the back. It barely hurt, but for some reason my next breath came raggedly, my knees shaking, and I almost fell back against the tree behind me. I looked down and around to see the hilt of Malikcek’s knife sticking out of my back. Malikcek’s hand was attached. It looked even uncannier to me somehow, now that the shadow it wore had been given proper definition by my blood.
‘That hurt-hurt.’
‘You look good for it,’ I admitted.
‘My soul is imprisoned in Ulgu, a plaything of the gods. I cannot die-die. Not here. Not to the likes of you.’ He twisted the knife, driving it up into my lungs, making me open my mouth in a breathless gasp. I shaped it into a big, oval grin.
‘I’ve… had… worse.’ While I had him pretty much exactly where I wanted him with his knife in my back, I lifted my lantern and, one-handed, thumbed the catch. ‘Have you?’
Then I slid the shutter.
Malikcek shrieked and evaporated, taking the knife with him, which I wasn’t exactly sure was a good thing or bad, but was as painless a method of removing a blade from a body as I knew. I couldn’t be sure exactly what became of him because the world turned white, searing hot, as though my face were being held against the surface of a star. Light streamed through every jagged, half-mended crack that Ikrit had left of my being to burn me from the inside. The knife wound in my side knitted shut and melted closed at the same time, as if it were some kind of contest to see what could hurt me more. Then something stepped in front of the light, cutting it and filtering it so that I was griddled in stripes while the rest of me suffered the bittersweet agony of being plunged into the sudden, bitter cold of the mountain.
The woman stepped on the lantern, forcing it under the snow and deadening the light, not quite enough to kill the pain but enough to let me concentrate on something else. I looked up and along the length of a spear.
‘My name is Brychen, priestess of the Savage Maiden. I am looking for my brother.’
‘Barrach,’ I murmured.
‘You know him?’
‘The skaven held us in the same dungeon.’
The cold tip of her spear burrowed into my collar. ‘Yet you fled without him.’
‘He died.’
I felt a flicker of emotion run down the haft of the spear. Her bark creaked, becoming spiny and thick, circlets of thorn lengthening to grow along her arms and legs in spirals. ‘How?’
‘Fighting.’
‘How very like him. I hope that made him happy.’
I thought about how the Gorkai champion had gone, bent double and practically broken in half by Malikcek’s poison and decided to say nothing. It wasn’t the sort of thing a sister needed to hear. Particularly not one as wrathful as this one. ‘Now that we’re all happy about which side we’re on, perhaps you could remove your spear?’
‘What did Ikrit want with you?’
‘You know of him?’
‘The Wild Harvest kept him at bay for many seasons, but when the Maiden left us…’ Her attention strayed for a moment, and had I any strength left in me at all then, even with the wan pain of my lantern in every muscle, I would have easily taken that spear from her. I hadn’t though, so I didn’t.
‘I am Hamilcar Bear-Eater,’ I said. ‘Lord-Castellant of the Astral Templars and the Seven Words. I expect you will have heard of me.’ Strange as it might seem to you, in those days the Mortal Realms were rich with folk who had long forgotten the name ‘Sigmar,’ much less ever seen one of his celebrated champions in the flesh. ‘He wanted what the God-King has given to me, as he did with your brother. He failed. With us both, I think. Take solace in the fact that he suffered for his pride.’ I knew I would. ‘He’s dead. I’m sure of that.’
‘Dead?’ she scoffed. ‘Hardly. If it were so easy that you could do such a thing, then someone else would have done it before now.’
‘You think any of this was eas–’
Before I could argue it further, Brychen had already pushed her spear into me, running between the thick tendons at the base of my neck, through my throat, and pinning me to the ice. The pain was as overwhelming as it was unexpected. I made several short, terrifically painful gulps for air, but nothing went down. The bloody neck wound frothed with my escaping breath.
‘Do not think of this as an act of malice,’ said Brychen, crouching beside me and cupping the back of my head with one cool, woody hand. ‘The Harvest takes life. That is simply what it does.’ My lips moved furiously, but my head was already beginning to feel heavy, my vision clouding. ‘I know what you are, Stormcast. I followed you from the Gorwood and watched your battle with the skaven and their allies. I know that a Stormcast’s gifts will return with him to his god on death. I will not let Ikrit keep even the smallest seed of you.’
The distant cry of an aetar echoed around inside my head, always distant, always fading, as the back of my head sank to the ice.
Chapter twelve
It occurs to me now that I’ve spent a good portion of this tale describing how badly things have hurt. I wouldn’t want to describe what followed and have you accuse me of exaggerating my suffering to make for a better story. While that is certainly the sort of thing that I would do, I am also a master storyteller, my skills honed by a thousand firesides in Shyish and Ghur and Azyr, and I would be far more subtle about it than that. To spare myself the charge of embellishment, and you the ordeal, I’ll skip over the details of the reforging that followed my death beneath Brychen’s spear. Know only that it was by far the most painful of the procedures that I had yet endured upon the Anvil, as if the Smith did not remake me so much as bash the pieces of me together until they fused into a rough approximation of the hero I had been before. Yet there was a bliss of sorts, throughout the pain, to being once again in the charge of a master maker.