And when I opened my eyes for the first time after my third death, the last thing I’d expected to see was the inside of another cell.
‘This is someone’s idea of a joke, isn’t it? Zephacleas! Are you out there?’
I stood up. The movement caused me no pain. I felt strong again, but not quite yet myself. Things could become lost in the reforging, I knew, but whatever I thought I was missing I couldn’t place. I pushed the heel of my palm into my chest, like a hypochondriac feeling for a lump, but it eluded me, whatever it was. I shook off the empty feeling with a conscious shiver.
Soul searching never had been my strongest area.
I looked down at myself, my restored body clad in a fur-lined gown. The weave was finer than anything that mortal hands could match, even if they had access to materials as flawless as these. The lining was from the fur of no beast that ever lived in the Mortal Realms, I’ll tell you that.
The cell I now found myself in was practically luxurious compared to the one I had gone to such extraordinary lengths to escape. The floor was flagged and even. There was a cot with bedding, large enough for eight feet and four hundred pounds of Stormcast Eternal to lie comfortably. A plain-looking chair stood with its back to the dressed stone of the far wall. There was even a basin with taps for hot and cold running water, practically unheard of luxuries even in the rarefied echelons of the Collegiate Arcana. The bars were celestite. That was strange. The seraphon starmetal was too astoundingly rare even for the accoutrement of Lord-Celestants, but it was well-known about the celestine vaults that Grungni and his Smiths were able to source enough of the material for their own private needs. They vibrated musically. It was actually quite pleasant, but I expected it to get tiresome quite quickly.
‘A better class of prisoner then?’ I mused aloud. ‘Or a better class of captor?’
‘You’re no prisoner in my house, Hamilcar Bear-Eater.’
On the other side of the bars was a guard room, typical of the form. A single three-legged stool stood in front of a no-nonsense, steel-clad door. A duardin sat in it, slouched forwards, elbows on his knees, studying me intently and drawing the eye in kind.
The absolute size of him was oddly difficult to be sure about. He seemed to fluctuate between a roughly duardin-sized core of strength and something far larger than the room he occupied. That duardin centre was fantastically well muscled, stoking an ember of manly envy even in me, which you should know is the sort of thing I don’t admit to lightly. Even the plain workman’s leathers he wore couldn’t mask that kind of obvious power. His beard was the grey of good iron, split into two plaits that wound Sigmar alone knew how many times about his waist until they lay thicker than mail. His ruddy cheeks were blackened by soot and years, and by an implacability of expression that made him impossible to read.
‘That’s me,’ I shrugged. ‘The Bear-Eater. I talk before I think. And that’s if I think.’ I wrapped my fingers around the quietly singing starmetal and eyeballed the duardin through the bars. ‘It’s been over fifty Ghur-years since I’ve walked the rings of the Sigmarabulum. I’m sure every guest chamber in the Aetherdomes is barred with celestite these days.’
The duardin frowned. The room darkened with it, the very walls about me seeming to bow under some inward pressure. ‘Your reputation for tomfoolery goes before you, Hamilcar.’
‘Though it is an almost unheard of phenomenon, you have me at a slight disadvantage, then. Who are you?’
‘My name is Ong. I assumed you’d heard of me.’
I know a little of the duardin tongue. It’s not nearly the secret language so many of the Dispossessed clans seem to think it still is, and it’s a handy tongue to have a grasp of in Azyrheim where almost all of the bawdiest ale houses are duardin free-houses. The name meant ‘One’. My heart gave a traitorous little flutter. I did indeed know this duardin, for his name had been beaten into my armour, although not in a form that I or any Stormcast Eternal I knew of could read or speak aloud.
‘You are one of the Six Smiths,’ I said.
The duardin (the god, actually – though I suppose he must have been duardin once), Ong, produced a grimace and pushed his tongue against the gap left by a missing tooth. ‘I always hated that name, you know. It was Grungni as coined it, of course. As if he owned us. Never thought it’d catch on the way it did. Are you aught more than Sigmar’s will, lad?’
‘Some would answer yes.’
‘Aye, they would, but I didn’t ask them.’
I shrugged. ‘I’d say no.’
Ong clapped his thigh and nodded, grinning with the same meagre apportionment with which he had earlier frowned. The pressure on the chamber eased slightly and the celestite again began to sing. ‘Good answer, lad. Good answer. The right answer too, for what that’s worth. Under better circumstances, I think I’d have enjoyed having you about my Forge to put the realms to rights. Your legend around here doesn’t quite do you justice.’
‘You’ll hear a better class of story beyond Sigmaron’s walls.’
I never did understand why, but the Astral Templars aside, my fellow Stormcast Eternals never exactly took to me in the same way as the soldiers of the mortal races had.
Yet more evidence for the imperfection of the reforging process, I suppose.
‘Aye, I did hear that, but I can’t leave my Forge.’
It sounded like my personal kind of hell. ‘Why not?’
‘Busy.’
‘Then let me out of here, and I’ll show you all the best drinking halls in Azyrheim.’
‘After Sigmar has rid the Mortal Realms of Chaos. Maybe.’ This struck me as the godly equivalent of ‘when Aqshy freezes over’. The Smith’s frown deepened. ‘How do you feel?’
‘Feel?’ I felt as though there was a gaping hole somewhere in my chest, not that it was any business of his. ‘You put a bear in a cage and ask him how he feels?’ I rolled my wrists and made fists, my intention being to show how strong I felt, laugh it off, but some ligament of the soul, unconnected to any muscle, twanged and drew my face into a grimace.
Ong leant forwards. ‘What?’
I tried to smile. ‘If you weren’t right here in the room with me I’d say you hadn’t done your best work here.’
The Smith didn’t react to the insult. He reminded me a little bit of Ikrit in that respect, the way he would hold himself apart and grill me, uncaring of the answers I gave. But it was no dearth of emotion that made Ong inscrutable: it was the depth of it. Ikrit aspired to be a god. He masqueraded as a god. The Smith was a god. The thoughts inside his head passed a long way beyond my notice, and what he felt had an equivalent gulf of travel, and had to be powerful indeed, before it would show on his face.
‘What makes you say that?’ he said
‘It hurt. More than usual. And I feel…’ I hesitated, unsure what to say to get me out of here and back to Ghur the fastest. I settled for, ‘Different.’
Ong eased back on his stool, big hands clasped over his big knees. ‘I’ve never received a warrior in my Forge as broken in spirit as you were. The lords-arcanum almost threw you out, you know, before you even got near to my Anvil. They’d never seen anything like it, actually thought you some trick of the Dark Powers. Nor would it be the first time they’ve tried to sneak a corruption into the Forge Eternal.’ He held up his forefinger and thumb, an inch apart, the calluses almost touching. ‘This close to returning to the Cosmic Storm, lad, that’s where you were. Maybe you’d have preferred that. Many would. But we are what we are, and we do as that demands of us.’