‘But…’ I gestured pointedly to where the three warriors had just been.
‘More of the soul gets lost to the Anvil than you’d think,’ said Ong. ‘More than Sigmar would like you to think, that’s for sure. Enough to make a passing forgery from what’s left behind.’ He shrugged. ‘The storm remembers.’
I felt myself deflate, feeling as low as I had when I’d first found myself so utterly alone in Ikrit’s dungeon. ‘Nobody knows I’m here, do they?’
Ong puzzled over me for a moment, as though a piece of ore had just claimed it was lonely.
‘Nobody outside these walls.’
I looked up at him, my light-sore eyes hardening into a glare. ‘Don’t get too used to my company, Ong. It’ll take more than a demi-god to keep Hamilcar Bear-Eater down.’
Chapter fourteen
For a being of cold starlight and the slow Celestial cycles, I had some crazed dreams that night.
I dreamt of old stars. Oceans of ice. Wind in my hair, cold on my face, warmth in my blood. I dreamt of Vikaeus again. As she had been.
Her skin was not as pale, her hair less dark and rubbed with goldspar, clad in bearskin and decked with jewels, or what passed for them amongst our people, which meant bright shells and feathers, polished stones, painted teeth. The sun rose behind her over the summit of the snow-draped mountain that our tribe had lived on and worshipped, lighting her up like a goddess. I dreamt of a heart melting for the knowledge that this vision before me was mine and mine alone. ‘You are usurped, my king,’ she recited to me, her voice dripping like honey. ‘The sun rises. The rule of the Day Queen comes.’ Lucidity dissolved into a riot of feasting and fighting, women in Day armour of cured hide and ribbons that their mothers and grandmothers had tended for these once-in-a-generation hours of day, commanding their menfolk to fetch them ale, bathe their feet, and embarrass themselves performing feats of strength for their pleasure. I dreamt of odd things. Unexpected things. The warm taste of ale in a woman’s mouth. Being dizzy from too much dancing.
It was enough to stir me from my sleep but could not rouse me completely.
I dreamt of monsters. Long hunts across the eternal wildernesses in search of forage and game. A father, a huge man with arms like tree trunks and a laugh to break ice with. Brothers. I dreamt of the ogor frostlord and his raiders who had been tracking the same prey as us. He was mounted on a white bear the size of a Dracoth, draped in the tattooed skins of men and beasts and wielding a lance of solid ice as long as three men. I dreamt of teeth and white fur, my father’s screams, the memory of blood as I chewed the white bear’s ear off even as it shook my body in its jaws.
‘My Bear-Eater,’ spoke the thunder as it all went away.
It sounded amused.
I woke for a spell after that, and in that limbo of half-sleep I felt myself sealed within a seed pod of the kind that the sylvaneth use to nurture the young of their kind. Chittering voices came to me from the outside, muted by the viscous fluids of the pod, drowned out by the warped, but strident, pulse of Life.
I startled awake, kicking off my bedsheets and beating the foot of my cot with my heels – convinced, for reasons I could not quite divine, that there were rats at the end of my bed. The dream fog cleared from me as I came fully awake, but the corrupted throb of the Life song was more cloying. I sat up slowly, brushing off the hair that sweat had matted to my face. The room was too dark, too airless. The walls were too close. There were no windows. That was what it was. I swung out of the cot, intending to go to the wash basin and see if I could figure out the cold tap when I noticed the intense-looking duardin from before stood outside the door of my cell. The way he crossed his arms over his chest emphasised his incredible musculature, and somehow made him appear ten feet tall. The shadows cast by the thunderstorms in his eyes did the rest.
‘Ong sent you to watch me sleep?’ I growled, slightly unnerved, the restless night making me snappish.
He shook his head. His beard was well-kept and tawny-coloured. A pair of thin-framed spectacles sat on his bulb nose. Lightning flared across the inside of the lenses.
‘You came to watch me sleep because you wanted to?’
Without answering, he slotted a key into the lock of my cell. The door sang like a seraphon choir as it opened. I frowned at the strange duardin. Power swept through the open door of the cell like the winds of a coming storm.
‘You are no duardin,’ I said.
He regarded me sternly.
‘Do you serve the Smiths?’
Finally, he spoke. ‘Not exactly.’
Where the chamber’s walls had previously shaped themselves to Ong’s moods, they shuddered to this duardin’s. Thunder peeled. Rain hammered upon the roof of the realm. I narrowed my eyes against the sudden gale.
‘I feared as much,’ I said.
I wanted to ask who he was, what god he served, why he had been sent for me and how he had managed to breach the Forge Eternal, but I sensed that the delay would have been my death. His power was sublime.
I felt it the moment that my punch made contact with his face.
Lightning bolted between us. His spectacles shattered. I knew I had no right even to be entertaining the idea of challenging a semi-divinity of this order, but surprise could be a powerful weapon.
The duardin stumbled back, storm clouds gathering about his shoulders like a cloak. I followed through the cell door, not giving him a chance to recover. An uppercut lifted him off the ground. He didn’t go far. It was as if he weighed twenty times what he appeared to. The flagstones split beneath him as though I had struck them with a starsoul mace.
When I got to the door, I dragged it open.
‘Whoah!’
I wobbled over the threshold, my hand still gripping the door handle for dear life as a sort of multi-dimensional vertigo crashed over me.
The Forge Eternal, even just Ong’s sixth of it, was a labyrinth of staircases and columns, celestine pillars carved with stylised duardin faces and crackling lightning forges. Trying to take in the entire vista at once was like trying to capture the entirety of the night sky. From where I stood, clinging to the door frame, it appeared as though duardin in work leathers and aprons blitzed up and down golden staircases, trailed by lightning, blithely unconcerned by the others doing the exact same thing on the flip side. Other sets just hung unsupported, or terminated mid-step only to emerge from behind an obstructing pillar elsewhere, going down where before they had been running upwards. Where walls were visible through the layers of lightning stairs and supports, I saw only storm haze and smoke, duardin and humans and the occasional aelf labouring like ants alongside the Smiths’ lightning automata in the creation of weapons – and beings – of power. If there was a ceiling, or a floor, then I couldn’t see one. Ordinarily, this was the sort of topsy-turvy stuff that I couldn’t get enough of, but it made my stomach roil.
Concentrating solely on the steps in front of me, I started running. Corposant lightning flickered about my feet, the view about me blurring as the stairs swept me through the labyrinth at mind-bending speeds. Just as it had been when fleeing Ikrit’s lair I had no idea what I was doing, but Ong was about to wake up to the same fact that the warlock had before him, and that was this: confinement does not a cooperative Hamilcar make. I would find Ikrit or Malikcek, preferably both, and beat the answers out of them if I had to before returning to Sigmaron in triumph. That was my plan – staggering in ambition, light on detail. The way I liked them. Focusing on the end goal made all the steps I had to take along the way seem individually smaller. Small enough to be ignored for now.