‘You have been absent for five years, lord,’ said the Liberator, sheathing his blade with apparent reluctance. ‘We had hoped… I mean, we had thought that Sigmar had bidden you do battle in some other land.’
‘Some distant land,’ murmured his brother, softly.
‘It heartens me that my absence has been noted and mulled over, mourned even, by those forged under a different storm.’ I looped out an arm and, before the Liberator could react, hugged him to my breastplate. I felt him cringe, as if he could shed his sigmarite layer and ooze out through my arms, which I put down to an aversion to emotion typical of Anvils of the Heldenhammer.
I was in a good mood, and determined to let everyone share in it, whether they had been forged under a darksome phase of the Mallus or not.
‘Come!’ I barked. ‘I have passed beneath the gaze of the solar wyrm Agraphon who wards the Seventh Gate and crossed its threshold. I would feel the icy breath of Ghur on my face, and see its mountains one more time.’ I brushed past the Liberator, who still appeared somewhat stunned by the passion of my greeting, and between the two Judicators before they had a chance to decide what to do with me. ‘Knight-Questor Hamilcar Bear-Eater will be about his sacred task,’ I thundered, just as I was hitting my stride.
The title of Knight-Questor actually conferred few privileges over and above that of Lord-Castellant, except when dealing with those of even higher authority, which I have to say I was looking forward to enormously. I had yet to tire of announcing it to every warrior I passed.
‘I have been set a geas by the grace of the God-King himself, and by the Twelve-Pointed Star I will see it done.’
I stopped sharply and turned back.
The four Anvils of the Heldenhammer stood there like the recently animated dead in a puddle of torchlight.
‘Is it still winter?’
‘No, lord.’
‘I suppose even I can’t have everything.’
‘Lord?’
‘Carry on.’
And with that, I left them to it. I had rarely ventured into the endless maze of catacombs that plumbed the Gorkomon during my time as Lord-Castellant of the Seven Words. I have little sense of direction in such spaces, and have no taste for confinement. But I had been Lord-Castellant.
I knew the way.
The Seven Words, as you may know, is a serviceable pile of fortifications situated upon the craggy lip of the Gorkomon, but as much of it exists inside the mountain as upon it. The first folk to build here had been duardin, but next to nothing was known of them, all trace of anything beyond their mere existence obliterated by millennia of serial reconquests. They had built the Seventh Gate, we think, linking the surface fortress to Azyr, but why they had built it so far underground and what the purpose of the rest of the labyrinth had been were mysteries lost to the Age of Chaos. Xeros, in one of his more lucid phases, had once told me that the old duardin had crafted worms of iron and steam to carve these tunnels, and that in the millennia since their makers’ demise the machines had burrowed on without purpose. But, the odd moonclan aside – left over from the last bloody change in occupation but one – nothing was ever found down there. I happily put the theory down to the Lord-Relictor’s usual inability to cope with too many days spent in one spot without blood to spill.
About twenty minutes and several equally awed and speechless Anvils of the Heldenhammer later, I strode through a flat dolmen of stone and into open air.
A small amber sun winked in a clear blue sky. The brightness fair kissed my eyelids, like a journeyman lector alighting once again upon hallowed soil. Summer, then – but sitting less than a mile below the highest point in Ghur, there was enough of a chill in the air for me to consider it homely.
It smelled of night soil, of livestock and dray beasts, beasts for hawking and hunting, of men and duardin and aelves. It smelled of tanneries and sawmills, butchers and brewers. Life, then. Vigorous and barely tamed. Ghur. Dogs barked from higgledy-piggledy little streets that scrambled along the clefts and crags of the Gorkomon. Children played there. Drays rattled over broken cobbles, hauled by men, by horses and by placid half-tree, half-beast things native to the Gorwood. The clash of steel rose from the Freeguilder blockhouses. Pennons bearing the fortress’ seven rings alongside the emblems of Azyr fluttered in a gale that could have knocked a grown man over, but which for the Seven Words could be considered gentle.
The Seven Words was a frontier fort in every respect. Every man, woman and child, regardless of species or trade, knew the precariousness of their adopted home, and they lived fully in the knowledge that death was at best one more day away.
My kind of people.
Despite an enviable position in command of the mightiest peak in Ghur, the Seven Words was almost laughably indefensible. The walls, for instance. For reasons known only to the old duardin who had built them, they were far too long, defending vast swathes of icy rock on which a flock of an Azyr breed of goat now dutifully grazed, presumably thankful for their security. Its situation several miles above the cloud layer also left the fortress entirely dependent on a network of messenger forts and watchkeeps for word of the Gorwood – a network which, if the Vikaeus-thing were to be believed, had been completely overrun by Ikrit’s skaven. And then of course, there was Ghur itself. Ever hungry, birds, insects and small animals chiselled away at the fortress almost as quickly as it could be repaired.
Hearing the mournful cry of an aetar, I looked up.
Shielding my eyes against the low sun, I caught a pinprick of something dark and shiny against the awesome blue of the sky, and followed it as far as I could manage with my eyes until it disappeared into the high crags.
At its summit the Gorkomon was encased in ice year-round, the source of the summer snows that would occasionally blanket the Seven Words. The timing and depth of which was a source of great interest to the gamblers amongst the local population, myself included. Even I, after a second attempt on the summit (coming, coincidentally enough, on the same night as my first summerfall revel), had accepted that the final few hundred feet of the Gorkomon were unconquerable.
There was a reason that the aetar had looked ambivalently down from their fortress-eyries on a hundred changes in ownership of the Seven Words.
My gaze dropped to the keep. Ostensibly the last and toughest redoubt of any fortress, this keep was a silver tower built upon an Ironjawz scrapfort built upon the rugged square block of a duardin keep-hold. It was a record of the disparate peoples that had fought here, foolishly tried to live here and ultimately died here. It was the single most anarchic thing I have ever seen – and I had once spent the night in an Ironjawz camp – and naturally I thought it was wonderful. Useless at what it was meant to do. But wonderful.
Crossing my arms, I looked out over the mess of wards and defensive works towards the main gate. From there, a bridge flew across to the shoulder of the neighbouring peak. The mountain had not had a name when we arrived, but Broudiccan, in a rare moment of high levity, had dubbed it the Morkogon. It had stuck. That solitary approach was the Seven Words’ one true concession to actual defensibility, being as it was the only decent way in or out. There were plenty of indecent ways of course, and all I needed to do was find myself one of those and–
‘Hamilcar!’
The shout from the streets below interrupted my thoughts before I could finish.
A big, bald-headed man in soiled overalls, stained red up to the elbows, stood on the cobbles outside a slaughterhouse, caught mid-hurl with a bucket full of offal. The bucket dropped from his fingers and clattered across the cobbles. He backed away from it, slapping his hand to his mouth.