‘Hamilcar!’ someone else yelled.
I didn’t see exactly who, because before I had realised what was happening there were men and women piling into the street, abandoning their animals, throwing open their doors, looking up and pointing.
‘Hamilcar is back!’
I raised my hand immodestly and the cry became a cheer.
‘Hamilcar!’
Then a chant.
‘Hamilcar! Hamilcar! Hamilcar!’
Then a wave that wasn’t really words at all, but a rush of raw emotion and sound, worship in the mindless roar of the sea. I thought about what Sigmar had said to me, that he had been mortal once, that all the great divinities of the Pantheon once had been, and wondered for a moment if to these people I could actually be a god. If the Wild Maiden could do it and Ikrit could aspire to it, then why not Hamilcar Bear-Eater? Laughing at the absurdity of the thought, I raised my palms in an appeal for quiet, but, as I had known it would, the recognition only spurred them to greater volume. My name came faster and faster, and my grin grew broader and broader.
I hadn’t realised how much I had missed this.
‘Yes!’ I bellowed, shouting over them all. ‘You are saved now. Hamilcar has returned!’
The roar that greeted that declaration made what had come before sound like a ripple of applause through the Collegiate Arcane’s private galleries (so I’m told – a friend of mine has been there). The crowd suddenly rushed towards me. A narrow staircase meandered its way from the inner wards to the catacombs’ entrance, warded by a pair of Liberators in black aegis war-plate and shields. The crowd forced them aside. And I waited for them, arms spread as if to welcome a horde of my children. We laughed and cried. I patted heads and brushed fingers that were raised to mine, allowing the amethyst and gold of my thrice-blessed to be kissed and prayed upon until it felt as though I had been manhandled by half of Ghur.
And I milked every moment of it.
‘Who will hold the Seven Words where all before have tried and failed?’ I bellowed.
‘Hamilcar!’
‘And you all will hold it with me.’
Their cheers were deafening.
‘For the God-King!’
‘Hamilcar!’
I wasn’t here to save them, of course, unless I happened to do so indirectly, which wasn’t impossible, but I couldn’t help myself.
‘Hamilcar!’
‘Hamilcar! Hamilcar!’
I leapt off the last step and into the Seven Words proper, a grin as broad as the sea gates of Stardock on my face.
The sloping courtyard was strangely empty of people but for a single Stormcast Eternal, walking towards me with the metronomic clack-clack-clack of a castellant’s halberd on stone. A blazing sun masked his face. Golden serpents coiled about his forearms and legs, their distending jaws the plates for elbows and knees. A thick yellow and black cloak rippled out behind him in the seven winds, a warding lantern rattling against his thigh.
The crowd around us grew suddenly quiet.
As if a grownup had just entered the fortress.
‘You are late, Hamilcar Bear-Eater.’
No two Stormcast Eternals are alike, not even two Lord-Castellants, but like me, Akturus Ironheel knew how to make an awesome first impression.
He let his halberd droop a fraction so that its blade turned towards me.
I felt my shoulders sag.
Akturus’ eyes glinted inside his golden mask.
‘I have been waiting five years for this.’
Chapter sixteen
Sometimes I wondered if Akturus and I had been adversaries in another life. He was the sort of man that made you look over your shoulder just thinking about him. Up close he smelled of death (the permanent kind) and stone (the sort they bury you under), and no power in Azyr seemed able to eradicate it from his soul. I knew, of course, that amongst the Anvils of the Heldenhammer discussions of their mortal existences were considered taboo, but to me that was like waving red meat in front of a bullgor.
‘I think that you must once have been a duardin king, brother – cruel to your people and miserly with your gold, until a bold king of the Winterlands brought you low.’
‘Only human warriors can be reforged into Stormcast Eternals,’ Akturus replied flatly.
I shrugged. ‘So we are told, but it wasn’t so long ago that we didn’t know about the Sacrosanct Chambers.’
Make of that what you will.
Akturus sighed as a pair of Retributors heaved the throne room’s great doors shut behind us. The bang echoed through the blustery grey chambers.
The décor was much as I had left it.
Animal skins and throws were much in evidence. Faded orruk murals and a mad collage of glyph art daubed the crumbling stonework, picked out here and there with my own illiterate markings. I would have expected my old quarters in the keep to go to Frankos, since the Lord-Celestant now had the title and the swords, and lacked Akturus’ maudlin aversion to fresh air and natural light. And sure enough, if the Ironheel had spent half an hour in this hall since my ill-fated excursion into the Nevermarsh, then he was covering his tracks as well as any Vanguard of the Astral Templars. You could even see the rounded impression of one Hamilcar Bear-Eater in the furs heaped over the wooden throne at the far end. The surrounding flagstones were still littered with cracked bones. Beastmen and skaven – though I’d let it be known about the keep that they belonged to little children who didn’t say their prayers to Sigmar. I felt a lump forming in my throat. Crow had been chewing on them on the eve of my departure.
Time is an elastic thing in the soul-mills. Knotted. Looped. Able in the same stretch to be both very, very short and very, very long. It had been a handful of weeks. It had been five years. Standing here now in my own lightning-forged skin, in a room essentially unchanged, it felt like yesterday.
The single addition that had been made since my regency of the Seven Words had ended was a brightly coloured silk blanket, laid out on the floor and surrounded by scattered cushions. Tassels wound with gold thread flapped in the winds from the chamber’s enormous windows. A fine collection of clay pottery held the four corners down.
‘Sit, brother.’
Akturus folded himself neatly onto one of the cushions and reached for a decanter of wine. It had been sculpted into the form of a swan, or something similar to it. It had been painted black, the carved details of the bird neatly done in gold. He glanced at me, pointedly, jug hovering.
Without making too great a fuss about it, I sat.
The alternative would have been to settle our differences back in the street.
After everything I’d been put through over the last month or so, getting my pride bruised in an honour match with the Ironheel didn’t come with quite the terror that it had. Be that as it may, however, everything I’d been through had come about precisely because I’d been avoiding such a public thrashing, and I didn’t want to cheapen my ordeal by just giving into it now.
Dipping his head a hair my way, Akturus poured himself a goblet.
‘That’s not from Ghur,’ I noted, though I knew full well that the Lord-Castellant wouldn’t answer.
I must have sat through this ritual a thousand times.
The cup is always the same distance away. The decanter is at the same angle, in the same hand, resting against the inside of the wrist in the exact same place. A precise measure is poured, always the same. Then he sets the decanter down, exactly where he picked it up from, as though this is a work of seraphon astromancy rather than the libation ritual of a dead civilization. With the same hand, free now, he reaches for the spice bowl. He takes a spoonful. The spice is dark orange and fragrant. Always the same blend. I have no idea what’s in it, or where it comes from. He smooths it level with the sigmarite of his little finger and then sprinkles the spice into his wine, muttering as he does so in a tongue that I have never heard spoken outside of his company. The spoon is then dipped into the wine for a single stir around the inside of the cup. Then he withdraws it, taps three times on the rim of the cup, and returns it to its resting place against the lip of the spice bowl.