‘And… I don’t?’
Augus shook his head.
I pursed my lips, faintly troubled by that, but shook it off with a shrug. It really is as easy as that, if you let it be. I hadn’t deliberately attempted to scale the Gorkomon in order to petition for the aetar’s aid, but I was here now, and Augus was a powerful friend.
If a friend he was.
‘Then forget the skaven,’ I said. ‘Let Vikaeus and Akturus deal with them. I’m only interested in their leader, Ikrit.’
At my utterance of the name, Augus hissed. His eagle guard took up the sound in earnest, surrounding me with a needling hum of noise.
This time Barbarus spoke up for himself.
‘If we knew where the warlock was then I wouldn’t be here now. Augus would have taken his vengeance and I would be Knight-Venator again, wearing the storm-struck anvil of the Heavens Forged.’
I thought back on the dream that I had awoken to prior to my escape from the Forge Eternal. I had felt myself cocooned in the rancid flesh of a corrupt seed pod, a discordant Life song twisted out of harmony and muffled by the cushioning fibres of the seed. It had felt too vivid to be a dream, mad even for me – and in any case, I was almost certain that I had already been effectively awake by that point. What, then, if it had not been a dream at all? It would not be the first time that I had experienced a vision that had turned out, invariably with hindsight, to be prophetic. What if the thing that Ikrit had attempted to steal from me had been too large, too securely held, to be taken intact? What if he had been forced to resort instead to crude vandalism to take that which he had desired, leaving a broken trail of my soul essence that now connected my spirit to his… and vice versa. An unpleasant thought if ever I’d had one, and believe me, I’d had them.
‘He’s been lying low,’ I said. ‘Cocooned somehow, and recovering. I think I injured him badly in my escape from his lair.’
The dried paint daubing Barbarus’ features cracked as he slowly grinned. ‘And now he shows his tail again, and Sigmar sends you after him.’ He thumped my pauldron with some of his old vigour. ‘Yes. Good. So long as your quest does not interfere with mine, Bear-Eater.’
I should point out here that there is no formal hierarchy amongst the Knights-Questor. By our very nature we operate outside of the command echelons of the Stormhosts, so to create a whole set of new ones just for them would have been to totally miss the point. But even so, it struck me as obvious that those specifically chosen for the role by the God-King had to outrank those who had assumed the role for themselves.
Simple, cosmic order.
I decided to proceed on that basis.
‘I don’t know where Ikrit is, and neither does the God-King, but I know where he was. After the battle at Kurzog’s Hill he took me to his lair. I saw it briefly from the outside when I escaped. And so did she.’
I pointed at Aeygar.
Augus bristled and delivered a shriek that had the princess shuffling along her perch in surprise.
‘I heard you in the sky,’ I shouted, raising my voice enough to silence them both, and to bring the watching eagle knights into shrieks of contention. ‘You were searching for me, but the snow was falling too thickly for you to see me. I didn’t see you either, but I recognised your voice above me.’
The king threw his daughter an enquiring squawk. She shrieked back and the two fell into a belligerent hopping about and drumming of wing feathers that I would have recognised as an argument in any species.
‘Apparently the princess sought you without his consent,’ said Barbarus.
‘Apparently,’ I agreed.
Aeygar cocked her head thoughtfully, a gesture that Augus greeted with an ear-destroying shriek. I looked again to Barbarus.
The Errant-Questor had gathered up his helmet and was standing up.
‘She says that if she is permitted to go with you, then you can help her retrace her flight to where Ikrit’s lair might be found. He says that it’s too dangerous, and that he’s done doing Sigmar’s work for him. She then asks if he wants the skaven and their flying machines ruling over the Seven Words.’ Barbarus’ eyes sparked with new lightning as he slid his helmet back over his head and looked up to face the enraged King Augus. ‘Only it is not Sigmar’s work, is it? Not for me. It is yours. And I renew my pledge to you now, that you, and not the God-King, will have the warlock.’
I glanced across at him. ‘There’s my King in the Sky.’
Augus swung his head from side to side, gripping his perch tight in his claws as his wings beat in a fury.
Aeygar lifted off, hovering for a second before falling back to her perch with a shriek.
‘Yes,’ I shouted. ‘Let her. Ellias was her mother too.’
Augus quietened down, glaring at his daughter, then at me, then hung his head.
Barbarus nodded once. ‘He says that it was Ellias who convinced him to listen to Aeygar, and to give Sigmar one more chance. She was the wise one. He was only ever beak and claws.’
I snorted at that. ‘Me as well.’
The king of the Gorkomon looked sorrowful, the wind carrying through his feathers. He looked too tired to disagree with anything then.
As I said, I know people.
‘I can find him,’ I said. ‘Let Aeygar help me. What happens after that is out of all our hands.’
He gave me a hard glare.
Then lifted his beak into the air and shrieked.
Chapter twenty-one
Aeygar cawed at me, the short feathers of her head and neck forced back by the wind of her flight.
‘I see them.’
A force of about thirty men was strung out over the harsh, thickly wooded slope, fleetingly visible between the groping branches of the leechwoods and carniferns. Glassmarks and crystal armour glinted in the dusk light as they fought, the sound of quartzblades on rusted skaven steel like the clinking of china from up here on the aetar’s back.
‘It’s the Jerech Blue Skies,’ I yelled at her. ‘I am starting to think they are following me.’
Many Stormcast Eternals believe in things like fate, destiny, providence. Too many. Not me. I knew that some men were just dogged enough to keep on putting themselves in the right place at the right time.
I heard the crackling pop of gunfire.
With a gum-ache hum of the aetheric, Barbarus looped under the aetar’s wings and tucked in alongside me. His russety plume whipped out behind him. The star-eagle, Nubia, soared alongside, shedding starlight with every swift beat of her wings.
‘This is their battle now,’ he said. ‘Not ours. We have a quest and I would see it through.’
The Errant-Questor was probably right, but the idea of swooping to the rescue of the Freeguild on the back of an aetar princess in full armour was too good to resist. ‘For shame, Barbarus, where is your humanity?’ I pointed down with my halberd. ‘For Sigmar!’
‘Of course. For Sigmar.’
‘Sigmar!’
Aeygar issued a war-shriek of her own as we looped towards the embattled regiment.
Barbarus was first to the ground.
The princess may have had the clear beating of the Errant-Questor over open skies, but nothing drops out of the air like a knight in armour, believe me.
Aeygar and I were still some way up when his loosed arrow tore through a clanrat warrior like a lightning bolt, splitting him from shoulders to belly and crisping him from the inside out. It happened so suddenly that even the clanrat directly behind him hadn’t realised he was dead before Barbarus swept overhead. Branches snapped at the Errant-Questor’s beating harness as he ballooned his wings, allowing the winds aetheric to snatch him up and hurl him back into the sky.