‘King in the Sky!’ I shouted approvingly, as the Errant-Questor raked the milling skaven with arrows from his realmhunter’s bow.
The clanrats were still looking dumbly after Barbarus as Princess Aeygar’s shadow descended on them.
I thrust with my halberd like a lance as Aeygar’s claws slapped through the suckered leaves and barbs of the leechwood canopy, only managing to dent the back of a fleeing warrior’s helm before the aetar beat her wings and began to climb. I bellowed, barely holding on with just one hand and my thighs.
Nubia glittered across my face like an arrow and smacked into something furry out of sight.
I swore.
I didn’t doubt that I looked magnificent, but it wouldn’t count for much if I couldn’t hit anything and every Jerech on the ground was killed.
Even the star-eagle was making a better fist of this than I was.
‘We need to go lower. Blasted trees. I’ve seen a carnifern devour a deathrattle for the marrow in its bones.’ I shook my head. That’s the sort of sight that stays with you.
Aeygar gave a screech.
‘Fair enough, princess, this one will be all about Hamilcar Bear-Eater.’
I twisted to face the ground, just as a skaven in the overly complicated bronze armour of Ikrit’s engineers pointed a weapon roughly into Barbarus’ jinking path. It was a firearm of some kind, comprised of about a dozen barrels connected by belts to a drum borne across the hunched back of a skavenslave. The cackling engineer cranked the handle, hosing the sky around the Errant-Questor with warpstone bullets. Barbarus tried to pull out of the gun’s range, but one green-glowing missile punched a hole in his wing and he went cartwheeling to the mountainside.
He made a deep, sparking crater where he hit.
The Jerech cried out in alarm, while the emboldened vermin pressed their attack.
‘I’ll give them something to squeak about,’ I told Aeygar.
The aetar gave an enquiring caw.
‘Let me worry about the trees.’
I let go of her.
It might surprise you to learn that falling from a great height is every bit as exhilarating as flying. I dropped through the thrashing branches of the Gorwood, the predatory trees desperate to get a purchase on my plate, while I bellowed joyously. A few did manage to scratch my face, but not enough to stall the descent of a Stormcast Eternal in full armour, and I hit the ground with almost as much power as Barbarus had done moments before.
The impact ripped through the spongy topsoil, tremors rippling through the underlying rock and throwing clanrat warriors from their footpaws. I was back up before they were, bruised and dazed, but confident enough in my arm to whip out my halberd and nick the throat of a clanrat as he scrambled upright.
He scrabbled uselessly at the gushing wound as he keeled over.
The remaining clanrats sought to drown me in fur. I laughed as my halberd whipped out in looping circles, the height and width of them varying like the winds of Azyr so as to rip out jaws and chests and bellies as the gods willed it. One clanrat, panicked into an act of outright bravery, leapt through the storm of blades and clamped his jaws around my gorget. His claws scratched over my breastplate. His fangs worried against thrice-blessed sigmarite. I peeled him off, lifting him by the throat with my left hand. I regarded him for a moment, detached, as if I had just shaken a pebble from my boot, then, without thinking about it, brought my other hand to his scalp and tore the ratman’s head from his shoulders. His neck geysered hot blood into my face, and I laughed and bellowed with the battle joy of the Winterlands.
For a moment there, I wasn’t me.
Or rather I was a different, older me.
I was a king of battle, a God of blades, champion of the arctic steppe. Thoughts and needs that had not commanded my soul in centuries suddenly inflamed me, painting my vision red as I struck another clanrat across the jaw, shattering its teeth and breaking its neck.
‘For the God-Peak!’ I roared. ‘For the Twelve-Pointed Star! For the Sky-Hammer!’
I had no idea what these battle-cries meant or from whence they came, but they filled me with fury as I swept my halberd low across the ground, severing the legs of another three skaven warriors. Then I hurled the still-leaking head in my left hand, poleaxing the clawleader with a blow to the snout.
‘Lord Hamilcar!’
Someone was calling my name.
Blinking the berserker haze from my eyes, I looked around.
Captain Hamuz el-Shaah waved to me from the centre of a small box formation of Jerech Blue Skies. In addition to the usual mixed groupings of swordsmen and pistoliers, I saw a handful of heavier infantrymen wielding greatswords and two more that were hunched over a brass-barrelled field gun. I’d heard them call it a demi-cannon. A plainspoken name, for a daemon of brass and powder that speaks with Sigmar’s thunder. I counted twenty-five, with five more led by a heavily bearded greatsword bravely pushing towards the fizzing crater that marked the ground about fifty yards from their position. As I watched, I saw Barbarus flap up on one wing, smash a skaven to pulp with a blow from his bow stave, then stab another through the heart with a storm-gladius. The Jerech fighting towards him gave a ragged cheer.
‘Take down the standard-bearer!’ the captain shouted to me.
Other men yelled at one another, and the two human engineers pivoted their demi-cannon towards the figure that el-Shaah was alluding to.
A skaven warlock clad in a swollen incarnation of rubberised armour pushed his ‘standard’ ahead of him on a set of clattering metal wheels. Surmounted by a branch-like array of wires and spinning prongs, the device emitted a strange amber radiance that seemed to be afflicting the surrounding skaven with an unusual savagery. I was no Lord-Arcanum or mage-sacristan (Sigmar being wise that way), but even I could see that the device was drawing on the energies of the Ghurlands somehow to empower the skaven warriors.
Trust the warlocks of the Clans Skyre to make something as simple as a battle standard complicated. Never mind Chaos. If the Pantheon could impose upon their mortal children to build fewer contraptions such as these then it would go a long way towards peace in the Mortal Realms.
I heard the boom of the demi-cannon. Skaven squealed as thirty pounds of Gorwood iron smashed through them. The warlock with the standard wasn’t amongst them.
‘Never trust a made thing to do a warrior’s work,’ I said.
‘Is the Bear-Eater. Kill-slay.’
Turning from the warlock, I saw five of Ikrit’s elite shock-vermin, each one clad in bronze plates and ticking wheels, fan towards me. Powered glaives hummed in their paws, each spinning like its own small piece of the larger work.
The first stroked his blade towards me. I clubbed it aside easily, but the second was already stabbing for my hip while a third carved towards the opposite shoulder. My halberd spun, knocking the low blow aside, and I drew in my shoulder. The withdrawal bled enough force from the blow to let my bastion armour take the hit. Angry sparks erupted around the blade as my halberd came up to uppercut the rat that had gone for my hip, only to hit glaive. It pushed my blow wide. The fifth shock-vermin aimed his glaive at my exposed midriff like a handgun and, from essentially point-blank range, fired. Purple lightning blasted from the tip of the blade. My vision soured as I was swept off my feet and into a steaming pile of armour several feet back.
I gagged on the poisonous ozone aftertaste as I stumbled back up.