Ignore me, then. I do not want-need you now. But do not squeak-say you were not warned.
‘He’s there,’ I told her, staring a challenge into the heart of the fire. ‘I know it.’
Chapter twenty-three
It looked so different, I almost missed it.
Things appear different from on high than they do for those with little choice but to view it all from the ground. To recognise that is to be halfway towards understanding the apparent diffidence of the gods. Perspectives shift. Boundaries vanish. Impenetrable crags and impassable swathes of forest become flattened smudges, merging into an endless obscurity of indefinable features and the occasional nebulous shadow. What threw my eye most, however, was the indifferent passage of time. The last time that I had glimpsed the outside of Ikrit’s mountain lair it had been buried under a blizzard. To see it now, swaddled in long grasses and wild flowers, violently coloured and straining for every drop of sunlight and insectile attention, was unnerving. As if I’d closed my eyes for a moment in winter and opened them again in spring.
‘There,’ said Brychen, pointing.
The priestess was wedged in behind me, gripping my armoured thighs with hers. Her hair had been bound with thorns, but still whipped out behind her, holly leaves rustling over the barky lattice of her living plate. Directly below us, a string of great lakes shimmered against the mountain’s side like polished armour. They clung to the slope in perverse defiance of whatever native force should have had them gushing into the Nevermarsh.
‘I was just about to say that,’ I said.
Aeygar gave an amused shriek.
‘These lakes are what remain of the ice forests, where Malikcek hunted you after your escape,’ Brychen explained. ‘The warmer months are short on the mountain, and the trees wait them out in this molten form.’
‘I see no sign of skaven,’ screamed Hamuz, from the back.
The captain and his retainer, Nassam, sat further down Aeygar’s neck. Despite a few false starts in which one or both of them had almost fallen off as soon as Aeygar had spread her wings or lifted a foot, and some hair-raising episodes immediately after take-off, the two men had become reconciled to their terror over the hours it had taken us to over-fly the Nevermarsh. Nassam had even become relaxed enough to remember how abhorrent he found Brychen’s living armour and green flesh, and experimented with loosening his lock around her chest every once in a while.
‘They are gone. As I said,’ said Brychen.
‘The lair was below ground,’ I yelled back. ‘Beyond the lightning collectors that Ikrit had built over his apotheosis chamber, I don’t remember seeing anything up here.’
‘Then where are the collectors?’ said Hamuz.
I made a non-committal snort. ‘After five years in the Ghurlands, probably distributed between the bellies of every bird, mite and beast from here to Excelsis.’
‘That only proves my point,’ said Brychen. ‘The warlock has gone and the wild has reclaimed his lands.’
‘Not if the collectors had already done what he’d built them to do,’ I replied, a barely audible mutter in the wind of Aeygar’s flight.
Brychen remained quiet.
‘So what do we do, lord?’ shouted Hamuz.
‘We go in.’ Even if Ikrit was not here, and I was more certain than ever that he was, then he would have left something behind, some telltale piece of metal or arcana that to the eyes of Sigmar or Ong would tell the story of what was done to me. Or so, in my ignorance of such matters, I prayed. I patted Aeygar’s neck plumage and pointed to the silvery lake at the top of the necklace-like chain. ‘Take us down, princess. But not too close.’
The princess crowed her agreement and descended.
We landed in an explosion of pollen.
I coughed on the syrupy pungence of crushed flowers and rampant life. I blinked a few times, but my vision remained yellowed and tear-filled. Buzzing things swarmed through the ochre pall of seed pollen to breed and fight and prey on everything else. Including us. Hamuz and Nassam were already slapping at their skin, and even Aeygar looked discomforted until a smaller insectivorous bird flew too close and disappeared in a puff of amber feathers and a squawk. The princess tilted her neck back and swallowed. She was a creature of Ghur too, after all. The insects nibbled just as vociferously at Brychen, but it didn’t seem to bother her as much. The first to alight on my skin and jab its proboscis in died in a tiny snap of lightning, the stench of which seemed to ward off any others.
Brychen glared at me as though I’d just strangled a gryph pup.
‘And you claim to be a thing of nature?’
With a shrug, I dismounted, flattening the long stems beneath my boots and throwing up another cloud of disturbed wildlife and seed. The fingers of a shadow reached into the febrile miasma, almost reaching the ground, and I shuddered in spite of the cloying warmth. I looked up as a huge, pregnant cloud rolled across the sky between the sun and me. An itch crept down my spine, making me look away, back up the mountain’s slope.
There was nothing there.
Brychen leaned in to me, branched spear in hand, the single word she uttered making me tremble anew.
‘Malikcek.’
I nodded, doing my best to hide the fear I felt at confronting the skaven assassin again. Of course this was entirely out of concern for my companions. It would not do for Hamuz and Nassam to see their hero tremble. ‘Keep your wits about you and your swords to hand.’ I turned to Brychen. ‘I told you he was here.’
She didn’t argue.
‘You should have told them to run,’ she said instead.
And perhaps I should have, but that would not have been nearly so helpful to their morale.
‘The men of Jerech are fighting men,’ I said, thumping my breastplate, then pointing at Hamuz as though he personally exemplified the point I was making. ‘Don’t doubt their courage for the fight. They will fight, and maybe surprise you yet.’ I bared my teeth. ‘Malikcek too with any luck.’
‘Lord.’
Nassam had wandered a short way off, greatsword still in its sheath, as though he were strolling amidst the goats that grazed over the Seven Words, and was pointing to something far out in the lake. It glittered gold against the fierce brilliance of the liquid ice. Something about it tugged on my heart, stretching the glue that Ong and his apprentices had smeared over the ill-fitting shards of my soul.
Hamuz started towards it at once.
‘Stop!’ I shouted, the twang of genuine terror in my voice causing the captain to freeze as though he’d just put his foot in a bear-trap, thigh high reed stalks butting hungrily against the glassy skirts of his armour. He turned to me, white-faced. I remembered the prickling sense of cold as it had travelled up my arm from where I had touched the bark of one of those trees. I’d probably be an ice tree myself about now, had Brychen not killed me. ‘Don’t touch the ice.’
Hamuz carefully lifted his foot and drew it back from the lake-shore.
‘I think it’s your lantern, lord,’ said Nassam, surprisingly deadpan in the face of his captain’s near brush with death.
I peered out, my eyes adjusting slowly to the white glare of the lake.
It was indeed my warding lantern.
I almost laughed in surprise. I had dropped it during my fight with Malikcek, and had managed to lose it shortly after that when Brychen had stepped in to finish what the assassin had started. I had assumed that it had gone back to the celestine vaults, only to be discarded, spoiled, along with the rest of my wargear – with the exception of my halberd. For which I had Sigmar to thank. But there it was. My heart felt as though it was trying to pump air, an ache spreading through my chest. Was there some power in the ice trees that had held the lantern from Sigmar’s grasp? Or was it me? Had Ikrit broken me so completely that even its link to my soul had been weakened?