With ice up to the rim of my gorget, I probed for the lake bottom with my toecaps. Nothing. Head tilted back, I strained my fingers for the lantern’s golden loop handle.
I clenched my chattering teeth and growled as my fingertips began to sizzle.
‘Just… a little… further.’
I made a grab for the loop handle, only for the compression wave from the movement of my own hand to push it back, just out of reach.
‘Nearly, lord,’ Nassam called out.
‘Nothing’s… ever… simple.’
As I tried to figure out how I was going to reach the damned thing, I felt the ice around my hand beginning to contract. It was the heat of my own smouldering gauntlet. It was tricking the living ice into thinking that the sun was shining on it, making it retreat further into its winter stores of chill. The turgid play of currents sucked on my arm. I fought it back up, but I saw my lantern start to sink.
‘Sigmar, damn it.’
Letting my breath out in a frozen roar, I kicked off from the bottom and lunged for the lantern. My wave caused it to wobble, the movement throwing out dulled lances of Azyr light that papered over chilblains and scrapes even as it seared my soul. I bit my knocking teeth together as I grabbed it in both hands and pulled it in to my chest.
‘Haha!’ I roared, quickly shuttering it as I treaded ‘water’. ‘Hamilcar Bear-Eater always triumphs!’ I hoisted the lantern up high, splashing my face with droplet-shards, which probably wasn’t the greatest idea in the realmsphere, and shouted, ‘Hamilcar!’ Hamuz and Nassam whooped from the lake-shore and clapped each other’s backs as my armoured body sank, my feet kicking out for something to stand on.
And kept on sinking.
‘Bloody God-King,’ I burbled, as the ice lapped over my head.
Chapter twenty-four
Brychen creaked softly as she padded barefoot down the dank, sloping tunnel into the skaven lair. I glared at her knotted back, not trusting myself to contribute anything worthier than a chatter of teeth or a rattle of half-frozen bastion plate.
After my carelessness had seen me dunked under the ice, I had managed to strike for shallower floes before my arms had numbed completely. I remember getting my toes on the bottom, but after that I’m not sure; a vague recollection of buffeting wings and entangling vines. However it had been done, it could have been done better. The cold clung to me still, encasing me like some kind of hoary mollusc in a shell of blistering chill. Even the heat from the torches that Hamuz and Nassam bore barely nibbled at its surface. I was shivering so hard that I barely noticed the subtle vibrations running through the rocky floor. My hand trembled towards the wall. There it was again. Faint, but there. Like rock pulling against rock.
‘My lord, you’re frozen through,’ said Hamuz. ‘Why haven’t you used your lantern to warm yourself? I’ve seen it restore far worse.’
‘I am saving its power,’ I lied, for it had been burning continuously for five years. Ignorant of the workings of Azyr, the Jerech captain accepted that explanation.
‘Never thought I’d miss the aetar,’ grunted Nassam.
The passage widened into a familiar cavern. The circle of torchlight expanded like an inflated bladder until it could go no further, thinning and straining as it pushed against the outer dark. Those shadows that it couldn’t reach stretched and grew massive, growing horns and claws to scrape at the tenuous skein of light as we passed beneath them. The Blind Herd’s camp. It was still here. The detritus of beast-hide yurts littered the uneven ground as far as the torches could reach, and presumably further still. Toppled beastpoles lay over skinning boards and scotched fireplaces. Hoofmarks preserved in hardened ash. A crouched figure, hooded and black, watching. The occasional glint of a femur or rib.
My heart stopped.
I looked back.
There was no figure crouched there.
‘What is it?’ whispered Hamuz.
‘Nothing,’ I said.
‘Now,’ Brychen added, ominously.
‘I wish Aeygar were here,’ Nassam muttered, holding his torch higher.
‘Courage, my friend. Hamilcar goes into this dark place beside you.’
I took the torch from the Jerech’s hand. He relinquished it gladly, instead drawing his greatsword with a sigh of creamy white quartz on rough Gorwood leather. I held the torch up, my greater stature digging another foot or so of illumination out of the black. I blinked, breaking the skin of ice that had built up over my lashes as I looked around. The position of Sigendil, the High Star – the ever-present beacon, fixed above the cosmic order of the aetheric cloud – was starting to blur in my awareness. I had felt that sense of being out of place before, but only in Ikrit’s private burrows. Not out here.
‘Do you see something, lord?’ asked Nassam.
‘The last time I came this way I was half-dead, disoriented by memories that Ikrit’s sorceries had broken loose. It doesn’t feel much better now.’
‘I know what you mean, lord.’ Hamuz shivered, and not with cold. ‘Where did everyone go?’
Realising belatedly that I had spoken aloud, I drew my attention back from the distant Celestial. ‘The entire place was falling down around my ears when I left. I thought the whole lair was going to collapse.’
‘A lot of it did,’ said Brychen.
‘Not all of it,’ said Hamuz. ‘So why didn’t they come back?’
I frowned, then shrugged. I was trying to work out the surest path to Ikrit’s apotheosis chamber and the answers I sought.
‘We should split up,’ said Hamuz, apparently regretting it as soon as he did.
‘What is the matter?’ The chittering voice echoed from the bowl of the cavern ahead of us. ‘Do you fear the shadow?’ From the crumpled yurts to my left. ‘Or he that bids them?’ The passage behind us.
Hamuz’s pistol darted from point to point. Nassam turned on the spot, the hilt of his quartz greatsword in both hands, the blade lying across his shoulders.
The echoes snickered, overlapping with and building off one another until we were surrounded by their chittering mirth, like beasts in a gladiatorum pit.
Brychen’s crooked spear hummed as she spun it. ‘The predator that dares not pounce has little to say on fear.’
‘Where is Ikrit?’ I shouted.
The shadows tittered. ‘Did you not learn-hear, Bear-Eater? He is away-gone. Long-scurried.’ The voice came from the ceiling now, and I held my torch up towards it, banishing the shadows from the claw-dug rock. Inky threads fled along gouged tracks and furrows towards the walls, away from the torchlight. ‘We were equal before, priestess of the Savage Maiden. But here-now?’ The walls chittered with quiet laughter. ‘Think not-not. Not without tree-things in which to hide-skulk.’
‘You overlook the Lord Hamilcar, vermin!’ shouted Hamuz, his voice echoing.
My grin was forced, but nobody seemed to notice in the dark.
‘I live lots-many years, but I forget nothing. My soul belongs to Malerion’s cage. Nothing escapes its shadow.’
The darkness at the edge of the torchlight suddenly swirled into humanoid form, Malikcek bursting from its diaphanous cowl like a newborn with a dripping knife. The Jerech captain screamed in surprise, pushing his torch into the path of the blade. An explosion of sparks showered the assassin. The assassin tittered, bursting into formless wisps of shadow as Nassam’s greatsword swept through him, and scattering before the injured sputtering of Hamuz’s torch. Nassam’s sword banged on hard rock. He cursed as it leapt out of his hand and clattered away.
‘Stay where you are,’ I yelled at him, walking quickly to the edge of the light and picking up the lost sword.