‘Are you sure? It seems to be the only way in or–’
‘Are you wanting to go somewhere? Lock it.’
‘Lord.’
The Jerech captain set about his orders.
‘And you.’ I pointed at Brychen, spotting the ripped Magrittan chaise that Malikcek had dumped me in when I’d first attended upon his master in his lair. ‘Sit. Recover your strength.’
‘There can be no recovery for me here,’ she said. ‘Cut off from the currents of the Ghurlands as we are.’
I blinked at her. ‘You felt it too? Why didn’t you say something?’
‘I assumed you knew.’
I rolled my eyes.
‘What’s she talking about, lord?’ said Hamuz, just finishing up with the door.
‘Nothing to worry about,’ I said. ‘We’re here now. Let’s find the warlock.’
‘He is not here,’ Brychen observed, with annoying dispassion, and even more annoying accuracy.
I looked around. The burrow did indeed appear to be devoid of any obvious signs of life, but it wasn’t lacking in clutter. Everything that had been missing from the workshop-warrens and study-holes in the surrounding tunnels seemed to have been crammed in here. Blocks of browned and nibbled papers had been stacked up, tied with rattails or string, or just flung in wherever. There were half-finished devices. Complicated-looking firearms with no stock, strings and wiring spilling out the sides. A plethora of iterations around the theme of powered digging and cutting tools. What looked like a crude facsimile of my lantern in amberglass, warpstone and bronze. I smashed it with the butt of my halberd and some satisfaction. Shaped crystals and assorted gems sat in drawers, loose on the floor, alongside claw-scratch sketches, odd bits of machinery and rubber bands.
I rubbed at my head. It was starting to hurt. It was possible that being severed from Azyr was having a more profound effect on me than I’d imagined, but given how the realm’s focused energies burned me now, its eclipse should have been the opposite of painful. Being cut off from the Mortal Realms more generally then?
Perhaps.
Or maybe the man I was slowly remembering how to be didn’t respond too well to adversity.
‘Maybe it’s not Ikrit as we know him that we’re looking for. I hurt him the last time we parted. He has been recovering somehow, regenerating, using the powers he has stolen to regather his strength.’ I went on to explain, without going into the grisly details, of the vision I had experienced in the Forge Eternal, of being cocooned in a seed pod, feeling my ancient body mend.
‘A seed pod?’ said Brychen.
‘What are you, my Heraldor?’
‘The Wild Harvest used such magic to revitalise our warriors when they tire and rejuvenate our leaders when they age.’
‘Used?’ said Nassam.
‘It was a gift from the Maiden. Like the tide, withdrawn.’
‘Ikrit stole it from her,’ I said. ‘That and other things.’
She glared at me, and for a moment I thought she was going to strike me. ‘It would be large,’ she said at last. ‘Not like those of the Gorwood sylvaneth. We are flesh and blood and cannot be cut and re-sown as they are. It would be larger even than the skaven himself. It could not be hidden here.’
‘My lord.’ Hamuz was rifling through some of the loose papers. He picked up a clutch of them and held them up against the light of his torch. ‘I can’t read the language, but there are pictures here. Designs for…’ he struggled for a moment, ‘things.’ He flipped a piece of paper to show me what looked like the skeleton of one of the flying machines that had undone the aetar at Kurzog’s Hill. ‘Maybe there’s something here that can shed some light on what was done to your soul.’
‘You heard about that?’ I said.
He nodded.
‘And you followed me anyway?’
‘Hamilcar, Sigmar, Seven Words,’ he said, repeating the triptych that I’d heard him shout out before bringing down Broudiccan on my behalf.
‘In that order,’ said Nassam.
I felt a fuzziness in my chest, pushing out the stinging throb in my temples.
Hamuz tossed me a book.
‘What am I supposed to do with this?’
‘Have a look.’
I held the object in my palm as though it might shed its carapace and sprout wings.
‘How would you know that Ikrit had gained such gifts of regeneration?’ asked Brychen.
I ignored the question with a snarl of discomfort.
‘Look at these,’ Nassam called over from the bookshelf bolted to the rock wall. He proceeded to pull various tomes down, holding them together as a stack and examining the spines. ‘These are in Azyri, I think.’ He turned to me.
I stared at him, dumbly, the other book still sitting in my palm, stubbornly refusing to move or transform. Hassam waved another sheaf of papers at me.
‘Come on, lord. Let’s find anything that might be of value and get out of here.’
‘Why were you so certain that Ikrit would be here?’ Brychen went on.
‘Arrrgh!’
In a sudden, senseless rage, I ripped the book in half and threw the torn halves aside.
‘The nights I spent, night after unending night, huddled in the snow, lying in wait for mournfang or thundertusk and huskwolfen. Do you think we read? When we recalled the brothers and sisters, daughters and sons, fathers and mothers lost to war and winter, do you imagine we did it with these?’ I kicked over a table and sent papers flying. Hamuz stumbled back, his hands raised placatingly. ‘We saw by the stars, and by the unlight of Dharroth. Nothing grows in the Eternal Winterlands. Nothing that will burn. I was a grown man when I saw the sun for the first time.’ Feelings poured out of me. Rage. Shame. Guilt. I had no idea where they were coming from, but I couldn’t make them stop. I closed on Hamuz until I felt Brychen’s spear against my breastplate. I turned to her with a feral grin, uncaring. ‘And what did we do? We fought until we couldn’t stand, we drank until we couldn’t stand, we let the women abuse us until we couldn’t stand. Because that is how the Winterlands tribes have always seen in the Day.’
‘I’m sorry, my lord,’ said Hamuz, mortally terrified, in spite of Brychen’s spear. ‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry.’
I leaned in towards him, the spear-point digging in in a way no wood should have been able to mistreat sigmarite. ‘I. Can’t. Read.’
A slow hand-clap snapped me out of it before I or Brychen could do anything more lasting. It made an odd, muted clicking sound, as if the hands were gloved.
Or furred.
‘Ikrit squeak-say that this would happen. You are becoming less-less the perfect thing that your god tried to make you. More that of meat and bone which he took-snatch from the ice.’ Malikcek was sprawled comfortably over the chaise that I had bidden Brychen to sit in. Something in my face made him snicker in amusement. The indescribable bout of rage had left me as suddenly as it had come about, but anger doesn’t leave you just like that. It’s like oil. It blackens what it touches.
‘What does Ikrit know of it?’
‘What becomes of you becomes of him, only… opposite.’
I grappled with my belt, Hamuz and Nassam backing fearfully away from me, before finally unhitching my warding lantern. Malikcek regarded it in apparent surprise.
‘Your hell-light. I thought it lost.’
‘It was. To the ice lakes outside.’
The assassin clapped his paws together in front of his snout and sniggered in delight. ‘Teheheheh. Such beautiful irony. That which even now he invades the Seven Words to claim, he could have just took-found outside his own lair.’
I held up my lantern. ‘He wants this?’
‘You feel-know how it mends your soul, even as it burn-burn your body, yes-yes? Ikrit wants a hell-light for his own.’ He licked his lips. ‘He was most wrathful when he found you had taken it in your escape. He kill-flayed three engineers with Death magic from inside his flesh cocoon.’