Brychen shot me a look. I ignored her.
Malikcek bared his fangs at me. It could have been smile or snarl, I didn’t know.
‘But he not squeak-ask for me to take-steal your light from you. He squeak-ask for me to make sure you found his burrow.’
‘Hah! You lured me nowhere, shadow–’
‘Enjoy your oblivion, Bear-Eater.’
With that, he sank back into the shadows of the chair cushions and left me brandishing a lantern over an empty chaise.
‘Malikcek!’ I yelled. ‘Malikcek!’
I got no answer, and I had the sense that the assassin was gone for good this time.
And that I probably wanted to be going the same way, fast.
‘Nassam, get that door open.’
The greatsword hesitated a moment, looking at me fearfully, before hurrying to the door. He grabbed the wheel-lock mechanism, but recoiled with a cry before he could turn it as though he had just been burnt. An amber flood, muddied with polluting streams of Chaotic energies, shone from the very matter of the door. Substance dissolved into pure magic, and the door – and the entire wall – twisted into a puddle of discoloured fire that I was in no hurry to command anyone to try to open again.
I knew now why I had felt that the passages and chambers beyond the various collapses hadn’t been there anymore. They hadn’t. They’d sunk through the aetheric plane of the realm and gone to an entirely other place.
And we were about to join them.
‘Find another way out,’ I yelled, as the walls began to swirl and run, a bubble of non-existence closing in around us.
‘There’s none,’ screamed Hamuz.
‘Take my hand.’ Hamuz and Nassam didn’t hesitate, gripping my gauntlets tightly. Brychen frowned, then reluctantly held up her hands for the two Jerech to take.
‘This is your fault,’ she said.
‘We stand together. We fall together. We stand again by the God-King’s grace.’
The ground beneath us tilted, stretched, sliding towards an event horizon a billion billion miles below our feet. The rest of the lair and the Ghurite-Chaotic strands that it now existed as streamed in towards that amber-haloed maw, a smear of suns and moons and broken stars laddering all the way towards the High Star and its companion cosmos, an infinity and an eternity away.
‘Lean on me, brothers and sisters.’
I roared, fighting the cosmic drag on the three mortals with all my storm-forged might, but my voice was already being drawn out, disappearing into the abyss.
My legs started to stretch, my feet little more than dots in the Celestial nothing.
‘Hamilcar… stands! Hamilcar… lives!’
Chapter twenty-five
‘What think you of your conquest, my king?’
Vikaelia stood before me in spousal furs, hands on hips. Her body was clad in a bodice of finely stitched leathers and hides, the individual squares of leather crawling with the warrior motifs of her tribe. A pair of black bear paws cupped her breasts, the claws sharpened to lie against pale skin. A zephyr feather skirt glittered and dazzled down to her ankles. Her arms, hardened by axe and spear and sling, were strapped into vambraces of soft minkgor leather. The outfit left her shoulders bare. The sight of even that much uncovered skin was enough to arouse a fever in me.
Her lips parted, powdered with goldspar, inflamed by too much ale and no little pride.
‘You stay your final blow,’ she said, her voice slurring slightly. ‘Does your courage fail you at the last?’ She stepped back.
She was a queen. My queen.
Sigmar, I wanted her.
And Hamul of the White Spear Tribe got what he wanted.
I barked like an animal, unsettling the hounds curled up around the ember coral in the corners as I rose to tackle her. She yelped in surprise as I lifted her off the ground, the muscles in my shoulders bunching as I locked my hands together behind her back.
‘Hamul has nothing if not courage.’
We fell together into the bedding furs. Even with a dozen layers of fur between us the ground was hard, but I was accustomed to ice and naked rock and so was she. Light and glitter from her zephyrarch skirt settled on us like a dusting of snow. I laughed as she scratched her nails down my chest, and grabbed at her wrist.
The grave chill of her touch seared the passion from me, and I pulled my hand away to stare at her arm.
The hard muscles had somehow atrophied to become sinewy and thin, clad no longer in minkgor but in a stiff matt of white fur. I looked up, and into the scintillating witch-glare of a demi-god’s gaze.
The warlock recoiled from me at about the same moment that I recoiled from him.
‘Hssss,’ said Ikrit.
‘Aaaargh!’ I countered.
I woke up with a scream and the taste of warpstone breath in my mouth, rubbing my hands vigorously up and down my forearms as if to rid them of every trace of fur. Slowly becoming aware of someone standing over me, I threw out a heel to kick them off. But it wasn’t a dream anymore, and it wasn’t Ikrit. It wasn’t Vikaeus, or Vikaelia, anymore either, more’s the pity.
It was Brychen.
The priestess brushed off my wayward boot and thwacked me on the head with her spear.
‘Aaagh.’
Rubbing at my head, I backslid into a sudden recollection of lying in a bed with Ikrit on top of me. My throat clenched as if preparing to throw up. ‘Sweet Sigendil.’ The warlock had been unarmoured, very much a living, breathing, warm-blooded rat with the exception of his eyes. They had burned like dying stars. ‘Sweet Sigendil. We’re appearing in each other’s dreams now? Well, I hope you enjoyed that one, you–’
Brychen raised her spear again.
I held up a hand.
‘Wait!’
‘Are you back with us?’ said Brychen.
‘I think so.’
‘It sounded as though you were wrestling a tigress.’
‘Something… like that.’
I looked up at a familiar rock ceiling. Familiar that is except for the powerful sense of vertigo that was doing my stomach few favours. I could see that it was still and yet I could tell that it was spinning. I could feel the solid ground beneath my back and yet I knew that in reality I was falling. I tried closing my eyes, but the sense of tumbling through the aetheric cloud was even worse without the illusion of solid rock around me.
‘Did I save us all?’
‘See for yourself,’ said Brychen, more grimly than I had ever heard her speak.
With a grimace, I sat up.
I looked around.
I allowed myself a moment.
‘Well. That wasn’t what I was expecting.’
We were still in Ikrit’s burrow. Or at least a chamber that was identical in every detail to it. Every piece of parchment and stray bolt was exactly where I remembered it being. Even the two halves of the book I had torn apart lay where I’d tossed them. Hamuz el-Shaah and Nassam had made something like a pair of chairs out of the stacked papers and had collapsed into them, clutching the arms and staring at the ceiling as though on the ride of their lives. Hamuz was sporting a livid black eye and a bloody lip, his left hand draped across the arm of his paper throne in a way that suggested a break or at least a sprain. Nassam’s magnificent moustache looked a little askew and his armour scuffed, but, a spot of dizziness aside, the Jerech greatsword appeared otherwise hale and whole.
‘L-lord,’ Nassam slurred.
Hamuz’s gaze rolled towards me. I smiled reassuringly, but he recoiled as though shown a glimpse of fang. Fear and love warred over his face, and I recognised the look that mortal men and women showed to the Stormcast Eternals all over the Mortal Realms. Except for me. No one ever wanted the mortals’ fear, but I had never even desired their respect, which was probably why they had always given it so whole-heartedly. I just wanted them to love me enough to forget their fear of death, to fight beside me in Sigmar’s name.