Only now he had seen something of that which my brother Stormcasts had sensed.
I was a broken hero.
Part of me wanted to apologise for my loss of temper but, as with so many of the traits that lifted a man above the dogs in his cave, the skill of doing so just wasn’t in me.
‘I think that the mortal man I once was… wasn’t a very good man.’ I sighed. I looked at the floor as if the words I sought might be there amongst the scattered pages, taunting me with my inability to know them. ‘Why me?’ My voice had become a hiss. It was unused to articulating these kinds of thoughts. ‘Why did the God-King choose to raise up someone like me?’
Hamuz attempted to say something, his head lolling back into his seat.
I took it as encouragement.
‘You are right, my friend. And you too, Nassam. Thank you, both.’ I offered a hand, which the Jerech captain regarded woozily. ‘Sigmar wanted a warrior and that was what I gave him. The rest was in his power to reshape, and he did. He made me better than the man he found. Fair enough, a lot better. And though Ikrit would strive to see that great work undone, I make you this promise now that I’ll always strive to be the best man I remember being rather than the worst. And with you men here to help me, how can I fail?’
‘Ungh.’
Nassam slipped off his seat and flopped onto his side.
I frowned at him, then at Hamuz, glancing sideways at Brychen.
‘Do they seem a little off to you?’
‘It is this place,’ said Brychen, and I detected a hitch of tension in her voice that I hadn’t before, as if she was concentrating very hard on one small thing and even talking to me was a distraction she could do without.
‘I wonder where that is,’ I said.
‘The realm roots,’ she whispered.
She stared up at the ceiling with plates for eyes as if it were a circling aetar.
It felt like one.
‘The realm…’ And then I understood what she meant. A Stormcast Eternal always knew where he was in the realm, and I had been here before.
It wasn’t in the realms.
‘I’ve felt the formless magic of this half-realm before. Once. When I fought against the Varanguard of the Everchosen and their daemonic allies at Beast’s Maw. The Arcway Fortress of Gorgonsarr.’
‘Gorgonsarr,’ breathed Hamuz, eyes rolling. ‘Lord-Celestant… Kaedus Fulgurine… led that assault.’
‘Why do you think we lost?’ I frowned as I looked around. ‘We’re in the Allpoints.’
‘Sigmar…’ the Jerech moaned.
‘But this sense of tumbling, falling, this is new. It was not like that when I stepped through the Maw. It’s as if a piece of Ghur has been shorn away and cast into the aetheric cloud.’ I turned to Brychen. ‘Why aren’t you feeling it too?’
‘Am I not?’ She giggled, before she could control herself. ‘Our place within the realm roots is unsettled. We are still burrowing through the void. The ghurlines grow thin but I can feel them still. If I concentrate. They are a point of focus for me. I…’ She smothered another high-pitched laugh. Whatever she was feeling had pushed her to the edge of madness. ‘I think that Ikrit meant for us to be cast adrift in the realm roots, but we have not yet travelled far.’
The voicing of Ikrit’s name made me shiver.
I pushed the image of him bestride me far away.
‘Do you mean to say that this entire burrow is travelling through the Allpoints?’ I said. No one replied so I nodded in answer to my own question. ‘Of course. That would explain how Ikrit has managed to keep ahead of the Horned Rat and every other god he’s irked over the centuries. You thought he was nomadic, priestess, but he never really goes anywhere. When he’s ready to move he just unmoors his entire burrow to cast back into the Allpoints. Whatever damage I caused in my escape, it must have unintentionally begun the process.’
‘So… all of these flayed trees?’ Brychen toed aside a piece of parchment from the general ground litter.
‘Must be what Ikrit couldn’t bear to leave behind,’ I said. I didn’t want to add that Ikrit had lured me into yet another trap, so I didn’t, but that didn’t do much to alter the fact that he clearly had. ‘He’s probably ransacking the Seven Words about now,’ I sighed. ‘Looking for Akturus’ lantern.’
‘Which would suggest that he would want a way back.’
I snapped my fingers. ‘Yes! You said that you can still feel the energies of Ghur nearby. These… ghurlines?’
‘I can, but I told you that they are weak and becoming weaker. I will need to be able to concentrate if I am to find a path back to the Gorwood.’
‘Just try to avoid the Varanspire.’
‘You do understand that the realm roots run through the entirety of the Mortal Realms, and beyond.’
‘I was making a joke,’ I said, trying – successfully, I think – to cover for the fact that I had not been.
‘Varan… spire?’ murmured Hamuz.
‘The fortress of the Three-Eyed King,’ I told him. ‘It’s supposed to be in there, somewhere, though I know of no one who’s ever seen it and returned.’
Hamuz grinned like a lunatic, then passed out.
I looked at him. Then at Nassam, splayed out on the floor. Brychen, staring at the door, lips peeling, unpeeling, fighting to keep her eyes from crossing.
‘This is going to be harder than I’d imagined,’ I muttered.
Isn’t it always?
Chapter twenty-six
Within the bounds of Ikrit’s chambers, all was much as it had been when the lair had still been tethered to the Ghurlands. Beyond his door, the insanity of unreality reigned. Passages flexed towards some immaterial end-point, their walls smooth to the touch, but otherwise indistinct, as though the matter to make them had yet to be fully mined from the aether. Pinpoints of light that weren’t true stars, waypoints in the lunatic substrata of the Allpoints perhaps, streaked as we plunged deeper through the plane of the realmsphere, smearing the half-made walls a virulent green. Energy and motion vibrated the walls, the ground underfoot. We were accelerating, spinning out of control, beyond Sigendil’s light and un-anchored from the Mortal Realms. It was becoming too much even for my awesome constitution to bear.
‘Which way to the Gorwood?’ I roared.
Our descent was soundless, the Allpoints a void, but in my soul it screamed and it was over that imagined cry that I strained to be heard.
‘Do not talk to me,’ said Brychen, voice high with strain. ‘Just follow.’
Staggering, as though her legs were of variable and changing lengths, the priestess veered towards a flapping maw in the substance of the wall. It took me a moment to recognise it as the fork to another passage. I blinked. The maelstrom of energy was overwhelming, but my eyes were starting to adapt to it. Either that or the lair itself was starting to impose some kind of stability on the raw flux of the aether. If I looked hard enough and concentrated, I could even see through the wall in front of me, visualising instead the whole labyrinth of tunnels and caverns, boring outwards through the Chaos until my eyes crossed. I blinked and tried again, but it was like holding a finger in front of your nose and forcing yourself to see double.
All I could see was wall.
Hamuz murmured desperate nothings in my ear, struggling limply where he lay across my pauldron.
‘It’s alright, my friend.’ I gave him a reassuring pat on the back, but he didn’t seem to notice it, which was hardly surprising.