‘Yes, lord.’ Nassam dropped back.
‘That is no daemon-thing,’ squeaked one superior thinker.
‘And there is four of it,’ added another, not to be outdone.
‘Dread whiskers of the Great Horned Rat. It is the Bear-Eater!’
That was more like it.
Some rabid breed of courage drove them on just the same, the first two frothing at the mouth, squealing in a frenzy of racial hatred and terror as they stabbed at me with spear and man-catcher. I welcomed the former into my breastplate, presenting myself as a human shield for the still-fumbling Nassam. The weapon delivered some kind of pathetic lightning charge that splashed against my armour even as the blade snapped. The man-catcher closed over my shin, snap-releases firing a ring of steel splints into my greaves. The slavers’ implement didn’t have a prayer to any god of breaking sigmarite, of course, and my sense that my attacker hadn’t really thought things through was confirmed a moment later when I pulled my leg back and dragged the ratman squealing along the ground towards me.
‘I can wait no longer!’ Brychen cried, breaking suddenly for the passage behind me.
‘Go with her, Nassam.’
‘Yes, lord.’
‘The Bear-Eater shall hold the vermin here. I–’
I glanced over my shoulder, but the Jerech was already stumbling after the departing priestess. I frowned, faintly annoyed at having my inspirational cry cut short. With a snarl, I kicked off the skaven that was still holding furiously to his man-catcher, then punched into the pack with my halberd. What I lacked in orientation I more than made up for in stature, and with the haft held diagonally I could cover most of the passage. The spear-rat ducked under the high end, but the skaven leaping over Man-catcher got a broken kneecap and a rendezvous with the floor as just reward for his keenness. Hamuz mumbled something as he was jostled against my breastplate.
‘Look-smell how the others run-flee,’ came the clawleader’s snarl. The skaven leader held the traditional position of high rank at the very back of the pack, urging his warriors on with what looked like an Ironweld blunderbuss, only ten times worse. The green fumes dribbling from the barrel seemed to be working the clawleader up into a hyperbolic state. ‘Kill-kill the storm-thing. It is alone. Kill-kill!’ He clapped the heavy gun-barrel into his palm, squeaked something that I hoped for his comrades’ sakes was Queekish for ‘get down’, and fired.
There was no solid projectile that I saw. It was as though the clawleader had just triggered the cantrip for a spell-trap to turn the air between us into a screaming, murderously glowing blizzard of shrapnel.
I hate guns. I always have, and always will. It is something I have borne with me from my mortal life, I think. In the Eternal Winterlands, a man killed and was killed in turn by the strength and reach of his own arm. Give a mortal a gun and he can hit near as hard as a Stormcast Eternal, but it is more than power that forges one of Sigmar’s chosen. It is wrong. It is unearned strength. It is unnatural, foul-smelling, and arcane. The limit of a warrior’s fury should be the throw of his spear. I have barely reconciled myself to bows.
I roared back as warpstone dust and scrap metal cut through the packed skaven bodies. It rattled against my armour like daemon hail and tore the skin from my face. I staggered back, hand belatedly rising to shield my eyes, and heard a cry from Hamuz.
The Jerech had been hit.
The clawleader tittered, drunk on warpstone vapours, already stuffing another bag full of sharp objects down the fat barrel of his gun.
‘The storm-thing bleeds. Kill-kill. Kill-kill now.’
He looked expectantly over his warriors, but unless this lair was currently hurtling towards Shyish, none of them looked as though they would be springing up any time soon.
The clawleader gulped.
He was scampering back down the tunnel before I’d even lowered my hand from my eyes.
I was tempted to give chase. I am a hunter, a wild beast at heart, and it ran against my nature to let a foe escape. There was also a chance that he would lead me right back to his brothers and the way out, but my odds of keeping pace with a fleeing skaven in this place were about as good as finding my way back without Brychen. Reluctantly, I turned around, giving Hamuz a gentle nudge as I started after the priestess.
‘Hamuz?’ Another shake. ‘El-Shaah?’
‘Still here. My lord.’
I grinned with relief. On top of the broken hand that the Jerech captain had taken falling out of the Ghurlands, he could now add a buckshot grazing to his unlikely collection of injuries. The freckling of hits to his upper thigh and forehead looked superficial to me, but there was a poisonous glitter to the wounds that didn’t look good. My smile fractured. I knew without needing to consult the knowledge of wiser heads that the captain wasn’t going to make it. The ghurite herbalists, spirit healers and warrior priests of the Freeguild talked as good a medicament as I did a campaign, but this was of a level beyond the usual flesh-eating and blood-ravaging complications of doing battle in the Realm of Beasts. This was warpstone poisoning. Even a warrior of the purity of Akturus or Vikaeus would have struggled to cleanse this wound.
‘We’re really in… the Allpoints,’ he mumbled. He was staring at the floor. The waypoints struck by beneath us like shooting stars, all falling in a line. ‘I meant to take something back… for my… daughter.’
‘Your…’ My expression wavered between a forced laugh and a full grimace. ‘What?’
‘I… brought her a… soulblight tooth from… Shyish, and… a snowflake from… Azyr. So she knows… I’m… thinking of her. She…’ He gritted his teeth against a violent shudder. ‘She’ll never believe I was… here… otherwise.’
‘I knew it,’ I said.
‘Knew what?’
‘That you were disappointed that we weren’t really going to the Varanspire.’
The captain’s chuckles faded to shallow breaths. ‘You should… leave me.’
‘You think that Hamilcar Bear-Eater, Champion of the Gods, cannot carry you?
‘Of course… not.’
‘Then don’t suggest it again.’
‘Hamilcar. Sigmar. Seven Words.’ The Jerech’s words grew quieter as he slipped back into unconsciousness. I shook him gently against the shoulder where he lay, but this time he didn’t rouse.
‘Fight, my friend. This is one battle I can’t win for you.’
I may not have been able to trace the Ghur energies as Brychen could, but I was a trapper and a hunter; I could see the depressions that Brychen and Nassam had left in the amorphous ‘rock’ and follow them. Sounds came back to me. Hushed voices. Stumbling feet. They didn’t rebound back to me in the manner of an echo, but rather trembled out of the walls like ripples through a pond. Every so often, I even trained my eyes to catch a glimpse of them. Two figures, greyed out and blurred together by several feet of intervening rock, leaning into one another like a three-legged gor, and running.
After what I presumed to be a few hundred feet, but could not be sure as the passage had a nasty habit of flexing and stretching at random, Hamuz and I came to a large half-finished cavern. The walls rippled and bulged like the skin of an under-inflated bladder. Skaven clambered over ramshackle timber scaffolds to chip away at them, others remaining below to slap at them with nothing more esoteric than paint rollers. Where their instruments passed, the walls of the cavern became marginally more opaque. They were making this place real, mining solid rock from the aether stuff of the Allpoints.
In amongst the labourers, overseeing the work, were large, black-furred skaven encased in armoured suits veined with warpstone.
They put me in mind of the lightning golems that mined the hollow core of the Mallus for sigmarite on the God-King’s behalf.