I had never ventured into the remains of the World-That-Was of course (not at that time, anyway) for it was forbidden to all but Grungni and Sigmar himself, and I had the horrible feeling that this was the vision I would hold every time I thought of it thereafter.
The skaven seemed to be in a state of some disarray, and I noticed that one armoured miner was spraying green sparks from the cracked joints of his wrist. Almost as if his arm had just got in the way of a Jerech quartz greatsword. I couldn’t help but admire Nassam’s composure. The ratman squeaked in fright at the sight of me and managed to avoid making the same mistake by getting well out of the way.
Ignoring him completely, I belted past, after Brychen and my way out, down the tunnel that he’d been hunched in front of.
The place was a warren, a howling madness of coiling trails and endlessly snaking paths that seemed to lead nowhere but always, nearly, somewhere. I’d been harbouring the hope that it would start to show some similarity to the old Nevermarsh lair, but I should have known better. That’s not how skaven minds work. Dig first, plan later. Even if Ikrit had wanted everything to be exactly so, I doubted even the Horned Rat himself had the power to make his minions do so, not without getting down here and doing the work himself. And neither Ikrit nor his horned god seemed like the dirtied hands type.
Without slowing down, I allowed myself a moment to close my eyes and get my bearings, to set aside the sense of acceleration. Brychen was right. We were tearing free of the realmsphere.
The reminder that I was speeding through an infinite cosmos and not, in fact, in a confined underground space, actually came as something of a relief.
Feeling surer about things, I took a deep breath and blundered on.
My first indication that I was actually getting somewhere came in a flash of amber and gnashing teeth. I felt a low growl, as low as the fire in the earth beneath the permafrost, rumble through my marrow – the challenge of one alpha beast sensing the return of another. Ghur. It knew me, and the part of me that was still of Azyr responded in kind.
My second indication was the bullet in my rondel plate.
The warpstone shell punched into the circular disc covering my armpit and threw me back against the wall of the tunnel almost as soon as I’d charged out of it and into another cavern. A second blew a hole out of the rock between my legs. A third and a fourth missed by more appreciable distances, but close enough still to cover me in an acrid haze of debris. Coughing, I stumbled across to the opposite wall, Hamuz still unconscious across my shoulder, while a fifth shot smacked into the wall where my chest had been. I looked back at the crack in the wall and grinned ruefully. The sound of ringing sigmarite had numbed my ears, but I could hear combat up ahead. Steel on glass. Wood on steel. Inhuman squeals. I couldn’t see any of it, of course, but I was taking that as a positive sign that my attackers couldn’t see me anymore either. The fingers around my halberd jangled from the shot to my armpit, but I ignored it, charging through the green fugue and back into the cavern.
I blinked, disoriented as much by the grotesquery that milled about in front of me as the warpstone poison in my eyes. Banners hung like tithes of flesh from walls that were so thin as to be practically non-existent. Stars screamed past, coloured with the reds, yellows and bilious browns of Ikrit’s colours. And not just Ikrit’s. As well as cogwork shock-vermin, engineer-piloted warsuits, chittering clan warriors kitted out with warpfire throwers, ratling cannons and poison wind launchers, the chamber heaved with heavily armoured bestigors of the Blind Herd and a score of swollen knights in the putrid iconography of the Legion of Bloat. I’ll admit, I hadn’t given a second thought to the remnants of Manguish’s forces since defeating their champion at Kurzog’s Hill, but the long-suffering adherents to Nurgle’s creed were nothing if not apathetic in the face of life’s blows.
The sounds of fighting were still coming from somewhere, but the chamber’s disorder was so great that I didn’t even know where to start.
I looked instead to where that unclean alliance of Ruin seemed to be heading.
It was a portal. It looked and smelled like the Arcway gate I had described at Beast’s Maw, although I assumed it to be an artificial and temporary one, veined with warp-lightning and surrounded by a steel ring that was suspended from the ceiling by rusted hawsers. Something about it tasted familiar. As if it were my power that had blasted this hole between realms.
The only way towards it was by a single flight of metal steps, currently groaning under the stupefying weight of Ikrit’s blightkings. Slavering and snarling, it stained the horrific warriors under its maws with amber light before devouring them wholesale. Trying to look through the portal to what lay on the other side was like looking through an orange-coloured pool in the rain. To either side of the portal apparatus, tiered gantries had been set up, bristling with skaven jezzails and ratling gunners who would occasionally pummel the liquid surface of the portal with fire, presumably with the intention of convincing whatever was on the other side to keep their heads down.
Only about half a dozen or so seemed more intent on me.
Brychen and Nassam had to be in there somewhere.
I was good, but I wasn’t quite this good.
Unshipping my lantern, I held it at arm’s length. ‘Look at me!’ I yelled, easily shouting over the mixed braying of a few thousand skaven, beastmen and plague knights. ‘Turn and be awed when Hamilcar Bear-Eater speaks to you.’ A few hideously malformed heads turned my way and I inched open the lantern’s shutter, delivering a blast of Azyr light that, even directed away, seared my eyes and burnt a scream out of me.
The blubbering squeals of gors and skaven made me feel marginally better.
When my vision cleared I saw that I had burnt a swathe through the Ruinous horde. Up on the gantry, the jezzails that had been aiming at me had all dropped their guns in favour of pawing at their bleeding eyes. I grinned at them for a moment. I’d never seriously doubted it, but it was good to be reminded that I still had it.
‘Over here, lord.’
Nassam stood at the outer rim of an expanding wedge of scorched bodies, sword glittering amber, but looking otherwise immaculate except for a few specks of blood in his magnificent beard. Brychen, on the other hand, apparently much recovered for the snarling proximity of the Ghurlands, had hurled herself onto a bestigor twice her size with an icon of Tzeentch stapled through its nose and was disembowelling it with obvious relish.
‘No time for that,’ I yelled at her.
‘The summer fades!’ Brychen shrieked over the beastman’s terrible lowing, spraying the surrounding transparency with bloody entrails. ‘The days shorten. The bowers turn red. And now comes the reaping time!’
‘Brychen. What in the–?’
I covered my mouth as something cancerous and black, and yet unmistakeably stomach-like, was skewered on the priestess’ spear, ripped out, and flung towards me. It sailed over my shoulder and burst on the ground with a wet splat. I made a face. Even I had limits. Getting as far as Nassam, I pushed the Jerech towards her, then turned to smash a blightking across the face with my lantern. Hamuz’s limbs flapped. The pox knight’s helmet snapped around with a wheeze of lanced sores. Then he hacked up yellow pus, sounding suspiciously as though he were laughing at me as it dribbled through his grille. I backed off after the greatsword.
Sigmar, but they were hard-wearing.
Brychen emitted an ululating shriek from behind me. I looked over my shoulder as she launched herself at the Skyre clan warsuit at the top of the portal steps. It raised an arm. Her spear clanged against the riveted metal. It raised the other, a pulse of green lightning stiffening trailing whip-claws into six-foot long blades, and swiped at her head. She knocked it over her head on the butt of her spear, then let the weapon fall from her hands. The warsuit’s engineer-pilot squealed in delight. Brychen’s fists burst into roaring flame. The engineer stopped squealing as Brychen tore open the machine’s chest armour and roasted the contents of the pilot’s cradle.