‘My lord.’
Nassam greeted me at the bottom step with a nod. I assumed it was for me, but then I realised he was gesturing towards el-Shaah, on my shoulder. I gave the captain a shake.
He wasn’t breathing.
‘No,’ I snarled.
I’d lost men before, I’d lost them by the tens of thousands, but Hamuz and Nassam were the first two I’d ever known well enough to really lose.
I was surprised by how angry it made me.
‘Hamuz is dead, lord,’ said Nassam, matter-of-factly.
‘Hamilcar does not answer to Death.’
I pounded up the metal steps, Nassam falling behind me, just as the skaven gun teams sorted themselves out and started firing on us. I ran past Brychen, the priestess swiping a bark-encrusted hand to swat aside a bullet and, giving a furious yell, flung myself head first into the portal.
Chapter twenty-seven
You are probably expecting a corridor of rushing stars, a roar of cosmic noise – if so, then prepare to be as underwhelmed as I was at stepping through Ikrit’s portal. There was a ripple across the surface of the portal that I barely even felt, and then before I’d so much as realised that I’d gone anywhere I was stepping out into pitch darkness, looking for a step that was unexpectedly not actively spinning away from my boot, and fell flat on my face, Hamuz on top of me. I took in a deep breath of rock. Ghur. I would have recognised it anywhere.
I would probably have kissed that rock were it not for the battle currently being fought over it.
As battles went, this one didn’t present a lot to look at, a rutting blackness of antlered heads and armoured, animal shapes, illuminated by the occasional spark of blade on blade. A brilliant flash of lightning pushed back the darkness for an instant, replacing it with something more blinding, but not before giving me a glimpse of a shattered wall of Liberator shields, the gaps in their formation plugged by desperate Judicators, fighting off the Skyre clans’ elite with storm gladius and crossbow stocks.
Wincing at the throbbing ache behind my eyes, I started to push myself up, just as Brychen and Nassam fell out of the portal behind me. A single warpstone bullet split the rippling skein from which we’d come and struck Brychen in the back. Her armour cracked and she cried out, arms going up as she crashed to the floor. Nassam dropped immediately to her side, but she waved him off, already getting up. Looking over her shoulder she scowled at the split bark.
‘Warpstone bullet,’ she snarled.
‘Stopped by wooden armour?’ said Nassam, amazed.
‘Says the man wearing glass.’
‘It’s crystal.’ The Jerech self-consciously brushed dust from his immaculate harness. It glittered sporadically in the lights of Azyr battle. ‘And a bit of leather.’
I set Hamuz neatly on the ground by the portal. I’d seen him back to his home realm. That felt like something. Not much, perhaps, but more than most got in exchange for the sacrifices they gladly gave. For a moment we remained like that, staring at each other, as if waiting for one of us to say something.
‘I’ll make sure your daughter gets a piece of the Allpoints, captain,’ I murmured. ‘She’ll have a horn off the Everchosen’s crown.’
‘We should leave him,’ said Brychen.
‘I am leaving him.’
‘You look like you are taking root.’
‘Get moving,’ I snapped at her. ‘There’s an army behind us.’
‘There’s an army in front of us,’ Nassam chipped in helpfully.
Brychen frowned over the sporadically flash-lit cavern. ‘Underground again. Is it too much to ask for a taste of open sky?’
‘It’s still up there,’ I said.
Clenching her fists, the priestess opened her mouth and groaned. The sound came from the bark of her vambrace rather than her mouth, however, and in a rupturing creak of emergent life her hand suddenly sprouted another spear.
‘Nice,’ I said, and meant it.
‘The snake in the forest litter we will be, then. The lightning bolt that strikes the solitary tree.’ She raised her spear in the air, the wooden point bursting into a molten amber that bathed the battlefield in its savage glow. ‘Destruction comes for you,’ she shrieked, bounding towards the embattled skaven. ‘With poison and fire, and hatred in her veins.’
Twirling my halberd, I strode after her.
I wasn’t going to let a mortal priestess take all the glory. Not with Akturus’ Imperishables right there.
‘Hamilcar returns to the Ghurlands!’ I hacked down a bleating bestigor just as Brychen flung herself onto a clanrat warrior’s back and ripped out his spine. She sent a lance of amber through the heart of another, leapt forwards and impaled a bullgor through the mouth with her dripping spear. I kept pace with long strides, hacking and yelling, finishing off the fuming bullgor for her with a hewing stroke of my halberd. She glared at me as I shouldered past. ‘Brothers and sisters of the Storm Eternal, stand fast. This battle is won.’ I hammered my halberd into the cogwork shoulder of a shock-vermin as it sought, wisely, to spin out of my way. ‘Because Hamilcar Bear-Eater joins it.’ A bestigor lowed and swung at me with a cleaver. I broke its shin with a sharp kick, then did the same to its jaw as it dropped neatly into the rising uppercut from my warding lantern. ‘Rejoice, and let the heavens hear your praises.’
‘Sigmar,’ I heard one of the Imperishables breathe. ‘He has come back.’
I thought that I recognised the voice of the Judicator who had first welcomed me to the Seven Words. His tone was, if anything, even more awe-struck than it had been then.
‘Yes, brothers,’ I shouted, before adding simply. ‘Yes.’
‘More on the way, lord,’ said Nassam, safeguarding my back by swinging at whatever came close to it with a giant glass sword.
‘Let them come!’ I thundered. ‘Let them all come. Let Ikrit know that here is where Hamilcar stands.’ I looped my halberd overhead, messily decapitating one bestigor and cracking the antlers of another behind me with the ferrule. ‘I am coming for you, warlock!’ I bellowed with every kill I made and every forwards step I took. ‘The God-King’s judgement comes for you on storm-forged sigmarite!’
‘Step!’ someone yelled, which seemed an incongruous sort of thing to be shouting in the middle of a fight. There was a resounding bang from somewhere. ‘Step!’ And another. The bestigor I had been reaching for obligingly rammed itself onto my blade. It lowed furiously. ‘Step!’ The clot of fur and flesh ahead of me gave way before a wall of black cartouche shields. Too tightly packed even to raise their arms, skaven and beastmen died as warblades stabbed out from behind the shield wall.
I lowered my halberd.
The battle was over. This was the bit that came after, the slitting of throats and the spearing of chests; some of those in need of finishing off just happened to be upright and holding weapons.
‘Loose!’
A flurry of boltstorm bolts thrummed over the shield wall. Everything within six feet of me suddenly dropped, a quarrel crackling from some part of their anatomy. One of the Judicators aimed his crossbow at Brychen, his stormsight clearly less than convinced by the green-skinned priestess with the amber-tipped spear and the bloody face.