‘Nassam,’ I said. ‘Go with him.’
‘Yes, lord.’
There was no argument: this, in a nutshell, is why I’ve always preferred leading mortal soldiers over Stormcast Eternals.
The Realmgate spasmed as first Aphis and then Nassam stepped through. Lightning bolt discharges of Azyr blue cut away the shadows to reveal the creature shrouded amongst the rafters like a gargoyle. As soon as the two warriors passed, however, it was gone. The darkness closed back in, almost physically pushing Brychen and me together until we stood back to back. I gripped my halberd two-handed. I heard Brychen’s living spear hum as she spun it.
‘Just we three,’ Malikcek hissed from hiding. ‘As it was on the mountain. Do you remember? Long-long ago it feels now. This time there will be no interruption. This time we will know-see which of us is best.’
I scowled into the darkness.
And I thought I liked to talk myself up before a fight.
‘Come on then, Malikcek. Show me what you’ve got and I’ll tell you if it’s enough to finally end the Bear-Eater.’
‘You will regret-rue your courage.’
The assassin burst out of the darkness in front of me.
My first instinct was to recoil, but I suppressed it. All of my will, my anger at the injuries to my pride that this skaven had inflicted, went into ignoring his knives and instead thrusting my halberd through his heart. The assassin evaporated before my blade with a snicker. As I’d known he would. I stepped in, spinning even as he reappeared behind me, reversing my grip and stabbing back with the haft. Malikcek squealed in fury and exploded into a tornado of black cloud, the occasional glimmer of steel or skaven feature taunting my blade. I hacked at it, but my halberd passed through. The assassin tittered as the shadow storm blew itself out. I roared. From behind me, there came a thunk and a splitting of wood as Malikcek’s knife sank into Brychen’s spear. She pushed him off, the assassin dissolving and streaming back into the shadows before I could turn around.
‘Hehehehe,’ he squealed, launching himself out of nothing, inches from my face.
‘Do we outnumber him?’ I bellowed, hacking, slashing, scissoring blades driving me back so hard that I couldn’t even think of returning an attack of my own. ‘Or is it the other way around?’ I saw an opening and scythed my halberd through the cackling mirage of an assassin.
The blessed sigmarite of my halberd couldn’t cut him. The breathing wood of Brychen’s spear passed straight through.
‘He bleeds like any creature of this realm,’ Brychen hissed, already winded. ‘I have seen you hurt him.’
‘I am the Bear-Eater,’ I yelled, watching the shadows as they fled from me before reforming in the lee of one of the giant duardin columns. ‘There is but one true immortal here!’ Taking my halberd two-handed like a quarter-staff, I charged at the assassin with a roar. Malikcek blocked with both knives held overhead, then kicked me in the knee with sigmarite-breaking force. I dropped onto the knee and he spun, smashing a footpaw through the side of my face that had me spitting blood and seeing stars. I must have blacked out for a split-second because the next thing I knew I was face down on the flagstones.
‘Squeak-say it. Malikcek is best.’
‘The greatest beast in the wood does not need to display its fangs,’ said Brychen. I looked up from the floor. Malikcek turned his black, partially transparent snout. The priestess extended her open palm towards us. ‘Every other creature will already fear its might.’ With the furious buzz of a vespis swarm, the twittering of a flock of flesh-eating birds and the roar of a ghyrlion, amber-hued light lanced from her fingertips.
Malikcek flailed, shadows boiling off the rat-shape within, and tripped over my prone form. He burst into the dark, dissolving back safely beyond the cone of the priestess’ light, striking his blades together as though sharpening a knife for carving.
‘This game is over-done. Malikcek wins.’
‘The game is a cycle,’ Brychen corrected. ‘There are no winners.’
She turned her palm up to the ceiling and as she did so the two wooden torches that I had seen lying on the ground (and frankly, forgotten about in all the excitement) burst into flame. The assassin squealed at the sudden light to either side of him and covered his eyes. Seeing his distraction, I drew my feet beneath me and charged. Even half blind and robbed of his shadows, the Deathmaster was a more gifted killer than I’d allowed for. He struck the inside of my halberd with his left-hand knife and tried to force the blow wide. He was twice as strong as any skaven assassin had a right to be. But I was a Stormcast Eternal. I was stronger.
I pushed through the attempted parry and drove my blade into the flesh and blood of his shoulder.
‘You have faced the Bear-Eater and you have lost!’
The assassin’s shriek of pain rose to become a rush of air, his body billowing up towards the ceiling.
It became a shriek again.
Black eyes glinted evilly from a black hood.
‘Only with your tree-thing witch to aid you.’
‘We are not ghurzelle displaying our horns.’ Brychen straightened with an obvious effort. ‘We are hyenae ripping apart a freak of nature.’
The priestess might have been impervious to the assassin’s taunts, but I felt my pride nettled.
‘I have this from here,’ I told her.
‘He is still dangerous.’
‘This is the fight for which I was forged. Stand back, priestess, and watch what the pinnacle of Sigmar’s creation can do.’
‘He is toying with you.’
Malikcek chittered as he drew himself into the darkness, his verminous form expanding to envelop the entirety of the ceiling.
‘She is not wrong, Bear-Eater. Cat and mouse is the game we play. You are not the cat.’
With a hiss of inrushing air, the assassin imploded.
I started back instinctively. It almost certainly saved my life. Malikcek exploded into my face with knife, teeth and whip-tail, all awhir with a rabid energy. The injury to his shoulder and the consequent loss of a blade in no way diminished the ferocity of his attacks. He didn’t seem to tire. He didn’t even seem to breathe insofar as I could tell. Everything that I had left to give went into matching him, blow for blow, and it still wasn’t nearly enough. Step by step, parry by bone-jarring parry, he forced me back.
‘You are the mad-fool, here. Not I.’
‘How so?’
‘You need-want to ask? Who is Malikcek? He is nothing. He is not master here.’
‘Ikrit? What of him?’
Malikcek cackled as he eroded my guard and slammed me against the wall. ‘There are two lords-castellant in the Seven Words. And the other is not Hamilcar Bear-Eater.’
I stared through Malikcek’s shadowy muzzle and into nothing. My own stupidity was suddenly so glaring it stole everything else’s light.
Broudiccan.
Ikrit was in the Seven Words, and I’d let him trick me. Again.
He was going after Broudiccan.
I didn’t even notice as Malikcek palmed aside my halberd and hammered an elbow into my breastplate. Fractures splintered through the sigmarite, a matching set of fissures spidering into the dressed stone behind me as my backplate and head smacked into it. The breath rushed out of me, and I wheezed down the wall to the floor.
I never even saw the deathblow coming.
Luckily, it wasn’t coming for me.
Dawn came from the direction of the Realmgate. The white-hot brilliance of Azyr’s billion suns scoured the gate chamber clean, shadows withering to bright light before the cosmic power of the Celestial. With tears running down my face and soaking my beard, I rolled over and scrambled blindly for shelter. My fingers touched the base of a column and I dragged myself behind it.