‘My brother Hamilcar is not alone in neglecting the presence of a Lord-Castellant,’ came Akturus’ dust-dry voice.
I gasped aloud, a strange mingling of exquisite pain and relief, and looked back around the column, only to recoil from the white wall of light and pain.
‘Now for the jugular,’ said Brychen, untouched by that storm of light.
Leaves rustled through the aether, and then a second light reared up like an amber bear to challenge the Azyri newcomer for its kill. Shielding my eyes, I forced myself to look back out. The light burned, but it was no longer as terrible as I had feared. I thought back to what Malikcek had said to me, back in Ikrit’s burrow, about how the Azyr light of a warding lantern might mend our damaged souls. Could he have been right? How faithful a restoration could it produce with half the pieces still lost to another’s body? Perhaps that would be good enough for Ikrit, but not for me.
Malikcek writhed in agony, suspended in mid-air like a black moth between two plates of coloured glass, one amber and one blue. The assassin steamed, growing ever more distinct as the opposing lights burned the shadow from his flesh.
The silhouette of a man wobbled towards the captive assassin.
My eyes trembled. I refused to let them blink.
‘Allow me, lord,’ said Nassam.
‘Glorious Highheim,’ I called back. ‘What are you doing here? I sent you through the Seventh Gate.’
‘You did, lord. But you didn’t tell me not to come back.’
I laughed, as the Jerech hacked his greatsword down.
Chapter twenty-nine
The skaven were, as you’ll remember, abroad in the High Gorwood in force well before the opening of Ikrit’s Arcway beneath the Seven Words, and I emerged from the catacombs to find the fortress under siege from above as well as from below. The old fort had weathered the two-pronged assault about as well as I would have expected.
Skaven rampaged through the twisting lanes in packs of a hundred or more. They kicked in doors, pried slates from roofs, dragged women, children, and men screaming into the streets, butchered the livestock that grazed on the grassy outcroppings with equal malice and no apparent distinction.
From the vicinity of the keep, thunder still rumbled. The growls of Dracoth. The reports of storm-infused lightning hammers and volleystorm crossbows.
Paladins of the Knights Merciless, godlike and aloof in shining white armour, scattered any muster of strength with repeated charges of their Fulminators and Tempestors. If the cries of those in the wards praying for deliverance penetrated their helmets’ icy veneer, then they betrayed no sign of caring.
Fighting spilled through the rest of the city.
From the Ironweld compound, gunfire crackled. The fortress manse of the conclave representative stood fast yet, as did a number of temples to the more redoubtable divinities of the Gorkomon (Sigmar and Gorkamorka, primarily) and at least half of the five Freeguild garrisons. Outposts of resistance in a sea of slaughter.
Everything else was screams and burning.
The fiercest fighting was centred around the main gatehouse.
As I watched, a great wheeled engine thundered down the Bear Road, repeated blasts of lightning from its fork-like projectors shredding the buildings to either side, before ripping itself apart, a seething ball of rapidly disintegrating skaven engineering rolling through the unmanned Freeguild stockades towards the Morkogon gate. The Heraldors’ horns sounded an incessant call to arms. The tattered banners of the Heavens Forged and of Lord-Celestant Frankos himself flew there, jewels of amethyst and curls of gold glinting still under the deluge of rust and rot and verminous fur. A ramshackle fleet of paddle-driven airships circled the embattled fortifications, skaven gunners scampering the weather decks to pour fire over the Astral Templars. The killing was as indiscriminate as it was deadly, but the masters of the skaven ruinfleet clearly considered a few hundred slaughtered clanrats to be fair exchange for one Azyr-bound stab of lightning.
The storm energies of a Stormcast warrior chamber aroused fully to war was an awesome spectacle, even to one such as I. Thick clouds and sudden downpours broke from blue skies. Mighty winds hammered the airships, disrupting their formations, forcing the overseers of the rowing decks to crack their whips lest their craft be dashed against the rocks of the Gorkomon.
A clarion voice rang out from the bastion wall.
‘Die, unclean vermin. Burn on a pyre of your own scabrous bones!’
Lightning speared the sky in half, carving through the hull of an airship and blitzing east to west along an overrun section of rampart. Skaven squealed, going up in tiny little flares of igniting fur. There was a creak, as of roasted bones, and a large part of the wall collapsed. ‘How dare you, heathen rats. Your ungodly souls are unworthy of the stones of this Free City. Your cairn shall be storm cloud and wind alone. The stench of burnt flesh shall be your sole remembrance.’ Another crack ripped the sky asunder, this time calling forth a volley of lightning that bombarded the entire length of curtain wall, reducing it to rubble despite the clear absence of so much as a clanrat within fifty feet.
I groaned, feeling my high spirits deflate.
Lord-Relictor Xeros Stormcloud still had that effect.
‘Was it asking too much of Sigmar for him to stay dead?’ I muttered. ‘Not for all eternity. Just a decade or two. If anyone has flaws in their spirit to warrant another pass through the soul-mills then it’s the Stormcloud.’
‘Ikrit has yet to show his own claws,’ said Brychen.
The priestess stood on the causeway steps beside me, inhaling deeply of the fresh air that gusted endlessly towards this high point from the seven corners of the aetheric cloud. The hollies clambering over her armour lattice fluttered violently against it.
‘What makes you say that?’ said Nassam.
‘Because the wall is still there,’ said Brychen.
‘Most of it anyway,’ I added. ‘No thanks to the Stormcloud.’
‘I see,’ said Nassam.
The Jerech looked at me guiltily, as if he felt the burn to my face and the cracks in my armour were partly his fault. None of it was anything that the lifting of a divine geas and six months in the Aetherdomes of the Sigmarabulum having my whims catered to by aelven maidens wouldn’t remedy.
But outwardly, I chose to suffer like a hero.
‘That’s where we’ll find him, though,’ I said.
‘Why is that, lord?’
‘Because that’s where Xeros is, and if Broudiccan learned just one thing from me in a hundred years as my second-in-command then it would have been to keep that maniac close.’
‘If that is where the prey is, then that is where we must go too.’ Brychen was already gliding down the steps.
I grunted to Nassam to go after her.
The square at the bottom of the stair was like a charnel pit, a mass grave for the enemy’s anonymous dead. But these bodies had belonged to no one’s enemy. Dropping to one knee, I swept blood-matted hair from a woman’s face. The pale, fish-eyed gaze of a corpse stared sightlessly back up.
Azyrite settler and Ghurite native, everyone in the Seven Words had understood the precariousness of their existence. Their walls were porous. The land was hostile. But they had known all that. Or had they? The more I thought about it, the more I wondered whether anyone would have chosen to build a life and raise a family from the harsh rock of the Gorkomon if they had really believed any of that.
Had they not simply believed that the Bear-Eater would protect them from it all?
A low growl rose from my throat.
‘They are dead,’ said Brychen. ‘They belong to the worms and the insects now.’