‘We should survey the battlefield a while yet,’ said Broudiccan. ‘I don’t know this Manguish, but how many months have we hunted Kurzog through the Gorwood? How many times has he ever offered us pitched battle so freely?’
‘He offers nothing,’ I said. ‘His back is to the wall. He has nowhere left to go now but the Well of Eternity, and I mean to pitch him in head first.’ I thumped Frankos hard across the back. ‘Now, Knight-Heraldor!’
‘Yes, lord.’
Frankos put his horn to his mouth slit and blew.
Chapter four
The oldest memory I have is of violence. I can’t remember who I was fighting, or where, or why. Only that the ground was frozen, the air so cold that it was like breathing knives, and the stars were out with us in force. Sigendil, the beacon star of Azyr, hung bright and fierce above our heads like a banner, and I remember the battle-lust that it gave me. When the high star took to the field, so too did we, the tribes of the Eternal Winterlands. I don’t remember why. For the glory of our tribe? For the notice of our gods? To display our ferocity before Sigmar’s shining herald, locking horns like rutting beastmen for the favour of our patron? To be honest, no one really cared what a few thousand barbarians in the back end of Azyr got up to at night; what matters is that we fought, and none better or more joyously than I. It’s why Sigmar chose me, why he re-made me in the manner he did. Despite what you may have heard about me, it’s all I know how to do well.
And anyone who thinks that immortality detracts from the thrill of it has never felt the hammers of the Six Smiths upon their soul.
But you came for blood, didn’t you? So let me show you blood.
I pulled my blade from the blightking’s belly, drawing out his rotten intestines like a string of butcher’s sausages. Even with his guts looped around his ankles, he fought me, looking to bludgeon me with his cleaver-like sword. I spun my halberd like a bladed gyre, switching hands, direction, speed, drawing the squalid blightking’s cyclopean eye to my blade when it should have been paying closer heed to my boot. I kicked the base of his shield into his greaves. The flat top tilted forward and exposed the mouldering iron of his helmet to my fist. His grilled visor was not rigid, like metal. Rather, it was hard and gelatinous, like clotted blood, and quivered with the impact of my punch. Yellow bile oozed from the breathing slits, his grille otherwise settling back into shape.
The blightking gurgled with amusement as I shook out my knuckles, his voice a liquid rasp. ‘In the demesnes of the Fenlords the name “Bear-Eater” is spoken with–’
I rammed my halberd through his mouth with a wordless yell.
Unoriginal, I know, but from the heart. Even so, I was somewhat regretful of his passing. To this day I occasionally wonder what it was that the Fenlords had thought of me.
His white feathers rippling with power, Crow bore another pustulent warrior to the ground. The gryph-hound broke open the blightking’s rib cage and started ripping out ulcerated lung tissue. The Chaos knight chortled wetly even as his limbs twitched and his chest wall was sprayed over the freezing ground.
I knew that Nurgle commanded jovial acceptance in the face of despair, and by his own tenets I supposed that the blightking died well.
‘I’d spit that out if I were you,’ I said.
Crow turned his viscera-stained beak to me and warbled.
‘Fine. But expect no sympathy from me in the morning.’
Funnelled right across the narrow approach to Kurzog’s Hill, Astral Templars and Freeguild soldiers were tangling with the putrid blightkings of the Legion of Bloat. The Bear-Eaters fought like barbarian kings of old, each warrior a champion unto the reach of his own blade. The mortal soldiers, though possessing neither the strength nor the ferocity of the Stormcast Eternals, were disciplined and inspired. Under their combined onslaught the Nurglites were taking an almighty beating, but they were proving as difficult to break as I’d feared. The occasional snap of lightning arced towards the heavens, the fiery marker for a hero’s passing. Whole blocks of infantry fought themselves into the mud. Groups of ungor and Freeguild skirmishers tussled in the gaps between them, arrows and throwing spears whistling back and forth through the flurrying snow. Horns blared. Drums pounded. Horses whinnied and screamed.
I raised my halberd in the air and yelled, ‘Hamilcar!’
For what am I to these men but Vexillor, Heraldor and Relictor in one god-kissed sigmarite frame?
Another blightking took up position against me in the shield wall. He delivered no battle cry to announce his arrival, to intimidate me or to bolster his own courage, or to drown out the sounds of Crow chugging down his erstwhile comrade’s insides. Just a grim acceptance of his lot as he hoisted his heavy shield.
‘Why do the beastmen not attack?’ Broudiccan shouted between apocalyptic blows from his starsoul mace.
Aside from the skirmishers nibbling at our proverbial coat tails, I could see that the Decimator-Prime was right. Kurzog was still holding his biggest hitters back.
‘The brayseer is as much a stranger to pitched battle as I am to the Grand Library of Sigmaron, brother,’ I bellowed at the top of my lungs. ‘He hopes the Legion of Bloat will bleed our strength, enough for him to prevail. Hah!’ Broudiccan obliterated a blightking’s shield with a trouncing blow from his mace, spinning its wielder neatly into my field of attack. My halberd sliced wetly through the warrior’s vision slit. Crow dragged him out of the line by the knee and finished the job. Another heaved up and raised his shield to replace him. I blew out through my lips. This was starting to turn into real work. ‘Stormcloud! I think we’ve been banging our heads long enough against this wall.’
‘Praise be to Sigmar.’
Denied the basic succour of conflagrating his enemies en masse with the balled fists of the Eternal Heavens, the Lord-Relictor had been battling alongside the men of Jercho. While they hammered the shield wall with pistol shot and courage, he had resigned himself to annihilating it piecemeal, his expression as thunderous as any storm of Azyr.
He lifted his reliquary staff skyward, his eyes taking on a crackling lambency as dark clouds boiled across the sky. The snowfall intensified, coming in flurries, the wind tugging on my bearskin cloak and long hair. A rippling sheet of lightning illuminated the swamp of struggling combatants and Xeros pointed towards the thunderous peal with his staff. ‘God of Thunder, God of War, show the infidel your hammer!’ A bolt of lightning tore from the heavens to explode against the tip of his staff. The mummified relic-king it held flashed against the back of my eyes as lightning whipped out from the Lord-Relictor’s staff. It arced around the Jerech as if repelled by their honesty and faith, crawled wildly over Broudiccan’s aegis war-plate, and cracked against the wall of blightkings like the whip-tentacles of an Azyr beast. Dozens were blasted from their feet, poisonous steam billowing from eye slits and the warped seals of ancient war-plate as they roasted in their armour.
The Lord-Relictor inhaled deeply, and grinned. ‘Bare your hearts on the altar of the God-King, unbelievers.’ He raised his reliquary to call forth another blast when a terrific shriek rang through the swollen clouds.
‘No more, Stormcloud. They saw.’
Another shriek echoed across the marsh, and this time a colossal winged shape clad in blued metal scales dropped beneath the layer of clouds. It was King Augus. I clenched my fist and roared in welcome as the King of the Aetar, my friend, descended on Kurzog’s Hill. Beastmen brayed in alarm, rattling up their spears, but Augus was just too skilled a warrior, and too large. He ploughed through the thicket of spears, scattering beastmen to the ground before rising again with a bleating creature struggling in each clawed foot. I laughed as two dozen magnificently armoured eagle knights broke through the clouds in an arrowhead formation. With the grace of a flock of aesterlings in flight, the formation split into two smaller ‘V’s. Half of their number tucked in alongside Princess Aeygar to strafe Kurzog’s Hill. The rest, led by Queen Ellias, flew after Knight-Venator Barbarus, coming about to engage the aerial screen of rot flies and beastman disc-riders that continued to harry my flanks.