Dracoths or no Dracoths.
And then things really would turn ugly.
‘You’ll have to kill a lot of people to get at me,’ I warned her.
‘The Hamilcar I know would never shield himself with the blood of those he claims to protect.’
Vikaeus advanced on me. I continued backing away until my back hit the hovel’s door.
‘They are the men and women who should be defending this place,’ I said.
‘Given that it was your misguided rebellion that broke the Freeguild in the first place, I find your concern of dubious sincerity now.’
‘That was never my intention,’ I said, feeling for the door handle behind me. ‘If you want someone to blame for that, you should help me look for Broudiccan.’
Vikaeus tutted in disappointment. ‘Are you trying to shift blame?’
‘Is it working?’
She stepped in closer. Near enough for my skin to shrink from the cold emanating from her reforged skin. ‘No one ever speaks the truth to a Lord-Veritant. Not at first.’
‘I was afraid of that. I’ll have to try something else, then.’
‘You have nothing left to try, Hamilcar.’
‘You really are the worst prophet, Vikaelia,’ I said, as I ripped the door from its frame and hit her with it.
Chapter thirty-one
Those things I told you earlier, about how you’ve never seen a Stormcast Eternal at full tilt? Forget it all – you don’t know what haste is until you’ve run through a sacked city with three Knights Merciless on Dracoths behind you.
I ran into the side of a building at a full sprint. It looked like an alehouse, but I paid it no mind. Grabbing hold of the projecting eave, I pulled myself up, my feet scrambling on the wall, and rolled onto the sloped roof. Quickly onto my feet, I drew enough acceleration from somewhere to leap the small rear yard and the narrow ravine it backed onto, landing onto cobbles in a clattering roll that carried me immediately back into a sprint.
The alehouse collapsed behind me.
Cryax bellowed and pounded through the back wall. I glanced over my shoulder. Vikaeus’ icy halo burned through the pall of crushed mortar and dust and stung my eyes. The following Concussors smashed what was left of the alehouse to rubble as Cryax bunched the gargantuan muscles of his haunches.
I’d wager you’ve never seen a Dracoth jump.
It’s not a sight for the faint-hearted.
Even from where I was, halfway down the street, I felt the ground shake and heard the shutters in the windows around me rattle. I found an extra push of speed.
‘Hamilcar is here!’ I screamed, one of the shutters ahead of me nudging warily open on the barrel of a longrifle. ‘The battle is not yet over!’
I sprinted past.
While I knew most of the alehouses in the Seven Words (and indeed, most of the Free Cities of the Mortal Realms), I’d been in too great a hurry to notice which one I’d just passed, or which street I was on now. The Seven Words was a honeycomb of narrow, ill-kept little lanes like this one, switchbacking their way around the Gorkomon’s inhospitable crags. It was hardly suited to the trio of enraged Dracoth knights and I knew it.
If Vikaeus had ever ventured beyond the keep then she would have known it too.
Skidding around a razor-sharp bend, I veered past the eviscerated remains of a Gorwood horse still lashed to a cart, my armour scraping the wall, bouncing and rattling off downhill.
I heard the Dracoths bellow behind me, the scrabble of foot-long claws on cobbles, then the crash of a Celestial war-beast bursting side-on through the stone wall of a house. The beast roared in outrage as the roof cascaded over its armoured head. I heard the muffled clang of a Concussor pitching from the saddle.
I grinned, glancing over my shoulder as Vikaeus and the last Concussor slowed through the turn before urging their monstrous mounts on after me. I had already doubled my lead on them. I knew where I was going. They couldn’t catch me now. I even felt confident enough to slow down at the sight of a group of armed Freeguilders holding their little patch of drystone wall.
‘You need more than a Dracoth to beat Hamilcar Bear-Eater in a race to the fight,’ I bellowed as I flashed past.
The ground shook as Cryax built back speed.
Too late now.
Like every street in the outer wards, this one wound its involuntary little way around the rough terrain to feed into the main traffic of the Bear Road. Exactly where I wanted to be.
I burst out of the lane and onto the wide, ruined concourse of the Seven Words’ one genuine road. I quickly looked both ways. The devastation that had been wrought by the skaven’s wheel machine was plain to see. It had ploughed through Freeguild stockades and Frankos’ diligently erected chokepoints like a stampede of wild beasts, leaving behind wooden debris and a warping haze of charge. And into the destruction had come the skaven, as surely as rotten meat produced flies. Judging from the earthy hummocks of spoil poking up through shattered cobblestones, they had come from beneath. The Seven Words had more holes in it than one of my alibis for failing to attend early morning drills, and I could hardly fault Akturus for letting a few slip his notice. In any case, shock-vermin were still shimmying down ropes dangling from the keels of low-hovering airships while several thousand more had gone for the expedient route of simply smashing open the main gate. The surrounding swathe of road was awash with armoured skaven warriors and verminous beasts, bludgeoning through a stubborn, but ever-diminishing line of Heavens Forged.
I tried to pick out Broudiccan, Xeros or Frankos from the mayhem, but I didn’t have the time for a proper look.
Swinging its huge arms, as if needing that initial boost to get the massed musculature of its upper body moving, one of the skaven war-beasts rounded on me and roared. Its head was that of a rat, hunched into gigantic shoulders, albeit enlarged to twice the size of a man’s. Its gargantuan build was that of an ogor. The skaven beastmakers call them rat-ogors, the famed ingenuity of their race inexplicably deserting them at the end. I had encountered several of the mutated rat-beasts before, but this one was the first to have been encased in cogwork battle armour, warpfire dribbling from nozzles appended to each fist.
Trust Ikrit to make a foul thing a hundred times worse.
Red eyes glittering with madness and childish hate, the rat-ogor lumped its balled fist at me. I ducked under the blow, and spun behind the beast, still working off speed as I backpedalled away from it.
I found myself perfectly positioned to watch as Cryax and Vikaeus emerged from the alley.
Anything less massive than a rat-ogor on the receiving end of a Dracoth would have been trampled, no questions asked, but the skaven war-beast was simply barged backwards – towards me. Claws and the ill-fitting armour plates nailed to its calves gouged sparks out of the cobblestones as it slowed down. Wrapping its arms around Cryax’s neck, it delivered a high-pitched mangling of squeak and roar. The Dracoth drowned it out with its own bellow. Lightning bolts sprayed from the Celestial beast’s open jaws and flayed the meat from the rat-ogor’s head. Incredibly, even with half its face dribbling towards its groin, the rat-ogor didn’t let go. Vikaeus swept up her sword, the bound energies of the merciless storm flickering along its length and haloing the Lord-Veritant in divine fury. She hacked through the rat-ogor’s clutching arm in a single blow.
The following Concussor did the rest.
Still running blind, the second Dracoth blundered into Cryax’s hindquarters, shoving him forwards, through the squealing rat-ogor, and finally throwing the pain-addled beast to the ground. A second rat-ogor waded towards the pair like an armoured ape, green light bleeding from the sutured ruin of its eyes. The Paladin swung his lightning hammer, shattering thick metal plates and knocking the rat-beast off its stride. The Dracoth smashed it to the ground with a swipe of its head, then proceeded to disembowel it with frenzied motions of its claws.