Ikrit looked over his shoulder at the priestess, his expression blank. ‘I am dead-dead. Many times over I have been given-fed to the black earth. Rarely does my buried form lie still. Death always conquers Life. In the end.’ Ribbons of entropic energies coursed the vines that held his gauntlet pinned. They withered, turned yellow, then black. The embrittled stalk husks fell off him like dust from a coat of armour as he turned. ‘Always.’
The look he gave Brychen was a thunderclap that hurled the priestess back into the melee on a comet tail of splintered armour and blood.
I didn’t watch her go.
I didn’t wait to see her land.
As I had instinctively known during my brief, albeit unwitting, altercation with Sigmar in the Forge Eternal, there was no way I was going to defeat Ikrit with strength alone.
Sucker-punch and surprise would be my weapons here.
I threw myself at the warlock while he was still facing the other way. My halberd carved a searing arc towards the wrist joint of his gauntlet. A black wind billowed about Ikrit’s body and carried him out of my reach. The halberd whistled past his midriff. He hissed his displeasure. I reversed my grip, roared, the muscles across my upper body bulging as I struck back with the butt. The sigmarite ferrule countered the weight of the entire foot-long blade. It could crush conventional plate and shatter immortal bone. Ikrit didn’t give it the chance. A whoosh of warpflame from his gauntlet flicked me contemptuously aside.
The ichorous green jet was severed almost as soon as it had been unleashed, warpflame dribbling from the nozzle to hiss off the cobbles.
It had been a playful shove, a jepard batting a doomed animal between its paws.
Surprise had not served me nearly as well as I might have hoped.
‘Fool-fool,’ Ikrit hissed. ‘After all you have seen you still challenge me.’
At the warlock’s gesture the ground between us shuddered and fell away. The road tore itself in half, noxious fumes gasping from the rent in the earth, swallowing clanrats and Freeguilders alike. ‘I need-want no army!’ the warlock squealed, shrill with power. ‘The very earth of the realm answers my summons-call.’ A nimbus of multi-hued energies encompassed him as he extended a gauntlet. ‘I am the Ur-Rat, the Rat-That-Was. You will kneel-die!’
A streak of oily lightning leapt from the warlock’s outstretched paw.
I dived to the ground. The blast careened over my head and obliterated a war-wagon that had been lying on its axle behind me. It died in splinters and flame. Bits of shrapnel rattled off my backplate as I crawled away from the pyre. Another energy blast blew a crater out of the ground. I found my knees, rising messily into a sprint as the third blast carved open a company of Freeguilder polearms and hit the rat-ogor that had been bludgeoning its way through them, reducing them all to ash and jelly and a foul taste in the back of my mouth.
‘Run-flee, Bear-Eater. I know-see what you crave over all else. I know-know how to make you hurt.’ The warlock cackled. ‘Let them see you run.’
Fire engulfed both his gauntlets, white hot and searing. His arms trembled as he drew them back, the flames shrinking into the metal until they glowed, then thrust his paws towards me.
A sun ignited on the Bear Road, and warriors of all ilks burned.
Skaven used their last breath before they were blown to ash to squeal. Men and women disappeared like tallow sticks in a flame. Lightning bolts tore free from the maelstrom, warriors of the Heavens Forged and the Imperishables, their thrice-blessed no proof against the monstrous fireball. It spanned the full width of the road, two-score feet across. Stone ran from the frontages of the buildings like fat from a roast. Scaffolds, awnings, and windows simply ceased to be. Lead tiles glowed like coals. Running out of the blast even as it was erupting, I avoided the worst, but then I think that that had always been Ikrit’s intention. Heat raced ahead of the explosion and threw me to my face. I skidded over the ruined cobbles on my breastplate before running out of push.
I threw my head back like a drunk who could not comprehend how he had come to be on the floor. I could barely see. Blood matted my hair to my face. I could smell it.
‘Vikaelia!’ I roared.
Broudiccan had been somewhere close by too, but it wasn’t his face that filled my mind then, nor goaded my strength to fury. I rose with a groan of sigmarite heated to murderous temperatures, the burnt muscles in the back of my neck stretching painfully as I turned my head towards Ikrit.
He was walking towards me, but, borne on a gryph-charger of complicit storm winds, he came as a thunderbolt of corroded bronzes and Azyrite blues.
I beat my halberd back across his path like a scythe. There was no finesse to it. I targeted no weak point in the armour nor gleaned vulnerability in his form. There was only the burning need to reap. My halberd hacked into a skein of Ulgu shadow, slowing the blade noticeably before it clanged against his armour. My fury became incandescent. Divine. I was a mountain man, and the boiling point came for me well before it would have taken another. Everything this rat had done, everything he had taken from me. I no longer cared if I lived or died. Life in the Winterlands was brutal and brief, and death unmourned. Let my soul burn, let it set the Heavens ablaze this one final time as it returned to the Cosmic Storm. I didn’t care, so long as I could hurt this rat in my passing.
Howling like a wounded ghurlion, I threw myself at my aggressor.
The warlock squeaked in surprise as my arms wrapped around him and locked behind his back. He shrieked. I sank my teeth into his snout. Cold blood oozed into my mouth. For a moment I relived the vision of my first, mortal death at the hands of the ogor frostlord and his giant bear, and was pleased. There was a circularity to it that appealed to my vanity, that fate would accord me such a thoughtful gesture for my passing. Spitting out a whisker, I smashed my head into Ikrit’s. It was like head-butting a statue. Pain rang outward from my forehead. I felt Ikrit’s jaws snapping for my throat. We grappled. My fingers went through the eye slit of his helm and mushed something glutinous and rotten. My other hand found the warding lantern in his claw.
With an outraged squeal, Ikrit caught the hand by the wrist and twisted. Pain exploded into the forefront of my mind, bringing me screaming back to my senses.
Bone spurs scraped over the inside of my vambrace as Ikrit dangled me by my limp hand. I screamed. He screamed back at me. Then he spun me once around and hurled me through the wall of a roadside inn.
Still cooling from the wrath of Ikrit’s fireball, the wall disintegrated as soon as I hit it. It collapsed onto me, followed by the ceiling, then the roof. I coughed, snarled, bellowed in pain and pointless fury as the building sought to bury me alive under rock that fell apart into cinders as soon as it came loose. I shook my face and my hand as if to dig my way out of the grave of cinders, glimpsing clear sky overhead as the last of the structure gave way. The blue thickened and turned green even as I flapped at the flames. Ectoplasmic muscle swelled across the open sky like angry clouds, thick-veined and bristling with Ghurite strength. A colossal in-breath snuffed out the flames around me as the Foot of Gork came crashing down, demolishing what little was left of the inn and smashing me into the rubble.
The gigantic foot broke into a virulent green fog as soon as it made impact with the ground.
I lay in the midst of it, gasping and broken, staring up at blue skies once again. My breath hitched as I struggled to fill my lungs. I had broken at least one rib and had collapsed a lung, by the frantic wheezing of my breath.
Ikrit stepped off the road and into the flattened inn.
The residual smog parted before him. I saw now why he did not need an army. An army was almost an encumbrance to a being like him, useful only insofar as he could not be everywhere at once.