One-handed, I drove the butt of my halberd into the ground and made myself meet death like a warrior. My armour protested the movement, rubble sliding off its curves. Anyone but me would have been dead already, but Sigmar had made my bastion armour thick and warded where it mattered. He had known that my next death could be my last, and had done all in his power to ensure that it never came to be. He did not want me dead. He wanted me triumphant.
Not nearly as much as I did.
The warlock’s surprise at seeing me alive was bettered only by that at seeing me upright. The sight of his snout still black and oozing gave me the strength to pull the last few inches of my spine straight.
‘What does it take-need to put you down?’
‘More than you can throw,’ I wheezed. I spat blood, then looked down at my broken hand. The claws of my fingers were still gripping the warding lantern that I had wrenched from his grip. ‘You haven’t got the strength in you to finish Hamilcar Bear-Eater. Chosen of Sigmar. Knight-Questor! Champion of the Gods!’
Gritting my teeth, I slid back the lantern’s shutter and hurled it like a Kharadron grudgesettler bomb with the pin removed.
Strobing starlight flashed across the smouldering rubble as the lantern spun, end over end, a weaponised pulsar encased in sigmarite, amethyst and gold. Where light slashed Ikrit’s armour, black steam rose, and he stumbled back from me with a hiss of pain. A stone from the inn’s foundation wall protruded from the ground behind him, and he went backwards over it in a billow of sparks.
He thrashed about, driving up fresh cinders as he struggled to right himself, only to shriek all the louder as he discovered a halberd piercing the palm of his gauntlet, driving into the rock, and pinning his paw to the ground.
Ikrit swung with his other gauntlet. Not for me but for my halberd. I knocked his paw aside on the outside of my knee, and then, my chest an agony, trod down hard on his elbow. Dropping my knee into his stomach plating, I punched him across the jaw. And again. And again. Losing myself to the fury. ‘I told you.’ His helmet buckled. ‘It would.’ A bloody smear on his diamond teeth. ‘Hurt.’ My blood. Thoughtlessly, I hit him with my broken hand. With a dying fish gasp of pain, I rolled off him. Using just my feet, I pushed myself back, my head flopping finally to the ground as the madness that had loaned me its strength departed me with its due.
I lay there for a time, struggling to breathe, listening to the sounds of battle return.
Of course, they had never left. Even so, I found it hard to credit that anyone else out there was still fighting. A hero had just fought a god into the ground. The realms should have taken a breath. They should have held back and taken heed. Instead, skaven and Freeguilder grunted and yelled like savages in the mud. The thunder of Stormcast and Ironweld weaponry warred with the piercing war-cries of the aetar.
I lifted my head just enough to look over at Ikrit. The warlock was slumped and beaten, his right arm half-melted by the fluids leaking from his own gauntlet, and speared to the ground. He looked even worse than I felt.
‘You’re mine,’ I managed to say. The breath coming in was agony. The voice going out was a rasp.
‘You cannot even… stand-stand.’
‘I’ll drag you to the Seventh Gate with my teeth if I have to.’
‘Try it… Bear-Eater. I do not need my… arm… to destroy you.’
‘Surrender! Show me how to restore my soul, and I will appeal to Sigmar to be merciful with yours. Tell me, and I will have him consign you to oblivion before the Smiths can lay their tools upon you.’
By way of answer, Ikrit turned his face to the sky and screamed.
He screamed with the vehemence of a beaten god. At first I thought it the venting of the indignity of defeat, but then I heard the familiar rifling of feathers, the whistle of air through an open beak. I saw the shadow that darkened the ground where Ikrit and I looked up. My heart forced pain wider through my chest.
With a blistering shriek, King Augus announced his intentions.
His plumage bristled with the fury of the seven winds. His mail coat and spiked crown caught Azyr lightning and warpfire, and were vengeful.
‘No!’ I screamed.
A furious beating of wings forced me back into the ground, as Augus lifted his enormous bulk off the crushed warlock, all the while keeping one enormous talon possessively over his body. Then the victorious king of the aetar closed his beak over the helmet and wrenched Ikrit’s head from his shoulders.
Chapter thirty-three
King Augus tossed the helmeted corpse head aside and turned to me with a look of aquiline satisfaction.
‘No!’ I cried again.
The word caused me so much pain that at first I didn’t recognise it as mine. It was a bladed imprecation that someone had pushed into my chest to the crosspiece and twisted. But it was just the broken end of my rib pushing into my lung. A trifling hurt, in comparison. On hands and knees, drawing my halberd through the rubble as if it were a paddle, I crawled towards Ikrit’s headless body, the co-vessel for my storm-forged soul. Ignoring Augus’ increasingly irate caws, I took Ikrit by the shoulder and shook him.
I don’t know what I was expecting.
‘No, no, no.’ I glared hotly at the aetar. ‘No!’
Augus lowered his head towards me and delivered an ear-destroying shriek.
‘You think I’ll let that insult pass?’ With the strength in my arms I pushed against my halberd to position my body upright until I was, on my knees, almost level with Augus’ breast. Pain flared in mine. The aetar swirled in my vision like cream poured into qahua. ‘You stole prey from the Bear-Eater. Do you think me so far gone that I won’t pluck every feather from your body before I spit you on my spear?’
As bluster went, this was a desperate attempt. Even hugging myself to my halberd like a tent around a pole, I swayed on my knees. I didn’t care. With Ikrit destroyed, his soul blasted into whatever aether awaited the souls of pariahs to the skaven race, the Smiths would never be able to undo what he had done.
What he had done to me.
I would never again be whole.
Augus was a proud king, but not so humane that he would not rip the head from a wounded foe, as I had just learned to my eternal cost. At least it would be quick. It would be bloody and honest. Better that than the slow dissolution of the soul that awaited me now.
‘Come on, Augus, why do you hesitate? Are you afraid?’
The aetar bristled, baring his gnarled and blood-stained beak.
A nearby voice interrupted. ‘Peace, Augus. Can you not see he is out of his wits?’
Lord-Veritant Vikaeus of the Creed crunched onto the rubble-strewn ground. Her sword was bloody, her plate battered. Her staff shone with a cold light that stung tears from my eyes. It was as though my body acted out of its own self-interest, for on top of everything else it had endured it knew that the sight of her, unblurred, would have broken me then. A pair of Concussors walked behind her, both as well-blooded as the Lord-Veritant herself. One was on foot. The other struggled through the wreckage on a rancorous, ice-blue Dracoth. Augus swivelled his head to glare at them, beating his wings threateningly to warn the Knights Merciless from his prize.
I, however, spread my arms and bowed my head, as though offering my neck as a gift.
‘The sun rises. The rule of the Day Queen comes,’ I said, speaking with bitterness the words that I could recall her once speaking to me when we had been mortal.
She looked at me quizzically. Her eyes unfocused, just for a moment. ‘What did you say?’