‘He’s with me, Kurzog!’ I bellowed, shaking my halberd vaguely towards the hilltop. ‘You’re not the only one who can pull off a trick.’
As I sought without success to bait the brayseer into showing his face, I saw Queen Ellias snatch a daemon disc from the air, catch the flailing beastman rider in her beak and then shake it viciously to death. The plague drones and disc-riders had the aetar heavily outnumbered, but the eagle-kin were mighty warriors and ferocious when aroused to battle.
I found myself counting my good fortune that King Augus had satisfied himself with mere ambivalence towards Sigmar’s return to the Ghurlands. The thought of trying to dislodge them from their Gorkomon fastness was not one I particularly relished.
In response to their arrival, Frankos blew a resounding note on his horn and the Freeguilds redoubled their efforts to dislodge the blightkings and push on Kurzog’s Hill.
‘Broudiccan. Xeros. Men of Jercho. To me!’ I plunged into the hole that the Stormcloud had gouged out of the blightkings’ shield wall with his lightning. My halberd chopped hands from wrists, heads from shoulders, tentacles from wheresoever they sprouted. I clove shields and splintered armour. I stabbed and clubbed, driving on until I was hemmed in by the stink of it, my warriors wedging their muddy boots in the door I had forced open with my strength.
It was time to win a battle.
‘You challenged me, Bear-Eater.’
The bitter voice seeped from the crush of bodies around me, like juice forced from a rotten lemon.
Manguish the Bloatlord was as tall as I was, but twice as wide at the middle. He was a pox toad in slime-covered armour, a sloughing skin bladder wobbling from under his throat. The plating around his gut was warped hopelessly out of shape, slapped in sticky bandages and leaking a corrosive bile that had turned the ancient metal to yellow. One arm was a mess of tentacles wrapped around a spear. The other held a huge shield bearing the repellent icon of Nurgle. My eyes near wept to look at it. Simply being in the warrior’s presence made my throat sore. He leered at me. Helmet and face had rotted away, blurring any distinction that might have existed between the two, a squamous amalgam of metal, bone, orphaned teeth and a blubbery vocal sac.
‘I accept,’ he rasped.
I bared my teeth in anticipation and made to push my way towards him.
Before I’d taken one step, I was startled by a loud crack.
I’d grown accustomed to the periodic crackle of the Jerech pistols, but this was louder. From something bigger, and I had nothing bigger. The Gorwood was no place for the arcanery of the Ironweld, but the real reason I had none of their weaponry with me that day is that their black powder sorcery terrifies me more than any lord or daemon or god of Chaos ever could. No good will ever come of it, I tell you that now.
‘What was that?’ I yelled.
‘Nothing that I can see,’ said Broudiccan, a few strides behind me.
Crow gave a trilling bark, beak turned skyward, and I looked up.
An aetar fell.
She was belly up, wingtips rippling in the updraft, blood staining the downy feathers of her chest. My heart clenched like a fist around a good luck charm as I watched her corpse descend and then strike the snowy earth.
‘Ellias Ip Augus,’ grunted Xeros, smiling tightly as though that was one less annoying patch of grey in his neatly black and white realm.
Now don’t let this pillar of flawless machismo stood before you fool you into thinking that I don’t know the pain of losing a queen.
I don’t remember much about it now besides how it made me feel. Anger. Weakness. As though her death was my failing somehow, naturally turning the loss of another human being into something entirely about me. But such memories are mortal ephemera, baubles of gold dust and light, too fine to endure the Cairns of Tempering or the attentions of Sigmar’s Smiths. I’ve heard it said that a warrior can protect a thing that’s precious to him from Apotheosis. A child’s name. A lover’s face. A father’s gift.
Clearly, my queen was none of those things to me.
And yet Augus’ shriek cut through to it, to a grief I’d forgotten I held onto, and I knew without needing the entirety of my recollection that things were about to become dicey.
With a disharmonious creak of cloth paddles, an unlikely airship rowed into view, rising into the air from behind Kurzog’s Hill. It looked like an ironclad canoe with a sealed top, hung beneath a giant gasbag. A hunched and goggled pilot was enthroned at the rear behind a nautical wheel, adjusting the craft’s tailfin with an enormous lever and punching at an array of knobs and dials to bring flashes of green lightning and verminous squeals, followed by a brief surge of enthusiastic rowing, from the lower decks. Several of the creature’s kin, similarly outfitted against wind and cold, scuttled about the weather deck slotting long-barrelled firearms into tripod mounts and taking pot-shots at the aetar.
‘Skaven!’ I yelled.
If I distrust the Ironweld then you can well imagine what I make of the wild technotheurgical contraptions of the skaven race.
More of the obscene aircraft were rising from hiding places on the lee side of Kurzog’s Hill, shedding ice and woven mats of swamp grass with every stroke of their paddles. I scowled. That was how they had avoided detection from the air. Crackling gunfire riddled Aeygar’s eagle knights, forcing the princess into an ungainly climb. One airship almost capsized as it turned to target my warriors on the ground. Jezzails cracked and popped, one Stormcast Eternal disintegrating into lightning as his undying soul leapt towards the celestine vaults. His final conscious act was to angle his ascent through the airship that had slain him, but he was moving too fast. The airship yawed crazily as the lightning bolt ripped across its bows, paddling furiously as its pilot attacked his controls.
With a tumult of squeaking, the skaven poured out of the Nevermarsh.
They were beyond counting. Hunched, hooded, clothed in swamp-coloured rags and poorly fitted armour, weapons rusted and notched. The numberless majority anyway. Hundreds more scurried alongside the horde, clad in baroque suits of bronze studded with dials and valves like runes of power, armed with bizarre interbreedings of halberd and rifle. There were globadiers. Ratmen in homemade protective gear hauling dribbling fire throwers and rusty machine cannon. Warpstone-powered automata the size and build of bronze troggoths, bedecked in the emblems of the Clans Skyre, crushed the occasional clanrat as they clanked awkwardly towards the battle.
Broudiccan had been right, though the Six Smiths themselves would have a task in beating that admission out of me when my time again came.
I probably should have scouted the battlefield more thoroughly.
An answering bray came from the Blind Herd on Kurzog’s Hill, and I finally figured out why they hadn’t attacked yet.
They were attacking now.
‘Clever goat,’ I muttered.
From further down the hill I heard Frankos screaming for the Freeguild to turn and reform to face the skaven, but most were doing so already. There wasn’t much that could cover ground like a skaven horde on the attack, and that had a way of setting a person’s priorities for him. Beside me, Xeros’ eyes rolled back into his skull. The Lord-Relictor gibbered manically as he sent lightning bolt after lightning bolt crashing through the line of blightkings and into the gors now pounding downhill towards us.