Broudiccan grabbed me by the arm and hauled me back towards the dubious protection of the Jerech.
‘The battle is lost,’ he growled. ‘We must withdraw.’
I shook him off. ‘Hamilcar does not lose.’ I shouted it at the top of my voice, the Jerech heartening to it with cries of ‘Hamilcar!’ Such was the reputation that I had built for myself that even now, outnumbered and surrounded, they didn’t believe that I could fail. And I wouldn’t. I would drag victory from the gums of defeat, no matter how diseased, no matter how many pieces it came out in. I would have sooner gone back to the Celestial Forges for a century of agonies than walk back to the Seven Words from there and explain to Akturus and Vikaeus how I had marched two thousand men into a skaven trap.
Manguish the Bloatlord was still within my grasp and Hamilcar Bear-Eater would have his prey. I lunged for him with a yell.
The Nurglite was a blob of corpse flesh in armour and about as mobile. My first blow neatly skewered one of the bandaged splits in his armour and slid my halberd’s spike into his belly. He was remarkably stoic about it, even for a follower of Grandfather Pox. His throat sac quivered wetly, which I took for laughter.
‘You will need to try harder than that, Bear-Eater.’
‘We’re not even sweating yet.’
I ripped my halberd from the Bloatlord’s belly and spun it overhead. No blood trickled from the wound. A little pus. A solitary maggot. I chopped down. Manguish whacked my wrist with his shield, then thrust at me with his spear. I jumped back, but the tentacles with which the Bloatlord held his spear seemed to have several feet of length bound up in their coils. A few inches of extension saw me stabbed in the shoulder. The sigmarite shrugged off the blow, but even so, that had been too close.
I had a reputation to protect.
Manguish cackled. ‘The energy Kurzog put into laying this trap, it would have been simpler just to kill you.’ He gave a sigh of long and joyful suffering. ‘But what is done is done.’
With a roar, I went at him again. Woodsman’s strokes. Looping figures of eight. Looking to just lop bits off now, rather than waste time and effort piercing or impaling. Possessed of neither extraordinary weapon skill nor layers of guile to supplement his glaring immobility, the Bloatlord had little option but to give out as he received. Spear and halberd were hardly classic duelling weapons anyway and to any onlooker we must have looked like frenzied pugilists rather than warring champions, two titans thwacking one another with pointed sticks.
Not that anyone was watching.
The implosive retort of a starsoul mace told me that Broudiccan was quite busy nearby, while Xeros’ lightning continued to craze across my peripheral vision. Crow yipped and snarled, but muffled, as though his beak were full. Even the Jerech were too occupied to notice me, a cordon of glassy blades and leather struggling to hold back a rising swell of blightkings and beastmen and, already, skaven. Any other mortal regiment under any other commander would have broken by now.
But not my regiment.
Not while I still lived.
The ground beneath us shuddered, a blast of Frankos’ war-horn demolishing a massed skaven assault on the base of the hill. Men and beasts toppled all around me, and Manguish wobbled like a jellyfish in an earthquake. Freezing air billowed from my mouth and fogged about my beard as I hacked through the Bloatlord’s spear with a cry. Bits of tentacle flopped to the ground with the broken spear half, wriggling like beheaded worms. Manguish blubbered in fury until my backswing split his throat sac. Noxious air fled in a wheeze. He struggled to say something, black teeth sticking out of his lipless mouth clacking together. The flaccid skin of his neck quivered breathlessly. He retreated behind his shield as I drew my halberd overhead. I kicked his shield hard, knocking him down. He squirmed like a turtle on its back.
‘Bah. Try harder, he says.’ I unhooked my warding lantern from my thigh-plate. It was a beacon of Azyr, encased within ornate shutters of orichalcum and electrum and purple stones. The engravings depicted a diorama of winged warriors leading a retinue of mail-clad bears towards the High Star. ‘Crow will have to try harder than this when he comes to passing your brethren tomorrow.’
I unshuttered the lantern.
The globe of a warding lantern is more than a receptacle for the light of Azyr. It is a lens for the storm energy and purity of its wielder’s soul. I feel it uplift me. My aches diminish. The cold departs my skin as an inner warmth rises to displace it. Even the dents and nicks in my armour are glossed over. Where my soul’s fury alights on the impure however, flesh sizzles and armour corrodes.
The Bloatlord gurgled noisomely, but mercifully quietly. He was a puddle of fat and liquefied armour when I closed my lantern again.
I looked up at an excited chittering to see a particularly large skaven in red-brown armour pointing at me with a cleaver. Its warriors squealed, the glimpse of my light working the ratmen into such a lather that I wondered if some sorcery of theirs was affecting my lantern somehow. As things would turn out, that was horribly prescient, if premature. And so, holding the lantern towards the clawleader, I unshuttered it again. The big skaven shrieked as smoke poured off its fur. It dropped its weapon and fell, rolling through the snow until Hamuz el-Shaah, neither hindered nor healed by my light, stabbed it through the neck.
It seemed to be doing the trick as far as I could see.
With the demise of their leader the remaining skaven were typically swift in turning tail, but there were plenty more where they came from, all equally determined to get through. The Blue Skies were crumbling like stone before a chisel holding them off, and the verminous warriors were boiling through by the score. I beheaded one before it could reach me. Xeros obliterated another dozen, but the vermintide was coming in and it was unstoppable. That the skaven were trying quite obviously to get to me struck me as entirely within the realms of the ordinary, given my repute in the Ghurlands, and I didn’t consider it further.
‘Lord-Castellant!’ Broudiccan screamed. He was grappling with a blightking, his armour gashed and bloody. The starsoul mace throbbed hungrily in the mud that had been churned up beneath the two warriors’ feet. ‘Call the retreat!’
Before I could give that my blessing I heard an all-too-familiar bleat of laughter.
My face hardened.
Kurzog.
In defence of what comes next, you should understand that I’d had little practice in handling a personal nemesis. Mannfred von Carstein had been a pox on the Hallowed Knights’ house, not mine. The Great Red had been swiftly despatched. The battle of Gnarlwood had been too impersonal and too vast. Kurzog, on the other hand, had left me looking the fool a few times too many, and today was shaping up to be a bad day of a particularly brazen and noteworthy kind.
I spun away from my second and glared into the braying ranks of the beast herd.
Brayseer Kurzog was a hound in his master’s clothes. Goat-headed. Dreadlocked. Dark skin pierced with human bones. A tattered magister’s robe wrung the life out of too-broad shoulders and backward-jointed legs. It was torn open at the chest, revealing a wiry scruff of black hair. Tattoos moved about beneath it like armies through the Gorwood. He wielded a dogwood staff, scent-marked by his daemonic patrons and the demi-beasts of the dire wood, scratched with the ninety-nine secrets of the Architect of Fate. A hideous little tretchlet thing fluttered about his brow, shedding glitter, pausing every now and then to whisper something in one bent ear or to gesticulate furiously down at me.