‘Moha bet five shells that you would fall in,’ said Akbu, conversationally, as another skull screamed over our heads, smashing into the built-up areas of the pontoons in a gout of flame. The maorai craned his neck to pick out a woman with a face like a salted chop and leaning on a pole arm of sharpened coral. ‘You are an imp squid, Moha, always squirting your coin into the ocean. The Castle Lord Hamilcar,’ I had long given up trying to make the Nemesians say Lord-Castellant, and here Akbu bent stiffly to slap his thigh, ‘he has legs like limpet stalks.’
I was assuming this was a higher compliment than it sounded.
I looked back over my shoulder to where the waves crashed against the gabion blocks. Rocks and shells had been stuffed into iron baskets, red with rust and seaweed, built into a perimeter wall on a colossal scale. Kelp fronds and accumulated driftwood bobbed with the waves. It was curiously inviting. I sighed, and for a moment the shrieks of the artillery ships, the crackle of the burning city, the endless jibes of the maorai were all sucked into the lap of the waves.
I could just hurl myself in and swim out to Blackjaw’s flagship, or die in the attempt. That, at least, would be an end that the Nemesians would speak about for a hundred years.
Had I been entirely myself then I probably would have done it, too. At the very least I would have loudly made the suggestion, and then laughed it off as the maorai talked me down, but my heart wasn’t in it. For all the soaring bellicosity of my highs, I was as prone to crushing lows from which even Korghos Khul with a ribbon around his neck would struggle to rouse me. These bouts were rare, thank Sigmar, and tended to pass swiftly.
I could feel one tightening around my skull as we spoke.
I jumped down from the battlements and onto the walkway. ‘I’m going to get some sleep.’
That a warrior, even a nominal commander such as myself, should just decide to leave his post for an hour or two struck no one as grounds for complaint. They were maorai. They took orders from no one and did as they pleased.
‘Good idea,’ said Akbu. ‘If anything will make Blackjaw properly attack the wall then it will be the sight of your back.’
I smiled, not entirely faking it. ‘I’d show him my arse if I thought it would help.’
Akbu and his warrior band burst with sudden laughter, for nothing tickles the outrageously well-wrapped Nemesians like an exposed body part.
With that, I left them to it. I tried not to feel too bad about it. I was just as capable of being blown to pieces by artillery fire from the pontoons as I was on the gabion-walls.
To see Nemisuvik now is to see a provincial backstop that the new Age has largely left behind. Caught within the abyssal currents of the Stormwilds, there are few places in existence that are harder to get to or more pointless to fight over. To see it as it was at the outbreak of the Realmgate Wars was to see a city whose isolation had given it licence to prosper. At the time, it was one of the greatest unconquered cities in the realms, rivalled only by Azyrheim, Nulahmia and perhaps a handful of others.
The city was spread across fifteen blubbery pontoons, each big enough to float several hundred homes. To walk its bridges and ropeways was to meander through the madness of the ocean bestiarist or the taxidermist. You were as likely to be presented with a lurkinarth carcass as a driftwood shack. The gigantic rotunda built from leviadon shells and deepwater beasts towered over those lesser dwellings, encrusted with turrets and minarets of caulked wood, silhouetted by fire. For the first few days after my arrival, there had been screams. Not now. No one screamed any more unless they were actually on fire.
It really was quite the liberation that Sigmar had brought to Nemisuvik.
You would be forgiven for thinking that the locals must have resented him, and me by extension, for all of this. But that would be to completely misread the Nemesian character. I was but one Stormcast Eternal in a city of thousands of mortals, but they did not see the thousands of warriors who had not come. They saw it through the lens of their own traditions.
They saw the one warrior who had.
I made my way across the interconnecting bridges towards the central pontoon, known as Katuunak to the locals. The buildings there were taller and finer, or at least as tall and fine as you can get when your principal building materials are dead animals and the bits that have fallen off other people’s ships. They had been decorated with shells and nacre, painted with the pigments of the ocean. Several had been destroyed by Blackjaw’s war machines, and the weight imbalance had caused the pontoon to list noticeably. The northern rim rode a good three feet above the water, whereas the southern was submerged, and I had to walk against an incline to reach the rail that surrounded the saltwater lake at Katuunak’s centre. My intention had been to stand and watch the still water for an hour or two before returning to the gabion-wall. The bombardment caused it to tremble like a puddle with the approach of a Dracoth, but I found its stillness otherwise to be soothing.
I had barely caught a glimpse of the water after crossing from the outer promenade to the inner, when I found myself in the unlikely scene of a riot.
Now in any other city after so many years under siege, a little rioting would have been entirely expected. But when you consider that the single most exciting day of this war – when the lightning bolt delivering me from Azyr had burned down half of the Igulik pontoon – had been greeted with a sigh and another cup of broth, it was frankly surreal. A scrum had formed, comprising about fifty men and women. The two were largely interchangeable in their thick blubber coats as they pushed against a handful of warriors.
From where I was standing, it looked as though something had inflamed the folk of Katuunak to such an extent that they were looking to throw themselves into the lake. The pontoon guards were all huge men, and they were holding the crowd back, but more seemed to be turning up to pile on all the time.
I felt my heart begin to race.
With hindsight, my first instinct – that Blackjaw had somehow evaded the nets, the sea monsters, the rock armour and ballista boxes to come under the city and land on Katuunak pontoon – was foolish. It was really just wishful thinking on my part. I was spoiling for a fight and would have gladly squared up to Khorne himself if the challenge had been offered. At least I was thinking clearly enough to slide my halberd into its bracket across my backplate before striding into the melee.
‘What’s happening here?’ I bellowed.
Someone stupidly threw a punch at me. I parried it on my wrist, turned it across me, opening up the unwise pugilist’s belly into which I obligingly planted a fist of my own. The man folded over before flying backwards into the scrum like a cannon ball.
‘Castle Lord!’ one of the guards cried out over the distant rumble of artillery, fending off three men with his spear held horizontal, an elbow in his face. ‘Help us!’
‘No!’ From the hubbub of voices in the crowd.
‘Feed Angujakkak!’