I looked down at it.
‘What in Sigendarrrrgh!’
The last bit of breath burst from me, and suddenly I was moving, yanked out of the cloud, free of the school of predators, dragged through the water as though I were holding on to a speeding allopex by the tailfin.
Then I was away. Clear. Everything about me was seethe and churn, raining out, vistas chopping between burning sky, boiling ocean, and vice versa. I gasped like a newborn – more seawater in it than air, but like ambrosia to me, let me tell you. I gave my head a brutal shake, water sliding off the suckered mass of translucent grey that held me above the frothing, bloody water.
‘Oh gods, no.’
The Grey King of Nemisuvik filled the visible ocean like a fractured iceberg, tentacles spread out over what must have been miles. I saw the ungodly behemoth that had come a halberd’s length from taking me whole, flapping helplessly between two coiled tentacles, trapped about fifty feet above the waves. Gasping creatures twitched and struggled in a hundred separate grips. It was as if the ocean had been dredged of all life. The only reason I wasn’t a meal already was that the King had an enviable glut from which to choose. As I watched, a struggling fish with the same stocky build and phenomenal upper body musculature of a celestial Dracoth went into the King’s mouth with a slippery crunch. Blood stained his ghastly, chewing jaws, bearded with pseudotentacles and ropes of blubbery tissue.
It had hardly been deliberate, but I had goaded him on blood all right.
I’d given him an ocean.
Looking furiously around, I spotted one of Blackjaw’s hellish vessels. It was black-hulled, with a single square sail bearing the emblem of a black-bearded skull. Its oars had been splintered down one side, its rudder hoisted high in the air as its prow sank under the massive weight of the tentacle draped across it. The tentacle had crushed the daemonic figurehead that had been there, carved from red wood and living skin, and the infernal siege cannon that had been situated above it.
Frenzied bloodreavers attacked the tentacle that was slowly sinking their ship with axes and with fire. They might as well have been trying to chew through marble with their teeth for all the effect they were having. I watched them, all corded muscle and heathenish tattoos, swollen with daemonic fervour and unholy strength.
I can’t tell you how energising it was to finally lay eyes on my enemy.
With a long-frustrated howl of aggression, I struck my halberd through the tentacle that held me. Where the bloodreavers hacked ineffectually, my blade was blessed sigmarite, starforged under the Auroral Tempest by the first of the Six Smiths, and it sheared through scale, cartilage and sinew in one clean slice.
Blood gushed from the stricken limb. For a bizarre moment, I was weightless, watching the monster’s blood cascade away and his limbs uncoil while I hung there, motionless.
And then, with a joyous bellow, I fell.
I had timed my blow for the moment that the whipping tentacle put the bloodreavers’ vessel beneath me. It had been my intention to land on the weather deck, then butcher as many of the savages as I could before succumbing to their numbers. But once again, my thoughts were lagging well behind my actions.
I hit the weather deck more or less as planned, only to punch straight through the blood-drenched timbers, landing hard across the back of a cannon. A lesser warrior than I would have permitted his spine to break with such a steep fall and unfortunate landing, but I’m made of sterner stuff. I grunted, dazed, sore, shaking off the woody haze that seemed to drift over me like a curtain in the breeze.
A roar like an almighty brass gong being struck right above my ear snapped me right out of it.
A hammer came down.
I rolled aside.
The cannon exploded into a million pieces. I looked up into the stretched, gloriously overmuscled features of a slaughterpriest, the sort of figure that might tempt men less confident in their own god-wrought physique to the worship of Khorne. The low roof of the gun deck forced him to hunch, a bunching of muscle and sinew that only served to overplay his ridiculous stature.
‘I am Aaksor of the Eight-Times-Bloodied Path,’ he drawled, drunk on murder, his smile distended by the weights piercing the muscle of his face. ‘Ordained in desecration and dismay.’
I felt all of the tension run right out of me. ‘Thank you,’ I said.
He looked momentarily puzzled.
‘This is how a fight between champions should go.’
With an outraged roar he swung his hammer overhead, a downward arc for my chest. My halberd nipped out neatly, catching Aaksor’s descending hammerhead and sending both weapons crashing to the deckboards with the wreckage of the cannon. I kicked up, drove my boot heel through his loincloth. He staggered back, which frankly was the very least he could do under the circumstances. I rolled up onto my knee, throwing a flurry of quick punches into his gut. The muscle there was slabbed on like armour. He dragged back on his hammer. I caught the inside of his wrist, dug in with my fingernails until blood flowed. He gasped like a Slaaneshi. Then I grabbed him between the legs with my free hand and, with a shout that put his kind to shame, I lifted him off the deck, rose to standing and threw him through the gun port behind me.
There was a splash, and then a moment later I saw him again, swinging uselessly about at the end of a milky grey tentacle.
He rose out of view.
The ship gave a lurch, growling like a she-bear about to give birth, as I shook myself off and hurried back up the steps to the upper decks.
The ship was going down. Even I could see that. The angle of its bowsprit was more reminiscent of an arrow sticking out of the ground than a ship at sail. Howling bloodreavers hacked away at the tentacle draped across their prow with increasing desperation. Waves crashed into them, foam spraying over the gunwales to slick the heaving deck. And that was before the second tentacle slid out of the water to encircle the ship’s midline and squeezed, making the already suffering vessel creak.
I had no sympathy for it.
Looking around from the vantage of the dying ship’s weather deck, I could see several others just like it. A fleet of them. Twenty, maybe. They were caught like the one I was on, some hoisted right out of the water, bloody brine draining from their bilges, others dragged under, crushed like so much cheap Ghyranite tat. The catapults, I noticed with enormous satisfaction, had fallen silent.
I had done this.
In freeing the Grey King, however unintentionally, I had turned this battle. Now all I had to do was ensure I received the proper glory for it.
In the midst of that spume and feeding frenzy, I marked a particularly large warship, three-masted, bronze-clad, blistered with infernal engines of war and swarming with crimson-armoured Blood Warriors. Her square sails were black, rippling under the tug of the wind when they should have been taut. Like a liquid. It sailed slowly through the carnage, coming about, extending oars, looking to pull away, its gunnery accursed and powerful enough to hold the tentacles of the Grey King at bay, at least so long as there was a fleet to occupy his hunger.
Blackjaw’s ship. It had to be.
And he was trying to run, the swine.
I looked desperately about the seething mass of tentacles and breaking ships, trying to figure a way to reach my enemy before he was completely beyond my reach. If recent experience had taught me anything, and never let it be said that Hamilcar Bear-Eater does not learn from his mistakes, it was that swimming was not an option.