HAMILCAR
The Age of Enlightenment
(David Guymer)
From the maelstrom of a sundered world, the Eight Realms were born. The formless and the divine exploded into life.
Strange, new worlds appeared in the firmament, each one gilded with spirits, gods and men. Noblest of the gods was Sigmar. For years beyond reckoning he illuminated the realms, wreathed in light and majesty as he carved out his reign. His strength was the power of thunder. His wisdom was infinite. Mortal and immortal alike kneeled before his lofty throne. Great empires rose and, for a while, treachery was banished. Sigmar claimed the land and sky as his own and ruled over a glorious age of myth.
But cruelty is tenacious. As had been foreseen, the great alliance of gods and men tore itself apart. Myth and legend crumbled into Chaos. Darkness flooded the realms. Torture, slavery and fear replaced the glory that came before. Sigmar turned his back on the mortal kingdoms, disgusted by their fate. He fixed his gaze instead on the remains of the world he had lost long ago, brooding over its charred core, searching endlessly for a sign of hope. And then, in the dark heat of his rage, he caught a glimpse of something magnificent. He pictured a weapon born of the heavens. A beacon powerful enough to pierce the endless night. An army hewn from everything he had lost.
Sigmar set his artisans to work and for long ages they toiled, striving to harness the power of the stars. As Sigmar’s great work neared completion, he turned back to the realms and saw that the dominion of Chaos was almost complete. The hour for vengeance had come. Finally, with lightning blazing across his brow, he stepped forth to unleash his creations.
The Age of Sigmar had begun.
‘After my spirited departure from the Seven Words, I journeyed north towards Brachys Sound and the Sea of Scales, eager to put as much distance as I could, and, with any luck, an ocean, between myself and the Knights Merciless. With Aeygar on my side and the head start I enjoyed, I knew that the swiftest Zephyros in Sigmaron was never going to catch me – I think I just enjoyed seeing how fast the eagle could go.
‘By some roundabout route we found ourselves in the Unchained Lands. You’ve not heard of them? I’m not surprised. I forget now where they are exactly, and you’ll find them on no map. Believe me, I’ve looked. How I wound up there, or why, or what became of them in the years since… that I couldn’t tell you. Which, now I look back on it does seem a little strange…’
‘Hamilcar!’
With a fierce shriek, Aeygar trimmed her wings and banked us left. Her shadow rippled across the battlements beneath us, and I shared in the aetar’s joy at her speed and power as she outpaced it. The air, as it generally was in this part of Ghur, was both humid and warm, and smelled distinctly of boar. The banners of about forty Freeguild regiments blustered in her downwash. I don’t recall now any of the banners I saw there that day. But someone clearly recognised me.
‘Hamilcar!’
After the first voice had flung my name into the air, it took wings of its own.
‘Hamilcar! Hamilcar! Hamilcar!’
It became a chant that swiftly raced ahead of us.
I grinned broadly and pumped one fist in the air.
The walls quaked in response. Excelsior warpriests grew strident in their prayers. Collegiate battlemages more daring in their castings. Crossbows spat with more zing. Even the batteries of Greywater greatcannons seemed to belch out greater volumes of smoke and fire, and who knows, maybe even did some damage amidst the chainrasp hordes and spirit hosts streaming across the causeway bridges from the Unchained Lands.
‘Soldiers of Sigmar!’ I yelled. ‘Cease your prayers, for they have been answered. The God-King sends you Hamilcar!’
I nudged Aeygar with my knees to descend and circle back.
The aetar craned her long neck to regard me regally.
‘Ahem.’ I coughed into my gauntlet. ‘Around and back, princess. If you don’t mind.’
She threw her beak wide and shrieked.
‘What are we waiting for, lord?’ said Nassam.
Despite his quiet state of polite terror, the Jerech man was as immaculately turned out as always. The short trousers he wore were neat, and somehow more-or-less white in spite of the bug splatter that was something of an unavoidable hazard when travelling in Ghur. His breastplate was a piece of polished quartz, two inches thick and alive with colours. His sleeves were pinched at the wrists with jewels. His fingers were ringed. His turban was neat, as though it had been tied just then, with a disc of gold and amber pinned to the front. His bushy moustache was lightly greased, a trick we had picked up from the lowland nomads that was supposed to keep biting insects at bay.
I looked as though I’d fallen out of bed and into an armoury.
‘Keeping them hungry, my friend.’ I pointed to where a Scourge fleetmaster in dark armour draped in sea dragon scales appeared to be in charge. ‘There, Aeygar. Put us down there.’
With quick, strident wingbeats, Aeygar descended to the parapet, scattering a unit of Darkshard crossbowmen and a grim company of aelf halberdiers wearing black helmets and mail. Her long talons scraped on the stonework as she shuffled, acclimatising to the new sense of being earthbound, and then flung out her wings as if to stretch. Their span rivalled the battlement itself, interfering with the Helstorm rocket crew embedded in the battery tower to my left. (And a good thing too – the thing is a death trap!) The blued steel and platinum scales of her torque dazzled in the light, the circlet on her aquiline brow a thread of starsilver.
Lifting her long neck to the sky, she issued a shriek of such bellicosity it would probably have split ordinary, unwarded stone.
‘All right, princess,’ I muttered as I dismounted. ‘Now you’re just showing off.’
She cocked her head, looking at me askance, and gave an innocent crow that I wasn’t buying for a second.
Nassam hurriedly climbed down.
‘This wall’s a shade on the small side for the both of us, my lady,’ I shouted back up. ‘Why don’t you go and see what you can do from the air.’
With a twinkle in her eye, Aeygar turned, stepped up onto the merlons and launched herself back into the abyss.
Her hunting cry lingered on the muggy air.
‘Stay behind me,’ I said to Nassam.
Bladegheists and glaivewraiths surged over the walls as though the fortifications weren’t emblazoned with twelve-pointed stars and blessed starwater: a spectral torrent of limbs and hooded ghost-faces, of manacles and scythes and massive tomb blades, attacking with the frenzy of a dying man seeking life.
Now don’t get me wrong, I enjoy a battle as much as the next barbarian king. But with the dead it’s all so… soulless. No rabble-rousing cheers. No rambling speeches. No tears of frustration or screams of triumph. The dead don’t posture their way through the first hours of a battle declaiming past glories, or describe in grisly detail the fate that awaits your skull before its dutiful conveyance to the Skull Throne of Khorne.
Call me old fashioned, but if you don’t have any of that then I don’t see how you’re supposed to know that you’ve been in a battle.
Suddenly, a behemoth dropped onto the walls from on high.
It flapped its tiny wings, ignoring the aelf halberdiers who swept in to engage it, before propelling itself at me with a ferocity you don’t expect from a creature of Death.
I spun my halberd from the wrist, meeting every blow of its spirit sword with sigmarite blade or ironoak shaft. But the war machine was relentless. Every blow ground me back. Supernatural hate had been beaten into the baroque armour that encased its skeleton. Spirit energies seethed from between its bones. It was as tall as three big men, with the strength of twenty.