At least, it was at the time.
I cleared my throat.
Settrus ignored me. See this paper? his aspect seemed to suggest. This paper is more important to me than you think you are.
I felt myself unconsciously deflate.
After what was, to me at least, an uncomfortably long silence, he looked up.
The white helm on his black armour looked like a skull without actually attempting to portray one. There were round slits for the eyes, but no eyes within, just black whorls, as if the sigmarite thrice-blessed was the sanctuary not of a man but of a Shyishan underworld under the temporary protection of Azyr. The harness itself was a tomb fit for a golden king. Hieroglyphics adorned the dusty black plates. Elaborate serpents wound up the arms and legs, and a fabulously crested asp fanned up from the dark ridge of sigmarite that ran behind his neck to present a halo. Settrus and his Imperishables, and indeed all the Anvils of the Heldenhammer, were intimately associated with the Realm of Death, but I had no idea who, or what, any of them had been in life.
He fixed me with that eyeless gaze.
‘Why have you come?’
That was Settrus. No preamble. No greeting. Voice like gravesand running through an hourglass.
I took a step inside, although moving against that stare is one of the hardest things I will ever do. I once saw him make a slann blink.
‘I was hoping to ask you the same question,’ I said.
‘Why I came?’
I snorted, not entirely comfortable. ‘No. Why I came.’
The Lord-Celestant stared at me a while longer.
He gestured to the table map. ‘Do you see this, Bear-Eater?’
‘More or less.’
‘When I first set foot in this citadel the page was blank. Day by day the magic fades. I can almost see it now. So it is with the keep itself, and the minds of those who, in days past, once knew of it.’
I crossed the chamber to join the Lord-Celestant in his appreciation of an essentially blank piece of paper. The not-quite-there lines made my head ache.
‘It doesn’t look like much.’
‘Soon.’ He looked up from the map. With no more than the width of a table between us, the intensity of his gaze was startling. ‘What do you know of this place?’
I leant forward. ‘Nothing.’
‘It is a Stormvault.’
I whistled.
Of course I had no idea what a Stormvault was, but it seemed the appropriate response to the sombre gravitas of the Lord-Celestant’s tone. As a storyteller myself, I understand the importance of a willing audience.
I’ve learned a thing or two since then though, so allow me to explain…
The Stormvaults were constructed by Sigmar in the Age of Myth. Holdfasts for some of the more terrible artefacts his explorations of the Mortal Realms unearthed. Dungeons for vanquished beings too potent even for the God-King to destroy outright. And when you think about some of things that Sigmar did outright destroy in his time, then you start to realise that ‘potent’ has a different meaning for Sigmar than it has for you and me.
‘What’s inside?’ I asked.
Settrus looked at me, nonplussed. ‘You would ask me that?’
‘How can you stand there and not wonder?’
‘The secret was hidden by Sigmar’s decree. The power of his writ may fade with the Necroquake, but we are the Stormcast Eternals, emissaries of his storm, and bound forever by his law.’
I nodded. My god-given authority to ignore orders without having to creatively misinterpret them first had not yet got old. I ached to know what this Stormvault held. But disagreeing with Settrus just wasn’t done. To his face, at least.
‘The Imperishables yield to no one,’ Settrus went on. ‘We will outlast Death.’
Now, I enjoy a little bravado. But the moment you realise the person genuinely means it is when it ceases to be amusing.
The Lord-Celestant studied me.
‘Your raiment has changed since our last encounter.’
I held up my arms, tilted my head back so my beard would not obscure the device on my breastplate, and grinned. ‘The finest suit of bastion plate from the smithies of Sigmaron.’
‘You have changed.’
‘I am Knight-Questor now.’
‘And the God-King delivers you to me?’
He extended his hand across the table. I hesitated a moment, surprised more than anything, before offering mine. We gripped forearms.
Apparently it’s in the manner of warriors. To be honest, I only started to do it because everyone seems to expect it.
The dark wells of Settrus’ eyes seemed to wobble in their steady swirl and he released me sharply.
I’ve witnessed some horrors in my time, but seeing the Lord-Celestant of the Imperishables take a backward step ranks highly amongst them.
‘I will take your timely arrival as an omen from Sigmar,’ he said
‘Probably wise,’ I said, forcing a grin.
‘You will fight with us.’ It was, I noted, not a question.
‘I’ll… fight,’ I said, easing back from the table.
Settrus turned back to his invisible map.
I couldn’t get outside fast enough.
Nassam hurried after me, the scuff of his sankritt leather boots drowned out by the echo of my sigmarite thrice-blessed on ancient stone. My greater-than-human stride forced the Jerech into an awkward trot, making my pace appear far more nonchalant than it actually was. I was breaking at least half a dozen of Sigmar’s oldest and mightiest rules just by trying to find the Stormvault, but you cannot put the Bear-Eater in a castle and point to him the door he cannot open. The lure for me was twofold. I could glimpse an ancient treasure, perhaps even a weapon, and wait there for whatever minion Nagash had commanded here to come to me, for the vault’s treasure was surely what they sought.
I could just wait this out, kill him or her, and claim all the glory.
The difficulty, of course, lay in finding something expressly engineered to be hidden even from the gods.
If I had an advantage it was that the power of obfuscation was obviously failing, and that the castle itself was not large. The bustle and din of its soldiers filtered like the dust of ages through the columns of the pristine, almost consecrated spaces of its inner halls. I found myself wandering in silent amazement that Settrus and his warriors could have been two hundred strides hence and never been tempted to venture this far.
And therein lay my second, arguably greater, advantage.
Whether it was conscious or unconscious, the Imperishables avoided this part of the keep. I could tell by the muddy footprints, equipment and general scuffing that was evident everywhere else but here.
The inner courtyard was a grandly colonnaded hall, designed for a more enlightened age and, one imagines, eagles. Aetar soared through dizzying frescoes, their flights encircling the golden apex figure of Sigmar.
Over the later panels, the aetar gradually diminished in prominence and number. Sigmar no longer appeared. Humans replaced them. By their appearance, garb and predisposition towards being depicted in poses of prayer, I assumed them to be flagellants. In one large scene, a thousand-strong congregation bore an old woman through the Stormvault’s radiant gates. She was wearing chains. Some kind of Ghurite spirit deity or demigoddess of the land, I imagined. I had encountered the like myself. A wayward power that Sigmar had been unable, or for some reason unwilling, to recruit to his Pantheon or destroy out of hand.