I snorted. I was with her there.
She looked down at her hands. ‘I was not young when I entered this place. I had risen to command the cult in Ghur. I had lived two hundred years. But I was healthy. My faith kept me strong.’ She raised her hands to me. They were wizened and they trembled. ‘See what my servitude has brought me. And I felt it all.’
‘You still look fair to me, my lady,’ I said.
‘Gallant. Is that your task from the God-King, Knight-Questor? To flatter me?’
‘No.’ I tapped on my breastplate. ‘That is from me.’
In spite of her blatant misery, she smiled.
‘The Penumbral Engines took great power,’ she said. ‘And faith… faith was my power. Or so it once was. That was why my own followers entombed me here within this vault. That was my task from the God-King.’
‘I fear your task is done. I am told that the Necroquake has damaged the Engine irreparably.’
‘I only wish that it had. At least then I would not have to agonise over my choice.’
‘What do you mean? What choice?’
‘Can you not see for yourself? The orrery continues to turn. The Penumbral Engine works as well now as the day the Great Maker set it from his forge.’ She was silent a moment. ‘Nightmares of death stirred me. They were strong enough to wake me, breaking my connection to the Penumbral Engine. Long enough for me to break free from it.’
‘But why…’ I said, genuinely unable to comprehend it. ‘Why would you want to do that?’
Ansira laughed a quiet, miserable laugh.
Nassam looked up from the bow he had been crouched in for about ten minutes. ‘Can you not return to it, sainted one?’
‘Never,’ said Ansira. Her voice was like slate. Brittle, but, from another angle, also hard. Black as the skies of Ulgu at night.
‘The lords of undeath that assail us will forget why they attack,’ Nassam pressed. ‘The siege will lift. The God-King’s treasures will be hidden again as he intended for them to be.’
‘I said no,’ said Ansira, her aura briefly flaring, and Nassam swiftly signed the hammer and averted his gaze with a muttered prayer. I winced. ‘If I had known then what it was I submitted to, the millennia of pain that awaited me. No. No. What loving god would abuse his faithful so?’
This was a question that only a Stormcast Eternal could properly answer.
‘I know the torment you speak of.’
I recalled the splitting of thunder, my physical body breaking under the blows of hammers, the better parts of myself falling from me as sparks, impurities of mortality to be beaten from the instrument of blessed sigmarite that the work of the God-King demanded me to be.
There are Stormcasts who embrace the storm with as much abandon as I profess to and they are, to a man and woman, all fools.
‘I understand,’ I said
‘You think so?’
‘Yes, my lady. Sigmar…’ I gritted my teeth and glanced at Nassam. A silent instruction that the words I uttered now were a secret to remain forever within the confines of the Stormvault, ‘…demands much of those to whom much has been given.’
‘I can see what he has given you, Knight-Questor. You are tall, strong, mighty. A panoply to match your fine body. Look at me, Hamilcar. What has this god of ours given me that he can demand so much?’
I waved my hand as though this should be obvious. We were getting closer towards my element here. Settrus and his Imperishables could fight until the Old Ones came home, but I could wrap up the whole affair right then and there.
All I had to do was convince a high priestess of Sigmar where her devotion lay.
‘He has given you a purpose.’
She snorted.
I blinked, taken aback.
‘And what purpose?’ she said.
‘You have kept one of his greatest secrets here, my lady. And spared the realms the ruin of those who would misuse it.’
‘Are you a fool, Bear-Eater. Or is it merely an act?’
‘My… lady?’
She shook her head sadly. ‘The realms have been brought to ruin so many times while I’ve slept that I have lost count of the times. The two Great Waaaghs! of Gorkamorka. Another so-called ally and brother of the God-King. Then Chaos. The wars of Death.’ She rested her head back upon her cushioned seat. ‘Ambersand no longer even exists. My temple was crushed under the foot of the Great Green God not a hundred years after my confinement. So tell me, wise one, what exactly has my torment saved the Mortal Realms from?’
‘You can’t know how much worse things might have been.’
‘Believe me, Hamilcar. I have had a long time to imagine.’
‘Do you even know what the Stormvault contains?’
‘A weapon.’
My eyebrow lifted.
‘Take it if you want,’ Ansira muttered into her cushion. ‘I no longer believe that it matters.’
My fingers flexed of their own volition. They were tempted. Awfully tempted.
‘Lord Hamilcar would never betray the faith of the God-King,’ said Nassam.
I frowned. But he was probably right.
‘Sigmar has blessed you with long life,’ I said. ‘Longer than most mortals could imagine. Who else can say they have served their god as long or as well? Even for an immortal like me, the realms are too full of dangers for us to expect the span that you have seen. Even if much of it has been visions of horror, you must have seen as well the embers of hope. With the help of his faithful it was Sigmar who did this. Return to the Penumbral Engine, and as Hamilcar Bear-Eater stands before you now you’ll live to see the return of a Golden Age to the Mortal Realms.’
‘Eternal life is a cruel gift to bestow on one in constant pain. Is that something Sigmar would do? Or would you think that the hallmark of his nemeses within the Dark Pantheon? Look at me, Bear-Eater. Look at me. If you came upon a warrior of yours in this state, would you not deliver them mercy?’
‘But you have power, my lady.’
‘The power to do only his bidding. The power to suffer forever in his name. To a conviction I no longer share. My power came from my faith, so if, in my heart, I deny him, do I still have power?’ She closed her eyes. I think she wept anew. ‘Leave me, Bear-Eater. I will not be persuaded.’
‘But–’
‘You waste your gifts arguing with an old woman. Even if you could somehow persuade me, it would do you no good.’
‘Why not?’
Her smile was brief and broken. That of a lifelong captive gifted one last day in the sun before her end. ‘Because I do not have faith.’
A rumbling crash from somewhere above us reverberated through the vault. We weren’t so far from the walls that we couldn’t hear the screams. The orrery spun on, regardless. I took its cue and tried to ignore it.
‘Lord?’ said Nassam.
‘But when I entered,’ I said, ignoring him, my eyes fixed on the old priestess, ‘you told me that you were praying.’
‘I was,’ she said, and with her eyes closed she smiled. ‘I was praying for death.’
As if in response to that dire pronouncement, the great aetar-made walls shook. The air grew hot, the arcane machine that whirred around us seething as master rune after master rune exerted against some inimical working of magic. Now, I’m no sorcerer, as I’m sure you don’t need me to tell you, but I’m as much a creature of the Cosmic Storm as I am a warrior of flesh and blood. Even I could sense the great tide of undeath that that casting had set loose. I heard the clatter of hooves, screams getting closer. A potent wielder of Shyish was approaching, his full attentions turned upon the Stormvault at last.