Gods & Mortals Page 22

  ‘To test yourself. To see if you were worthy of wielding these weapons you seek.’

  ‘I would not be here if I were not,’ Ahazian said. He twisted aside and then lunged back, grabbing the axe by the haft. Volundr laughed and jerked him off his feet. He slammed Ahazian back against the wall with humiliating ease, holding him pinned.

  ‘No. I suppose not.’ Volundr studied him for a moment. ‘They are not here, you know. They were lost. Scattered across the Mortal Realms by unknown hands.’

  ‘Then why call me here?’ Ahazian demanded, struggling to get free.

  ‘To see if you are worthy of the quest. Do you think yourself one of the Godchosen, then, Ahazian Kel? Are you one of the eight champions destined to wield the Lamentations in Khorne’s name, in the final bloodletting, when the stars themselves are snuffed out?’

  Ahazian clawed at the haft of the axe, trying to free himself. He lashed out at Volundr with his feet. It felt like kicking stone. Volundr chuckled. ‘Or perhaps such dreams are beyond you. Maybe you are simply a butcher, seeking a better quality of blade. Which is it?’

  ‘It is whichever Khorne wills,’ Ahazian hissed. ‘I am his weapon, to wield as he sees fit.’ He thrust his fingers into the eye slits of Volundr’s helm. The skullgrinder roared in fury and stumbled back, releasing him. Ahazian crumpled to the ground, gasping. Volundr had dropped the axe, and was clutching at his helm. Ahazian snatched the weapon up and lunged to his feet. He swung it towards Volundr’s neck. But, at the last moment, he pulled the blow.

  Volundr lowered his hands. His eyes gleamed, in the depths of his helm. ‘Very good. You have a brain, Ekran.’ He straightened. ‘More than I can say for some of the others. But then, my brothers have never been as particular as myself, regarding their tools.’

  ‘Tool,’ Ahazian repeated. ‘Those others, they were summoned as I was.’ He thought of the brute, and wondered whether such a creature would have the wit to pass such a test. He doubted it. But perhaps the other Forgemasters valued different properties in their tools.

  Volundr nodded. ‘By my brothers. The other remaining Forgemasters.’

  ‘Why? To what purpose?’

  Volundr turned back to his anvil. ‘The time for war – the last war – will soon be upon us. The weak gods of the lesser realms have returned to contest our dominion anew, even as Khorne’s brothers scheme in the shadows between worlds.’ He slammed his hammer down on the anvil. ‘The Eight Lamentations must be found. And we will find them. You will be my hand in this task, as the others who were called will serve my brothers.’

  Ahazian nodded. He’d been right. It had been a test, all of it.

  ‘And it still is,’ Volundr said, as if reading his thoughts. ‘If you are brave enough to continue. Your destiny awaits, Ahazian Kel. Will you falter?’

  ‘I told you before – I am Khorne’s, to wield as he sees fit.’

  Volundr nodded and struck the anvil again. ‘Good. Then I will not have to shatter your skull on my anvil.’

  Ahazian extended the haft of the axe to Volundr. ‘A good weapon. But not what I came for.’

  Volundr shook his head. ‘No.’ He chuckled and struck the anvil one last time.

  ‘But it will serve until you have a better one.’

  BEAR EATER

  David Guymer

  The sun was searing bright, the sky a lens of crystal blue, shaped by gods for the glorification of their oasis of light. Towers of white stone with domed roofs of mosaic gold shone with a splendour that stole a man’s breath, and drew sweat even from an immortal’s brow. The trek across the Sea of Bones had been arduous, but dust and battle damage aside, the dozen Astral Templars still standing could outshine any Mortal Realm for glory.

  Liberators in heavy armour of deep amethyst and gold marched in silent ranks; their shields were up in defiance of the sun, hammers strapped across their backs, heads high. The Prosecutors flanked them, walking in lockstep, but with the mechanisms of their wings unfurled, enhancing their size threefold. Their pinions sizzled with god-wrought might. To the rear came a pair of Judicators, the stocks of their crossbows each held in one heavy gauntlet, the stirrups to their shoulders. In the absence of the wrath of Azyr, the weapons were bright but otherwise inert arcs of blessed sigmarite. Impressive regardless, their function plain enough to anyone who knew war.

  Even they were but a foretaste.

  Hamilcar Bear-Eater marched a stride ahead, his helmet carried under the crook of his arm. His face was tattooed and bearded, his thick pile of red hair sweaty under the desert sun. His teeth were painted black, and he grinned for the awed men and terrified children that lined the Sacred Mile of Jercho to witness the return of Sigmar. Stick-figure representations of sacred beasts marked the rugged sigmarite of his armour; sandblasted and sun-faded, the etchings were as dim now as his own memory of the land and people that had spawned them. It clanked as he walked, the strapping loosened against the heat, his warding lantern banging on the opposite hip. A cloak of tattered Carthic bearskin trailed limply over one shoulder.

  Larger than life, men had once called him, when he too had still been a man.

  What then, he wondered, could they call him now?

  The soldiery of Jercho lined the approach in their finest wargear. They were armoured in short-sleeved leather lorica and skirts sewn with bronze plates. Masks of the same metal, cast in the likeness of a rising sun, covered the upper halves of their faces, eyes peering through slit holes, only their frowns visible. The exposed skin of their arms, legs and chins was the brown of baked bread. Several ranks stood flawlessly to attention under the punishing midday heat – the sun was always high over Jercho – a line of spearmen that ran the Sacred Mile all the way from the Gates of Noon and the citadel of Jercho itself. Archers with long composite bowstaves made of hewnbeam and grindworm tooth tracked the procession from the rooftops.

  The Astral Templars were not the only ones intent on making an impression.

  ‘There certainly are a lot of them,’ muttered Broudiccan.

  The Decimator-Prime was a man of heroic stature and few words, which was what Hamilcar, a man of many words of tremendous import, appreciated about him most. His helmet bore a dent from a battle with the sankrit, a reptilian people whose small empire straddled the northernmost reaches of the Sea of Bones. The sankrit had clawed knuckles, and the blow to Broudiccan’s faceplate had left a deep gouge across the mask’s impassive mouth that only deepened the warrior’s gloomy aspect.

  ‘There always are.’ Hamilcar thumped his breastplate with a clenched fist, making one of the nearby spearmen start. ‘There is only ever one of Hamilcar.’ The granite-white gryph-hound, Crow, that padded alongside him growled in apparent assent, or perhaps in hunger as it considered the soldiers of Jercho.

  ‘Think of what might be achieved if these people can be returned to Sigmar’s fold,’ said Thracius, last surviving Prime of his Liberators, his armour sand-polished and aglow with Sigmar’s energy, his manner characteristically ebullient. ‘Look upon Jercho’s wealth. And these towers, so grand, earthly twins to those of Sigmaron herself! Two Mortal Realms have I waged holy war upon, Hamilcar, and never seen the like of Jercho – a nation of city-states, as yet unmarred by the Age of Chaos. Their confidence and power would be a boon to Sigmar’s, equal to anything we have achieved in Ghur thus far.’

  Ever restless, Hamilcar’s mind turned back.

  He had been dispatched to the Realm of Beasts to reconquer the cities of the Carthic Oldwoods and oversee their resettlement in Sigmar’s name. He had succeeded, for Hamilcar always succeeded, only to see that great work undone as one by one those cities fell to marauding bands of ogors, the orruk hordes of the Great Red, and then, the death blow, to the undying legions of Mannfred von Carstein.

  It had been Mannfred that had slain him, in the final battle for once-mighty Cartha, and the ignominy of his defeat lingered more t
han the appalling injuries required to slay one as mighty as he. He was troubled, more often than he would admit, by dreams of that day. He would awake, clad in sweat, his halberd gripped so fiercely that if the dreams did not cease then one day even blessed sigmarite would snap. A lesser immortal would have broken, but it was not often that the gods forged men of Hamilcar’s mettle. Aware, as a god must be, of the evil that plagued his greatest champion, Sigmar had granted him swift catharsis, giving him the vanguard of the bladestorm that had driven Mannfred from the Sea of Bones and, in alliance with the hosts of Arkhan the Black, broken the back of the Great Red. The quest to bring the vampire to heel went on, and, though it had aggrieved Lord-Relictor Ramus of the Hallowed Knights, there was none better than Hamilcar to pursue it.

  It was not about vengeance. Nor was it even about restitution; in his heart he knew that the memory of his death would be with him to the end of days.

  He was a hunter, and the vampire was his prey.

  ‘The Hammers of Sigmar and the Celestial Vindicators claim the realms for Sigmar,’ Broudiccan grumbled, ‘while we battle half-sentient lizard people for an arid waste that no one desires and one worthless night-walker that time forgot to slay.’

  ‘This is where the glory will be, brothers,’ Hamilcar declared.

  ‘What makes you so sure?’

  Hamilcar spread his arms, his armour shining under the bright sun. The answer was so blindingly apparent that he did not need to speak it. He laughed instead, clapping Broudiccan on the pauldron so sparks of lightning played through the fingers of his gauntlet as he pushed his brother on.

  Say one thing for Hamilcar Bear-Eater: he is not greedy with his glory.

  The Knight-Heraldor, Frankos, sounded a note on his long, curved horn, the standard of the Knight-Vexillor held proudly aloft as Hamilcar and his best marched into the Plaza Solar.

  The great plaza of marble and tinkling fountains was set in the sultry wind-shade of the citadel’s ramparts. They were immense. The white stone of the walls was dazzling. The arrowslits were framed with gold. Fantastical banners of bright and daring colours fluttered against the bright blue sky, but the Solar itself felt no wind. The ornamental fountains sounded a note of coolness, but heat pressed down like a mailed fist.

  Frankos’ note faded into the still air. Silence fell, breathless, with a clatter of sigmarite as Stormcasts shifted in their armour for relief from the heat.

  Shielding his eyes, Hamilcar looked up the huge curtain walls to where a robed man with a bald head stood with his lips to a trumpet of gold-plated ivory. And there, on the highest rampart, surrounded by his banners and servants and beneath a shaded canopy, was the throne of Joraad el Ranoon.

  The sun-king.

  The king of Jercho was clad in a loose banyan of green silk, the hem and sleeve decorated with a chequer pattern of white and green. His arms were heavy with jewelled torques, his neck wound with heavy necklaces of gold. A golden mask that emitted rays like those of the sun covered his face in full, and a crown sat upon his head.

  Joraad leaned forward and his voice, when he spoke, boomed from all around, hundreds of voices, echoing from the fine statuary and feminine caryatids of the Solar.

  Hamilcar turned his gaze to see the men and women arrayed in royal livery above the square. He had been told of this. The Rays of the sun-king: bonded by ritual magic to the will of their lord.

  ‘I, Joraad, heir to the reign of Ranoon, regent of Jercho and king of earth and sky, welcome the embassy of Sigmar to my throne. Come in peace, brothers long lost, returned to us now by the blessings of the gods.’

  A stilted breeze stirred the high banners. Hamilcar licked the salty dryness from his lips and squinted over the silent crowds. He had been expecting a cheer, a dutiful applause. Something.

  ‘Why does he sit in shade while we bake?’ Broudiccan murmured. ‘Is he the sun-king or is he not?’

  Chuckling at his brother’s bleak humour, Hamilcar stepped forward. He let the quiet linger a moment longer. Then he took a deep breath; his lungs swelled, his diaphragm dropped.

  Broudiccan and Thracius took a step back.

  ‘And Sigmar’s greeting to you!’ His voice was a hammer beaten against the shield-wall of the sky. The pennants above the castle gatehouse fluttered. He looked up to the sun-king, eyes narrowed and shot through with red by the noon glare. ‘We are the eternals of Azyr, and by the might of Sigmar we have returned!’

  The sun-king peered down, nonplussed, appearing to remonstrate with one of his many fan-waving attendants, then waved a hand covered in rings towards the gatehouse and some garrison commander out of sight.

  ‘Here we go,’ Broudiccan muttered grimly as the gates creaked apart in a rattling of chains and a golden crack of light.

  A block of half-masked soldiers encased in full plate armour of flawless gold and wielding wickedly curved pole arms marched forth. A column with a rank of ten seamlessly became two columns with a rank of five, the marchers splitting to assume positions either side of the gate. A mighty bang reverberated about the Solar as two hundred men of the Solar Guard smacked the butts of their weapons into the ground, turned forty-five degrees to left or right, and then stamped their boot to the flagstones.

  The gryph-hound, Crow, lashed his tail.

  Hamilcar rubbed the beast’s heavy beak to soothe him. ‘You heard the king.’ He turned to Broudiccan and Thracius with a grin. ‘He asked us to come in peace.’

  The sealing of the gates actually brightened the gatehouse considerably. Natural light poured in through tall, outwards slanted windows, then burned like fire across the doors’ gold and electrum panelling. The walls were that same pitiless white. Hamilcar grimaced and held up a hand as a woman in jewelled armour approached through the files of Solar Guard, bent light streaming from her armour’s faceted edges in a dazzling spray of colours.

  ‘I had expected to be welcomed by General Sarmiel el Talame,’ he grunted. ‘It was his legion that treated with us in the border deserts of the sankrit. He was the one who arranged this audience once we had explained your city’s danger.’

  The woman did not answer.

  Everything about her spoke of remoteness, light without warmth.

  Steeling himself with a deep breath, he turned to look directly at her.

  Within her searing aura, he made out a smudge of darkness, skin, olive-brown, and long dark hair ornamented with some kind of gold. Tears began to fill his eyes as he found the glittering lines of powdered gold drawn from the corners of the woman’s eyes. One of the Rays of the sun-king. He gave her a pained grin.

  Crow, he held by the scruff to settle his growls.

  ‘The sun-king, Joraad el Ranoon, eternally glorious king of earth and sky, commands the surrender of your arms,’ she said.

  Hamilcar rubbed his eyes and frowned. Sarmiel had not prepared them for that.

  In addition to her armour, the woman bore an emerald-hilted tulwar, though it was belted in a scabbard of jewelled silk and could only have been ceremonial in function. Hamilcar squinted to the guards. He had counted about fifty outside, but if there had been any more waiting inside he could not tell, and one gold-armoured figure blurred into another here. How they saw him, he couldn’t fathom.

  He supposed they got used to it.

  ‘You don’t draw the teeth from a bear and expect it to behave.’

  Broudiccan snorted, and clutched his massive thunderaxe possessively.

  ‘Weapons are not permitted in the presence of the sun-king,’ the woman said.

  ‘Perhaps we should oblige them in this,’ Thracius counselled.

  ‘Am I able to speak to el Ranoon directly through…?’ Hamilcar waved vaguely over the blankly staring thrall. ‘This? An evil you are ill prepared for rides before us. Trickery is his weapon. Even your great citadel cannot be counted a haven. We are here to defend your kingdom, to test the s
harpness of the vampire’s wits on Hamilcar’s blade.’

  The woman’s eyelids fluttered, as if the host sought to wake but couldn’t. ‘The sun-king will settle for your blade, Lord-Castellant, if your followers will submit to having their weapons bound to the sheaths.’

  Hamilcar conceded. He tossed his halberd to a barely visible Solar Guard and with a nod of assent bade Broudiccan stow his axe. The woman waved a gauntleted hand – the light in its path cut to daggered purples and greens – and called for silk for binding.

  ‘Divine majesty.’ A captain of the Solar Guard crouched to one knee as men moved amongst the glowering Astral Templars bearing bolts of silk, then bowed his head to the Ray as though he addressed his king in person. ‘The crowds have been cleared from the Solar. My men have secured the plaza and the legions return the people to the city.’

  ‘You have done well.’ Her eyes rolled backwards for a spell, the attentions of the puppet-lord momentarily elsewhere, and then the dolorous clangour of gongs and horns sounded from the ramparts.

  Hamilcar squinted towards the high windows. Treating with a sovereign power was one part fine words to nine parts theatre.

  And Hamilcar Bear-Eater knew theatre.

  ‘I was not advised on any further ceremony.’

  The Ray nodded, as if to herself, then backed away. The pain in Hamilcar’s eyes receded appreciably. A few paces back she drew her ornamental blade from its sheath. It was a beautiful thing, as if drawn whole from the heart of a star.

  ‘The return of Sigmar and the elder pantheon has been awaited for centuries. Their disappearance was never explained to us.’ She lowered her head, and raised her sword flat across her palms to be kissed by the light that poured through the windows. ‘The people will not stand idle. Better they remain ignorant of what passes between us. I am the sun-king of Jercho, imposter, and Sigmar is dead to me.’

  Hamilcar bellowed as the woman swung for him. He raised an arm. Sparks tore from the sword’s curved blade and it slid down the angle of his vambrace. A twist, a shove, and he threw the mortal off. She spun once before she landed, light spearing from her as though a cut diamond had been flicked across the face of the sun, any idea of pursuit discouraged with burning pins to the eyes. With a grunt, Hamilcar pulled up. Pain turned his face behind the shade of his own pauldron, eyes narrowed to tear-filled slits.