Gods & Mortals Read online

  ‘Please, Castle Lord.’ Nanook cupped his hands in the Nemesian gesture of supplication. ‘The people take great inspiration from seeing you among them. The maorai, they look up to you – they see you on the wall day after day, night after night, railing against the bloodreavers without fear.’

  I coughed into my hand.

  Even I, it seems, have some shame.

  ‘Hamilcar Bear-Eater fears no enemy,’ I mumbled.

  ‘Do not let them think less of you by acting rashly now,’ he said.

  I grimaced. He had me by the short ones there, so much so that I couldn’t believe he hadn’t gone there on purpose. Nothing, no personal challenge or mortal dread, no commandment of the gods or bastion of Greater Azyr, could compel me like concern for my reputation amongst the free peoples of the Mortal Realms.

  ‘Perseverance and generosity,’ Hitta smiled.

  I could have beheaded her with her own soup bowl.

  I gave it thought.

  ‘We need only hold,’ said Nanook. ‘Angujakkak will lay and will break free on his own.’ He shrugged. ‘We need only hold.’

  I frowned at them all, Jissipa in the corner included, these old mortals who had far more right to be impatient than I. The last thing I wanted was to lose face with the maorai, but now I knew there was a way out there was no way I was going to spend another night in Nemisuvik waiting for a sacred whale to lay an egg. I just needed to be subtle about it.

  It was, in hindsight, a symptom of my mental state that I considered this within the realm of my abilities.

  ‘Perseverance and generosity,’ I said through gritted teeth, assuming a place by the hearthpot. I would have one more bowl of broth, and then I would sleep on it.

  I woke to a string of calamitous booms, sky-splitting, shivering the cut-out canoe-cots of the maorai hall in which I slept, rattling spare weapons in their racks. I would say that it sounded like thunder, except that I know thunder, and hold it in too high esteem. It sounded as though a mob of Ironjaw warchanters with steel drums were being dropped over the Nemesian pontoons by airship.

  I should have been so lucky.

  I sat up sharply, banging my head on the bunk above mine. This was well before the days of Stormholds, or even Freeguilder barracks in every settlement, and the berth I alternated with a burly maorai of the Arkorapter Double-Axes was a foot too low for me and three too short.

  I was raised in a cave, though. I’ve slept on worse.

  Shifting myself awkwardly out of bed, I looked around the huge hollowed-out leviadon shell of the hall.

  All the cots were empty.

  There is a school of thought that whatever a commander’s warriors are asked to suffer, he must suffer it first, and hardest. He must eat the same rations as they do, be first over every bridge and to the top of every hill, put his shoulder to the same labours. He must also be abed an hour after the most anxious warrior has fallen sound and rise an hour again before the dawn watch. Ordinarily, I am the exemplar of this school, but with nothing in Nemisuvik to actually fight I had slipped into the habit of grumbling awake around eleven with lunch. The maorai seemed to find my morning lie-ins cheering, as though nothing I could sleep through could possibly harm them, and after a time I managed to convince myself it was a deliberate act of brilliance on my part.

  I looked up, gripping one of the wooden crossbars from which the rocking cot beds were suspended as a new impact shook through the ceiling.

  I tried to guess how close it must have been. In the Nemesian fashion, the maorai hall had no windows by which heat might escape or damp gain entry. Another strike followed almost immediately, the sound of shattering shell followed by the muted wumpf of a fireball, and my cot swayed fitfully of its own volition. I had grown accustomed to onslaughts at all times, to falling asleep with my jaw clenched, but nothing as concerted as this was shaping up to be.

  I could think of two possibilities – either my efforts here had allowed Broudiccan and my brothers to win the war for the mainland, forcing Blackjaw to launch an attack, or the bloodreavers had finally become as sick of this as I was.

  I gritted my teeth and rose, hoping for the latter. I wasn’t going to have Broudiccan Stonebow and the Astral Templars coming to my rescue, not after I’d endured hell for a month.

  It didn’t take long to ready myself. After that length of time without serfs or armsmen, I’d become accustomed to living in my armour, a decision to go defiantly unwashed that was facilitated by Nemisuvik’s overwhelming odour of fish. I reached under my cot to collect my halberd, picked up my warding lantern from the wall hook I had claimed for it, then strode outside.

  It was night. The sky had become smoke, lit by constellations of burning skulls and the embers of fires. House fires boiled against the suffocating gloom, squat and broad and weirdly horned, like daemons of the Brass Citadel come fresh to Nemisuvik.

  Again, I should have been so lucky.

  I charged through streets that had become clotted with fumes. People huddled together in milling groups, looking at the sky in confusion. They had become accustomed to the incessant bombardment, as I had in my own way, but the unusual ferocity had reminded them of their fear of it. It reassured me to see that they had been as terrified as me all along, that they had simply wrapped it up in their lives and hidden it better.

  I reached my preferred spot on the gabion-wall to be greeted by Akbu and his maorai band. They cheered me as I ascended the steps.

  ‘See this man!’ Akbu indicated me with an open hand. With the other, he held a pole arm ready. ‘Who else could sleep almost to morning through this?’

  ‘Hamilcar!’ his warriors roared. Some pumped their weapons in the air, others banged them on the parapet.

  Typical maorai, they couldn’t even agree on that.

  ‘You should have woken me,’ I snapped. ‘Can’t you see this is a prelude to an assault?’

  Akbu shrugged, then turned to yell, ‘Moha! Hand over your shells, you fool-squid. When will you learn to not make bets?’ He turned back to me and grinned. ‘She thought you would sleep through and complain of the broth being cold.’

  While the maorai teased one another with squirting ink noises, I gripped the parapet and glared out into firestorm and fog.

  ‘Cursed Striking,’ I swore.

  ‘It could be harder, yes?’ said Akbu, merrily.

  ‘I still can’t see any of their ships.’

  ‘See this man!’ cried Akbu as though he were about to launch into a ballad. He jabbed furiously at my backplate with his fingers. ‘The bombardment is not enough for him. He wants Blackjaw himself!’

  Didn’t Sigmar know it.

  ‘Hamilcar!’

  I have to admit, the acclaim was starting to grate on my nerves almost as much as the bombardment. For the first time in my life, I felt as though I had done nothing to earn it. Before I knew what I was doing, I was twisting off my left gauntlet and throwing it aside.

  ‘What are you doing, Castle Lord?’ said Akbu.

  Off went the right. I bent down and started tugging on my boot. ‘I’m going in.’

  ‘In?’

  ‘In there.’ The boot came loose, and to make a point I hurled it over the parapet for the waves.

  ‘Good plan!’ said Akbu.

  ‘What?’

  Akbu turned and cleared his throat. ‘We follow Castle Lord, Hamilcar. We swim for the ships!’

  The maorai cheered like loons.

  ‘That is not what I–’

  ‘Do you hear that?’ someone said, interrupting me.

  We all looked up to the horrific wailing, but the sky was so murky and shot through with flame that there was nothing to be seen.

  ‘A close one,’ said Akbu, quietly.

  ‘I bet it doesn’t land within two hundred tarfins of here,’ said Moha.

  The entire warri
or band blanched, and then the moment I had been living in terror of for over a month hit me.

  It didn’t disappoint.

  The entire event was practically instantaneous, and yet I can remember every moment of it vividly.

  The skull materialised from the smouldering veil of grey fog, a baleful grin sketched out for me in flames. It smashed into the parapet ten good strides from me. The impact twisted iron, pulverised rock flying free. Two maorai immediately beneath the skull simply disappeared. Gone. Like that. Then flames ripped outwards. Another half score of Akbu’s warriors were incinerated on the spot. I didn’t get a chance to see who they were. They were probably the lucky ones. I saw a female maorai just outside the blast catch light as she was flung clear over the parapet. She struck the ocean in a hissing cloud of steam.

  I heard the first screams then, as the impact rippled out – through rock, through air, swiftly outpacing the bony shrapnel that raced behind it. I felt it grab me, my breastplate buckling as if in the jaws of some Chamonite dragon. It turned me round, propelled me over the wall. Fangs of rock and bone rattled against my backplate, shredded the hair and the skin from the back of my head. I maintain that helmets are for cowards and Hallowed Knights, and in any case the explosion was already throwing me well ahead of the damage.

  I saw waves. Lapping beneath me.

  From impact to impact, it probably took about a second. I performed a double somersault and smacked into the water on my back. It felt as though I had been coshed on the back of the head, then dark waves closed over me.

  Saltwater stung my eyes. I couldn’t see. I was still tumbling, and for a brief moment of panic I wasn’t sure which way was up and which was down. Then I noticed the bubbles streaming from my mouth and turned to follow them, seeing the wave-chopped orange smear of what could only have been a fireball. I kicked towards it. I was never the most elegant of swimmers, but as with all tasks in which I am less than proficient I make up for any weakness in technique with determination and raw strength. However, even I couldn’t overpower the drag of a near-full suit of armour, one boot still on, and despite my efforts I began to sink.

  A hard pressure closed around my throat, over my chest. The saltwater sting in the cuts to the back of my head grew dim.

  I looked up.

  I don’t know why, exactly: a desire to look on Sigendil one last time before I was blasted back to her, perhaps, or maybe just an old barbarian’s instinct for battle. The woman that had been thrown into the water moments before me paddled above. Unlike me there was not a scrap of metal on her, and her blubber armour was naturally buoyant as well as waterproof. It could have been the dark shape silhouetted on the surface, or possibly the abiding smell of fish, but the creatures with whom we now shared an ocean went for her first.

  Instinctively, I bellowed a challenge, precious bubbles of air exploding from my mouth as a twenty-foot-long fish with amber pectoral fins and spines running down its back took a bite out of her. The water around her turned browny-red and cloudy, and the giant fish twisted its body away, clutching something in its jaws that looked horribly like a leg. Even with all that, the maorai knew better than to waste air on screaming. Never have I been more in awe of a mortal warrior than I was then. With a powerful stroke of its tail, the fish swam off with its prize, fanning the blood cloud into the water and leaving a trail behind it.

  I soon understood why it was in such a hurry to be out of the way.

  Twinkling eyes, glinting teeth – barge-like shapes converging that made that first twenty-footer look like a minnow. I gripped my halberd tightly, grinning fiercely even as I continued to sink further beneath the maorai woman. I thrust my halberd into a mouth that yawned wider than the archway doors of the Astral Templars’ Winter Fortress. The halberd didn’t go deep, stabbing into the roof of its mouth so that the monster effectively pushed me back on its own palate. The snap shut of its jaws was like an underwater explosion. Nothing less than solid sigmarite stood a chance against it, and the behemoth’s front teeth duly shattered against the halberd’s shaft. I ripped the weapon clear, then backhanded it across the monster’s snout.

  The water robbed my blow of speed. My halberd carved a gouge through the monster’s nose, blood welling up from the wound to thicken the water, but failing to do it lasting harm. I pushed back against the monster’s lower lip. I stabbed it again. This time through the cheek. Like hooking a fish. It yanked its head away, brushed me off, and I belatedly appreciated that I was more fly than hook.

  I grunted from behind tightened lips as something clamped on to my shin. I looked down.

  A massively fat fish twice the length of my leg had locked its jaws over my knee. Its throat rippled with colours as it suckled on my unbooted foot. Some people think Chaos is vile, but it has nothing on the infinite vicissitudes of the deep places of Ghur. My entire body crawled with disgust. A rope-like eel brushed across my armour, looking for flesh to bite. I swung out my arm, caught it by the neck and drew its head to my breastplate. Bubbles squirmed from my lips as I throttled it, cartilaginous bone softening and crunching. With my still-armoured foot, I kicked down at the suckling fish that had fastened to my leg. I broke its eye, tore its gills, bloodied its face.

  I was already dead and knew it. It was about how: how I bowed out, how much blood rode back with me to the celestine vaults.

  I hadn’t been happier in weeks.

  The eel fell limp in my grip and I let go, stabbing once more at the deepwater behemoth and scaling a line down its underbelly as it swept across me. My chest felt like a bomb about to go off, my face as though it were set to implode. I couldn’t see for blood. The water was thick with it and I was still sinking. It sank with me, both of us heavier than water. The maorai woman was gone now, dead for all I knew, as I was about to be. My enemies I tracked by their movements through the cloud. My throat was burning. It wanted to cry out, desperate to breathe. I could feel my chest shaking, the muscles – no, the inhuman determination that was holding my throat shut – weakening. Everything felt ready to surrender when a monstrous grey tentacle snaked around my chest and pulled taut.

  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 tent
acle 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.