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  The cannon exploded into a million pieces. I looked up into the stretched, gloriously overmuscled features of a slaughterpriest, the sort of figure that might tempt men less confident in their own god-wrought physique to the worship of Khorne. The low roof of the gun deck forced him to hunch, a bunching of muscle and sinew that only served to overplay his ridiculous stature.

  ‘I am Aaksor of the Eight-Times-Bloodied Path,’ he drawled, drunk on murder, his smile distended by the weights piercing the muscle of his face. ‘Ordained in desecration and dismay.’

  I felt all of the tension run right out of me. ‘Thank you,’ I said.

  He looked momentarily puzzled.

  ‘This is how a fight between champions should go.’

  With an outraged roar he swung his hammer overhead, a downward arc for my chest. My halberd nipped out neatly, catching Aaksor’s descending hammerhead and sending both weapons crashing to the deckboards with the wreckage of the cannon. I kicked up, drove my boot heel through his loincloth. He staggered back, which frankly was the very least he could do under the circumstances. I rolled up onto my knee, throwing a flurry of quick punches into his gut. The muscle there was slabbed on like armour. He dragged back on his hammer. I caught the inside of his wrist, dug in with my fingernails until blood flowed. He gasped like a Slaaneshi. Then I grabbed him between the legs with my free hand and, with a shout that put his kind to shame, I lifted him off the deck, rose to standing and threw him through the gun port behind me.

  There was a splash, and then a moment later I saw him again, swinging uselessly about at the end of a milky grey tentacle.

  He rose out of view.

  The ship gave a lurch, growling like a she-bear about to give birth, as I shook myself off and hurried back up the steps to the upper decks.

  The ship was going down. Even I could see that. The angle of its bowsprit was more reminiscent of an arrow sticking out of the ground than a ship at sail. Howling bloodreavers hacked away at the tentacle draped across their prow with increasing desperation. Waves crashed into them, foam spraying over the gunwales to slick the heaving deck. And that was before the second tentacle slid out of the water to encircle the ship’s midline and squeezed, making the already suffering vessel creak.

  I had no sympathy for it.

  Looking around from the vantage of the dying ship’s weather deck, I could see several others just like it. A fleet of them. Twenty, maybe. They were caught like the one I was on, some hoisted right out of the water, bloody brine draining from their bilges, others dragged under, crushed like so much cheap Ghyranite tat. The catapults, I noticed with enormous satisfaction, had fallen silent.

  I had done this.

  In freeing the Grey King, however unintentionally, I had turned this battle. Now all I had to do was ensure I received the proper glory for it.

  In the midst of that spume and feeding frenzy, I marked a particularly large warship, three-masted, bronze-clad, blistered with infernal engines of war and swarming with crimson-armoured Blood Warriors. Her square sails were black, rippling under the tug of the wind when they should have been taut. Like a liquid. It sailed slowly through the carnage, coming about, extending oars, looking to pull away, its gunnery accursed and powerful enough to hold the tentacles of the Grey King at bay, at least so long as there was a fleet to occupy his hunger.

  Blackjaw’s ship. It had to be.

  And he was trying to run, the swine.

  I looked desperately about the seething mass of tentacles and breaking ships, trying to figure a way to reach my enemy before he was completely beyond my reach. If recent experience had taught me anything, and never let it be said that Hamilcar Bear-Eater does not learn from his mistakes, it was that swimming was not an option.

  My attention returned to the ship I was unfortunately still standing on with a snap as the Grey King’s constricting tentacle broke the vessel across the middle.

  Just as I was starting to expedite my thoughts on alternative places to be, the bloodreavers that had previously been occupied forward spun to see what had just happened, and saw me. There was an instant’s confusion, then a roar as the whole lot of them charged up the rapidly upending deck towards me.

  I suspect that a few of them had made their peace with an imminent return to their god and fancied the idea of making the trip with a little something to offer – I imagine that the skull of Hamilcar Bear-Eater would be just the thing to return a warrior to Khorne’s good side.

  If he has a good side.

  With a laugh that was as much at his expense as theirs, I caught hold of the tentacle just as it slid back over the side, leaving the bloodreavers to splash and curse after me as their increasingly vertical half of the ship slid them back towards the now-submerged prow.

  Using the tentacle’s suckers as handholds, I climbed onto the smooth scales of its back. It swung about, twisting in on itself in a mad effort to grab me. I grinned and held on, rising slowly to my feet with my arms held out for balance and my feet wedged in tight. It was just like walking across a rope bridge, I told myself. A slippery, wet, constantly undulating rope bridge that was trying to kill me. The solitary boot on my foot gave me a ridiculous gait that made the task of running along that tentacle infinitely more difficult than it had to be, but there was no way I was getting it off now, so I manned up and ran.

  As I drew within shouting distance of the King’s almighty head, my impromptu bridge became ever more precipitously sloped and I found that I couldn’t hold on any longer. From there, I mostly fell, but since you are here and this is my tale, let’s say that there was some element of jump involved as well.

  Let’s say that.

  The King’s head was harder than it looked. Even the buoyancy bladders and fatty sacs were covered in an armour of translucent scales. I hit with a heavy clang of sigmarite and a curse or two, but he didn’t seem to notice my presence on his brow at all. All his attention was devoted to the steady demolition of a mid-sized warship in his jaws. If he knew the difference between wood and flesh then he didn’t appear to care for it.

  I too can get that way, if left too long between meals.

  I realised that I had a moment or two to get my bearings, and took them both. The ocean had been transformed into a mat of writhing tentacles and floating debris. Timbers. Canvas. Bloodreavers splashing about, battling with the predators that had dared the Grey King’s hunger to pick at his leavings. It was a cauldron in which every impure ingredient had been smashed together and had come out red. I picked out the black ship, shrouded in the hellish smoke of her cannons and rowing hard.

  I frowned, judging the writhe of the tentacles between me and it, and then jumped.

  There was no uncertain initial embrace this time, no tottering, no stalling, no prayers to the God-King. This time I sprinted down that flexing limb, my warding lantern banging against my thigh, as though the rug were about to be pulled from under me.

  I have it on sound authority that a ship at full sail, even an encumbered warship, can run many times swifter than a man. Even a Stormcast Eternal. But the embattled black ship was not doing anything close to full tilt. The currents plied against her. Her sails fluttered, limp, the winds chopped and gusting around the extensive and ever-shifting bulk of the Grey King.

  I caught up to her before the tentacle could throw me off, running parallel for a few strides before the limb twitched close enough for me to jump.

  I jumped.

  This time I managed to catch hold of the rigging, my fingers tearing the black mizzensail like a scab as I went down it. The bottom of the sail was about twelve feet off the poop deck. I fell the rest of the way with a lot of flailing limbs and shouting. I banged onto the deck, bruised but ebullient, and quickly rolled onto my chest to get a knee beneath me. Gasping for breath, I looked about.

  The crew of the poop deck were huge warriors in spiked leather cuirass and snarling b
uckles, bucklers strapped to forearms and knees, missing limbs replaced with maces, axes and – in one fiendishly impractical instance – an eight-tailed flail. They were all looking up in fury at the torn sail, as tentacles snaked up from the water for the floundering warship.

  ‘To the guns,’ someone roared with a voice like lava. ‘We blast our way into the Blood God’s graces.’

  At last I saw him. The man himself.

  Blackjaw.

  He turned from the ship’s wheel to confront me, a powerful man in a mouldy coat decorated with bronzed frogging and bars. He was at least as tall as me. His chest was broad, his arms thick. He wore a tricorne hat bedecked in human skulls, and a beard of clotted blood clung to his face like a leech to dying prey, quivering occasionally as though anticipating a violent feast. Lit tapers stuck from the daemonic parasite, giving off a brimstone stench that inflamed and enraged me. I don’t think there was any particular power to it, beyond the foul gifts of alchemy I so deplored.

  ‘Hamilcar Bear-Eater,’ he spat, and I confess the acknowledgement that the infamous Blackjaw knew my name made the whole torrid adventure seem worthwhile. ‘For five hundred years I have ruled these waves. I burned the dragon ships that the sea aelves of Tarvain sent to defy me. I flattened the granite underspires of the Como duardin. I ended the defiance of Indomus where a dozen like me had tried and failed. It was I whose devotion Khorne blessed with the daemon engines to destroy Nemisuvik.’

  I yawned.

  This only seemed to infuriate him further.

  ‘The Stormwilds are my monument to the Blood God, my ocean of skulls.’ He turned his snarl upwards as a tentacle came crashing into the water, just off his bow. The waves of its impact battered his heavy ship. ‘I know not how you have achieved this, but if I am to sink to the Brass Citadel this day then it will be as the anchor about your neck, Bear-Eater.’

  I’ve been to the Brass Citadel.

  It’s not so bad, provided you have a fondness for skulls.

  I must have been distracted, thinking of the fortress of Khorne, because I didn’t even see his hands coming away from his belt with a brace of pistols. They were stocked and muzzled in black wood, the same as the hull of his ship, and chased in brass, unwholesome sigils steaming where they had been stamped through the wood and the metal.

  He cocked them with his thumbs, and fired.

  Now I know what you are all thinking.

  Where is the warding lantern you picked up in the sleeping hall? Well, I still had it. Truth be told, I’d made the decision not to use it. I’d been fully expecting to die, after all; had been waiting for it, even. What use has such a man for a blessing like that? But now I had won. This was just the first few hundred yards of my victory lap. All that was left of the battle now were the parts that matter: lording it over the victory feasts from the top table, accepting the praises as Sigmar’s regent, and ensuring that all the bards and heralds knew how to pronounce ‘Hamilcar’.

  You think it is warriors that win wars?

  They win battles. Heroes win wars.

  You think heroes just make themselves?

  I went for my lantern then, pulling it from my belt even as Blackjaw’s pistols coughed up black smoke and fire. I didn’t have the time to open it. I knew that. Even I’m not quicker than a bullet.

  I threw it.

  The lantern smashed into Blackjaw’s chin, his beard erupting in sparks at the exact same moment that two brazen slugs punched through my greaves, just where the fish that had been chewing on my leg had weakened them.

  I stumbled onto the other leg, my mouth a silent ‘O’ of surprise. ‘God-King. That hurts.’

  ‘I pray that this hurts twice as much.’

  Discarding his spent weapons, Blackjaw threw open his coat to reveal a bare torso of corded muscle and pale white scars. A bandolier crisscrossed his chest, and from it he drew another brace of pistols. That even now, barely an arm’s length from my face, he would resort to guns disgusted me.

  ‘What kind of champion of the Blood God are you?’ I said, adding a slur to my words, for feigning injury is not a ruse I consider myself above. In fact, if you can conceive of a ruse that I am above, then you have a darker mind than mine, my friend.

  ‘Khorne cares not from whence the blood flows,’ he snarled, cocking his pistol, black eyes locked on mine.

  My halberd cleaving his right hand from his wrist then came as quite the surprise.

  He howled in pain and outrage, firing the pistol that was still in his left hand. The bullet glanced off my rerebrace and splintered the oak of the gunwale behind me.

  ‘Careful, Castle Lord.’

  At the sound of that unexpectedly cheery voice, I turned my head to see Akbu, exhausted and dripping, but dragging himself and his pole arm up over the side of the ship. A similarly bedraggled band of maorai, reduced in number to about half a dozen, clambered up the netting behind him. They had swum all this way, just to follow me.

  My heart swelled.

  I felt as though someone had set a warding lantern in my breast.

  ‘This man…’ Akbu panted, trying to gesture to me but lacking the strength.

  I got the gist of it.

  I turned to Blackjaw, swollen with pride and bristling with Azyrite intensity. He backed away, awkwardly drawing a cutlass. It looked as though he had not needed to wield one in centuries.

  I grinned, and for the first time in a long while it felt like a fit for my face.

  ‘Let the glory begin.’

  So yes, maybe I did release the Grey King prematurely, and maybe that did have something to do with Nemisuvik’s diminished status in later years. It had lost the monster’s protection, but it had gained Sigmar’s, which had to be better, even if he was less hands-on about discouraging the ever-hungry beasts of the Stormwilds from the pontoons.

  The battle had been won, and that was what mattered. Many were the sacrifices that mortal folk were asked to make in those days, and they were invariably offered more gladly when it was me who asked it of them. Thanks in no small part to my efforts in holding Blackjaw at bay for so long, the greater war for the territories of the mainland had been a triumph, my name ever-present there also alongside Broudiccan and Frankos and the champions of the Bear-Eaters. And when the victorious folk of Nemisuvik were forced to abandon the outer pontoons to the beasts, when they rediscovered the boatmaker’s craft and found themselves new homes elsewhere across the Ghurlands, they took the name of their hero with them.

  That sounds like a great victory to me.

  PILGRIM’S TRIAL

  Robbie MacNiven

  ‘Hold her.’

  Vanik drew his Azgorh-forged broadsword, Serpent’s Fang. His chief retainer, Modred, flinched at the sight of the heavy, serrated blade.

  ‘I said keep her steady,’ the Black Pilgrim reiterated, baring his fangs in annoyance. Modred gripped the mare’s bridle more tightly, his face pale. The dozen Chaos knights surrounding them watched on in silence from the backs of their own great steeds, impassive in their black, spiked armour and rough pelts.

  For a few seconds, Vanik looked at the bay mare being held by his retainer. He had owned many warhorses since he started on the Path to Glory. He still remembered his first, given to him during his seventeenth summer by Golgeth Eightpoint. It had been a heavy-set grey stallion, reared on the Red Steppes like the mounts of most of Lord Golgeth’s cavalry, hardy and ill-tempered. She had fallen at Herrendorf, half a dozen musket balls in her breast, her death avenged by Serpent’s Fang. Others had followed – Winteroath, the white stallion that had trampled the captain of a Freeguild company at the battle of New Marsh, and Krux, the red-eyed brute he had stolen from Lord Jarqo’s stables in the dreadhold Sunderfall.

  In that regard, his latest mount, Fellwind, had a long and proud ­legacy. Vanik had won her off the master of his own cavalry, Lo Faug. She wa
s a Red Steppe mare, like his first. He supposed there was a sweet symmetry in that. The true, wicked gods loved their ironies.

  ‘Forgive me,’ Vanik murmured to the mare. ‘You must meet your end amidst smoke and ash. My destiny lies within the Cinderwood, and your blood will guide me to it.’

  Modred cast a nervous glance at the ash and smoke swirling around them. What it hid, Vanik did not know, but he doubted it would be cheerier than what he could already see – the low ridgeline they had clambered to the crest of was littered with blackened bones and charred corpses. The stench of burning and the cloying smog that shrouded them seemed perpetual, and just where it was rising from remained hidden. Vanik intended to be gone before he found out.

  Aqshy was the Realm of Fire, and it rarely accepted visitors without burning them.

  The Black Pilgrim followed his retainer’s glance, turning his eyes briefly to the smoke. There was something out there, he was sure of it. Something drawing closer. He could only hope it was what he had come here looking for.

  Jaw set, Vanik raised Serpent’s Fang, and swung down with all his Four-blessed strength.

  Fellwind screamed. Vanik grimaced and swung again, arterial blood spraying both him and Modred. Butchering a horse was never a simple matter.

  His steed went down on her front legs. Vanik swung a third and final time. The sounds of the slaughter echoed back weirdly from the smoke shrouding them. He had to be fast, before the blood and shrieks drew any more unwanted attention.

  Finally, Fellwind lay still. Vanik stood over her, panting, blood running thick and slow from his sword and armour. Modred crouched beside the fallen steed, looking up at his master fearfully.

  ‘It is done,’ Vanik said, turning to survey his retinue. The dozen knights of the Iron Brotherhood continued to look on in silence. They had followed him faithfully since he had first declared his intention to embark upon the Black Pilgrimage and seek entry into the ranks of the Varanguard. In the many quests since then, none had ever strayed from his side. Now, he would give them no choice.