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Force of Personality – David Guymer

About the Author

An Extract from ‘Hamilcar: Champion of the Gods’

A Black Library Publication

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Force of Personality

David Guymer

The first forged of the Stormcast Eternals are in many ways more human than those who came after. We can laugh, enjoy mortal company, recall bits and pieces of our former lives. Perhaps this is something that the God-King would rather I not share, but I tell you here because, with that knowledge in mind, events in Nemisuvik might be taken as further evidence of my place in Azyr’s firmament of heroes. I was still human enough to know fear…

I stood bestride the algae-coated gabion wall of Nemisuvik, proud as you like, getting battered by the elements of the Ghurite Stormwilds as though I were the amethyst-and-gold figurehead of an implausibly massive sail ship. Saltwater steam and brimstone ash stuck my hair to my face and made my tattoos glisten. A cloak of bearskin clung to my shoulders like a man half drowned as I shook my halberd defiantly at the sky. A skull the size of a chariot dropped out of it, horned and baleful. It screamed with the passage of wind through its gaping eye sockets and mouth, and smacked into the ocean about twenty feet out, dousing its fiery cargo and spraying me with sulphurous brine.

‘How do you keep on missing?’ I bellowed across the steaming ocean as the missile sank. ‘What can I do to make it easier? Should I light a fire? Wave a flag?’

More skulls wailed overhead like comets, invisible but for the daemonic glow of eyes and grins that burned through the occluding mists of the pontoon city. Fire mushroomed in the wet haze.

‘You couldn’t hit Azyrheim from the top of the Celestial Stair!’

Let us just say that we don’t all deal with fear in the same way.

Artillery.

Does it invoke the same dread in you that it does in me? Even thinking back on it now I can feel my heart beat faster. No? Let me say it again.

Artillery.

It was not war as I had been raised to. I didn’t know my past as fully then as I do now, but any fool could intuit that I had been a simple man. I was a child of the Eternal Winterlands of Azyr. On its frozen battlefields, we hit one another with rocks. If we were feeling spectacularly creative we would throw the rocks. A man there rose and fell by his own stamina and courage. Luck played a part, I suppose, as it always must. But a warrior earned his luck as he did the favour of his gods, with recklessness in battle and wantonness off it. Heroes were not splattered by faceless engineers from a mile away.

Perhaps dread was too timid a word for what I felt as I watched hellish artillery rain down.

It was a tension that would not pass. It was the feeling of endlessly filling your mouth with ale, but never being able to swallow – my guts were knotted, my mind galloping wild, and my beard was wet. The instincts I had honed on those simpler battlefields against the axe-throw, the spear-thrust, the frost-sabre cat, were of no use here.

I drew a deep breath, steadying myself internally.

‘What are you, an acolyte of Tzeentch?’ I bawled. ‘No, say what you like about the followers of the Twisting Path but they can aim! Anchor a little nearer next time, and maybe you’ll have half a chance of hitting something.’

The siege of Nemisuvik was one of the first of its kind in the Realmgate Wars. The reason for that was simple – when Sigmar’s storm broke over the Age of Blood, those of us in the vanguard found precious little left worth defending. That’s what a few hundred years under the dominion of Khorne will do to a place. In later days, it came to be known as the Thousand Day Siege. Whether it really lasted as long as that I never did know. I hadn’t been there for the start. The city’s own siege engines and the wild beasts of the Stormwilds had been enough to hold the foe at bay. It was only when the enemy’s catapults had managed to start hitting the walls from beyond the Nemesians’ range that Sigmar had heard the city’s prayers and cast me down to shore up its defences. It hadn’t quite worked out the way either of us had expected. The enemy never showed any interest in taking the city by strength of arms, intent instead on demolishing it from afar.

Two months I spent, waiting for that invasion, and in that time I never once laid eyes on my opponent.

Blackjaw was his name, a bloodreaver of whom I knew surprisingly little. Normally, champions of the Blood God tended towards bombastic displays and strutting about as though they had personally invented war. But Blackjaw was different. He had instead raised himself a daemon fleet and obliterated places like Nemisuvik without ever showing his no-doubt-ugly face.

It is said that in the underworlds of Shyish there exists a hell for every culture in the Mortal Realms. This one, I was starting to feel, was mine.

‘I am Hamilcar Bear-Eater! Do you–’

Then something hit me from behind. It turned out to be the head of a small, lightly braised fish, but I had wound myself into such a state of tension that I spun around with a roar, my halberd raised.

Akbu grinned at me from behind a mask of rubbing fat, his dark face hemmed in by a leather helmet and a hugely thick leather coat. He was flicking fish scales from his hands, graciously nodding to his warrior band as they handed him coin.

‘What…?’ I forced my arm to relax enough to lower my halberd. Akbu’s expression did not alter in the least.

‘I bet that I could make you turn around.’

‘You do not bait the Bear-Eater, friend. You are likely to lose an arm.’

‘Then I would be the one out of pocket. And your face would be very red, I think.’

Now, I have fought alongside Stormcast Eternals of every Striking. I have fought with duardin, greenskins, even the undead, but I have never stood on a wall with warriors as cheerfully stoic as the maorai, the professional warrior class of Nemisuvik. Give them a duty that would force them to forsake a meal or cheat them at dice and they would scream and rage as though you had sold their firstborn to a Verminlord. But ask them to stand on a sea wall while the sky falls in, week after week, and no masque of Slaanesh could have ever looked happier. They were irreverent, turned up on the wall as it suited them, and fought in iconoclastic formations based on the skins they wore and the beasts whose horns and fangs made their weapons. They didn’t give these groupings names. They probably would have been bemused by the idea, and in truth they functioned more like fractious extended kin-groups than the Freeguild regiments we know and love today. To me, though, they were the Allopex Knife-Throwers, the Eviscerark Spears, the Razorclam Half-Swords. Their insouciance under pressure almost made me ashamed of my increasingly manic acts of bravado.

‘Moha bet five shells that you would fall in,’ said Akbu, conversationally, as another skull screamed over our heads, smashing into the built-up areas of the pontoons in a gout of flame. The maorai craned his neck to pick out a woman with a face like a salted chop and leaning on a pole arm of sharpened coral. ‘You are an imp squid, Moha, always squirting your coin into the ocean. The Castle Lord Hamilcar,’ I had long given up trying to make the Nemesians say Lord-Castellant, and here Akbu bent stiffly to slap his thigh, ‘he has legs like limpet stalks.’

I was assuming this was a higher compliment than it sounded.

I looked back over my shoulder to where the waves crashed against the gabion blocks. Rocks and shells had been stuffed into iron baskets, red with rust and seaweed, built into a perimeter wall on a colossal scale. Kelp fronds and accumulated driftwood bobbed with the waves. It was curiously inviting. I sighed, and for a moment the shrieks of the artillery ships, the crackle of the burning city, the endless jibes of the maorai were all sucked into the lap of the waves.

I could just hurl myself in and swim out to Blackjaw’s flagship, or die in the attempt. That, at least, would be an end that the Nemesians would speak about for a hundred years.

Had I been entirely myself then I probably would have done it, too. At the very least I would have loudly made the suggestion, and then laughed it off as the maorai talked me down, but my heart wasn’t in it. For all the soaring bellicosity of my highs, I was as prone to crushing lows from which even Korghos Khul with a ribbon around his neck would struggle to rouse me. These bouts were rare, thank Sigmar, and tended to pass swiftly.

I could feel one tightening around my skull as we spoke.

I jumped down from the battlements and onto the walkway. ‘I’m going to get some sleep.’

That a warrior, even a nominal commander such as myself, should just decide to leave his post for an hour or two struck no one as grounds for complaint. They were maorai. They took orders from no one and did as they pleased.

‘Good idea,’ said Akbu. ‘If anything will make Blackjaw properly attack the wall then it will be the sight of your back.’

I smiled, not entirely faking it. ‘I’d show him my arse if I thought it would help.’

Akbu and his warrior band burst with sudden laughter, for nothing tickles the outrageously well-wrapped Nemesians like an exposed body part.

With that, I left them to it. I tried not to feel too bad about it. I was just as capable of being blown to pieces by artillery fire from the pontoons as I was on the gabion-walls.

To see Nemisuvik now is to see a provincial backstop that the new Age has largely left behind. Caught within the abyssal currents of the Stormwilds, there are few places in existence that are harder to get to or more pointless to fight over. To see it as it was at the outbreak of the Realmgate Wars was to see a city whose isolation had given it licence to prosper. At the time, it was one of the greatest unconquered cities in the realms, rivalled only by Azyrheim, Nulahmia and perhaps a handful of others.

The city was spread across fifteen blubbery pontoons, each big enough to float several hundred homes. To walk its bridges and ropeways was to meander through the madness of the ocean bestiarist or the taxidermist. You were as likely to be presented with a lurkinarth carcass as a driftwood shack. The gigantic rotunda built from leviadon shells and deepwater beasts towered over those lesser dwellings, encrusted with turrets and minarets of caulked wood, silhouetted by fire. For the first few days after my arrival, there had been screams. Not now. No one screamed any more unless they were actually on fire.

It really was quite the liberation that Sigmar had brought to Nemisuvik.

You would be forgiven for thinking that the locals must have resented him, and me by extension, for all of this. But that would be to completely misread the Nemesian character. I was but one Stormcast Eternal in a city of thousands of mortals, but they did not see the thousands of warriors who had not come. They saw it through the lens of their own traditions.

They saw the one warrior who had.

I made my way across the interconnecting bridges towards the central pontoon, known as Katuunak to the locals. The buildings there were taller and finer, or at least as tall and fine as you can get when your principal building materials are dead animals and the bits that have fallen off other people’s ships. They had been decorated with shells and nacre, painted with the pigments of the ocean. Several had been destroyed by Blackjaw’s war machines, and the weight imbalance had caused the pontoon to list noticeably. The northern rim rode a good three feet above the water, whereas the southern was submerged, and I had to walk against an incline to reach the rail that surrounded the saltwater lake at Katuunak’s centre. My intention had been to stand and watch the still water for an hour or two before returning to the gabion-wall. The bombardment caused it to tremble like a puddle with the approach of a Dracoth, but I found its stillness otherwise to be soothing.

I had barely caught a glimpse of the water after crossing from the outer promenade to the inner, when I found myself in the unlikely scene of a riot.

Now in any other city after so many years under siege, a little rioting would have been entirely expected. But when you consider that the single most exciting day of this war – when the lightning bolt delivering me from Azyr had burned down half of the Igulik pontoon – had been greeted with a sigh and another cup of broth, it was frankly surreal. A scrum had formed, comprising about fifty men and women. The two were largely interchangeable in their thick blubber coats as they pushed against a handful of warriors.

From where I was standing, it looked as though something had inflamed the folk of Katuunak to such an extent that they were looking to throw themselves into the lake. The pontoon guards were all huge men, and they were holding the crowd back, but more seemed to be turning up to pile on all the time.

I felt my heart begin to race.

With hindsight, my first instinct – that Blackjaw had somehow evaded the nets, the sea monsters, the rock armour and ballista boxes to come under the city and land on Katuunak pontoon – was foolish. It was really just wishful thinking on my part. I was spoiling for a fight and would have gladly squared up to Khorne himself if the challenge had been offered. At least I was thinking clearly enough to slide my halberd into its bracket across my backplate before striding into the melee.

‘What’s happening here?’ I bellowed.

Someone stupidly threw a punch at me. I parried it on my wrist, turned it across me, opening up the unwise pugilist’s belly into which I obligingly planted a fist of my own. The man folded over before flying backwards into the scrum like a cannon ball.

‘Castle Lord!’ one of the guards cried out over the distant rumble of artillery, fending off three men with his spear held horizontal, an elbow in his face. ‘Help us!’

‘No!’ From the hubbub of voices in the crowd.

‘Feed Angujakkak!’

‘Feed the Grey King!’

‘It has been long enough…’

‘It is time to strike back…’

There was more, but something in my mind between ears and brain snapped at the words ‘strike back’.

The maorai might have been perfectly content to let the bloodreavers carry on breaking their knuckles on their faces, but I wasn’t. I’m a simple man, you see. A man should kill, and get killed, according to the strength and reach of his arm. A strong man could throw a spear further, but that strength was earned. As far as I was concerned, Blackjaw sought to cheat me of my hard-earned advantage. He had resorted to ‘mathematics’ and other unholy wizardries to make parity with a chosen of Sigmar.

It was unnatural, and I refused to stand for it. I wanted to strike back, and if the Nemesians were sitting on a way for me to do that, then by Sigmar I wanted to know about it.

I turned to the guard who had called out to me. Something thunderous in my expression made him blanch. He took a step back, his foot splashing into water where the platform’s tilt had caused the lake to spill onto the promenade.

‘What are they talking about?’

‘I… don’t understand, Castle Lord.’

He actually seemed to be serious, which only annoyed me further. ‘The Grey King?’

‘It is sacred.’

‘So is lightning. I still throw it at my enemies.’

As if to affirm my point, a small tendril of Azyrite energy snapped from my clenched knuckles. I like to consider myself a man of the common folk, and generally do a better job of keeping the overt signs of my essential divinity in check. That it escaped me then only serves to demonstrate the kind of pressure I was under. The guardsman nearest to me lowered his spear with a cry, and while his comrades stared at me in astonishment one of the rioters succeeded in pushing through the cordon to make a break for the water.

‘Feed the King!’ she yelled, and hurled herself bodily into the lake. The splash of her landing broke my hold over the guards. They spun around as one.

‘Sigmar,’ one of them cursed.

‘Get her out of there.’

‘I’m not going in after her.’

‘Khunas, quickly. Fetch a net.’

While the guardsmen argued and one of them, Khunas presumably, ran off towards one of the gaily painted promenade-side buildings, the swimmer splashed towards the middle of the lake. For someone born on the ocean, her technique was appalling. I probably could have done it better in full armour, and I’d lived my entire mortal life on a mountain. I hadn’t seen running water until after my Reforging on the Anvil of the Apotheosis. It was quite the marvel, let me tell you. This woman, though, moved through the water as though through a fight – rolling around, hitting it with balled fists, slapping at it with her feet.

I noticed then that the entire promenade had fallen quiet. Citizens and guardsmen that had previously been trying to shove one another into the lake or onto their backsides stood shoulder to shoulder, just watching, completely ignoring the thunderous rumble of Blackjaw’s barrage.

I felt the intensity of their attention pull on mine.

The swimmer groped clumsily towards the middle. ‘Feed,’ she gasped, between dunkings, repeating the mantra even as she coughed up sea water. ‘Swim free. Fee–’

I like to think myself largely unshockable, I have seen enough in my day, but the suddenness of what came next drew a gasp out of me.

A huge grey tentacle burst from the water and whipped about, drenching the swimmer under a torrent of salty rain, drowning her fevered prayers. The water around her seethed, as though the ocean were being drained from under her, and a truly gargantuan body broke its surface. To this day, I don’t know what it was that I saw. I have seen lurkinarth and kharybdiss, leviadon and murkraken, and none have come anywhere close either in scale or in the foulness of their appearance. The best that I can describe it is as some nightmarish cross-breeding of mega-squid and trench-dwelling troggoth, ridged with armour and folded with fat, pit-black eyes sunk deep into a central body surrounded by a nest of tentacles. Seawater streamed from albino scales. Its body was partially transparent. I could see the burrowing purple lines of veins, organs of unholy scale throbbing against the other side of its pearlescent skin.

The swimmer, I belatedly realised, had not stopped shouting: she had simply become mute under the waterfalls cascading from the monster’s tentacles.

A suckered tendril wrapped around the woman and dragged her from the water. It looked as though each tentacle was in it for themselves as several converged to try to pry the woman away from the first as she was drawn inexorably towards the monster’s head. A mouth split the jellied mass in half. Row upon row of primitive white teeth glistened, and I grimaced as the tentacle unrolled to propel the woman inside.

‘Feed. Swim fre–’

The mouth slammed shut.

To my horror I discovered that I could still see the woman through the monster’s translucent scales. Like a chewing ruminant, it worked its teeth. Blood burst against the walls of the creature’s mouth cavity, bones grinding, before draining away into the body of the monster as it swallowed.

I don’t know why it never occurred to me to draw my halberd and dive in after that woman. I was a Lord-Castellant, after all, and had been spoiling for any kind of a fight mere moments before, and yet my courage deserted me then. I think it was the stillness of the crowd that had made me a part of it, the reverential aspect to their observance. No one screamed in terror from the promenade the way they should have. And then, like a fish that had bobbed its mouth above water to capture a fly, the monster sank, body first, then head, leaving a handful of whipping tentacles that disappeared without a ripple. An artillery strike to a nearby pontoon made the surface water tremble, the fire reflecting in broken orange and red, and then the beast was gone.

‘What on Sigendil’s radiant glow was that?’ I said.

‘I don’t follow,’ said one of the guardsmen, as though I had just asked him to explain to me the meta-cosmology of Ulgu and its relationship with Hyish.

I looked at him, incredulous.

He shuffled back. ‘I don’t understand.’

‘There is a monster under your city that could accidentally swallow a Stardrake in its sleep,’ I explained, deliberately. ‘These people seem to think that it can help you against Blackjaw, and I’m inclined to agree with them.’

‘No, Castle Lord.’

‘No, what?’

‘It’s forbidden.’

I glared at the guardsman, and then, because it wasn’t as if this idiot was ever going to go to Azyr and find me out for a liar, said, ‘There can be no secrets from those touched by the heavens.’

‘Secrets, Castle Lord?’ He shook his head vigorously. The others joined in. ‘I don’t understand.’

I swear that if I heard that one more time, then people were going to start dying. Fortunately for their skin – and my honour – it didn’t come to that.

‘Castle Lord Hamilcar,’ came a voice from behind me. ‘What is going on here?’

‘I wish I knew.’

I turned as a heavy-set older figure shuffled onto the promontory, escorted by a pair of pontoon guards that looked about as threatening as one of those little blue daemons of Tzeentch. He was clad in a slightly finer variation of the whale fat and seagull feather ensemble sported by all the Nemesians I had encountered thus far. Fishbone pins secured his collar and his sleeves, and a complicated necklace-cum-dreamcatcher rested against his broad chest. I knew him. His name was Nanook, elder chief of the Killiniq Pontoon, one of the council of fifteen that governed this place.

Now, ordinarily, I have precious little time or patience for temporal authority. I prefer to seize command myself where I can, or work further down the chain and act as though higher authority were not there if I cannot. The elder chiefs of Nemisuvik, however, took their duties commendably casually. Their ceremonial meeting place was a hut right there in the Katuunak pontoon, but they tended to convene wherever was warmest and driest, and happened to be offering food.

As the siege had drawn on however, I had seen them more often standing vigil on the gabion-walls with the maorai than sitting on a blanket humming to the ocean for guidance. I had been greatly impressed by them, truth be told, and naturally they had been impressed by me.

I jabbed my thumb over my shoulder. ‘I just saw a monster that would give a Dracoth nightmares eat a woman. You didn’t think to mention it when I arrived?’

With a reluctant sigh, Nanook gestured back with his head. ‘Come with me, Castle Lord.’

With that, the elder chief turned and shuffled off with his guards. With an impatient frown, I went after him. While I wanted to press him on the monster right away, I had a finely honed sense for an old man being bloody mysterious, and held my silence.

In any case, he didn’t take me far.

Our destination was a modest timber-framed building, waterproofed in stretched grey hide that looked as though it had been flayed from the allopex at about the same time that Dracothion was plucking Sigmar from the ruins of Mallus. Smoke puffed from the gill-windows, but it was of the ‘there’s something on the hearth’ kind rather than the ‘your house has been hit by a burning skull’ kind, so I stood by as Nanook pushed in the flap and entered.

As was customary in Nemesian dwellings, regardless of size, there was a single room. Furnishings were sparse, limited to blubbery skins on the floor and some twinkly things dangling from the ceiling, turning idly in the smoke from the hearthpot. For a people who made their homes in the coldest, wettest place in the Mortal Realms, they overcompensated enormously when it came to their homes.

Even I swooned slightly.

Two old mortals were already bent around the stewing hearthpot, but because no gathering of the elder chiefs would be complete without some humming and muttering, a third observed the ritual formalities from a mat in the corner. The first two supped contentedly at bowls of fish broth, as if the bloodreavers of Khorne were not knocking their city down around their heads. It made me want to shake someone. Instead, I took the bowl that was offered me, as Nanook took that offered him.

The Nemesians set great store in perseverance, and in generosity, and Hamilcar Bear-Eater never turns down free food.

Nanook sipped gingerly, while I took my bowl of broth in a single outsized hand to down it in one slug, fishy lumps and all. Wiping my mouth on the back of my gauntlet, I tossed the bowl back to the elder who had passed it to me. He caught it deftly, belying his years, for I swear that the Nemesians do not age like other men. The Stormwilds batter them until they are dried out, preserving them like some kind of brown cheese until they consent to up and die. His name was Pak, of the Taloyak Pontoon. The other seated beside the hearthpot was Hitta. Unless my ears deceived me, the woman muttering in the corner was Jissipa.

‘Is anyone going to tell me what I just saw?’ I said, as Pak and Nanook took seats by the hearthpot. ‘I am a Lord-Castellant of the Astral Templars, and I would know every inch of the fortress I am tasked to defend.’ The better to argue for conducting the fight outside of it, usually. As far as I’m concerned walls are good for nothing but impeding a real man’s swing. Of course, that had never been an option in Nemisuvik, so in truth I had not pressed my responsibilities in that regard too closely.

The gathered chiefs looked at Nanook.

‘He saw Angujakkak,’ he explained.

‘The Grey King surfaced?’ said Hitta. Her voice was like an old rope, crusty with salt and smoke.

The others’ eyes brightened momentarily, and not with the fire.

‘He has not lain yet,’ said Nanook. ‘There was a fight on the promenade. A crowd rushed the guards to entreat the King. One woman made it.’

The elders muttered into their soup. I couldn’t tell if it was a prayer for the deceased woman, or just elderly harrumphing.

‘People,’ said Pak, with the same tone of voice that you might say idiots. ‘They can be stupid as slugfish.’

‘They are desperate,’ said Nanook.

‘No excuse,’ said Hitta.

I snapped my fingers, releasing a tiny spark of Azyr into the drowsily lit hut. ‘I’m waiting.’

‘Forgive us, Castle Lord,’ said Nanook. ‘We never have visitors. It is not something we know how to explain, because it never needs to be said. Angujakkak pulled the first men here, so our legends tell us, to where the currents of the Stormwilds shelter and provide. You have seen that we have no boats of our own.’

I had noticed.

Had I spotted one then I would have been on it and paddling towards Blackjaw’s flagship quicker than you could recite the names of the Six Smiths. After the first few days of my stay I had actually tried to build one. Nemisuvik possessed no shortage of materials, or things that float, but it turns out that boatbuilding is harder than it looks.

‘The beast looks hearty for a thousand years or more,’ I said.

The elder chiefs shook their heads.

‘No, Castle Lord,’ said Nanook. ‘He is the fourth. Every few hundred years, the King will grow large enough to break the nets that hold him.’

‘You mean it will get bigger?’

Nanook shrugged. ‘When he breaks the nets he will be big enough, and then leave.’

‘But not before laying the egg,’ said Pak.

‘And a new cycle begins,’ Hitta finished.

‘Well, he’s more than big enough to smash a hole in Blackjaw’s fleet.’ I shook my head. ‘Any bigger and he’d be entering into Godbeast territory.’

Godbeasts, or Zodiacal Monsters, depending on the pretentiousness of the scholar you’re speaking to, are monstrous constellations of the Mortal Realms. Think of them like realmstone, the way that celestium, gravesand or warpstone soaks up the properties of their respective realms. Still with me? Good. Godbeasts are the same. Vulcatrix who slew Grimnir, Drakatoa who trapped Gorkamorka for hundreds of years, and of course the great Dracothion himself – all of these are Zodiacal Godbeasts, mighty enough to defy gods, and many of them even sat in the Highheim with Sigmar’s divine pantheon in the good old days. I didn’t know for certain if Nemisuvik’s Grey King was quite in that class, but it was close enough for me.

‘He and his ancestors have been our guardians for two thousand years,’ said Nanook. ‘He protects us from the predators of the Stormwilds even as he draws them to defend our walls, but he is still a wild monster, Castle Lord. He will not be bidden by us, or by you.’

‘You didn’t see him on the promenade,’ I said. ‘Trapped, surrounded by armed men and women. A wild beast would have run amok. Trust me, Nanook. I’m an Astral Templar, and I know beasts. It should have been a slaughter. The monster has bonded to you somehow, to this city. I can smell it.’

The old man frowned, thoughtfully. ‘Still, it cannot be.’

‘There has been no laying,’ said Hitta, leaning closer to underlight her wizened, fat-smeared features. ‘If Angujakkak leaves without first laying, then it will be the doom of Nemisuvik.’

I pointed angrily. At what, I don’t recall, but since we were surrounded it probably doesn’t matter. ‘The bloodreavers are going to be the doom of Nemisuvik!’

‘Perhaps,’ said Nanook, equanimously.

I let my head sink into my hands and growled under my breath. Perseverance and bloody equanimity. I wish I knew how they did it. Could they not be furious or frustrated like me, terrified like an ordinary human being?

‘The woman who dived into the lake,’ I said, drawing my fingers down my face and looking up. ‘What was she hoping to achieve?’

‘I do not know,’ said Nanook.

‘I know how well I play the part, but don’t mistake me for a genuine fool. And don’t think I can’t spot another fraud quicker than a Judicator can glean the taint of Chaos.’

The elders exchanged glances.

Nanook sighed and set down his soup, his appetite apparently gone. ‘To goad him on blood, Castle Lord. To make him hunger, enough that he will break his nets and swim in search of meat amongst the bloodreavers.’

‘That sounds like a fine plan,’ I declared. ‘A classic. Just the way they teach it at the castellan temples in Sigmaron. The only drawback I see to it is that it’s taken you over a month to bring it to me.’ The elder chiefs shrank from the thunder in my voice. The feathers in their attire prickled as the air in the hut became charged. I eyed the steaming hearthpot. ‘Let’s feed the Grey King.’

‘No,’ said Nanook, mildly, but firmly.

‘Try and stop me, old man.’ I regretted the words as soon as they left my mouth, but I was angry. The long, cold fear had made me so. I saw a way out of this purgatory and it made me go in with both feet. I never had been one to think of consequences. ‘I’ll jump in with the monster myself if I have to.’

The elder chiefs looked at each other, astonished, never once considering that I was an immortal barbarian who would far rather be eaten by a hell-squid in pursuit of victory than endure another day under Blackjaw’s siege ships.

‘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 warrior 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 tentacle 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.

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 buckles, 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.

About the Author

David Guymer wrote the Primarchs novel Ferrus Manus: Gorgon of Medusa, and for Warhammer 40,000 The Eye of Medusa, The Voice of Mars and the two The Beast Arises novels Echoes of the Long War and The Last Son of Dorn. For Warhammer Age of Sigmar he wrote the novel Hamilcar: Champion of the Gods, the audio dramas The Beasts of Cartha, Fist of Mork, Fist of Gork, Great Red and Only the Faithful. He is also the author of the Gotrek & Felix novels Slayer, Kinslayer and City of the Damned and the Gotrek audio drama Realmslayer. He is a freelance writer and occasional scientist based in the East Riding, and was a finalist in the 2014 David Gemmell Awards for his novel Headtaker.

An extract from Hamilcar: Champion of the Gods.

I arced over the gurgling water like a zephyrgryph with his claws unfurled. The air was ice, the sky a weird shade of green, amber leaking into the night with the dawn. My face was the painful side of numb as my arms and legs paddled the thin air. All I could hear from beneath me was the creak of ice, the rush of the river and the wind slipping through my fingers. I started to laugh, my mouth thus conveniently wide for a roar of triumph as my boots slammed into the frozen slush of the Nevermarsh. Cracks spread through the frost-veined mud, but it was already hard as rock and did not break.

Just as well – sinking to my greaves in mud or getting into a tug-of-war for my boot was hardly the look I had been going for.

‘Yes!’

The cry exploded from my chest and I spun around with my fists in the air.

‘Let it be known that Hamilcar Bear-Eater is first across every river, first into every charge, first unto every blade!’ I bellowed.

Broudiccan’s slow handclap wasn’t quite the enthusiastic reaction that I felt the feat deserved. My second-in-command cut an imposing figure on the other side of the water, a fortress of a man in the thrice-blessed maroon and gold of the Astral Templars. His Mask Impassive, the grim facial covering of the Stormcast Eternals, was anything but; a gouge from a beast’s claw had cloven the stoic purple mask in two, leaving a disdainful aspect which suited his taciturnity to the ground.

If he thought he could leap twenty feet across ice-cold rapids then I would have very much liked to see him try.

‘Bravo, Lord Hamilcar,’ Frankos shouted through cupped hands, separated from the burly Decimator by the haggard width of a tree. ‘Congratulations on being the first of Sigmar’s Stormhosts to set foot in the Nevermarsh.’

Distinctions of age and experience counted for little within a company of immortals, but the Knight-Heraldor had always been possessed of a youthful effervescence that made me feel old. I nodded my thanks, pausing to glare at my second.

‘May the Heraldor Temples always proclaim it so,’ I bellowed back.

‘They shall, my lord,’ he cried with gusto. ‘They shall.’

Frankos was also quite unique amongst my warrior chamber in taking everything I said in deadly earnest. He continues to do so, in fact, even after the later reversal in our fortunes.

The sigmarite mountain called Broudiccan rumbled as the giant sighed.

His masked gaze slipped towards the frothing water.

Feral-looking birds with wicked red eyes twittered back and forth between the two banks. Their beaks were perfectly made for the stripping of flesh, the cracking of bone, and I suspected they could even chew the cure right off a man’s armour. Generally, the birds were happy enough scavenging for fish and insects amongst the densely tangled buttress roots that clawed out of the riverbank and into the water, but the Freeguild army I was leading through the Gorwood might as well have been one giant victuallers’ caravan for all they were concerned. More than one poor soldier had already lost a finger or an eye. Broudiccan swatted at one, which knew better than to test its toothed beak on sigmarite and flapped out of reach to shrill from the leafless canopy.

‘I’ll wait for the bridge,’ he grumbled, after a while.

I barely heard him over the white roar of the water, but I am a Stormcast Eternal, and my ears are sharp enough.

‘I wonder about you sometimes,’ I laughed. ‘Are you a plodding Knight-Excelsior, summoned to my warrior chamber in error?’

Broudiccan shrugged. ‘Even Sigmar can make mistakes. The pain of reforging is proof enough of this.’

‘Ha! Indeed. I remember my last day as a mortal, when I feasted with Him and ten thousand warriors in the Heldenhall.’ The memories of my mortal life were dimmer back then than they are now, jumbled like a stained glass window that had been broken and thrown back together, most of the pieces still missing, but this I remembered. ‘He has a delicate stomach. For a god.’

Frankos frowned at nothing. ‘I do not remember my final night.’

‘Parts of mine are a little blurry also. It was that aelf nectar wine. I swear there was nothing like it where–’

A racket worthy of Gorkamorka drowned me out as the rest of the army made their way through the trees.

I looked past the two Astral Templars, my sentence unfinished.

About nineteen hundred soldiers, two of the five Freeguild regiments of the Seven Words, had followed me into the Gorwood. Their baggage train and camp followers amounted to about the same again although I generally deferred the small details to Frankos and the mortal generals themselves. The fifty warriors of my Chamber, the Bear-Eaters, were strung out over several leagues of woodland. The trees that grew here at the boundary of the Low Gorwood were twisted runts compared to the predatory bowers that canopied the high slopes of the Gorkomon, but no less deadly. For all my efforts, the Gorwood was – and would always be – a wild place, home to as many hungry creatures as it had been when the Beastlord Uxor Untamed had ruled these heights. And I wouldn’t have had it any other way. The men and women that emerged wore a collage of colours – torn, faded, chewed on – over armour of tough leather and the occasional skin. There were a few wooden or leather shields, but most carried two-handed spears, javelins or hunting bows. Despite the cold and the predations of the forest they were still laughing – Ghurites all of them, none tougher – whistling catcalls at those behind and pointing at me on the other side of the river.

Coming in behind the vanguard was a trio of ogors in tattered surcoats, hauling a bridge of coppery lumber behind them. Their faces were snarled with effort, muscles standing like boulders from a mountainside. A few of the soldiers dropped their gear to run in and help push, the ogors hissing something that probably wasn’t all that complimentary through their teeth.

I put my hands on my hips and watched them, my heart ready to burst with pride.

I loved them all.

Only slightly less than they loved me.

‘Who is first upon the Nevermarsh?’ I called out to them, thumping my breastplate. ‘He who waits upon no man, beast nor creature of Ruin.’ I thrust my gauntleted fists in the air, wringing the musty stink of bear from my cloak.

‘Hamilcar!’

Cheers rippled through the treeline. The ogors took the opportunity to draw up and wipe the sweat from their sledgehammer-like brows, before readjusting the draw-chains wrapped round their fists.

I made a grand show of pulling off my gauntlets, rubbing my hands together and blowing into them, despite the fact I have little feeling for the cold. I am a champion of Heaven, and to be of Heaven is to be as cold as starlight. And yet it means something to the common soldier to see his hardships shared. Most Stormcast Eternals, broken from humanity in order to be elevated to that space beyond, would never even have considered such a gesture. There are better warriors than I in Sigmar’s Stormhosts. I’ll not name them, and I’ll only deny saying it should it get back to them. Let’s just say I have all the fingers I need to count them. But if you think that any of them can get as much as I can from a mortal man, then I would say you have passed too many times over the Anvil of Apotheosis, my friend.

‘The winter is cold,’ I yelled. ‘The Ghurlands are dangerous. But you know cold, you know danger. Every man and woman here is a veteran of the Gorwood. You have fought beside me against beastman and skaven and orruk, yet here you all are with me still. Why?’ My breath shrouded my tattooed fist in fog. ‘Because Hamilcar Bear-Eater is your brother and your champion, ahead of you every step of the way!’

‘Hamilcar!’

The cry came back louder now, men still spilling out of the forest to hear my words.

I unhooked the halberd from its bracket across my back. The black wood of the haft scraped over my armour as I drew it. The head sang as it came free. The blade was sigmarite, forged by the first of the Six Smiths under the Auroral Tempest, imbuing the metal with the storm’s vicious power. Bands of amber and violet rippled through the blade as I turned it and held it aloft. A pair of predator birds that I had managed to trap and kill myself dangled from the head on chains. Runes of my own inscription decorated the haft. They imparted no power I know of, and I had no idea from which ice hole of my memory they emerged, only that in those days you could not leave me with a flat surface and a knife and not return to find the former filled with the strange pictograms.

I had always assumed them to be a facet of my lost life as a mortal, which would of course prove to be correct, though I never gave it much thought at the time.

‘The Nevermarsh is another challenge again. No army of Sigmar has ever crossed its border, and yet…’ I spread my arms to indicate the river running across me. The soldiers chuckled, a few of them still shouting my name. A cloaked and helmeted veteran in a glittery cuirass of leather and glass and a rash of insect bites on his browned face choked with laughter. Even I didn’t think my remark was that amusing, but I acknowledged the old-timer with the point of my halberd. I recognised him from some battle or other, and I always liked to give the impression of familiarity with every woman or man who bore the Twin-Tailed Comet in my name.

‘This is where our enemies seek to hide from us, so this is where we hound them. We will run them to the ground, my friends. We will kill them, we will butcher them, and we will feed their bloody carcasses to the carniferns of the Gorwood!’

The bank erupted with a mighty cheer.

‘For Sigmar!’

‘Sigmar!’

‘For the God-King!’

My voice was the coming of thunder. I held the final syllable until my throat was hoarse and my body shook with passion.

I rehoused my halberd, leaving my fist raised in salute.

The men would all be warm now. If my Vanguards were right about the position of the hole that our enemy had found to hide in, and they generally were, then I expected the fire I had put in the soldiers’ bellies to last them until it was needed.

‘A good speech, lord,’ Frankos shouted to me.

I could almost sense Broudiccan’s eyes rolling.

‘Go and aid with the bridge,’ I told the Heraldor. ‘You’re as strong as any ogor, brother.’ One hand on the pommel of his broadsword, Frankos bowed low, his white crest bobbing in the frozen muck. I called after him as he departed. ‘Be sure that it’s good and flat. I would hate for Broudiccan to fall off.’

I chuckled to myself, Broudiccan still wearing that disdainful look of his.

Now ordinarily, these sullen spells were precisely the reason I chose the Paladin for my second. The long silences gave me more room to talk, but a man can only bear so much.

‘Spit it out, brother,’ I barked.

‘It is nothing.’

‘With you, it’s never nothing.’

The big Paladin grumbled. ‘You are like a boy on his first hunt, lord.’

I smiled wistfully. ‘You remember your first hunt?’

‘No.’

‘Nor I mine.’ I cocked a grin as though he had just made my point for me. ‘Every time is the first now. The realms are so vast, the enemy so numerous. It is always new.’

‘You are a Lord-Castellant, not an Azyros or a Venator to go seeking out new dangers.’

I blew out through my lips. ‘The best defence…’ Broudiccan’s eyes narrowed reproachfully, and I motioned towards the Freeguild further uphill, dragging the bridge towards us with renewed vigour. ‘They will work faster knowing I’m here on the far side. I don’t forget my calling, brother.’

Frankos had joined the labourers as I spoke, jostling in between the ogors and taking up some of the chain to help pull.

‘He is a bad influence upon you,’ said Broudiccan.

I laughed at that. ‘I suspect most would say it was the other way around.’

‘I have known Frankos longer than you. He is perfectly incorruptible. You, on the other hand, will do anything for an audience.’

I frowned across the water, but Broudiccan had nothing more to add. Frankly, I should have been astonished to have got as many words out of him as I had, but I was justifiably distracted by what happened next.

Lightning struck earth a few feet from where I was standing.

Not an actual lightning bolt, of course. Deliverance from the Celestial Stair remained as possible as it ever had been during the Realmgate Wars, but it had become rarer in those days as Sigmar’s wars spread his attention thinner. Azyrite energies crackled and burst as the Prosecutor furled his wings then stood. His armour was the black of freshly dug soil, richer in gold even than my own, and embellished with images and inscriptions as one would a tombstone. It put me in mind of the mortis armour worn by Xeros Stormcloud, my Lord-Relictor, who had earned his war name for the black mood that followed him wheresoever he chose to darken with his tread. Or so I chose to believe, and tell all who ask.

Despite having just risen, the Prosecutor dropped again to one knee. ‘Lord-Castellant, I bear an urgent missive from my lord, Akturus.’ His delivery smacked of some ritual phrasing, the effect only slightly ruined by the breathlessness that came with a long flight from the Seven Words. He presented a tightly furled scroll, sealed with a flickering Azyrite rune.

The scroll fizzled under my nose.

Now, it has never been any secret that I find the written word disturbing. Trapping a man’s words and thoughts, his soul even, on parchment or tablet still seems to me like witchcraft and I avoid it where I can.

An awkward second passed between us in which neither moved or spoke.

‘Urgent was Akturus’ word, lord,’ said the Prosecutor, the formality of his address slipping. ‘Not mine.’

I sighed.

If in doubt, bluff it out.

‘Read it to me as we go.’ I turned my back, picked a direction from the frostbitten scabgrass and sand-coloured rushes of the Nevermarsh in what I was sure was an authoritative manner and started walking.

‘Yes, lord.’

The sounds of hammering and sawing and the strains of an ogor working song faded quickly as I strode into the marsh, swallowed by the chirp of predatory birds and biting insects. I idly swatted at a few. Largely out of habit. Most things in Ghur would try to eat you one way or another, but there wasn’t much out there that would willingly make a meal out of the storm-fused flesh and blessed sigmarite of a Stormcast Eternal.

The realm’s erratic sun was just pushing over the horizon, kissing every leaf and frond with amber lips. It was beautiful. From behind me, there came a faint crack as the Prosecutor broke the lightning seal and unrolled the scroll.

‘Brother Castellant,’ he read aloud. ‘Praise Sigmar, for he has noted your abrupt absence and seen fit to reinforce the Seven Words until your prompt return. Lord-Veritant Vikaeus Creed did arrive this morn at the head of the Drakwards, Exemplar Chamber of the Knights Merciless, to–’

I grumbled under my breath, missing whatever it was that the Prosecutor said next.

Vikaeus and I had what you could call a history.

She thought me foolhardy and arrogant. Actually, she still does, and nor is she exactly wrong. Foolishness and arrogance are two of my finest qualities, virtues to which too few amongst the Stormhosts can lay claim. I, for my part, have always been underwhelmed by the Lord-Veritant’s much vaunted gift for prophecy. While it is true that she accurately prophesied the coming of the White Pox to the Valdenmoor, and foretold of Skulla Gashamna’s ascension to daemonhood months before Lord-Ordinator Vorrus Starstrike read it in the stars, her warnings of my imminent self-inflicted demise had thus far all come to naught.

‘Still waiting for that vermintide she foresaw swallowing the Seven Words, I imagine,’ I said.

‘The Lord-Castellant did not impart that detail, lord.’

‘I bet he didn’t. Did he impart anything else?’

‘Yes, lord. He asked me to tell you that he prays for your swift return, and to remind you that the slight raised against his honour still stands.’

I said nothing to that.

Akturus Ironheel commanded a warrior chamber known as the Imperishables, a force numbering some four hundred souls. As a Lord-Castellant, we were equivalent in rank, but utterly dissimilar in character. The Anvils of the Heldenhammer, the Stormhost to which the Imperishables belonged, were a force of black repute, assembled from the heroes of empires long-dead and hammered into being while the Mallus turned under a darksome phase.

Or so their lords-relictor claim, and good luck to them, for no one knows better the power of a fearsome legend than I.

‘It was meant in jest,’ I said. ‘He enjoys it.’

‘He has already prepared the ring for ritual combat, lord. All of the Seven Words are eager for your return.’ It could just have been me, but I was certain I heard a smirk in the winged warrior’s voice.

Akturus might have preferred sitting in a castle to taking one, and despised the untamed Ghurlands as much as I hated being bottled up in the Seven Words, but he was the most vicious and underhanded fighter I have ever had the misfortune to cross in all my centuries of war. I swear, he knew the weaknesses of aegis armour and the pressure points of a Stormcast Eternal’s body the way a Lord-Castellant should know bricks and mortar.

And he was touchy about the honour of his war name, as I had recently learned.

‘Not nearly as eager as I am,’ I said, though I would have rather challenged the entire Drakwards Exemplar Chamber than entertain Akturus in the ring. If there’s one thing people admire more than a victor, it’s a bold loser, and being batted around the Seven Words by a Dracoth or two would at least be a moral triumph of sorts.

The Prosecutor chuckled, which I took as more comradely than mocking. It was easy to forget sometimes that the Imperishables were as human beneath their armour as I.

I sighed. I supposed that my reputation could afford to suffer a knock or two, taken in good spirits.

Suddenly, I stopped walking, holding up my hand as I stared into the endless marsh. It was called the Nevermarsh for a reason.

‘The thought occurs. I have no idea where I’m going.’

The Prosecutor gestured back the way we had come. ‘This way, lord. I am not the only bringer of news.’

Click here to buy Hamilcar: Champion of the Gods.

A Black Library Publication

First published in Gods & Mortals in Great Britain in 2019.
This eBook edition published in 2019 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.
Cover illustration by Jake Murray.

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