Starseers ruin, p.11
Starseer's Ruin, page 11
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
VAEL
The scout woman was trying to keep one eye on him and one on the Seraphon warrior, meaning she ended up sidestepping along like a crab.
‘Your lordship,’ she said, ‘if I can ask, Sigmar sent you here to fight the lizards?’
Vael’s stare probably looked as though he was offended by her curiosity. Inside he was just… blank, vacant. Sigmar had not sent him. He had begged to be sent. Sent here, because all along the barren shore of his memory it was the one landmark remaining, and all else just driftwood and pieces. He had come to find the man he’d been, back in his first forging. The hard-edged bastion Sigmar had made him into.
And yes, he had come to relive his clash with the Seraphon, but only because it was the ragged edge of his story and he needed to tie it off. And somehow there were Seraphon here to fight, and yet…
‘We were never supposed to fight them,’ he said hollowly. An answer not to her but to his own thoughts. ‘The Everchosen’s host was below us. It was the apex of Chaos. Mistakes were made. Even by gods.’ He felt the desperate yearning in him, to call for the Seraphon to turn and fight him. To end it. Win a victory or a new death, and either option as satisfactory as the other. Lost, I am lost. And the Seraphon had seemed lost too. The war against disorder has scattered us across time, disjointed us from who we were and where we were meant to be. Each time a squad of Stormcasts was broken up and died separately, they were Reforged piecemeal, sometimes even thrown into battle with new faces, new comrades, rather than left to sit idle in the halls of Azyr. Into a world of fresh enemies and a geography rewritten by mortal hands. New cities, new banners, new allies, even as their memories were eroded away by a constant personal attrition. Vael had struggled, death after death, to hold on to why they fought, who against, who alongside, what was won, what lost. Impossible. No wonder that so many of his fellows, perhaps the whole of the first forging of the Hammers, had abandoned all attempt to make sense of the fight. They had become nothing more than Sigmar’s lightning in human form, no questions and no tolerance for dissent, consigned to the Ruination chambers. That was what awaited Vael the moment he let go of these last scraps of remembrance.
Isn’t it better than this agony and doubt? But hidden within that agony and doubt were the last scraps of the human Vael, who had spent his mortal blood in fighting Chaos. Who had been stolen from true death by Sigmar, and made into something that never truly died but lived less and less with each remaking.
Ahead, the Seraphon stopped and turned, seeming just as oppressed by its own thoughts. Beyond it, through the trees, Vael could make out a cluster of its fellows gathered about a dim crystal. The lesser kind were in the centre, huddled close in the chill night as though the glowing thing were a fire. A circle of the bigger warriors surrounded them, squatting on their haunches and staring dully out at the dark, spears and clubs sloped over their shoulders. Easy to read human dejection into them, and easy as well to mark how few they were. He reckoned a good half must have fallen in the ruin when the rats attacked.
‘You… going to fight them all now, your lordship? One at a time or all at once?’ The scout was looking at him warily.
Was he? The prospect had simplicity to recommend it, but no more. ‘There would be no meaning,’ Vael told her. Just as the fight aboard the flying temple had possessed no meaning. Just one mistake in the confusion of the great war against Chaos. How the Everchosen must have laughed.
‘Only I was thinking,’ the scout murmured, and a hideous shrilling went up throughout the trees. Abruptly there was motion everywhere, a furry, bristling tide. There were more Skaven abroad than the isolated patrols Vael and Stanner had been fighting. They had spotted the Seraphon’s camp.
They came swarming out of the dark, and in the first instant they seemed to completely overrun the reptiles, who reacted slowly, torpid in the cold. A moment later the great warriors had risen up, rats clinging to them that stabbed and bit and shrieked as they were plucked off and savaged in lizard jaws. The biggest warrior – Vael’s nemesis, whom they’d followed here – let out a monstrous roar and lumbered into the fray, and Vael found himself following up automatically. As though the creature were his squadmate, his fellow champion of Sigmar. His feet, following some memory of their own, fighting some battle lost to the rest of him.
Stanner’s crossbow snapped on one side, impossible to miss such a dense host of ratfolk as they swarmed the camp. The melee came down to teeth and claws on both sides as the smaller lizards tried to get out from the press to use their javelins and blowpipes.
Vael and the lizard champion tore into the rat pack together, club and hammer almost in sync. Lightning crackled and flared where he struck, and stabbed out from his eyes and the scars on his face. The Skaven fell back from him; their spears and crooked swords scraped from his mail and from the Seraphon’s scaled hide. They were two juggernauts, wading into the mass of rats, scions of Order, indomitable.
Then one of the Skaven was on Vael’s shoulders, fingers hooked about one pauldron as it sawed at his neck. He felt the edge grate across the scales of his mail shirt as the creature lurched left and right to evade his grasping hand. Its fur was standing out straight and dancing with blue fire, but it was viciously determined, refusing to be thrown off. A thrust of its blade opened a gash across his temple that bled blue light.
Vael lurched sideways as a new weight landed on his back. Another rat, surely. They were going to drag him down by sheer numbers. The first rat got another glancing blow across his brow and he went down, overburdened, hammer spinning from his grip. Spitting oaths, he tried to lever himself up and saw the point of the rat’s blade right before his face, driving for his eye.
So be it. He feared the pain less than what the Reforging would take from him. It was the wounds Sigmar dealt that stayed with you from life to life.
The thing still on his back lunged forwards. He saw a reptile head jut into his eyeline, jaws open. A tongue flicked out, a foot’s length of it, impacting straight into the rat’s left eye. It squealed, and then the tongue snapped back into the lizard’s jaws, leaving only a bloody socket in its wake. Kicking off from Vael’s back, the little Seraphon leapt on the shrieking rat, one hand punching forwards with a fistful of dark needles. It drove them into the Skaven’s throat with brutal efficiency, one turreted eye tilted to see if Vael was going to be trouble. A moment later it was gone. Not run off, just… faded into the general fray, impossible to keep track of.
Vael lurched to his feet, finding his hammer. His wounds burned, cauterising themselves with the fire of his blood. He felt detached from the fight, not sure if what he’d just seen was even real.
‘Your lordship!’ It was the scout, at his elbow again as she reloaded her crossbow. ‘They’re going, the rats are, but they’re not going far. What’s the plan?’
Her faith that he had one was one more burden. And if it had just been him then the plan would have been, Fight until I die, after which it’s in Sigmar’s hands. Easy for him to throw his life away. But if the rats killed this woman, or the Seraphon, there would be no Reforging for them.
He stared at her, and saw the exact moment when she understood he had no idea at all.
She nodded, as though the revelation was a kind of permission. The Seraphon had indeed thrown the Skaven back into the trees, but Vael could hear lots of chittering out there as the creatures regained their fickle courage.
‘Listen here,’ Stanner said urgently. ‘Any of you speak a word of a decent language?’
One of the smaller kind stepped forwards. ‘Ape-speak we hear,’ it said. ‘What does it speak, ape-speaker?’
The scout just nodded at that. ‘Ape says this,’ she told them. ‘Rats’re coming back. Stay here, your skins are cloaks and boots by morning. Our camp’s better than this. You want to live, stick with us. We’ll mess ’em up together.’ That many words seemed to exhaust her. ‘Or not,’ she added. ‘However you want.’
There was a lot of hissing and clicking between the Seraphon, as Vael watched furtive movement within the trees. Then the big one, their leader, walked up and pushed at his shoulder. Pushed hard, enough to topple a smaller man, and Vael thought, So we do fight, then? And knew a curious kind of relief that the decision had been made for him. But the lizard warrior wasn’t raising its club, and he wondered if, instead, that hard shove was just a greeting amongst them. A handshake, a cheery salute.
‘Gokumet says, you do what, Golden One?’ said the little lizard interpreter.
Vael looked from one reptile face to the other. ‘What?’ he asked.
‘You stand, you fight, all stand. To ape camp you go, also we go. Gokumet says, you do what?’
‘Why?’ Vael asked. Gokumet. His nemesis had a name.
‘Gokumet, you he knows. Your flesh in his teeth,’ the interpreter said.
‘Your what?’ Stanner hissed, and Vael found he was smiling at a joke that he shared with the Seraphon, that the human would never understand. Suddenly, he didn’t want them all just to die here fighting rats, at night in this morbid forest. Let their final battle at least be in Shyish’s pale daylight. Let them see one another clearly when the end came.
‘We go,’ he said. If there were tears in his eyes then they were lost in the lightning.
The Skaven tried another attack as they were moving out, but Vael and Gokumet held the rear as Stanner led the Seraphon away. Faced with the pair of them, fighting in lockstep, the rats’ nerve broke again and they fell back. And it was good. Like fighting alongside his fellows in Sigmar’s service. Good to look sidelong and see that brutal reptile profile, the glimmer of its scales. You and I will fight, and you or I will die, but for now we will kill these servants of Chaos together. Vael the man and Vael the Stormcast in momentary harmony.
Kenlo’s people weren’t expecting the reinforcements Stanner led to them. Vael found the whole business grimly amusing. The first sentries’ challenges, followed by an escalating series of panicked exclamations as the entire reptilian convoy came into sight. The scout’s hissed explanations, and the marching Seraphon simply refusing to stop and be challenged, until it was very nearly a whole new fight right there and then. Vael put himself between them, though, just holding his arms out as though restraining children, and by then Stanner had explained how the Skaven had been on the prowl out there. No news to Kenlo and the others, as it turned out, because they’d already turned away one attack by the rats.
They had a fire, too. The wood of Shyish burned with phantom flames of pale green and violet, casting no healthy light. It gave enough heat for the smaller Seraphon, though, who ended up clustered near it and elbowing the Steelhelms out of the way. Their interpreter was not endearing itself to anyone by calling them all apes, either. The alliance of convenience was off to a rocky start.
‘But they’re good for fighting rats, you say?’ Kenlo noted. He and Stanner were sitting against a tree, and Vael lowered himself down to join them.
‘They are warriors of Order. The rats are their enemies since the earliest days,’ Vael said. He frowned at the thought: a fragment of memory, something he’d been told by someone wiser.
‘Well then,’ Kenlo said, ‘I don’t know that I’d have gone recruiting for them myself, but we can use them now they’re here, lord. First light we’re into the ruins and finding Perlo.’
‘You think she lives?’ Vael asked. An innocent enough question inside his head, but Kenlo tensed, hand clenched about the haft of his axe.
‘She is my sister,’ he spat. ‘She can look after herself. She’s fine. We’ll find her. Find her, fill our bags, then get out, and the lizards and rats can fight over this cursed place forever for all I care.’
Stanner looked away, saying nothing. She doesn’t believe the mage lives either, Vael understood. And he could see that the decent thing to do would be to tell Kenlo that, yes, obviously Perlo was fine and they’d somehow just chance across her in all the ruins, but neither he nor the scout had that kind of decency in them.
There was another burst of squabbling near the fire, as Sergeant Lofus tried to evict a couple of the lizards so he could sit down.
‘What’re they even here for?’ Kenlo complained.
‘This is their place,’ Vael said.
‘What, now? When our father came through he didn’t say anything about the place crawling with lizards! Why now? Hey, you, the talker. You talk to me?’
The interpreter looked over. ‘Apes need not the warmth,’ it complained. ‘The selfishness of apes shows no respect for need.’
‘I see why they made that one the diplomat,’ Kenlo muttered to himself. ‘What are your people here for?’ he said out loud. ‘You came to fight the rats?’
‘Irixi Starseer has come for the Good Purpose, proclaimed by Sek’atta Mage-Priest,’ the interpreter said. ‘Purpose beyond the wisdom of apes.’ Then another lizard was at its shoulder – suddenly enough that all of them started. The creature with the long tongue and the pivoting eyes that Vael had seen during the fight. He watched, fascinated, as the firelight chased across its skin and was chased in turn by a wave of swirling pattern, the outlines of the creature simultaneously there and not there as though it were made of smoke.
It flashed angry patterns at the translator, ending with a hiss that was plainly a threat. The interpreter flinched and ducked its head, flushing dark.
‘Someone got told off,’ Stanner remarked quietly. It was the first suggestion of disagreement he’d seen between the Seraphon. Then she frowned. ‘What’s that light?’
She wasn’t the only one to have noticed it. A pale indigo radiance was forming in the air above the fire. Steelhelms leapt up, scrabbling for their shields and weapons, but the Seraphon were all attentively still.
‘Hold!’ Vael called. From a dim glow, the light stretched and fragmented, forming a constellation of star-motes that shaped a head. For a moment it was a lizard head, crowned with two feathers. Blocky and stylised but animated, moving as though it were living. Pictograms bloomed and faded around the image.
‘What is this?’ Kenlo demanded, but even as he spoke, the image broke apart into firefly motes and then reformed: a human-seeming visage, as though some lizard artist had tried to capture Perlo’s likeness.
‘Kenlo?’ Her voice echoed to them as though from some vast chasm. ‘We’re in trouble. You have to come and get us.’
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
IRIXI
The human, Perlo, made sounds again. By now, Irixi was familiar enough with the rhythms and fluting of its voice to understand the meaning: ‘It’s me. How is it me?’
And it was, and the fact that human eyes had recognised the fact showed the wisdom and foresight of the original frieze-carvers because Irixi could recognise the effort that had gone into making the image as human-like as possible, pushing the boundaries of the accepted sacred form. When the ancient mage-priests had dreamed this vision and decreed it to be set down for posterity, they had known that it was important even a human could interpret this specific panel.
What, then, was the carved Perlo proffering, that the ruin of the temple had erased? Irixi felt a spike of hope: perhaps this panel depicted the very moment that the carving itself was restored. Why else would events have conspired to place humans in the ruin of the Wings of Serendipitous Fire unless their presence could assist in Irixi’s mission? Of course the full record of the Nine Orchid Path included the story of its own restoration. Irixi felt a flutter of awe in its heart at the magnificent prescience of the Old Ones.
Now was the time to explain. Perlo was a part of the Nine Orchid visions, and so the human must be made to understand.
‘You must know that in the dawn of time the Old Ones foresaw the rise of Chaos and the disordering of the cosmos,’ Irixi began, because surely even infant humans were taught as much. Perlo was listening attentively, face screwed up in concentration, doing a human’s best to grasp the concepts. That was gratifying.
‘The Old Ones formulated a plan by which the cosmos could be restored to its proper order, all things in their place.’ Irixi made the proper gesture of hands, crest and tail, to indicate the supreme desirability of such a state. Lost on Perlo, but it was force of habit by now. ‘Then they passed the responsibility of carrying out the plan to their greatest servants, the supreme arcane authorities of the universe, the Starmasters, of that exalted people whom some call slann.’ Irixi searched the human’s face and body for signs of understanding. Perlo was doing its best, the Starseer judged, which would have to suffice.
‘All forms of life have their role in the plan,’ it explained magnanimously. ‘Of course, we Seraphon are to be trusted with the most important elements, but other servants of Order will play their parts, the aelves, the duardin, the humans. When the plan calls for some obstruction to be torn down, that is why there are orruks and ogors in the realms. When something must be preserved in cold stillness, the forces of Death shall play their role. Sometimes even the agents of Chaos itself shall take a hand in their own downfall, so all-encompassing is the plan of the Old Ones.’ Irixi hoped Perlo understood the great honour paid to all humanity by being permitted to play its part.
‘Alas, the machinations of Chaos, the tides of strife and time, mean that much of the plan has been obscured,’ it went on. This was how one taught skinks new from the waters, those who would in time progress into the study of such things. ‘To enact its details, we must uncover each part of it and piece together the whole. In such a way the cosmos shall be returned to its proper order. Here in this chamber was once recorded one small loop of the coils of prophecy, known to us as the Nine Orchid Path. Over time, all other record of this wisdom has been taken from us, but here it is preserved.’
