Starseers ruin, p.18
Starseer's Ruin, page 18
The man he had been laughed into Vael’s scarred face, cast off his later self and waded off into the fray. Unstoppable, undoubting, revelling in the strength and power that the forging had infused him with. Vael grasped for him, trying to haul him back, but he was just one more Stormcast amongst many, falling to the blows of the Seraphon and striking them down in turn.
For a moment it was all just ghosts and shadows again, and he was sane, or at least dancing on the knife edge of sanity. The past could be staved off, forced back into the gloom of memory. He could cope. He had a brief glimpse of Stanner staring at him, keeping well back. Of his hammer, head down, haft up, waiting for him. His gauntlet closed about it without thought, knowing its place. A weapon that knew no fear or doubt. That was what he was made to be.
The next instant it all flooded in on him again, the other sun, the walls. The great horned head of Dracothion worked in stone, louring down on him, judging him. He cowered from the dragon’s spread stone wings, even as another flash of lightning drew a molten line down them.
Forgive me! Forgive all of us! But his fellows were gone beyond memory and beyond doubt, and without those things, how could they ever be forgiven for what they had done?
The battle around him swirled like smoke, Stormcasts and Seraphon blurring and flurrying as something forced its way through the memories to get to him. He saw a huge scaled form, crested head, gaping jaws. Gokumet, and he had no idea if it was the Gokumet of his mind or of the real.
Its toothed club was directed at him, though, calling him out, challenging him. Offering the only way out of the nightmare.
Vael bellowed out a despairing war cry and rushed forwards to join the fight.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
GOKUMET
These things Gokumet understood. The warm sun on its hide. The orders of the mage-priests. War.
Oaxmal flashed urgent colours, saying, No, no, but while the scout was cunning, there were things it could not know. Some domains were Gokumet’s alone.
Above was Sotek, font of all reptiles, hunter of rats in the dark places, youngest of the gods yet first amongst them while this age of war endured. Around Gokumet, the spectres of broodmates and kin glimmered and danced. A gift, from the past. Not a gift of sorrow, as it seemed to the Golden One. A gift of joy. Like one last mild autumn day at the very brink of winter. One final glimpse of First Home.
Gokumet felt as though it had never departed this place. As though some part of the champion had fallen with the Wings of Serendipitous Fire, even as Sek’atta commanded the retreat. Now that piece had been restored, for the saurus stood where it had been, and all around was the fight it had abandoned. A circle had been completed in its heart. When it had returned to First Home the stones had been dead and broken, but now First Home had returned to Gokumet.
The Golden One gave out dreadful lost noises, like a beast in a trap. It struck at phantoms, then dropped its own weapon, clawing at its mauled face. Gokumet was no seer. No human, to be consumed by inner tides like this. It understood ghosts, though. It had lived with its own on the Celestial Eye of Tepok. The ghost of First Home lost.
At peace now, it watched the Golden One devoured from the inside, a human haunting itself. Gokumet knew what action must be taken. The calm within, the acceptance of ruin, must be shared.
The saurus hefted its club. Oaxmal was still signalling No and the other human was shouting, but what did they know? This was warrior business. This was what Gokumet understood.
There were rituals – festivals, almost – when the Seraphon recounted their myths through acting them out, each participant exact in word and motion so that the paths of ritual power embodied in the stories could be reinforced. Stories that were magic, magic that was legend. Real histories idealised and corrected so that the future could be better, or future events re-envisioned so that the plan might be brought closer to fruition. It was skink work, mostly, the treading over of those stories. There was music, finery. Five of the little Seraphon might carry a cloth-covered jointed frame, dancing the steps of The Great Dragon Rises In Flame, or The Banishing of the Daemon Lord, or Itzl Tames the Carnosaur. Gokumet had never been a performer, but it stepped into the dance of ritual now, adopting the role of its own self, Gokumet of First Home, Champion of Sek’atta, Defender of the Fallen Temple, pacing through the remembered motions of How the Golden Ones Were Fought.
It passed through the steps of the challenge, simultaneously remembered and acted out anew, and the Golden One saw, and became calm, knowing his own role as the Lightning Bearer, the Bright Enemy. Gokumet almost heard the crowd rustle in appreciation. I am become a myth.
The Golden One stepped forwards, hammer descending, just as it should be. Gokumet took the blow on its shield, letting the bright weapon slant away. The starmetal club slammed against the Stormcast’s shoulder, resounding through the strong metal. Gokumet felt a deep satisfaction, stepping back as the hammer’s next arc passed by, the Golden One letting its momentum carry itself under the saurus’ following sweep. They parted, circled. Around them, the phantasmal melee wheeled, each fighting figure a star in its greater constellation.
The face of the Golden One was the one ill note in the precise steps of the dance. The Stormcast should have been masked, as it had been before. Or, if not masked, then serene, understanding its place in the cosmos. Instead, the human features stretched and twisted. As though it was real for it. As though it was fighting for its life.
Gokumet was not a creature of many understandings, but a revelation came then: how terrible it must be, to be human. To not know oneself part of a greater plan. Even the golden servants of their human god lived in such ignorance, it seemed. They must strive to believe when Gokumet knew.
Their weapons passed back and forth, each move perfect. The Golden One’s mind might know doubt but its body and armour understood. Gokumet dealt and received a blow, knowing the pain was a step along the ritual path that the two of them had plotted out centuries before. They were coming to the conclusion. The saurus felt saliva well under its tongue at the thought. In the Golden One’s face, a similar revelation came. The Stormcast remembered how this ended, and the knowledge at last brought it peace.
Gokumet stepped inside the Golden One’s guard, letting the butt of the hammer bound from its shoulder. It grappled with the Stormcast, feeling the strength of lightning within the armour. Saurus jaws gaped, lunged.
Distantly there came one discordant note, the shocked cry of the other human.
Gokumet’s fangs found their grooves, each fitting to a precise rut across the face of the Golden One. It held them there, biting slightly, feeling the resistance of the man’s scars.
Around them, the last tatters of what-had-been blew away. The ghosts ebbed back into air. The distant clatter of battle faded,
Gokumet eased its jaws open and crouched back on its haunches. The ritual was done, the story was told. The Fall of First Home.
There were eyes on them. Oaxmal, the human scout.
The Stormcast spoke human words. Thank you, said its tone. If the madness was not gone from those lightning eyes, it had retreated. A wound unhealed but salved at least. These things Gokumet understood.
One more pair of eyes was on them. At the mouth of the ruined temple a single rat stood, frozen, staring in utter bewilderment at what had just taken place. Oaxmal hissed and brought up its blowpipe, but the creature turned and fled, shrilling for reinforcements. It was time to move on.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
OAXMAL
The tail was dying. Written in its twisting and faded patterns were Oaxmal’s final instructions from Irixi. One more shrine and its location before the work was done. And be ready to act! Irixi’s coda. There were rites that bore no fruit for generations, whose workings would take a hundred years before their effect on the realms became manifest. This, Oaxmal divined, would not be one of those.
It flushed bright red across its crest and throat pouch to hook Gokumet’s attention. The saurus was still crouching before the Golden One, lending the Stormcast strength to rise. The rats would be here soon, in strength.
Oaxmal weighed the oracular tail in its hands, seeing its final commands dying on its skin, then dropped it as the sympathetic link to the Starseer finally withered. The Chameleon’s skin danced through a sequence of simple images, not the complex flicker it would use with its peers but ideas fit to communicate to a saurus.
Return. Gather force. Prepare. Seize opportunity. Assault. Then a second time and a third until Gokumet growled understanding. After which, between shoving, pulling and some brutal clubbing mime, it communicated the same to the Golden One. Soon enough, the pair of them were heading back to where the humans had their fire.
The other human, the useful human, watched all this, and Oaxmal eyed it thoughtfully. The path the tail had described in its last throes would take them to the very fringes of the Skaven camp, and the shrine was immediately below, perhaps swarming with the creatures. Mere force would not suffice, but subtlety? Perhaps.
The useful human nodded. It would follow Oaxmal’s lead. Its dart-thrower was loaded, the little arms drawn back.
There were rats aplenty across the ruins, between them and their target. Oaxmal and the useful human ghosted past each pack, sometimes climbing high above across the jagged teeth of broken walls, sometimes slinking around fallen rubble, hiding in the shadows of truncated columns, crawling through the dried-up gutters of sacred water channels. The Skaven were making themselves at home, picking over the ruin, squabbling with one another, smearing their filthy sigils on the walls. Oaxmal saw the triangular rune of their rat god painted in blood and excrement over the ordered pictograms of the seers and knew a dull, patient loathing. All such sacrileges would be answered in the fullness of time, but Seraphon were creatures of patience. They had been created to enact a plan as wide as the realms and as deep as history. Not like humans with their swift, fierce lives.
They crept to the very edge of the Skaven’s surface camp. Not the full, thronging host that was in the prophecy chamber deep below, surrounding Irixi’s weakening shield, but still a festering mass of them. Oaxmal watched half a dozen separate fights amongst the creatures, the meanest of the mean fighting for lordship over the three or four others within reach of claws and teeth. Others had made themselves petty little thrones, sitting like deluded princelings as lesser rats brought them stinking delicacies or decked them in Seraphon-crafted anklets, rings and pectorals. A handful of rats were plainly supposed to be keeping watch, but their attention was mostly on the antics of their fellows. Oaxmal and the useful human drifted past them and they knew nothing of it.
There was a shaft with narrow, steep steps, burrowing crookedly into the earth at the very edge of the Skaven camp. Needless to say, the rats had found it already. A handful of them were clustered at the top, peering down with what Oaxmal identified as fear. Not just scurrying into the dark to scavenge, but certainly standing in the way.
Oaxmal tilted an eye at the human. It counted off the rats carefully: five. Was five too many, to kill them before word could spread? One squeak of alarm and the whole camp could be on them.
The Chameleon gestured for its companion to come close, then plucked the little javelin from the human’s bolt-caster. A simple missile. Oaxmal drew the head along the slick skin of the frog at its belt, coating the metal with toxin, then handed it back. The human understood immediately, refitting the missile with great care and then handing over the rest of its ammunition. Oaxmal coated each in turn, knowing that this was, in some small way, forbidden. A Seraphon secret, a Chameleon secret, a venom sacred to Oaxmal’s own patron, in the hands of a human.
The gods would have to understand.
They struck without needing a signal between them, Oaxmal’s throat inflating to force the darts explosively from its pipe as the human’s weapon spat out its own bolts, its fingers drawing back the string with deft motions. Three rats were down and spasming before the others understood they were under attack, and they had no chance to do anything about it.
The pair of them had the bodies down a pit in short order. Perhaps some rat taskmaster would miss them, but absent was less suspicious than dead. Then it was the dark, the human’s half-closed lantern lending just enough light to see the precipitous steps.
Down below, they discovered why the rats had been leery of descending. They weren’t the first to try, and the previous patrol hadn’t come back out.
The near end of the small chamber was a scree slope of shattered stone. Beyond, the shrine itself was cramped, little space beyond that needed to kneel before the effigy itself. Oaxmal registered a square engraving in the far wall, crazed through with cracks but still mostly intact. Within that square was Huanchi. An older, more stylised representation than Oaxmal was used to, shown head down, teeth bared, head, limbs, body and tail tessellated so that there was not an inch of the design that was not Huanchi. The Hunter of the Night Forest, the Eyes in the Darkness, simultaneously the predator and the hunting grounds themselves. Oaxmal’s own patron, who had blessed the waters of its birthing.
On the ground, before the icon and strewn halfway up the slope, were another half a dozen dead Skaven, killed as they tried to flee. And all around, the faint glimmers of motion, the very ghosts of ghosts, spectres of things that would have been hidden from sight even when they were alive. Oaxmal’s kin. When the Wings of Serendipitous Fire had lived and flown, a brood of its own kind had dwelled and worshipped here. Now Irixi’s ritual had roused them in spirit, and they had come to defend their sacred place. Oaxmal didn’t know if the rats had died from some phantasmal venom or from fear.
It picked its way around them, approaching the effigy, feeling that fierce regard. Huanchi was like life: one could never be sure of it. Of all the Seraphon powers, Oaxmal felt, Huanchi was the wildest. Not cold and patient like the Serpent, Sotek, or the Sun-Lizard, Chotec. Huanchi was the Jaguar, swift and filled with passions. Hot-blooded, like a human.
If its broodmates had been at its side and living, Oaxmal would never have thought in such a way. Here before its god, with the desecrating Skaven making merry above, it felt their absence keenly. It had only the one ally able to walk where Huanchi’s followers must go, though. A fellow hunter, despite everything that separated them.
Oaxmal crouched before Huanchi’s stone likeness. One topaz eye had been prised out by the Skaven, but the shrine’s defenders had manifested before the rats could blind the god entirely.
The useful human knelt beside it, watching intently. In a few heartbeats, Oaxmal would see if its blood would suffice to awaken its patron, but there was a necessary duty first. Huanchi must be told of those who had borne its blessing, and who would not be returning to its service.
Oaxmal drew their names with a finger – no blood, no lasting mark: those consecrated to Huanchi passed through the world and left not a ripple. As befitted a Chameleon, their names were writ invisibly, in silence. One after another, Oaxmal traced the sign of them, until every broodmate was accounted for save itself.
It hunched back on its haunches, feeling a weight taken from it. Feeling Huanchi devour the names of its adherents, to keep them safe and remembered. The useful human watched, and somehow the meaning of the rite communicated itself, because it also reached forwards and traced something, some piece of human writing on the stone.
‘Arnulf,’ it said softly, and Oaxmal understood. Arnulf: one more fallen hunter. For all it would never have known the god in life, Oaxmal felt Huanchi accept the dedication in death. Arnulf, a name to be held in the secret annals of the Stalker in the Shadows.
Keeping one eye on the effigy, Oaxmal turned the other on the human. The creature’s blood had awoken Sotek when Oaxmal’s had not sufficed, after the temple of the Serpent had been scarred by the power of human gods.
A great daring came to Oaxmal’s mind. Something that others might decry as blasphemy but that seemed only natural here and now. There would be no more guidance from Irixi. Oaxmal had only its own judgement.
It wished it could know if the human felt the god speak to it, understood something of the meaning of the shrine. Human minds were stamped on human faces always, those rubbery features never still, yet it was a language Oaxmal could not interpret.
It drew out its flake of obsidian and indicated to the useful human to draw its own steel knife. Each of them drew blood, and then Oaxmal guided the human’s hand. Not merely an enactment of Irixi’s ritual to awake the shrines, and the temple. A consecration, an invitation to the spirit of the Jaguar god, to look kindly on this human creature, to find in it a kinship, a surrogate child to watch over.
Oaxmal reached up and smeared its own blood across the human’s face, its own skin echoing the patterns it drew there. Darkness. Fear. The unexpected strike. Feeling through that touch a connection absent since the last of its siblings died. Useful human, my broodmate, we shall hunt together.
It guided the human’s hand one last time, and they daubed blood on Huanchi’s remaining eye together. The topaz was just a faceted stone, now dulled with red, but inside itself, Oaxmal felt the god’s regard.
Quetzl to ward the way, Chotec’s warmth to give life and animation, Sotek to lend a predatory purpose, Huanchi to start the hunt. Gods. Philosophical concepts. Nodes in the disjointed network of arcane lines that had once stretched through the temple-ship Wings of Serendipitous Fire. Long severed in the sacred vessel’s crash, and now rejoined.
