Starseers ruin, p.6
Starseer's Ruin, page 6
Nearby, Gokumet had the band of Starborne warriors arrayed in rigid order, after which they had settled into an almost stony immobility, spears straight, their scaly hides rippling softly with the celestial gleam of Azyr. They were true children of the high temples, born in the upper reaches of the realm of lightning and infused with its power. Irixi was vaguely aware that some cults and breeds of human also reached out to that realm for empowerment, with potent but unsophisticated results. The star dragon aspect they called Dracothion – known to the Seraphon by truer, older names – had taken pity on them and taught them some fragment of Azyr’s secrets, Irixi understood. Raising them up from mere earth-made mortals prone to corruption and death and making of them something purer. A crude but effective tool against disorder.
The Starborne were steeped in the light of High Azyr. It glowed out from within them, limning each scale. They stood with a solid discipline, immune to distraction, able to go a week without drinking, a month without food in their slow, cold way, but ready to rouse to instant action if their charge was threatened or if Gokumet gave the command. Irixi shifted closer to them just for the security they represented. The Starseer had not been out of the Celestial Eye for a long time. To have one’s claws digging into the earth of the realms was to be in danger. Even in so still a place as this.
Irixi had not seen the Wings of Serendipitous Fire aloft. The temple-ship had fallen to this ground long before the waters of the Celestial Eye had birthed it. Gokumet had, though. The pools which birthed the champion were buried beneath them even now, doubtless cracked open and choked with roots and bones. Irixi wanted to ask about those elder days, but saurus were not renowned for their descriptive abilities. Possibly the champion wouldn’t even understand the question.
Irixi wondered if the first hint of Shyishan purple might be visible in the glimmer of Gokumet’s scales. If these Starborne stood on this ground for long enough, the realm would begin to leach into them, making them more things of earth than of the stars. One more fragment of the native state of the Seraphon muddied by contact with the stuff of the world.
Looking across this stretch of ruin, Irixi tried to reconstruct how the Wings had seemed in its full majesty. Here was an observatory, surely, its crystal dome no more than sand but the curve of its walls still preserving familiar astronomical litanies. And that great heap of collapsed blocks – a discerning eye could reconstruct the tower that had once stood there, its core a spiral of braided gold like a barbel trailed in the fabric of the Astromatrix to detect the emanations of power. The gold would still be there, great arm-thick coils of it. Useless because the intricacies of its shape had been crushed out of it, the pictograms twisted and deformed.
At the back of its mind, Irixi felt a sense of loss at all this grandeur laid waste. The loss of a whole temple-ship! Hardly the only such disaster to occur back during the great heights of Chaos, when all things had teetered on the edge of oblivion. Then the Starseer shivered for more prosaic reasons and drew the cloak about itself, trying to husband the warmth brought from the Celestial Eye. Some of the other skinks had brought crystals that still scintillated with the fire of Azyr, setting them out to lend their heat to the saurus, and the lone, solemn Kroxigor who towered over even them. The Starseer gratefully stepped close to one, feeling its blood quicken a little.
There was something waiting in Irixi’s mind, ready to descend should it be given the least chance of ingress. In a human it might be despair, for they were directionless things. Irixi had a direction. Sek’atta had entrusted it with a task vital to the comprehension of the plans of the Old Ones. It knew what it had to do.
It looked across the great landscape of half-walls and tower stumps and great loose scree slopes of stone. Within all of this had been a whole, intact passage of the Nine Orchid Path prophecy, a sequence of predictions and images that Sek’atta had found no record of anywhere else. Simple, then: Irixi must find it and record it, and then one more vital part of the plan would be recalled and the realms would be that much closer to perfection.
Somewhere within all this. And what state would that ‘whole, intact passage’ be in now, after the ship’s fall and whatever ruin had been enacted below? Not despair, no, but for a moment Irixi felt like that undersized newborn again, facing the enormity of the world with no idea of how to overcome it.
Sek’atta had given the task to one specific servant. Therefore, that servant must be capable of performing the task. Any failure would be one of its own. The mage-priest’s judgement could not be questioned.
Even so.
Irixi felt the gaze of Gokumet, implicitly trusting. The saurus warriors would all lunge into action at the least word, knowing implicitly that a Starseer’s orders bore the authority and wisdom of Sek’atta. Their faith would be absolute.
Irixi felt very small.
Then Oaxmal was right there, skin shedding the shades of stone and dust as if removing a dull-hued cape. The Chameleon, leader of the scouts whom Irixi had sent to find a way below into the collapsed bowels of the ruin.
Irixi drew itself up to what height it had and rapped the ground with its staff, inviting Oaxmal to report. The purple crystal suspended in the crook of the stave’s head sparked as the power around them earthed into it and was stored for future use.
Patterns shifted and flowed across the Chameleon’s skin, a simple and efficient method of communication for those limited concepts they ever needed to pass on. Their jaws and tongues found the elegant sibilants of skink speech difficult. Instead, a flurry of colour and shade passed over Oaxmal’s throat pouch and the curve of its crest, telling Irixi that the scout had successfully accessed the spaces below them. Irixi read additional markers there: an indication of incompleteness, a confirmation of mission. Much of the inner structure of the Wings of Serendipitous Fire must have survived the fall and been navigable – at least to a skink. Perhaps some parts of the prophecy remained intact on the walls of the inner sanctum? Oaxmal, without magical training, would not be able to answer – Irixi had to see with its own eyes. And most likely it was all cracked shards, but of course there was a plan for that. Sek’atta had foreseen the need, and placed the ritualistic details in his servant’s head.
For which they would need… ‘The pools?’ Irixi prompted. Oaxmal’s head bobbed, and its colours shifted and danced. Yes, the spawning pools remained intact below them, forming conduits of living water through the ruin. At a sequence of other prompts, Oaxmal confirmed that, yes, there was danger down there; yes, some of the sacred chambers had survived, though others were shattered into powder. A picture of the ruin beneath them emerged out of the pigments of the Chameleon’s hide, and Irixi considered their situation could be worse.
At which point it became worse. One of the skink scouts came pelting back to them, eyes wide, clicking gutturally, Danger! Danger! As one, Gokumet’s warriors shifted, one foot forwards, shields up. Irixi heard voices – out of sight around the mounds of stone but surely just in the next plaza. Not Seraphon voices, hence an intrusion to the plan. A destabilising force. Trouble.
A thunderous detonation sounded – not magic but some alchemical weapon. Irixi saw their Kroxigor had ambled forwards, reacting protectively to the alarm of the skink. Now it shuddered, a savage, blasted wound punched into its chest. It roared out a wordless complaint of pain.
Gokumet croaked out a command, deep and loud enough that Irixi felt it through the earth. The warriors rushed forwards, from dead still to full charge on the instant, getting their stone and starmetal shields between their leader and danger. Off the leash and enraged, the Kroxigor lumbered in the vanguard, maul upraised. Irixi heard more voices: alarmed, angry, human.
Humans. And while humans were surely part of the Old Ones’ plan, they were not supposed to be here. A disruption, the introduction of unpredictable disorder. Not as if the Starseer needed any more obstacles given the scale of this task.
Let it be done quickly, it decided, and hurried at the heels of the warriors to give them its arcane support.
CHAPTER SEVEN
KENLO
He hadn’t managed a good look at the little scurrying thing as it darted away. Honestly, his thoughts had gone to the ratmen. A swift-running creature smaller than a human, long tail whipping in its wake. And that would be the death of the expedition because nobody would be delving into the ruins for treasure if there could be a nest of Skaven down there.
When the big monster had lumbered out into sight, he’d been so sure of the problem that he’d taken it for a Rat Ogor first, one of those bulked-out rodent shieldbreakers who’d given them so much trouble in the first days of the Gnawtide. Then his eyes had caught up and he’d been looking at a twelve-foot-tall lizard-creature, a fortune in gold and precious stones hanging in amulets and medallions about its throat, and six hundredweight of mace raised above its head. And behind it were coming a host of armoured, spiky reptiles with spears and shields, a weird phantom luminescence clinging to them as though they were ghosts or conjured by magic.
The shields were drawn up before him, and he made sure to get Perlo at his back. The head of his axe was slotted back onto the haft – he’d long ago learned that a canny quartermaster had to walk into plenty of places where a weapon was bad manners but where someone was going to try and stab you eventually despite that. He planted the weapon in the ground for later use and took out his pistol. A masterwork weapon a mere Steelhelm shouldn’t own, but it was a poor quartermaster who didn’t supply himself as well as his army. Loosing it at the monster felt like spitting into the hurricane, but he let the weapon kick in his hand, seeing the ball impact in a spurt of weirdly luminescent bluish blood without slowing the beast remotely.
A crossbow bolt flowered in the creature’s shoulder as it powered towards the line. Lofus was shouting at Vael, entreating the Stormcast to get within the ring of shields, but the armoured figure was ignoring them. Staring at the reptilian advance as though it was a gift from Sigmar.
‘My lord!’ Kenlo added his voice. ‘Stand with us!’ Probably he should tug his forelock and say what an honour it would be, but who had breath for that?
The fusils sounded again, all three of them. He saw one of the lizard warriors take a backstep, a bright scar across the gold facing of its shield. Gold! Something in Kenlo kicked at the damage, feeling half the value of the piece torn away. Then the mace was coming down.
‘Brace!’ shouted Lofus, as though any mortal strength could have resisted the blow. The central Fusilier ducked down below her pavise, but the colossal descending blow tore through the ironwork atop the shield, smashed the stout planks below to kindling. The barrel of the fusil spun away and the jagged end of the shaft punched through the woman’s thigh in a burst of arterial blood a fraction of a second before the strike of the maul shattered her every bone from skull to femur.
Lofus took his chance and thrust his sword at the thing’s ribs, the force of the stroke skidding from its scaly hide. A spear-tip of greenish stone almost caught him in the face, but one of his squad’s shields took it aside. Then Kenlo himself leapt forwards, finding himself standing over the smashed wreck of Fusilier and pavise, swinging his axe to carve a shallow gash in the monster’s leg.
He looked up into its blunt turtle face. Calm, incurious, no more emotionally invested in this life-or-death struggle than the stone head of its weapon. So this is how I die, is it?
A bolt of spitting purple seared into the monster’s chest from over his shoulder, Perlo putting her skills to use. Then an armoured form slammed into the monster’s side, crackling hammer landing with a searing thunderclap. Vael had deigned to join them in the melee after all.
The monster staggered sideways, its vast bulk actually shifted by the strike. Lizard behemoth and Stormcast were abruptly off to one side, trading blows in a furious skirmish of their own, leaving the other reptiles’ spears to test the shields. Kenlo fell back as one of the Steelhelms put himself between the two remaining Fusiliers to close up the gap, hunching against the jabbing stone points. Stanner popped up to shoot over the top into the snouts of the enemy, then ducked back down to reload. Perlo was shouting something, but then Perlo was always shouting something. One of the spears found a throat over the lip of a shield and a man went down, the wall crunching in to compensate. Kenlo set to reloading his pistol, wondering if the Stormcast was about to make another miraculous intervention.
VAEL
The reptilian giant stumbled back away from him, and Vael thought he’d overbalanced it. It caught itself with its tail, though, and then its own maul swept around at him. They were clear of the shield-wall, and just as well because that broad stroke could have shattered half a dozen in a single impact. The thought bloomed in his mind, for a moment making the regular humans a part of his strategy. Then they were gone from his sightline and he had forgotten them: just him and the monster, a duel to one more death.
He dropped, turning his charge into a skidding slide across the slanted stones of what had once been an ornamented square. As the teeth of broken stone chewed at his armour he had a moment’s flash of vision: the same lines of wall and colonnade, but complete and bright, garlanded with a webwork of green vines that were parasite and part of the place all at once. An instant’s flash and then all was ruin and dead stone around him, and he slid beneath the swing of the monster’s club–
Not quite. The toothed edge caught the rim of his pauldron and hooked at it, a moment’s pain across his upper arm as the straps bit tight and then snapped. The shock of impact – the slightest fraction of the monster’s strength but enough to let him know how powerful it was – connected with his lost past. He saw the bright blooms, the panicked scattering of the birds, the lightning. The spears of Sigmar lancing down towards the unseen Chaotic host below, interrupted by this flying monument. The great beast bellowed in his face as he levered himself up to meet it, and he saw another such creature overlaid on it. A different pattern on its scales, other wounds, but the same breed of monster. I have fought you, Vael thought, and clung to the memory like a friend, like a drowning man with a plank. His hammer struck the monster across the jaw and one of its club fists smacked him in the breastplate, knocking him onto his back. The impacts – scales and stone – were bursts of colour in his mind. It was so bright back then! Understanding that it had not been the sunlight or the surroundings but his eyes that had changed. The life and Vael-ness hammered out of him with each successive turn on the Anvil until all was muted tones, the golds and bright blues faded. I was so alive back then!
The monster stood over him, maul held high to make as much a ruin of him as the fall had made of this flying temple. He dragged his short sword out from behind his back and rammed it upwards, driving it to the hilt in the reptile’s belly. The wound went deep enough that when the bludgeon’s blow came down, there was only a weak trickle of strength behind it. He took it on his other pauldron, feeling the weapon’s teeth gouge his mail, then came up swinging. His hammer, with both arms’ full might behind it, impacted against the side of the creature’s head and it went down.
He was already wheeling for the next battle. In his eyes, the brightness of the past and the dull, leaden tones of the present chased one another’s tails, not a distraction but an inspiration. He yearned for the way the fighting had felt back when he had been new to Sigmar’s service. His felt his eyes and the jagged pattern of his scars blaze.
He rediscovered the Sigmarite shield-wall again, as it pushed back against the spears. The Dawnbringers momentarily bewildered him with their presence here, unwanted in his memories. Between them and him, already running at him, was one of the reptile warriors. A big one, its head-crest and scales bristling with spikes and adorned with gold and slate. In its hands…
He did not recognise the warrior, but the weapon. The square-sectioned club toothed with gleaming stone and reinforced with gold. A work of art. A thing from his memory. And he almost stood there too long, trying to sift past from present. Almost let his enemy gift him that weapon full force to the head, before understanding this was here and this was now and this was the enemy who had killed him that first time. Not the mortal death at the hands of his kin that Sigmar had stolen him from but his Stormcast reintroduction to mortality. The only one that had stayed in his mind.
He almost dropped his hammer. He did open his arms to the lizard-creature, and what mix of pain, loss and joy was on his face, he could not have said.
It slowed as it reached him, lambent blue-white eyes narrowing, looking for the trick.
‘Come on!’ Vael shouted at it, words the thing would surely not even understand. ‘Fight me, brother! Fight me once more!’ As though the creature was one of his fellows in Sigmar’s service. ‘I know you!’ he called to it, feeling the mad grin dragging the corners of his mouth. ‘We have unfinished business, you and I!’
And it knew him. He could read nothing in that reptile face, but he felt the jolt of connection like lightning in his chest. It saw the scars he had painstakingly preserved over all those centuries and deaths. The mark of its own teeth.
They could not smile, he thought, but he read it into the creature’s jaws nonetheless.
GOKUMET
A long time, sleeping within New Home. To wiser minds, the Celestial Eye of Tepok, but always New Home to Gokumet. Sent out sometimes. Brought back. Held in readiness. A life apart from the world.
A long time in the service of Sek’atta the Starmaster, just one small servant of a great lord, as it should be. But hard, to know there had been another place, a First Home, now gone.
