Blightslayer, p.25
Blightslayer, page 25
Amara grinned as she realised what was happening.
‘Hurts, does it?’ she cried. She gave a harsh laugh. ‘I think something you ate is disagreeing with you!’
The daemon shrieked. The light burst in a haze of flames from its chest, and as the monster screamed with a voice that echoed from the other side of a sundered veil, Gotrek erupted into the clearing. Hacking his way madly through the daemon’s aetheric flesh, his axe blade blazing with fire, the Slayer burned like some duardin god of war. In a spray of rotting entrails, he leapt to the ground as the Grandson broke apart behind him, and the battle cry he screamed would have forced any army in the Mortal Realms to retreat.
Amara fell to her knees, shielding her face. The master rune scalded the light and burned away the foulness of the grass. The flames that crackled through his hair and beard were like threads of lava, and his axe seemed more like a shard of lightning than a mortal weapon. His eyes – and there were two eyes now, she saw – were points of blinding light blazing in the depths of the void. He was Grimnir. He was Grungni the Maker, blessed of Azyr. He was the soul of every duardin that had ever lived, geared to war and lusting for the blood of his enemies, undefeatable.
And then, as the Grandson’s daemonic form smeared away with a crack of thunder and a horrified scream, fading into the hidden weave of reality, and as the clearing steamed with its melting guts, Amara saw that the Slayer was none of these things. He was Gotrek Gurnisson – the most brutal, violent and deadly character she had ever met, but a mortal thing for all that. The light left him and the pain of his injuries returned. The unnatural disease that had come so close to bringing him low redoubled its efforts. Gotrek slumped forwards and collapsed, his skin stained that same infected green.
Amara rushed to him. She knelt at his side, her palms on his heaving chest. The rune was dull as brass again, and his breath came ragged from his lungs. His eye twitched, half-closed. His hand slackened its grip on his axe.
‘Gotrek!’ she cried. She could feel his heart hammering beneath his ribs, stuttering and weak. He was barely breathing now. A dark contagion crept through his veins, marbling them against his skin. He was dying. ‘Gotrek, can you hear me?’
She slammed her fist against his chest. She slapped him and tried to drag him up into a sitting position, but the duardin was too heavy. His frame was too slack. He was spent.
The pendant was still gripped in her hand. The hammer of Sigmar, the sign of his justice, of his mercy. Amara, weeping, held it to the sky. Up there, just faintly visible, she could see the emerging blue as the foul smoke of the pit was blown away. The ground shook. The smoking crater where the Grandson had been struck cracked and a spray of seawater leapt a dozen feet into the air. Wither Island was breaking apart.
‘I was a priest once,’ Amara whispered. ‘And I can be again.’ She laid her hands on Gotrek’s chest again. She stilled her breathing, tried to feel the flow of his life as it faltered. ‘A warrior in Sigmar’s name. But to heal is to fight in a different way.’
She mumbled the prayer she had last spoken when she knelt over the body of her son. When the dusk had faded and the pain of her injuries almost eclipsed her grief, she had pleaded with Sigmar to bring him back – her boy, killed in the valley as the crusade died around them. The hand that had reached out to her from the tent that last morning, that had reached for her when the Hedonites descended. Sigmar had not listened then; or, he had listened, knowing only that greater trials lay ahead for her.
Tears spilled down her face. She felt Gotrek’s heart stop beneath her fingers.
‘Bring him back,’ she wept. ‘Please, bring him back, for all that he has done.’
Another fount of seawater, another tremble in the earth. The trees of the jungle melted into a stinking paste. The stone and rock of Wither Island was crumbling into the ocean.
Through her fingers she felt the island shiver – and then she realised that it was not the island, but the faintest beating of Gotrek’s heart.
Amara held her breath. His eye flicked open. There was a shimmer of light fading from her hands. The master rune flashed with a last effulgence. Gotrek moaned, his skin flushed and ruddy. The green tinge had vanished from him.
‘Gods above and below,’ he muttered. He pressed his stubby fingers to his forehead. ‘My mouth tastes like an orruk’s loincloth. I swear, I’m never drinking again.’
‘Gotrek, you’re… You’re alive?’
She tried to keep the reverence from her voice, but she could not help it. She looked at her hands. Had the healing passed from her to Gotrek, or had some hidden power in the rune, charged by Sigmar’s lightning, brought him back from the brink of death? The hands of a healer. The hands of a warrior.
‘Course I’m bloody alive,’ he snarled. ‘Although I’d give all the treasures in Karaz-a-Karak to be dead, if it would only get rid of this utter bastard of a headache.’
Whatever had happened, there was no time to think of it now. The island was shaking apart around them. Amara tucked Odger’s boathook into her belt and threw Gotrek’s arm around her shoulder. She tried to drag him to his feet.
‘Move yourself,’ she said. ‘We have to get out of here. With any luck the boat’s still moored on the beach.’
Gotrek groaned again as he picked up his axe. He shook his head clear. He was covered in slime and dried blood, and half his face looked as tender as pulverised meat, but he could walk under his own steam at least. Amara didn’t think she’d have been able to drag him.
‘Why? What’s happening?’
‘Wither Island,’ she said, as she started to run. ‘It’s about to sink back to where it came from!’
The boat swung on the tide, smacking up against the rocks. All the pebbles on the beach were shuddering, the sand rippling like liquid as the skin of the island began to crack. The earth buckled beneath their feet, throwing them to the ground, and behind them the trees and jungle scrub were being torn up by the roots. Amara pulled Gotrek up again, but each time a little more of his strength seemed to return.
‘Whole bloody place is falling down around our ears,’ he said. ‘Either Sigmar’s lightning holed it below the waterline, or that sorcerer’s spell was the only thing keeping it together.’
Amara waded into the sea to grab the gunwale of the boat, dragging it back across the sand. The crust of algae had melted away now to an oily stain across the surface of the water. Where the line of the jungle met the beach, the thickets of putrid brushwood began to melt. Dissolving fluids trickled down onto the sand, hissing like acid.
She flopped into the boat, Gotrek collapsing beside her. She reached for the oars where they were clipped to the lock, but didn’t have enough strength to pull them free. Her fingers felt numb and there was a sheet of dark shadow sweeping across her sight. All her strength seemed gone from her, after everything that had happened since they woke up in Kranzinnport that morning. The tunnels to the harbour, the fight against the pirates, the dreadful confrontation with the Grandson. And the prayer she had given up to Sigmar, the prayer that had in some way been answered…
‘Rest yourself, lass,’ she heard Gotrek say. ‘I’ll see to that.’
She fell back as Gotrek took the oars, and as she drifted off into an exhausted sleep she found herself wondering how it was possible that he had the strength to continue. After everything that had happened, he should be unconscious at the very least. The water gulped around them as the oar blades struck the surface of the sea. As they pulled away from Wither Island she could hear the great gurgling roar of the ocean surging up to drag it back down, hiding it safely down there in the deeps where, Sigmar willing, no one would ever find it again.
As they struck out into the wider sea, she could hear a thin, high scream somewhere on the breeze, like the call of a bird. It was the howl of something on the other side of the veil, she knew, only a hair’s breadth away. The sound of wrath and fury. The sound of defeat.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
THE LAST CRUSADE
The plains of Thyria… The crusade into the wilderness, the valley ahead… She dreamed, and remembered.
They had made camp in the plains the night before, the wagons and carts in a ring around the pickets. In the morning they doused their campfires and packed up their gear. The dawn was spectacular, like the first dawn of a new world, rising above the jagged mountains in the distance, their peaks gnashing together like teeth. The sky was a blue canvas touched with fiery reds and oranges, and it stretched from end to end of an infinite horizon. Far in the distance, a hundred miles away, they could see the floating pads of plains-lilies and the rolling progress of the veldt-louses, each of them larger than Dagoleth itself. Each blade of grass was as green as emeralds, thicker than a human wrist, a carpet of jade that ran on unbroken for a thousand miles.
Amara woke early and stood at the mouth of her tent, breathing in the fresh, fragrant air. Everything smelled clean and pure, unsullied even by the smoke of the first campfires or the rich stink of the latrine they’d dug on the campsite’s western edge last night. Thyrian air, she thought. The finest air in all the Everspring. It was the smell of promise and new life. In that wide and unbroken vista was the sight of a new civilisation just waiting to be built, wrought into being by the brave hearts and strong hands of the Dawners who’d left Dagoleth on the crusade.
She knelt and took up a handful of soil, rich and loamy in her hand. All the obligations had been paid, she knew. All the debts back in Dagoleth, large and small, had been settled. The commitments had been fulfilled, and every man, woman and child who set off from the gates of the city was doing so with Sigmar’s name on their lips. They were bringing hope into the wilderness.
More folk started waking, coming out of their tents and getting the first Xintilian tea brewing on their campfires. The sutlers started banking dry wood around the cook pots, boiling up the remaining rockworms they’d harvested by the Crimson Cliffs. The pickets were dismantled as the soldiers fell into their marching order. Some of the bivouacs and shelters were taken down and packed away. Once everyone had eaten, the wagons would be tied once more to the oxen. Hundreds of people would get ready to move, to make the last stage of their journey. Hundreds had already died on the way, but once they were in the valley the real work could begin. They would toil and clear and build, and before long they would have a place worth defending with their lives – a new settlement cut out of the unforgiving land, a shard of civilisation planted in the wilds.
Amara crouched at the mouth of her tent and softly called his name. There was such a day ahead of them. She would give a sermon before they set off, put the final touch of courage into hearts that were already near brim full of it.
She heard him call for her. She smiled and held out her hand, and he reached for her; and though she didn’t know it then, by the end of the day he would be dead. They would all be dead, and Sigmar would have turned his face from them.
It started as a faint rumbling in the distance, as though a storm were brewing in the mountains. Then she felt the tremor underfoot, the earth shaking very slightly, the drumming of hoofbeats. There was a blast of noise, a note skirling wildly across the grasslands. Amara stood. She felt for the hammer in her belt.
‘Arnza,’ she said to her son. ‘Stay inside the tent.’
There were cries from the pickets. She heard the flat discharge of a black-powder weapon. The rumbling was deeper now, more insistent, and above the wailing notes she could hear yelling, a wild, ululating call that scratched at her mind and put ice in her belly. There was a sudden smell wafting across the air, pungent and sickly, a mix of musk and dead flowers.
Amara ran between the tents, leaping over the ropes, pulling the hammer from her belt. She cut west, sprinting across the clearing in the centre of the camp, where the cookfires were already burning. Freeguild troops were forming up on the far side; other soldiers were running back from the pickets with blood on their faces, their uniforms torn. There were screams in the air, the clash of steel. Still that damned yelling, that frantic, piercing cry.
She saw one of the Freeguild sergeants, a big man with a flaring handlebar moustache and muttonchop whiskers, bark out orders to his men. He pointed with his sword, shouting, exhorting.
‘Get them to the armoury wagons,’ he cried as she passed. ‘Guard the supplies and get troops on the hospital tents.’
The sergeant turned – then fell back with an arrow jutting from his eye.
The troops bunched up, some of them drawing their swords, others swinging round with their handguns, looking for targets. More screaming on the other side of the clearing, the bright clash of weapons. Amara saw men and women running, staggering through the tents with blood sheeting down their faces. Arrows came down like hail, peppering the clearing. Three of the Freeguild troops fell at once, pierced through by arrows fletched with iridescent purple feathers. The ground shook – and then the enemy burst onto them like a tide.
In moments the clearing was a chaotic melee of oiled steel, blood and furious screaming. They were Hedonites, she saw, the depraved, debauched followers of the Dark Prince. She had a swirling impression of shaved skulls tattooed with sickly glyphs, of brutal piercings designed for maximum agony, of savages festooned with feathers and trinkets, drenched in cloying musks and perfumes. They ran and leapt with barbed blades and whips in their hands, lancing in with gleaming spears that dripped with honeyed unguents. Some rode grotesque reptilian creatures barded with glistening silver armour, their spikes and spurs tearing through flesh or lopping off arms and legs as they rode past.
In moments the clearing was overrun. The whole damned camp was overrun, as far as Amara could tell. She smashed in with her hammer, cracking skulls and breaking limbs, screaming for the Dawners to stand firm.
‘Hold!’ she roared. ‘Sigmar wills it! Raise your voices in holy prayer so that he may strengthen our arms this day!’
The crusade had combatted everything Thyria could throw at them since they had left Dagoleth. An orruk tribe, their ugly faces streaked with white paint, had tried to infiltrate the camp one night; their bones still decorated the wagon trains. A pack of bone-gryphs, creatures rarely seen outside of Shyish, had shadowed them for days, until the Freeguild Pistoliers rode out to shoot them down. A field of vast, near-sentient fungus had tried to suck the crusade into its voracious maw, and they had battled more bandit raiders and wandering gargants than Amara could even remember. But even as she fought in the clearing, she knew this was different. Shattering bones with her hammer, bellowing prayers to Sigmar, she had no real sense of how the battle was unfolding. It was all happening too fast.
The Hedonites had swamped their camp like an avalanche, pouring down from the mountains, taking advantage of how few of them were left after their long months in the wilderness. They moved so quickly it was impossible to form a coherent defence. Amara watched the last Freeguild soldiers in the clearing cut down, felt an arrow streak across her brow and carve a line of blood from her forehead. She staggered backwards, parried a scimitar already stained with gore, swung out and saw a leering face crumple under the flat of her hammer. The light seemed to flicker around her, the hot morning bending and twisting into weird, unnatural shapes – daemons, summoned by the Hedonites’ foul lusts, shrieking into reality from their own dread realm. She ducked a guy rope and reeled back into the lines of tents and bivouacs, half of them now torn and smoke-stained, the canvas red with blood.
The screams around her were wilder now. Not the shouts of rage or battle madness, but sheer panic. Everywhere she looked there was the flash of silver blades, the gleam of oiled leather, the exposed flesh and flensed nerves of cultists so deranged that even their own terrible wounds were a source of ecstasy to them. Fires had taken hold over where the armoury wagons had been corralled. There was a hard, flat explosion, a gout of smoke as the black-powder stores went up in flames.
She ran on, fighting where she could, trying to rally the survivors. She tried to push all thoughts of her son from her mind. He would live or die depending on their strength now, on their unity. If the Dawners truly broke, then all was lost.
‘Turn and fight, damn you!’ she screamed. ‘Sigmar sees all, and your cowardice will reap his judgement!’
Frightened eyes, wild with panic, rolled away from her. Folk gibbered and cried and ran, heedless of everything but their own survival.
‘Only together will our strength prevail!’ she shouted. She raised her hammer. ‘Face your deaths with gladness in your hearts and a prayer on your lips, for Sigmar asks only that we die in his name!’
An arrow slammed into her thigh. She gasped, the pain flashing through her. A spear came stabbing out of the rolling smoke, and it was all she could do to parry it with the haft of her hammer. She grabbed the collar of the spear point and wrenched it aside, swinging wildly and feeling bone crunch under her blow, and then she was falling backwards into the stained grass.
‘Sigmar, please,’ she whispered. She started crawling, dragging her wounded leg behind her. Blood was crusting on her face. She could feel the heat of the flames, could smell the spilled blood even above the stench of the cultists’ perfumes. ‘Hear my prayer. Send your champions down to protect us, God-King! Send the Stormcast Eternals to deliver us from this evil, I beg you!’
On she crawled, and when she heard him screaming she felt something wrench and tear inside.
‘Arnza! Arnza, run, my boy, run!’
Hand over hand she crawled. She tried to stagger to her feet, her leg buckling under her. She heard him scream again, heard dark laughter on the stinking breeze.
The tent she had left only a few minutes ago was no more than a tattered rag stained with blood. She heard the scream ripping across the burning campsite, wondering for a brief, dislocated moment who could possibly feel that much pain, before realising that it came from her. She held what was left of him in her arms. She looked to the sky and it was empty. Sigmar had turned his face from them, and when the last blow came she did not feel it. There was only darkness around her, and the body of her son in her arms; and when she woke, the sole survivor left for dead, the darkness was still there. It would never go away, she knew.
