Chris Wright - Age of Sigmar - Omnibus

The Stormcast could handle the vampires, Hamilcar had no doubt, but that still left the Solar Guards.

‘Hold them, Thracius!’ he bellowed. He turned to find el Talame, shouting instructions to his own men, beset, on the other side of the bridge. Their rear ranks were ankle-deep in the water. ‘With me, my friend. Bring me to the sun-king.’

‘Take your own,’ the general called back across the water. ‘They will be more use to you.’

‘The Bear-Eaters can hold their own. You cannot. And I would hate to come so far to strike the wrong head from its shoulders.’ His chest was tight. Breathing came hard. ‘Lead me through this nightmare!’

One of Thracius’ Liberators took the slack as el Talame and his soldiers splashed across the water to Hamilcar’s side. The general himself was last, covered by a boltstorm from a kneeling Judicator that drove the Solar Guard from the water’s edge and allowed the Liberator to put down the vampire that had led them. Another with a snarling leopard daubed across his facemask took station on the bridge and grimly stood their ground.

‘This way.’ El Talame swept past Hamilcar. The pace he set was impressive for one so old, but Hamilcar had time enough to look back and see Broudiccan’s thunderaxe obliterate a statue and shred a dozen Solar Guard with shrapnel and still better it. He swatted aside a silver bower that grew across the path.

Unkempt for a court. And Hamilcar had once ruled from a cave.

And just like that he began to laugh.

Mortality had never seemed so distant.

With strength and vigour twenty times a mortal man’s, he forged a path to the front of the company of warriors, and forced his way through a tangle of ornamental dwarf trees to stumble into a clearing.

An elevated platform of eerie silver-grey stone rose above the small trees and tiered gardens. It looked ancient. The moon shone with a caged, furious splendour, shackled to the form of a splintered throne in which sat the sun-king, Joraad el Ranoon.

His golden mask beheld Hamilcar from his high throne.

With a series of shouts intended to bolster each other’s courage, el Talame’s men took the steps. In response the sun-king lifted one sleeve from the shining rest of his throne.

At his gesture a host of men and women, and even children, shuffled, unseeing, from the crackling glare of the throne and moved to block the steps. Some wore blazing suits of armour, similar to the woman that Hamilcar had bested in the gatehouse, although nothing so impressive in this penumbral shadow-realm. Others were in simple habits emblazoned with the unsetting sun. None of them spoke, smiled, or even looked down at the cracked steps as they pressed together between the oncoming soldiers and their king. If there was one amongst them that could appreciate the incongruity of that emblem in this place then it was the self-proclaimed god-king on the throne behind them, but he did not seem to.

The soldiers hesitated a few steps below the vacant Rays.

The Rays themselves looked over the soldiers as if they were blind, and soporific with the experience of their remaining senses.

‘You seek to best me with children,’ Hamilcar shouted up to the impassive sun-king. ‘Know that you face Hamilcar of the Astral Templars. I am a Stormcast Eternal!’ Hamilcar hefted his halberd high above his head, his lantern in the other. ‘Tell the Lord of Death when you cross the Stygxx Gate that it is the Bear-Eater that sends you, prince of lies. Tell him that you are down payment on the soul of a brother.’

The assembled host opened their mouths, and with one voice alone they spoke.

‘The men you have killed thus far have followed me freely. Not by choice perhaps, but they could have chosen death and that is as much a choice as any other. But these,’ the enthroned king waved a hand over his thralls. The proximity to his person of genuine peril must have caused his attention to lapse somewhat, for several of the thralls mimicked the gesture. ‘These are innocents. You will have to butcher them all to reach me, Eternal . I will see to it. Has Sigmar forged you the stomach for it?’

Joraad leaned forward then, and in a hundred distinct voices, male and female, old and young, began to laugh.

With a grunt, Hamilcar tossed up his halberd, reversed the grip, and then hurled it.

Like a javelin it hissed from his extended arm over the heads of the uncaring slaves and through el Ranoon’s belly.

There was a snarl of moonlight as the blade tip skewered him to his throne’s high back. A cry tore from Joraad’s throat. Blood and dark lumpy juices spurted from the hole made by the halberd shaft and turned the king’s banyan silks black. The gathered Rays echoed their master’s scream, then one-by-one passed into unconscious. The sheer number of them packed onto the steps kept them from falling far.

‘They call me the Bear-Eater,’ he called up to the pitifully crying sun-king. ‘You do not want to test my stomach.’

He frowned then as the increasingly pale king of Jercho slumped forward onto the halberd shaft.

‘Light above,’ muttered el Talame. ‘Is it dead?’

‘He is.’ Hamilcar was surprised.

Joraad el Ranoon was no vampire. It was true then: anyone could make a mistake.

Perhaps the mind-controlling magicks by which he ruled would have been affected by the transition to unlife. Or perhaps the land of the unsetting sun was simply no place for a vampire king.

‘I suspect Mannfred found him more useful as a willing puppet than a slave.’

‘So your vampire is still out there?’

Hamilcar laughed aloud at that, despite his disappointment at seeing the betrayer slip through his fingers once again. There was truth in what the old man said.

The vampire was his.

‘There is only so much of Ghur for him to run into. Say one thing for Hamilcar — in the end, he always triumphs.’

Ahazian Kel twisted in his saddle as the barbed arrow sank into the meat of his bicep. He looked down at it, and then up, to see where it had come from. More arrows followed the first. Most of these splintered against the warped plates of his crimson and brass armour, but several found gaps and pierced his flesh. More annoyingly, one found the eye of his horse, killing the scaly brute instantly.

The animal fell with a sibilant whinny, and Ahazian tumbled from his saddle with a curse. The Deathbringer rolled to his feet in a slew of choking dust and shredded grasses, weapons in hand. He ignored the broken arrows jutting from his scarred body. A little pain was good, like salt for meat. The goreaxe squirmed in his grip, eager to bite flesh, and the skullhammer throbbed, ready to crush bone. The thorns of metal set into their hafts bit comfortingly into his palms, sinking into old grooves of scar tissue. The weapons were a part of him, an extension of his arms and will. He stepped away from the dying horse, deeper into the waving, waist-high grasses of the plain, and set his feet, awaiting his attackers. If they wanted him, he saw no reason to disappoint them.

He didn’t have long to wait. A dozen horsemen galloped towards him through the sea of black grasses, their reptilian steeds shrieking with hunger. The cannibal-horses of the Caldera would, and often did, devour anything that fell beneath their scything hooves, even their own riders. The Horse-Lords of the Caldera were little better than their fierce steeds, and the other tribes of the steppes justly feared falling into their hands.

Clad in armour made from bronze plates and the reddish scales of their stallions, and draped in dark robes of firewurm silk, they made for a most impressive sight. Each rider carried a stubby, curved bow and an array of hand weapons that even the most ardent blood reaver would eye with envy. Masks of bone hid their faces.