War storm, p.16
War Storm, page 16
More thick columns of light hit the open ground, depositing warrior brotherhoods who joined the shieldwalls of the others. Soon there were thousands of Stormcast Eternals gouging at the Eldritch Fortress with destructive magics. The men of the Celestial Vindicators sang songs of vengeance and ruination, and their fervour added power to the barrage.
Rain pounded from the sky, rattling from armour and shield. Thostos raised his hammer and his sword, and roared out his joy.
‘You cannot stop the oncoming storm!’
‘This battle is not going according to your plan, sorcerer,’ growled Maerac. His manticore growled and shook its mane, agitated by the scent of blood.
‘Nonsense,’ said Ephryx distractedly. He was intent on the conflict below. ‘This fortress is more than capable of absorbing the worst they can muster. They will be the ones to suffer.’
No sooner had Ephryx spoken than a section of the ramparts was brought down, struck by a bolt of lightning that speared from the boiling black clouds over the fortress. Ephryx could not suppress a flinch as he looked into the maelstrom.
‘Is that so?’ bellowed Maerac. ‘It may soon become moot whether your fortress is up to the task or not. Such things stir the hearts of my warriors. Do you think they will stand idle as our foes attack without hindrance? It will not be long before they cannot stand by any longer, and sally out to meet the foe face to face.’ Maerac glared at the enemy warriors, so small far below. It was evident he was speaking of his own desire. ‘They are the chosen of Tzeentch, and would prove their superiority against a worthy foe.’
‘They would be foolish to do so,’ said Ephryx.
A series of monstrous booms shook the fortress. There were more of the Stormcasts arriving at every moment.
‘Do something, Ephryx! I cannot make promises for the actions of my men!’
Ephryx nodded. With a hurried wave he summoned his disc into existence beneath his feet, a twinkle of gold that bore him up into the air.
‘Very well! I shall unleash the defences of the Eldritch Fortress, though it is a waste of magic.’ He shot downwards, leaving Maerac to follow cursing in his wake.
Wind streamed over Ephryx as he leaned into the rain. His disc took him into position over the east gate, the focus of the enemy’s attack. He brought it to a halt, and held high his arms.
‘Come silver blades! Come silver hounds! Defend your master, defend your lord!’ In a tongue thick with blasphemous sounds he chanted, drawing upon the disturbances in the ether that roared all throughout the realm. Power burst from his hands.
Maerac flew around him in broad loops. ‘Hold!’ he shouted at his followers. ‘Stand your ground! Let the sorcerer do his work! Hold your positions, Tzeentch damn you! Hold!’
Ephryx was lost to the flood of magic. It burned through his body and soul. Such exquisite delight there was in power, which too rarely did he exercise himself. Too rarely did he remind himself why he had pledged himself to Tzeentch. Maerac’s voice became the annoying whine of an insect. A fitting voice for such an insignificant man, he thought. The eyes of Tzeentch were upon him, and they glimmered with approval.
With a hellish cry, Ephryx brought his hands together, and a new thunder joined the symphony of battle.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Second death
Thostos watched the sorcerer descend from his tower and work his spell. ‘Beware,’ he shouted. ‘Beware!’
All along the line, Lord-Relictors chanted out their own incantations. Glittering waves of magic pulsed over the Celestial Vindicators, healing and empowering them.
The walls of the castle twitched. Patches of decoration whirled in on themselves to be replaced by blank, featureless silver, and from this shining blades leapt. Trailing pink fire, they shot towards the shieldwall. The Liberators raised their shields in response, but the blades did not impact and came to an abrupt stop before them. In perfect step with one another, as if they were wielded by a line of warriors, the swords hacked at the shields. Blades sliced down with supernatural might, rending sigmarite in two, forcing the warriors to discard their protection, which drew additional weapons to them from the magically charged air.
The line of Liberators disrupted, the swords broke formation, picked out a target each and duelled with them. Sigmarite blade rang on magical weapons, the blades which came in greater numbers. Along the front, Liberators began to fall, their ascension marked by skyward-leaping energies. But they did not return to Azyr. Shouts of horror went up along the line as the Stormcasts saw their comrades’ essence drawn off course and sucked into the copper skulls of the fort.
A terrible howling came from the city then. Thostos saw silver-skinned hounds pounding down narrow alleyways, eyes afire with forge flame. Molten metal streamed from their jaws like drool.
They galloped across the metal plaza, claws skidding on the smooth surfaces. They plunged into the lines of Judicators, their dagger teeth closing around helmets. Men wrestled with the beasts, their bodies vanishing in flashes only to be taken into the skulls of the castle. In the wake of the hounds staggered ancient suits of armour, woken by magic, their dull blades clutched in empty gauntlets.
Cries of mirth and exultation came from the top of the walls as the sorcerous things attacked, but once their element of surprise was exhausted, they died quickly. Judicators shot the blades down with unerring skill, and the shieldwall reformed. Reserves of Liberators turned about and met the hounds. Hammers and blades fell on them, cutting through gleaming hides to bring forth floods of silver viscera. Thostos felled two himself, smashing the head cleanly from one with a hammer strike. Bright metallic blood spattered his body and he screamed his anger, the same words over and over again.
‘Vengeance, vengeance, vengeance!’
He broke the hip of the last hound, and it yelped as pitifully as any mortal cur. A reverse thrust stopped the noise.
Then Thostos was into the creaking army of animate armour. Empty suits exploded under his hammer, the bones of their long-dead occupants shattering into dust. He chanted the names of his mother, father and sisters – words from another life and time. His blood surged as he said each.
He and his men destroyed the last of the armour, and the castle shuddered under the bombardment. For every skull that glowed with stolen power, another melted or fell free.
‘Is that the best you can do?’ Thostos shouted, and raised his weapons again. ‘Sigmar! Vengeance! Sigmar!’
His men followed his example. ‘Sigmar! Vengeance! Sigmar!’
And then the gates creaked open, slamming hard against the wall, and the forces of hell-twisted Anvrok poured out to face the army of Sigmar in open battle. Heavily armoured warriors screamed the names of Tzeentch as they crashed into the battle line. The Celestial Vindicators shouted back.
‘Sigmar! Vengeance! Sigmar!’
Thostos ran back to the line of battle, silver blood and rain streaming from his armour. The lead warriors of Chaos used long, hooked halberds to yank away the shields of the Celestial Vindicators. The shieldwall wavered, then broke apart, the warriors in it overcome by the furious need for revenge. The battle line became a series of individual combats, and everywhere the slaves of Chaos were being bested. Fearless men all, heartless tyrants, were shocked by the fury of their foe. None such as the Stormcasts had ever been seen in Chamon.
A dark shadow swept over the fight. A manticore flew overhead: its body that of a lion, tawny and powerful. A snarling face set with dimly intelligent eyes craned and snapped from a huge scarlet mane.
Thostos watched it, momentarily transfixed. Not since his days in Amcarsh had he seen such a creature, when Chaos magic had changed the beasts of the land and made them savage, and its ilk had become common. The champion riding the manticore came shrieking through the air on his mount, swooping upon Prosecutors like a hawk and dashing their broken bodies upon the ground. His beast reared, all four claws out to slash and rend, and others fell. ‘Form up!’ he was screaming. ‘Make line! Make line!’
The wind from the manticore’s flight buffeted Thostos as it swooped low. The heavy paws of the monster struck a furrow through the Celestial Vindicators, killing some and scattering many more. Stormbolts chased the flying creature of Chaos. One struck home, causing the beast to howl in rage, but the lord was a skilful rider, and he swept his beast from side to side, dodging all the fire but that single bolt.
Thostos barged his way to the front. As commanded, the Chaos warriors were reforming their own lines, and now the Celestial Vindicators found themselves in isolated groups against a well-organised foe.
‘Match them. Match them! Shieldwall to shieldwall!’ Thostos cried. ‘Shieldwall, then for the gate!’
The Celestial Vindicators locked shields for the third time with supreme discipline, and marched in unison, but a wall of fire sprang up in front of the Chaos warriors, and the Tzeentchian soldiery attacked without fear of reprisal. The flickering pink and golden flames turned hammer and sword, but their own blades stabbed out without hindrance. The manticore swooped overhead again, the sword of its rider taking heads to the left and right. He laughed as he slew. The energies of slain Stormcasts shot upwards, only to be sucked into the castle. Stormbolts burst apart on the firewall, and the Chaos warriors killed and killed.
‘Back, back! Retreat twenty paces. Move!’ called Thostos.
Flawlessly, the Stormcast Eternals went backwards, shields still to their fore, opening a space between themselves and the Chaos warriors. The Tzeentchian host paused for a moment. It was enough.
‘Judicators, aim for the ground!’ shouted Thostos.
As soon as he had spoken, a rain of hissing bolts rose up and fell down. Half fizzed out or exploded upon the magical shield protecting the warriors, while the rest slammed into the metal ground before them. A crackling storm of energy arced across the front of the Chaos warriors’ company, creeping under the fire shield and coursing through the metal-clad warriors behind. They jerked and danced, before collapsing dead and smoking.
The fires guttered out. The laughter of the manticore’s rider turned to screams of anger, and the Stormcast Eternals charged back into their enemy, striking down the few who had survived.
The gates swung shut, but Thostos saw his opening. The walls for a hundred yards either side of the gate had been cleared of warriors. Thostos grinned. The problem with studding a castle wall with skulls, he thought, is that it makes it very easy to climb.
‘To the walls,’ he cried. ‘To the walls!’
Thostos and his followers made a quick ascent, fingers digging into the soft copper of the skulls adorning the walls. Below, more Stormcast Eternals hacked at the walls directly, caving in the skulls that had consumed their comrades, burying their swords into them or ripping them from the walls. Each one destroyed burst with a flash of released magic.
All along the defences the same thing was happening. Thunderbolt crossbows burned whole stretches of the wall bare. Judicators and Prosecutors covered their comrades as they hacked at the fabric of the fortress. Where a skull was ruptured that imprisoned the essence of a Stormcast Eternal, the energy roared upwards, booming with the joy of release.
Thostos hauled himself up the last few feet of the wall, the power invested in his limbs by Sigmar allowing him to climb quickly even in his heavy armour. He vaulted over the crenellations, drawing his weapons again as he landed. Chaos warriors were running along the wallwalk, but too late to stop him. His men were already over, and the clamour of battle erupted along a section of the wall.
‘Force them back!’ he roared. ‘Make room for our brothers!’ Thostos growled with the fierce joy of vengeance. He broke a savage’s jaw with the hilt of his sword and kicked another over the battlements.
Shouts, grunts and the clang of metal. He revelled in it, in the blood, in the struggle and the burn in his muscles. A flash transmuted a Stormcast next to him to a guttering puddle of thick liquid. Two more stopped dead, frozen in place, then melted like hot wax. Another turned into a crystal statue in a puff of purple smoke. Transformed mid run, he toppled from the battlement and shattered on the flagstones of the bailey. Flashes of departing magic struggled for the sky, but the fortress was still consuming the essence of the Bladestorms. Thostos smashed down another warrior, and searched for his quarry.
The sorcerer floated ten yards out from the wall on his golden disc; a tall, gaunt man with long horns. He was much altered from a man’s usual form, a long-serving servant of Chaos. He was chanting wildly, hurling magic that killed Thostos’s warriors. ‘Bring him down!’ he shouted. ‘Kill the sorcerer!’
A group of Prosecutors heard his order and swooped upward over the wall. They circled past the sorcerer, pelting him with their celestial hammers. The sorcerer knocked half of the hammers from the sky with a sweep of his staff, but the Prosecutors’ aim was good, and their own magic powerful. Three bolts of energy hammered into his golden disc, causing it to slew around and slam into the wall walk. The disc sparked and died, and the sorcerer was sent sprawling.
Dozens of Liberators and Judicators were now on the wall. ‘Kill him! Kill the sorcerer and we win the battle!’ Thostos bellowed. A trio of Judicators raised their bows, but the sorcerer knocked their missiles aside with blurred swipes of his staff. The men jerkily rose into the air, raking at their throats. The sorcerer closed his fist and they went limp, and he threw them down.
‘I will finish this myself,’ growled Thostos. ‘With me!’
The sorcerer was only yards away. Thostos howled with righteous fury as he closed on him. A look of dismay crossed the twisted daemon-worshipper’s face, one that turned swiftly to hatred. He made a series of complicated passes in the air very quickly. A bang sounded from the courtyard, a rush of displaced air. An unearthly roar wounded Thostos’s ears, a hideous, mewling howl that should never be heard in the mortal world. His men cried out and stumbled, but he went on, hammer ready to deliver the final blow.
The battlement transformed into a flood of boiling gold beneath his feet, and he fell, half a dozen of his men plummeting into the courtyard with him. He struggled up, ignoring the burn of the molten metal as it seeped through the gaps in his armour. All around his feet were flapping, cog-scaled fish, gasping for gold and dying as their clockwork ran out.
A rich perfume hung on the air, and a troubling shimmer distorted all sight. From the heart of this haze reared a creature whose very appearance was anathema to sanity. It shifted and changed constantly, seeming not to be wholly of one world or realm – the impression Thostos had was of a house-sized creature steeped in madness and pain. From its back erupted an array of crystalline bones in the shape of the blasphemous wheel of Chaos. At the centre turned a weeping hole in space, a gateway to the realm of the four powers.
One of his men looked into it and screamed. Blue flames jetted from the joints in his armour and he imploded with a bang.
‘Avert your eyes!’ Thostos shouted. But it was no use. Writhing bolts of plasma erupted from the portal, screaming around the beast like the shades of the tormented dead. They shrieked through the air, plunging into the Stormcasts. All around Thostos his warriors were transformed by wild magic. One split down the middle into two identical, half-sized replicas of himself, one black, one white, who immediately started fighting each other. Another turned into a cloud of moths that burst apart and scattered to the four winds. A third became a porcelain vase that fell to the ground with a dull clunk.
Thostos could barely contain the horror the thing evoked in him. The magic in his body could feel the tug of the vortex of wild energy that roared around it, as if it would tear out his soul.
Lord Sigmar, hear my prayer, he thought. You answered me once before. I ask you again, lend me strength.
He raised his sword and hammer for what was sure to be the final time.
‘Vengeance,’ he hissed. He charged.
A spasming tendril of energy caressed his helm as he closed upon the creature. A spike of pain ripped through him, down every nerve ending. He dropped his weapons and staggered back in horror. Something was happening to him, some fundamental and terrifying change. He howled in pain, and went down onto one knee. He closed his eyes and awaited his death. He had failed.
The pain stopped. He still lived. But he was not the same. His body, his flesh. It felt different, heavier, harder.
His gauntlet dropped from his arm. He raised his hand before his face. Metal gleamed in place of skin. Flesh and blood had been transformed into living sigmarite! Another bolt of change slammed into him, and did not perturb him. He laughed, a triumphant, disbelieving bark of mirth. He stood, stepped forward calmly, and plucked up his weapons from the ground. The beast whuffled and whooped, multiple discordant animal voices blending into a hellish gurgle of frustration.
Magic rained down upon Thostos as he strode confidently at the monster, all of its sorceries running without harm from his transformed body. The creature reared up, tentacles spearing forth from its mouth. Thostos slashed them with his sword, severing them and stepping through as they turned to shreds of multicoloured magic. He leapt up, swinging his hammer over his head and down, burying it in the small head hidden behind the nest of tentacles. The creature’s skull gave in with an audible crack and, with a sigh that seemed to be of relief to the Lord-Celestant, the beast collapsed to the floor.
The gateway upon the beast’s back blinked, and winked out. The creature heaved one last breath and died, its flesh shrivelling in on itself, becoming black ash.
Thostos turned back to where the sorcerer stood and raised his hammer in a gleaming metal hand.
Ephryx ran back and forth on the wall. His perfect kingdom, laboured over so long and so lovingly, was being smashed to pieces around him. Blazing jags of lightning burned down from the sky, slamming into the walls. He flung up his arms as celestial energy played about the northeast tower, exploding in an outwards fountain of molten copper. The warriors of the God-King hacked and smashed at his magical receptacles, spilling his carefully husbanded power back into the ether. Shooting bolts raced upwards as the essences of Stormcasts were set free to ride the storm.
