The eye however, he avoided looking into too deeply.
Say one thing for Hamilcar Bear-Eater: he wasn’t perfect. He dashed the reflection with his gauntlet.
Memories of death and reforging had never before troubled him while he had been awake. Was he awake in this place? He wondered, briefly, if el Talame ever slept and if he did, if he dreamed.
Crow whined up at him as he rubbed his breastplate.
Sigmar, would the dreams never leave him?
He turned to el Talame. ‘The sun-king. Point me at him.’
The general pointed through a crumbling stone arch. He was afraid to be here, but he marshalled it well, achieving as much as Hamilcar with far less in his making. Determined to be the champion of a god that warriors would kneel to, he shrugged the ache aside, then rose, flicking dream water from his fingers, and ducked under the arch.
The fact that they moved through the heart of the citadel of Jercho, or some timeless, dreamscaped version of it, was artfully masked by weeping orchids and clambering vines. Night birds twittered in backwards verse and things both ageless and unseen scampered amongst the branches. Blossoms drifted on the air as they need never fall.
Broudiccan tramped after him, grim, solid.
‘Do you think this place would resist a Chaos invasion if it came?’ Hamilcar asked him, surprised at how the garden’s solemnity made him whisper.
‘No. If an army can breach the Sea of Bones then Jercho and her sisters will fall.’
They passed onto a bridge over a gurgling stream, causing the wood to creak under the weight of their armour.
‘It needn’t be an army,’ said Hamilcar. ‘Mannfred can build an army. I saw it myself in Cartha—’
‘—hold!’
Broudiccan caught his shoulder and the column of Astral Templars and Jercho legionaries clattered to a halt.
The space beyond the bridge was littered with small stone benches and statues that had been subjected to centuries of weathering and then shrouded in creepers. The moonlight that filtered through the ornamental trees gleamed where it touched bare stone and cut sharply across reflective pools and small bowls of water. A young man with the entitled impatience of a nobleman rested with one arm against a statue, as though awaiting an audience. He was lightly armoured in a fitted leather lorica with gold accoutrements and a silk cloak swept over one shoulder. A fine pair of steel swords with jewelled hilts were scabbarded at his belt, and rested against the statue beside him was a long spear with a jade-coloured pennant tied around the base of the blade. Seeing Hamilcar at the same time as Hamilcar saw him, he swept up his spear and sauntered towards them.
Broudiccan didn’t wait for any sign of malice.
Striding towards the noble he planted his boot heel through the man’s chest, strength that had been beaten into him on the God-King’s anvil lifting the mortal from his feet and smashing him back against the statue. The youth dropped in a clatter of lorica scales into a reflective pool, broken, Hamilcar would have thought, but then he vaulted agilely to his feet. He hissed, bleeding from his mouth. His spear began to hum as he spun it.
And something that no man should possess glittered in the moonlight.
Fangs.
‘By the gods, that’s Gilgazed,’ el Talame stuttered, agog, pointing with his tulwar, ‘el Raniel’s eldest son.’
Snake-quick, the vampire struck Broudiccan like a spear thrown at a wall. The Decimator’s enormous axe whirled as fast as the vampire’s spear could match. Blade struck blade, haft against haft; claps of thunder shook invisible birds from their roosts amongst the trees as storm-fused barbarian battled undying fiend.
Hamilcar turned from his brother’s fight, the splash of water warning of the arrival of others from downstream. The vampire’s speed made him little more than a blur, a sweeping depression in the surface of the water that raced towards Hamilcar at the foot of the bridge.
The vampire’s blade came at him like the lance head of a galloping knight, hard enough and fast enough in that first dramatic instant of arrival to have speared through dragon scale had Hamilcar not had the wherewithal to duck. It sliced across him. Using his momentum to turn, Hamilcar backhanded the rising butt of his halberd across the vampire’s jaw. The knight’s face snapped back and spun away. Hamilcar forced the rest of the vampire’s body to follow. A boot to the back bent the vampire over the bridge’s handrail. Hamilcar lent in, drew his gladius, and rammed the stabbing blade through the vampire’s spine. The fiend’s legs turned to jelly, and Hamilcar’s boot held him where he was. Boot transferred to knee and then he leant in to bite down on the vampire’s ear. His teeth tore through cartilage, his mouth filled sluggishly with brackish warm blood, and then he put his full strength through his knee.
The handrail broke with a splintering crack and the howling vampire dropped the short way to the water. Hamilcar spat his bloody ear after him and roared.
He was Hamilcar of the Astral Templars. Eater of Bears. Sigmar would look upon him and then turn to his own two hands to marvel at the titan they had wrought.
The vampire writhed in the shallow water, and the slower men in clanking golden plate that had been hurrying to the bridge from the same direction looked up in surprise. Hamilcar grinned at them. ‘Hamilcaaar!’ He leapt, two-footed, and flattened the two men into the rocky streambed where the first still scrabbled madly to claw his way out. These were not vampires; they were mortal.
They never stood a chance.
‘Slaughter the infidels!’ cried a voice, cultured, but too steeped in the intonations of the Jerchese to be anything but a native. ‘By order of the sun-king!’
With a roar, four-score Solar Guards surged up the paths that converged on the little bridge and its island folly. A boltstorm bolt blasted a knight to scraps of liquid gold and cast the two behind into the trees with the aftershock. Prosecutors took wing. While Hamilcar and Broudiccan had fought, Thracius and el Talame had organised their men and they moved to oppose their attackers now. Armed and ready, Hamilcar would have counted on his dozen alone against five times the number of mortal warriors that assaulted them now, but for every ten heavy knights there was a sneering nobleman with an exotic blade and fangs.
With a hiss of fury, a vampire in oiled green lorica scales broke from his unit of mortals and punched through a line of el Talame’s soldiers like a ballista bolt fired from Shyish. Hamilcar yelled for Thracius as men began to cartwheel from the frenzied vampire.
Before the Liberator-Prime could intervene, the bushes behind the vampire burst apart and Crow bore the undying champion to the ground. There was a gargling scream as the gryph-hound’s beak tore through the armour of its chest. Hamilcar grunted at the sudden, shared pain in his breast, and splashed for the stream’s bank. Inexplicably breathless, he turned to see Broudiccan. The Decimator was now holding his own against three more, warring through the rubble of demolished statuary.
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.