‘Feed the Grey King!’
‘It has been long enough…’
‘It is time to strike back…’
There was more, but something in my mind between ears and brain snapped at the words ‘strike back’.
The maorai might have been perfectly content to let the bloodreavers carry on breaking their knuckles on their faces, but I wasn’t. I’m a simple man, you see. A man should kill, and get killed, according to the strength and reach of his arm. A strong man could throw a spear further, but that strength was earned. As far as I was concerned, Blackjaw sought to cheat me of my hard-earned advantage. He had resorted to ‘mathematics’ and other unholy wizardries to make parity with a chosen of Sigmar.
It was unnatural, and I refused to stand for it. I wanted to strike back, and if the Nemesians were sitting on a way for me to do that, then by Sigmar I wanted to know about it.
I turned to the guard who had called out to me. Something thunderous in my expression made him blanch. He took a step back, his foot splashing into water where the platform’s tilt had caused the lake to spill onto the promenade.
‘What are they talking about?’
‘I… don’t understand, Castle Lord.’
He actually seemed to be serious, which only annoyed me further. ‘The Grey King?’
‘It is sacred.’
‘So is lightning. I still throw it at my enemies.’
As if to affirm my point, a small tendril of Azyrite energy snapped from my clenched knuckles. I like to consider myself a man of the common folk, and generally do a better job of keeping the overt signs of my essential divinity in check. That it escaped me then only serves to demonstrate the kind of pressure I was under. The guardsman nearest to me lowered his spear with a cry, and while his comrades stared at me in astonishment one of the rioters succeeded in pushing through the cordon to make a break for the water.
‘Feed the King!’ she yelled, and hurled herself bodily into the lake. The splash of her landing broke my hold over the guards. They spun around as one.
‘Sigmar,’ one of them cursed.
‘Get her out of there.’
‘I’m not going in after her.’
‘Khunas, quickly. Fetch a net.’
While the guardsmen argued and one of them, Khunas presumably, ran off towards one of the gaily painted promenade-side buildings, the swimmer splashed towards the middle of the lake. For someone born on the ocean, her technique was appalling. I probably could have done it better in full armour, and I’d lived my entire mortal life on a mountain. I hadn’t seen running water until after my Reforging on the Anvil of the Apotheosis. It was quite the marvel, let me tell you. This woman, though, moved through the water as though through a fight – rolling around, hitting it with balled fists, slapping at it with her feet.
I noticed then that the entire promenade had fallen quiet. Citizens and guardsmen that had previously been trying to shove one another into the lake or onto their backsides stood shoulder to shoulder, just watching, completely ignoring the thunderous rumble of Blackjaw’s barrage.
I felt the intensity of their attention pull on mine.
The swimmer groped clumsily towards the middle. ‘Feed,’ she gasped, between dunkings, repeating the mantra even as she coughed up sea water. ‘Swim free. Fee–’
I like to think myself largely unshockable, I have seen enough in my day, but the suddenness of what came next drew a gasp out of me.
A huge grey tentacle burst from the water and whipped about, drenching the swimmer under a torrent of salty rain, drowning her fevered prayers. The water around her seethed, as though the ocean were being drained from under her, and a truly gargantuan body broke its surface. To this day, I don’t know what it was that I saw. I have seen lurkinarth and kharybdiss, leviadon and murkraken, and none have come anywhere close either in scale or in the foulness of their appearance. The best that I can describe it is as some nightmarish cross-breeding of mega-squid and trench-dwelling troggoth, ridged with armour and folded with fat, pit-black eyes sunk deep into a central body surrounded by a nest of tentacles. Seawater streamed from albino scales. Its body was partially transparent. I could see the burrowing purple lines of veins, organs of unholy scale throbbing against the other side of its pearlescent skin.
The swimmer, I belatedly realised, had not stopped shouting: she had simply become mute under the waterfalls cascading from the monster’s tentacles.
A suckered tendril wrapped around the woman and dragged her from the water. It looked as though each tentacle was in it for themselves as several converged to try to pry the woman away from the first as she was drawn inexorably towards the monster’s head. A mouth split the jellied mass in half. Row upon row of primitive white teeth glistened, and I grimaced as the tentacle unrolled to propel the woman inside.
‘Feed. Swim fre–’
The mouth slammed shut.
To my horror I discovered that I could still see the woman through the monster’s translucent scales. Like a chewing ruminant, it worked its teeth. Blood burst against the walls of the creature’s mouth cavity, bones grinding, before draining away into the body of the monster as it swallowed.
I don’t know why it never occurred to me to draw my halberd and dive in after that woman. I was a Lord-Castellant, after all, and had been spoiling for any kind of a fight mere moments before, and yet my courage deserted me then. I think it was the stillness of the crowd that had made me a part of it, the reverential aspect to their observance. No one screamed in terror from the promenade the way they should have. And then, like a fish that had bobbed its mouth above water to capture a fly, the monster sank, body first, then head, leaving a handful of whipping tentacles that disappeared without a ripple. An artillery strike to a nearby pontoon made the surface water tremble, the fire reflecting in broken orange and red, and then the beast was gone.
‘What on Sigendil’s radiant glow was that?’ I said.
‘I don’t follow,’ said one of the guardsmen, as though I had just asked him to explain to me the meta-cosmology of Ulgu and its relationship with Hyish.
I looked at him, incredulous.
He shuffled back. ‘I don’t understand.’
‘There is a monster under your city that could accidentally swallow a Stardrake in its sleep,’ I explained, deliberately. ‘These people seem to think that it can help you against Blackjaw, and I’m inclined to agree with them.’
‘No, Castle Lord.’
‘No, what?’
‘It’s forbidden.’
I glared at the guardsman, and then, because it wasn’t as if this idiot was ever going to go to Azyr and find me out for a liar, said, ‘There can be no secrets from those touched by the heavens.’
‘Secrets, Castle Lord?’ He shook his head vigorously. The others joined in. ‘I don’t understand.’
I swear that if I heard that one more time, then people were going to start dying. Fortunately for their skin – and my honour – it didn’t come to that.
‘Castle Lord Hamilcar,’ came a voice from behind me. ‘What is going on here?’
‘I wish I knew.’
I turned as a heavy-set older figure shuffled onto the promontory, escorted by a pair of pontoon guards that looked about as threatening as one of those little blue daemons of Tzeentch. He was clad in a slightly finer variation of the whale fat and seagull feather ensemble sported by all the Nemesians I had encountered thus far. Fishbone pins secured his collar and his sleeves, and a complicated necklace-cum-dreamcatcher rested against his broad chest. I knew him. His name was Nanook, elder chief of the Killiniq Pontoon, one of the council of fifteen that governed this place.