While the maorai teased one another with squirting ink noises, I gripped the parapet and glared out into firestorm and fog.
‘Cursed Striking,’ I swore.
‘It could be harder, yes?’ said Akbu, merrily.
‘I still can’t see any of their ships.’
‘See this man!’ cried Akbu as though he were about to launch into a ballad. He jabbed furiously at my backplate with his fingers. ‘The bombardment is not enough for him. He wants Blackjaw himself!’
Didn’t Sigmar know it.
‘Hamilcar!’
I have to admit, the acclaim was starting to grate on my nerves almost as much as the bombardment. For the first time in my life, I felt as though I had done nothing to earn it. Before I knew what I was doing, I was twisting off my left gauntlet and throwing it aside.
‘What are you doing, Castle Lord?’ said Akbu.
Off went the right. I bent down and started tugging on my boot. ‘I’m going in.’
‘In?’
‘In there.’ The boot came loose, and to make a point I hurled it over the parapet for the waves.
‘Good plan!’ said Akbu.
‘What?’
Akbu turned and cleared his throat. ‘We follow Castle Lord, Hamilcar. We swim for the ships!’
The maorai cheered like loons.
‘That is not what I–’
‘Do you hear that?’ someone said, interrupting me.
We all looked up to the horrific wailing, but the sky was so murky and shot through with flame that there was nothing to be seen.
‘A close one,’ said Akbu, quietly.
‘I bet it doesn’t land within two hundred tarfins of here,’ said Moha.
The entire warrior band blanched, and then the moment I had been living in terror of for over a month hit me.
It didn’t disappoint.
The entire event was practically instantaneous, and yet I can remember every moment of it vividly.
The skull materialised from the smouldering veil of grey fog, a baleful grin sketched out for me in flames. It smashed into the parapet ten good strides from me. The impact twisted iron, pulverised rock flying free. Two maorai immediately beneath the skull simply disappeared. Gone. Like that. Then flames ripped outwards. Another half score of Akbu’s warriors were incinerated on the spot. I didn’t get a chance to see who they were. They were probably the lucky ones. I saw a female maorai just outside the blast catch light as she was flung clear over the parapet. She struck the ocean in a hissing cloud of steam.
I heard the first screams then, as the impact rippled out – through rock, through air, swiftly outpacing the bony shrapnel that raced behind it. I felt it grab me, my breastplate buckling as if in the jaws of some Chamonite dragon. It turned me round, propelled me over the wall. Fangs of rock and bone rattled against my backplate, shredded the hair and the skin from the back of my head. I maintain that helmets are for cowards and Hallowed Knights, and in any case the explosion was already throwing me well ahead of the damage.
I saw waves. Lapping beneath me.
From impact to impact, it probably took about a second. I performed a double somersault and smacked into the water on my back. It felt as though I had been coshed on the back of the head, then dark waves closed over me.
Saltwater stung my eyes. I couldn’t see. I was still tumbling, and for a brief moment of panic I wasn’t sure which way was up and which was down. Then I noticed the bubbles streaming from my mouth and turned to follow them, seeing the wave-chopped orange smear of what could only have been a fireball. I kicked towards it. I was never the most elegant of swimmers, but as with all tasks in which I am less than proficient I make up for any weakness in technique with determination and raw strength. However, even I couldn’t overpower the drag of a near-full suit of armour, one boot still on, and despite my efforts I began to sink.
A hard pressure closed around my throat, over my chest. The saltwater sting in the cuts to the back of my head grew dim.
I looked up.
I don’t know why, exactly: a desire to look on Sigendil one last time before I was blasted back to her, perhaps, or maybe just an old barbarian’s instinct for battle. The woman that had been thrown into the water moments before me paddled above. Unlike me there was not a scrap of metal on her, and her blubber armour was naturally buoyant as well as waterproof. It could have been the dark shape silhouetted on the surface, or possibly the abiding smell of fish, but the creatures with whom we now shared an ocean went for her first.
Instinctively, I bellowed a challenge, precious bubbles of air exploding from my mouth as a twenty-foot-long fish with amber pectoral fins and spines running down its back took a bite out of her. The water around her turned browny-red and cloudy, and the giant fish twisted its body away, clutching something in its jaws that looked horribly like a leg. Even with all that, the maorai knew better than to waste air on screaming. Never have I been more in awe of a mortal warrior than I was then. With a powerful stroke of its tail, the fish swam off with its prize, fanning the blood cloud into the water and leaving a trail behind it.
I soon understood why it was in such a hurry to be out of the way.
Twinkling eyes, glinting teeth – barge-like shapes converging that made that first twenty-footer look like a minnow. I gripped my halberd tightly, grinning fiercely even as I continued to sink further beneath the maorai woman. I thrust my halberd into a mouth that yawned wider than the archway doors of the Astral Templars’ Winter Fortress. The halberd didn’t go deep, stabbing into the roof of its mouth so that the monster effectively pushed me back on its own palate. The snap shut of its jaws was like an underwater explosion. Nothing less than solid sigmarite stood a chance against it, and the behemoth’s front teeth duly shattered against the halberd’s shaft. I ripped the weapon clear, then backhanded it across the monster’s snout.
The water robbed my blow of speed. My halberd carved a gouge through the monster’s nose, blood welling up from the wound to thicken the water, but failing to do it lasting harm. I pushed back against the monster’s lower lip. I stabbed it again. This time through the cheek. Like hooking a fish. It yanked its head away, brushed me off, and I belatedly appreciated that I was more fly than hook.
I grunted from behind tightened lips as something clamped on to my shin. I looked down.
A massively fat fish twice the length of my leg had locked its jaws over my knee. Its throat rippled with colours as it suckled on my unbooted foot. Some people think Chaos is vile, but it has nothing on the infinite vicissitudes of the deep places of Ghur. My entire body crawled with disgust. A rope-like eel brushed across my armour, looking for flesh to bite. I swung out my arm, caught it by the neck and drew its head to my breastplate. Bubbles squirmed from my lips as I throttled it, cartilaginous bone softening and crunching. With my still-armoured foot, I kicked down at the suckling fish that had fastened to my leg. I broke its eye, tore its gills, bloodied its face.
I was already dead and knew it. It was about how: how I bowed out, how much blood rode back with me to the celestine vaults.
I hadn’t been happier in weeks.
The eel fell limp in my grip and I let go, stabbing once more at the deepwater behemoth and scaling a line down its underbelly as it swept across me. My chest felt like a bomb about to go off, my face as though it were set to implode. I couldn’t see for blood. The water was thick with it and I was still sinking. It sank with me, both of us heavier than water. The maorai woman was gone now, dead for all I knew, as I was about to be. My enemies I tracked by their movements through the cloud. My throat was burning. It wanted to cry out, desperate to breathe. I could feel my chest shaking, the muscles – no, the inhuman determination that was holding my throat shut – weakening. Everything felt ready to surrender when a monstrous grey tentacle snaked around my chest and pulled taut.