My attention returned to the ship I was unfortunately still standing on with a snap as the Grey King’s constricting tentacle broke the vessel across the middle.
Just as I was starting to expedite my thoughts on alternative places to be, the bloodreavers that had previously been occupied forward spun to see what had just happened, and saw me. There was an instant’s confusion, then a roar as the whole lot of them charged up the rapidly upending deck towards me.
I suspect that a few of them had made their peace with an imminent return to their god and fancied the idea of making the trip with a little something to offer – I imagine that the skull of Hamilcar Bear-Eater would be just the thing to return a warrior to Khorne’s good side.
If he has a good side.
With a laugh that was as much at his expense as theirs, I caught hold of the tentacle just as it slid back over the side, leaving the bloodreavers to splash and curse after me as their increasingly vertical half of the ship slid them back towards the now-submerged prow.
Using the tentacle’s suckers as handholds, I climbed onto the smooth scales of its back. It swung about, twisting in on itself in a mad effort to grab me. I grinned and held on, rising slowly to my feet with my arms held out for balance and my feet wedged in tight. It was just like walking across a rope bridge, I told myself. A slippery, wet, constantly undulating rope bridge that was trying to kill me. The solitary boot on my foot gave me a ridiculous gait that made the task of running along that tentacle infinitely more difficult than it had to be, but there was no way I was getting it off now, so I manned up and ran.
As I drew within shouting distance of the King’s almighty head, my impromptu bridge became ever more precipitously sloped and I found that I couldn’t hold on any longer. From there, I mostly fell, but since you are here and this is my tale, let’s say that there was some element of jump involved as well.
Let’s say that.
The King’s head was harder than it looked. Even the buoyancy bladders and fatty sacs were covered in an armour of translucent scales. I hit with a heavy clang of sigmarite and a curse or two, but he didn’t seem to notice my presence on his brow at all. All his attention was devoted to the steady demolition of a mid-sized warship in his jaws. If he knew the difference between wood and flesh then he didn’t appear to care for it.
I too can get that way, if left too long between meals.
I realised that I had a moment or two to get my bearings, and took them both. The ocean had been transformed into a mat of writhing tentacles and floating debris. Timbers. Canvas. Bloodreavers splashing about, battling with the predators that had dared the Grey King’s hunger to pick at his leavings. It was a cauldron in which every impure ingredient had been smashed together and had come out red. I picked out the black ship, shrouded in the hellish smoke of her cannons and rowing hard.
I frowned, judging the writhe of the tentacles between me and it, and then jumped.
There was no uncertain initial embrace this time, no tottering, no stalling, no prayers to the God-King. This time I sprinted down that flexing limb, my warding lantern banging against my thigh, as though the rug were about to be pulled from under me.
I have it on sound authority that a ship at full sail, even an encumbered warship, can run many times swifter than a man. Even a Stormcast Eternal. But the embattled black ship was not doing anything close to full tilt. The currents plied against her. Her sails fluttered, limp, the winds chopped and gusting around the extensive and ever-shifting bulk of the Grey King.
I caught up to her before the tentacle could throw me off, running parallel for a few strides before the limb twitched close enough for me to jump.
I jumped.
This time I managed to catch hold of the rigging, my fingers tearing the black mizzensail like a scab as I went down it. The bottom of the sail was about twelve feet off the poop deck. I fell the rest of the way with a lot of flailing limbs and shouting. I banged onto the deck, bruised but ebullient, and quickly rolled onto my chest to get a knee beneath me. Gasping for breath, I looked about.
The crew of the poop deck were huge warriors in spiked leather cuirass and snarling buckles, bucklers strapped to forearms and knees, missing limbs replaced with maces, axes and – in one fiendishly impractical instance – an eight-tailed flail. They were all looking up in fury at the torn sail, as tentacles snaked up from the water for the floundering warship.
‘To the guns,’ someone roared with a voice like lava. ‘We blast our way into the Blood God’s graces.’
At last I saw him. The man himself.
Blackjaw.
He turned from the ship’s wheel to confront me, a powerful man in a mouldy coat decorated with bronzed frogging and bars. He was at least as tall as me. His chest was broad, his arms thick. He wore a tricorne hat bedecked in human skulls, and a beard of clotted blood clung to his face like a leech to dying prey, quivering occasionally as though anticipating a violent feast. Lit tapers stuck from the daemonic parasite, giving off a brimstone stench that inflamed and enraged me. I don’t think there was any particular power to it, beyond the foul gifts of alchemy I so deplored.
‘Hamilcar Bear-Eater,’ he spat, and I confess the acknowledgement that the infamous Blackjaw knew my name made the whole torrid adventure seem worthwhile. ‘For five hundred years I have ruled these waves. I burned the dragon ships that the sea aelves of Tarvain sent to defy me. I flattened the granite underspires of the Como duardin. I ended the defiance of Indomus where a dozen like me had tried and failed. It was I whose devotion Khorne blessed with the daemon engines to destroy Nemisuvik.’
I yawned.
This only seemed to infuriate him further.
‘The Stormwilds are my monument to the Blood God, my ocean of skulls.’ He turned his snarl upwards as a tentacle came crashing into the water, just off his bow. The waves of its impact battered his heavy ship. ‘I know not how you have achieved this, but if I am to sink to the Brass Citadel this day then it will be as the anchor about your neck, Bear-Eater.’
I’ve been to the Brass Citadel.
It’s not so bad, provided you have a fondness for skulls.
I must have been distracted, thinking of the fortress of Khorne, because I didn’t even see his hands coming away from his belt with a brace of pistols. They were stocked and muzzled in black wood, the same as the hull of his ship, and chased in brass, unwholesome sigils steaming where they had been stamped through the wood and the metal.
He cocked them with his thumbs, and fired.
Now I know what you are all thinking.
Where is the warding lantern you picked up in the sleeping hall? Well, I still had it. Truth be told, I’d made the decision not to use it. I’d been fully expecting to die, after all; had been waiting for it, even. What use has such a man for a blessing like that? But now I had won. This was just the first few hundred yards of my victory lap. All that was left of the battle now were the parts that matter: lording it over the victory feasts from the top table, accepting the praises as Sigmar’s regent, and ensuring that all the bards and heralds knew how to pronounce ‘Hamilcar’.
You think it is warriors that win wars?
They win battles. Heroes win wars.
You think heroes just make themselves?
I went for my lantern then, pulling it from my belt even as Blackjaw’s pistols coughed up black smoke and fire. I didn’t have the time to open it. I knew that. Even I’m not quicker than a bullet.
I threw it.
The lantern smashed into Blackjaw’s chin, his beard erupting in sparks at the exact same moment that two brazen slugs punched through my greaves, just where the fish that had been chewing on my leg had weakened them.